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Well that's just impossible bud. The number of twitter employees in 2018 was 4000 and it is about double that now. What on earth do you think they've all been d

Well that's just impossible bud. The number of twitter employees in 2018 was 4000 and it is about double that now. What on earth do you think they've all been doing? You can't possibly run something like twitter with just 2000 employees like you suggest. The fail whale might reappear.

inglor_cz 5y ago
If I read him correctly, he is saying that only 30 per cent of current employees will be there in a year. It is possible that some of them will be replaced by other people who now work elsewhere and who will try their luck with remodeled Twitter. There will likely be a major cultural shift at Twitter; for someone, deeply repulsive, for other people, possibly very attractive. So there might be significant staff churn even though the total numbers may stay similar.
johnmorrison 5y ago
You can run something like Twitter with 500 good employees. That is, unless, you mean the massive manual censorship organization needed to "run" the current "algorithm", which Twitter will no longer be needing.
- helsinkiandrew 5y ago
  No offence but that sounds a little naive. Twitter isn't just the app and feed algorithm - I imagine there's more that 500 people needed to run the advertising side of the business alone (multiple countries, different tax regimes, payment processing, big customer relationship managers etc). Even the low level data centre, network engineering will number into the hundreds. And they'll still have some kind of 'manual censorship organization' to enable them to operate legally in different countries, handling people posting illegal content and responding to law enforcement requests, bot detection, reports of harassment etc - that's going to be more than 500 people, for a company with the number of users Twitter has.
djbebs 5y ago
Do you also think that you can't just fire 12 floors worth of people?
- recuter 5y ago
  When has that ever worked out for anybody? What are you even saying, life isn't some sort of Joseph Heller novel bucko. This is the big leagues, you need all those people to keep the trains running on time. Are you seriously trying to tell me that some smooth operator can just come waltzing into a well oiled operation like Twitter Inc and simply purge thousands of highly skilled specialized knowledge workers assigned to an extremely complicated web scale project willy nilly? What of all the accumulated institutional knowledge. Countless man (and woman) years of code optimizations. The massive ETL pipelines. The company culture. Truly the most valuable asset Twitter has is the talented people that work there. Surely it would all come crashing down.
  - GordonAShumway 5y ago
    I agree. But, what's it that they say -- pride goeth before a fall? If Twitter collapses into a burning hulk is that -really- a bad thing?
  - djbebs 4y ago
    It was a reference to what actually happens, and improves the business as a result.
toolz 5y ago
While I agree it's silly to think musk is going to fire everyone, Whatsapp hit 1 billion messages a day with only 11 engineers. I certainly think twitter could function at a base feature set with far fewer than 2k.
- ruh-roh 5y ago
  "Number of engineers" has become another vanity metric in the VC ecosystem and it needs some pushback. I have viewed of a ton of tech leadership job postings in the last year+, and almost all of them have a requirement/bullet of "grew Engineering team from X to XXX", or something like it. As an engineer, building & supporting products with the right / a limited amount of engineers should be the goal. The Whatsapp example is fantastic and should be lauded. It might be extreme, but we need more stories like that, not less. I get that most view it as a proxy for business growth, but I fear there's a growing group of non-technical investors/leaders/founders who see FAANGs with 4000 engineers, so you're only successful if you have that many too.
adlpz 5y ago
Actual question for anyone familiar with the company inner workings: What are those ~8000 people doing at Twitter?!? I guess they do sales and advertising stuff. Would that be a large chunk? The tech doesn't seem that crazy and they don't really ship much so I wouldn't thing they need that many technical people. Is it mostly an army of moderators? I know nothing of how such massive-scale tech companies work, but just seeing what Twitter does, the ~8000 number seems crazy, doesn't it?
- phphphphp 5y ago
  You can have literally infinite numbers of people working on things that might seem like they don’t need that many people from the outside, because every organisation is very different. If you walked into Twitter, and spoke to people, you’d probably find that there’s a justification within the context of Twitter for most people even if a different company could do more with less (or less with more). Headcount is an artifact rather than a choice, the amount of people working on Twitter will be a consequence of decisions made more than a decade ago, not as a consequence of how many people Twitter needs today to operate as they are today — which is true for all companies.
  - recuter 5y ago
    If we fail to effectively manage our growth, our business and operating results could be harmed. We continue to experience rapid growth in our headcount and operations, which will continue to place significant demands on our management, operational and financial infrastructure. As of June 30, 2013, we had approximately 2,000 employees, an increase of over 1,800 employees since January 1, 2010. ..As we continue to grow, we are subject to the risks of over-hiring, over-compensating our employees and over-expanding our operating infrastructure, and to the challenges of integrating, developing and motivating a rapidly growing employee base in various countries around the world. In addition, we may not be able to innovate or execute as quickly as a smaller, more efficient organization. If we fail to effectively manage our hiring needs and successfully integrate our new hires, our efficiency and ability to meet our forecasts and our employee morale, productivity and retention could suffer, and our business and operating results could be adversely affected. Our corporate culture has contributed to our success, and if we cannot maintain this culture as we grow, we could lose the innovation, creativity and teamwork fostered by our culture, and our business may be harmed. Moreover, liquidity available to our employee securityholders following this offering could lead to disparities of wealth among our employees, which could adversely impact relations among employees and our culture in general. Our transition from a private company to a public company may result in a change to our corporate culture, which could harm our business. - Twitter S-1 IPO filing October 3, 2013
__alexs 5y ago
There is no relationship between total head count and operating work load in most companies. Twitter isn't a factory. They don't need 8000 people to churn out widgets and every extra person means another extra widget they can make per day. The marginal value of each extra employee is negative but you rake in so much cash from monetising all the free content users are making for you you'd be stupid not to spend it on wild ass bets. If you have a product that takes 100 people to run but generates billions in revenue it is standard practice in public companies to just hire lots more people. It's mostly speculative in that you hope that one of those thousands of people will come up with something else that makes billions.

inglor_cz 5y ago

If I read him correctly, he is saying that only 30 per cent of current employees will be there in a year. It is possible that some of them will be replaced by other people who now work elsewhere and who will try their luck with remodeled Twitter. There will likely be a major cultural shift at Twitter; for someone, deeply repulsive, for other people, possibly very attractive. So there might be significant staff churn even though the total numbers may stay similar.

johnmorrison 5y ago

You can run something like Twitter with 500 good employees. That is, unless, you mean the massive manual censorship organization needed to "run" the current "algorithm", which Twitter will no longer be needing.

helsinkiandrew 5y ago
No offence but that sounds a little naive. Twitter isn't just the app and feed algorithm - I imagine there's more that 500 people needed to run the advertising side of the business alone (multiple countries, different tax regimes, payment processing, big customer relationship managers etc). Even the low level data centre, network engineering will number into the hundreds. And they'll still have some kind of 'manual censorship organization' to enable them to operate legally in different countries, handling people posting illegal content and responding to law enforcement requests, bot detection, reports of harassment etc - that's going to be more than 500 people, for a company with the number of users Twitter has.

djbebs 5y ago

Do you also think that you can't just fire 12 floors worth of people?

recuter 5y ago
When has that ever worked out for anybody? What are you even saying, life isn't some sort of Joseph Heller novel bucko. This is the big leagues, you need all those people to keep the trains running on time. Are you seriously trying to tell me that some smooth operator can just come waltzing into a well oiled operation like Twitter Inc and simply purge thousands of highly skilled specialized knowledge workers assigned to an extremely complicated web scale project willy nilly? What of all the accumulated institutional knowledge. Countless man (and woman) years of code optimizations. The massive ETL pipelines. The company culture. Truly the most valuable asset Twitter has is the talented people that work there. Surely it would all come crashing down.
- GordonAShumway 5y ago
  I agree. But, what's it that they say -- pride goeth before a fall? If Twitter collapses into a burning hulk is that -really- a bad thing?
- djbebs 4y ago
  It was a reference to what actually happens, and improves the business as a result.

toolz 5y ago

While I agree it's silly to think musk is going to fire everyone, Whatsapp hit 1 billion messages a day with only 11 engineers. I certainly think twitter could function at a base feature set with far fewer than 2k.

ruh-roh 5y ago
"Number of engineers" has become another vanity metric in the VC ecosystem and it needs some pushback. I have viewed of a ton of tech leadership job postings in the last year+, and almost all of them have a requirement/bullet of "grew Engineering team from X to XXX", or something like it. As an engineer, building & supporting products with the right / a limited amount of engineers should be the goal. The Whatsapp example is fantastic and should be lauded. It might be extreme, but we need more stories like that, not less. I get that most view it as a proxy for business growth, but I fear there's a growing group of non-technical investors/leaders/founders who see FAANGs with 4000 engineers, so you're only successful if you have that many too.

adlpz 5y ago

Actual question for anyone familiar with the company inner workings: What are those ~8000 people doing at Twitter?!? I guess they do sales and advertising stuff. Would that be a large chunk? The tech doesn't seem that crazy and they don't really ship much so I wouldn't thing they need that many technical people. Is it mostly an army of moderators? I know nothing of how such massive-scale tech companies work, but just seeing what Twitter does, the ~8000 number seems crazy, doesn't it?

phphphphp 5y ago
You can have literally infinite numbers of people working on things that might seem like they don’t need that many people from the outside, because every organisation is very different. If you walked into Twitter, and spoke to people, you’d probably find that there’s a justification within the context of Twitter for most people even if a different company could do more with less (or less with more). Headcount is an artifact rather than a choice, the amount of people working on Twitter will be a consequence of decisions made more than a decade ago, not as a consequence of how many people Twitter needs today to operate as they are today — which is true for all companies.
- recuter 5y ago
  If we fail to effectively manage our growth, our business and operating results could be harmed. We continue to experience rapid growth in our headcount and operations, which will continue to place significant demands on our management, operational and financial infrastructure. As of June 30, 2013, we had approximately 2,000 employees, an increase of over 1,800 employees since January 1, 2010. ..As we continue to grow, we are subject to the risks of over-hiring, over-compensating our employees and over-expanding our operating infrastructure, and to the challenges of integrating, developing and motivating a rapidly growing employee base in various countries around the world. In addition, we may not be able to innovate or execute as quickly as a smaller, more efficient organization. If we fail to effectively manage our hiring needs and successfully integrate our new hires, our efficiency and ability to meet our forecasts and our employee morale, productivity and retention could suffer, and our business and operating results could be adversely affected. Our corporate culture has contributed to our success, and if we cannot maintain this culture as we grow, we could lose the innovation, creativity and teamwork fostered by our culture, and our business may be harmed. Moreover, liquidity available to our employee securityholders following this offering could lead to disparities of wealth among our employees, which could adversely impact relations among employees and our culture in general. Our transition from a private company to a public company may result in a change to our corporate culture, which could harm our business. - Twitter S-1 IPO filing October 3, 2013

__alexs 5y ago

There is no relationship between total head count and operating work load in most companies. Twitter isn't a factory. They don't need 8000 people to churn out widgets and every extra person means another extra widget they can make per day. The marginal value of each extra employee is negative but you rake in so much cash from monetising all the free content users are making for you you'd be stupid not to spend it on wild ass bets. If you have a product that takes 100 people to run but generates billions in revenue it is standard practice in public companies to just hire lots more people. It's mostly speculative in that you hope that one of those thousands of people will come up with something else that makes billions.