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Some of that might be differences in business areas. Have you had to do paperwork for R&D tax deductions? It’s pretty flexible. Like “did you do a design doc fo

Some of that might be differences in business areas. Have you had to do paperwork for R&D tax deductions? It’s pretty flexible. Like “did you do a design doc for a new thing?” “Did you have to solve a problem for which the answer wasn’t obvious ahead of time?” So a lot of “normal engineer” activities are R&D. So maybe they have too many engineers, or maybe they have less non-engineers and just not a lot of revenue due to their niche market coverage. Aka I’m not sure R&D equals innovation equals revenue.

AlbertCory 4y ago
That's true. I could make the argument that, on the macro scale, it all evens out. So maybe some activities are counted that shouldn't be, and some aren't counted that should be. On the scale of billions of dollars, it probably doesn't matter. You can buy that, or reject it. I won't try too hard to persuade. Our whole system of financial reporting is based on trying to make things comparable, and CFOs are very well versed in the current doctrines and IRS rulings on R&D. But we'd be headed into the weeds if we went any further.
- therealdrag0 4y ago
  To be clear I’m not saying it’s in accurate I’m just saying it depend on the rest of the domain. Social media is different than cloud providers, and require different investments. Social media doesn’t require a hoard of sales and support and legal for B2B and B2G clouds for example. So we can note that in the list the closest example is Facebook to twitter, which also has the closest business domain. So maybe Facebook is bloated too or maybe both just have more engineers as a percentage of their workforce because of the domain. (Sorry I didn’t read the article if this is addressed their)
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    All good points. If you look online for industry-wide comparisons, you tend to find them behind paywalls. That's why I used SEC filings, which are public. It's also very tedious. I suppose that's why people think they can charge for having done it. A list of "comparables" for Twitter might be hard to compile. If you take a really new company, of course they have to invest in R&D, a lot. Twitter really isn't coming out with radically new products, AFAICT.

AlbertCory 4y ago

That's true. I could make the argument that, on the macro scale, it all evens out. So maybe some activities are counted that shouldn't be, and some aren't counted that should be. On the scale of billions of dollars, it probably doesn't matter. You can buy that, or reject it. I won't try too hard to persuade. Our whole system of financial reporting is based on trying to make things comparable, and CFOs are very well versed in the current doctrines and IRS rulings on R&D. But we'd be headed into the weeds if we went any further.

therealdrag0 4y ago
To be clear I’m not saying it’s in accurate I’m just saying it depend on the rest of the domain. Social media is different than cloud providers, and require different investments. Social media doesn’t require a hoard of sales and support and legal for B2B and B2G clouds for example. So we can note that in the list the closest example is Facebook to twitter, which also has the closest business domain. So maybe Facebook is bloated too or maybe both just have more engineers as a percentage of their workforce because of the domain. (Sorry I didn’t read the article if this is addressed their)
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  All good points. If you look online for industry-wide comparisons, you tend to find them behind paywalls. That's why I used SEC filings, which are public. It's also very tedious. I suppose that's why people think they can charge for having done it. A list of "comparables" for Twitter might be hard to compile. If you take a really new company, of course they have to invest in R&D, a lot. Twitter really isn't coming out with radically new products, AFAICT.