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The thought that a company like twitter, that has about 5 features anybody cares about (and pretty much had them for years) spends ONE BILLION PER QUARTER on "R
by dr_faustus 4y ago
The thought that a company like twitter, that has about 5 features anybody cares about (and pretty much had them for years) spends ONE BILLION PER QUARTER on "R&D" and operations boggles my mind. I mean, 250 people or something, I would understand (but only if there is no major outsourcing involved). But THOUSANDS of developers? How? Why?
There certainly was some effort involved to make Twitter performant if someone with 100m followers posted a tweet. But that seems to have been solved for quite some while and since the number of active users is quite stagnant, I don't see any order of magnitude changes coming which would require a lot of "R&D" on that end.
- version_five 4y agoThere are tax incentives for doing R&D so everything that could remotely fall in that category is classified as such. There are even consultants that specialize in turning course-of-business development into R&D
- tinyhouse 4y agoYou're right, it's a lot. But you're also missing something important (like most people here who compare it to products like Cragislist). You're thinking about it as a service that needs to be run. But Twitter is not an open source project. Twitter is a public company where they need to make share holders happy. That means they HAVE to grow Revenue year over year. At that point you start hiring people just for that reason. Most employees were not hired to run the business. (for example, if Twitter wants to grow its current revenue by 20%, next year they need to roughly make $1B more than what they did this year). BTW, under Musk the pressure to grow revenue is going to be even higher, despite his plans to take the company private. He has plans to triple revenue in like 3 years. Good luck to whoever stays there...