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They would be profitable in an instant if they'd get rid of half their employees? Im not sure why they need SO many people for Twitter. I believe they have ov

• dntrkv 9y ago
  And you came up with that number, how? Do you have in-depth knowledge of what their staff makeup looks like? If you don't, how do you even begin to think about making such an absurd statement. You are saying that Twitter can continue to do what they do if they fired 3 out of 4 employees. You know what, you should propose this to their leadership, I'm sure they haven't thought of this great idea.
• ceejayoz 9y ago
  I'd fully expect many of those 4,000 to be sales staff, each of whom presumably brings in more than their salary in revenue to remain employed.
  • adventured 9y ago
    Twitter was massively overstaffed before they began to meaningfully grow sales. It goes back to the days of their faster user growth when they were anticipating competing with Facebook and having over a billion users. They built the company ahead of time for that outcome rather than restraining employee growth and focusing on profitability. They could have probably done both, given what Facebook managed to accomplish financially. FB was profitable at $500-$600 million in sales and around 200 million monthly active users. At that same size Twitter was losing an immense amount of money. At the $2.5 billion sales level that Twitter hit in fiscal 2016, Facebook had around $750-$900 million in net income.
  • Top19 9y ago
    Sales Departments have way too many people. I like that they employ people, but that’s a separate conversation. On a team of 8 sales people, typically 2 people together sell enough for the team to break even. The other 6, usually because of poor sales territory luck, sell maybe half their salary worth of services, but since growth is everything, an employee who makes 100k but only sells 50k is considered valuable.
    • praneshp 9y ago
      Are those numbers from a study or something?
      • yannyu 9y ago
        Probably just anecdotal numbers from experience. I've seen similar things as well. The division of prospects/accounts is kind of a big deal, and usually defaults to geographical area or industry as the primary dimension, with size/revenue of prospect as the secondary. Given that, if you're selling something like Github or container management services, you can imagine that the person who's selling in the Pacific West Coast region might be having an easier time of things than the guy who has the mid-west. This isn't universally true for all products, but sales people will complain about leads being bad in any industry (see: Glengarry Glen Ross). All of that is to say is that empirically, usually there are a few outperformers on any sales team that are crushing quota, and a bunch of others who are skating by at fractions of quota until they get canned. As some evidence, there's a lot of churn in sales teams and for the average sales person, which is partially because of the above, and also because good sales people will kill it as a company is getting a lot of adoption, and then jump ship when a better opportunity arises. So maybe there's been a study on this stuff, but you could talk to any number of people who work in sales orgs and hear similar stories without the study. Oh, and yes, when companies get 'serious' about sales, you'll see sales quickly expand to encompass a third or half the total company size. I won't make any guesses as to whether that actually makes sense and how many people are being productive, but large sales orgs are common in my understanding.
        • praneshp 9y ago
          I see, thank you for the reply. I guess someone might want to make similar claims about an engineering team, but eng teams probably don't have hard numbers to judge with.
    • turc1656 9y ago
      Yes, but it makes sense for things that like to occur because when you think about it, firms care about the total contract value - meaning it might be a 50k contract per year for 2-3 years. Companies are looking at the longer term. At least that's how it is at my company. Clients generally sign a 2 year contract at $X per year. So if a sales person only sells 50k in a given year but every contract averages 2 years that's really 100k.
  • ProAm 9y ago
    > each of whom presumably brings in more than their salary in revenue to remain employed Good sales people bring in enough revenue for a company to be profitable. But I have no idea how many sales people Twitter has, I think even if they had 100 it'd be plenty.
    • BartSaM 9y ago
      Add one zero. Remember that Twitter works in multiple countries and in different languages. Then there is a lot of face to face meetings required, so add offices and service staff as well. 1-1,5K would sound reasonable for global sales and customer services.
      • ProAm 9y ago
        I would agree, but I think their sales is doing a terrible job if they have that many and are not bringing the appropriate amount of money.
        • BartSaM 9y ago
          I would blame management/top more, than sales. Sales can work only with products they were given. AFAIK Twitter was pretty aggressively hiring 2-3 years ago sales reps across the globe and they were stealing top employees from FB and co. I would assume that it is the lack of products/top commitment that causes poor sales.
          • ProAm 9y ago
            I agree again, I think there is a lot of blame to go around in Twitter, also another reason why I think they could have a healthy purge and move forward with some fresh vigor.
  • overcast 9y ago
    How's that been working out for them? All the sales staff in the world hasn't made them ANY profit.
• criddell 9y ago
  Instagram had around 20 employees when Facebook bought them. I've often wondered how Twitter ended up with so many people as well. I'd love to see a breakdown of what they are all doing.
  • smcl 9y ago
    For a while stories popped up describing Devs lounging around or playing table tennis, waiting for their stock to vest. I've no idea the truth in these anecdotes and they're annoyingly hard to find due to google finding lots of tweets instead of articles about twitter.
    • normalhuman12 9y ago
      You can add -site:twitter.com to remove all tweets from your search results when you're trying to find something about twitter instead of something on twitter.
  • ebola1717 9y ago
    Instagram’s CEO has said one of the most valuable parts of being acquired by FB is they could just hook into their vast revenue org (probably thousands of employees, and battle tested ad targeting tech and expertise). Twitter has to build its own, and I’m sure that accounts for most of their headcount.
• mipmap04 9y ago
  They can easily get by with 1000? Are you sure about that? What does the timeframe look like for reducing 75% of your workforce and what kind of costs would there be in such an initiative? What lay-off laws are tripped when you do this sort of mass firing? In 2016, they spent $957M on marketing (which is the area I often hear people saying they should reduce), most of which was personnel expense, according to their 10K filing. I suppose it's easy to look at it and just say "cut it in half" (which would nearly make up the $457M profit deficit from 2016), but is that truly realistic? What affect would that have on top line revenue?
• a13n 9y ago
  Oh boy, another Hacker News commenter with zero experience running a large corporation telling experienced folks how they should run a large corporation. Better yet, with no explanation for why. The sheer arrogance.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • ProAm 9y ago
    But Im not wrong. Twitter was in dire straits a year ago. Saved by a reality show presidential candidate and might have their first profitable moment after 10 years of existence. Twitter is easily overstaffed by looking at what they have produced over the years. Even if you shaved the bottom 25% of employees they could still be operational and extremely profitable. They are a public company, growth is stagnant, and expenses are extraordinary. It's not rocket science even for someone with sheer arrogance and zero experience running a large corporation.
    • jczhang 9y ago
      Hahaha I don't have a cow in this race but I find it hilarious that someone would admit to having `sheer arrogance` hahahaha
    • throwaway0255 9y ago
      No you're probably wrong According to my Wikipedia research, they had ~2.5 billion in revenue last year and ~450 million in net losses If they shaved the bottom 25%, to reach ramen profitability they'd need a savings of $450,000 per employee cut, and do that without having any negative impact on the productivity of the org as a whole (be it through hours worked or employee morale or additional churn) Corporations are giant container ships moving in one direction, you can't just snap your fingers and turn 90 degrees
    • hobofan 9y ago
      "Let's force ourselves to be profitable right now, regardless of the fact that it will destroy our future profitability" Soundcloud just had a similar shock happen, and after all the people they had to fire, I would not be surprised if that will kill the company in the mid-term, even with their new investment. If you have no ability to innovate due to missing staff, there is a good chance that your competitors will eat you alive.
• thomasthomas 9y ago
  i think their past issue was having to hire more sales people to scale revenue in a manual fashion talking to companies rather than having a robust programmatic platform they can rely on to bring in revenue with fewer headcount. not sure if this is still a problem for them or not.
• ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  It's because they need the headcount to speculatively try to achieve the growth numbers needed to support their valuation. Suppose they cut back to just keeping the lights on in engineering, along with obviously-profitable sales staff to sell advertisements and make business deals. Twitter is instantly profitable, but the net present value of those cash flows is something like a third to a tenth of their current valuation. This is what happens when you over-fund a business at too high of a valuation. They do what they can to try to "grow into" the valuation, because otherwise management's junior equity positions and stock options are worthless.
  • bm1362 9y ago
    This makes the most sense to me. Constant growth to meet investor expectations.