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I'm pretty curious about how and where Twitter employees were distributed. For a company ostensibly worth $44 billion, having 7,500 staff feels pretty damn lean
by aliljet 4y ago
I'm pretty curious about how and where Twitter employees were distributed. For a company ostensibly worth $44 billion, having 7,500 staff feels pretty damn lean. It feels like Musk isn't just purging people, he's purging the Twitter culture...
- bluescrn 4y agoFor comparison, SpaceX runs an entire private space program on ~12,000 employees. Near-weekly launches. Rocket development+production. Building+deploying Starlink. (Although that's just a number from a quick googling. Maybe they outsource a lot of manufacturing etc?)
- esoterica 4y agoSpacex also makes less revenue than Twitter with their higher headcount.
- parkingrift 4y agoIt’s privately held so we don’t actually know that. However, SpaceX was valued at around $120 billion in their last funding round.
- wildrhythms 4y agoNASA has 18k permanent employees which I thought was surprisingly low. https://www.nasa.gov/about/index.html https://www.nasa.gov/about/index.html
- breezedream 4y agoGovernment typically has a whole ton of contractors, sometimes twice the number of FTEs, but a cursory Google indicates NASA has only about 1000 contractors. Interesting, but the contract money probably goes to acquisition and commercial partnerships (https://www.osbp.nasa.gov/docs/top20_2020_contractors-TAGGED.pdf https://www.osbp.nasa.gov/docs/top20_2020_contractors-TAGGED...). That said, their FY22 budget is “only” $30B, which is less than Elon just paid for all of Twitter. This number usually surprises people but a lot of other space-related work is within the USAF and NRO budgets.
- acdha 4y agoAbout a decade ago I was working on websites for NASA and just the contractor I worked for had over a thousand contractors. They were far from the largest, too.
- mirker 4y agoThat’s because recent focus on the space program is nonexistent. It’s been getting on life support since the moon walk.
- threeseed 4y agoThat comparison is however completely irrelevant to Twitter. It may seem to ignorant people that a space program is more advanced than "just a website" but actually running these kind of websites is extremely complex. Especially when you're needing to compete with Facebook and Google at serving ads in a relevant and effective way. It is really interesting reading through their infrastructure challenges alone: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago> at serving ads in a relevant and effective way. Anyone ever seen a relevant Twitter ad? Just seems very dumb location based placement. Nowhere near the level of IG.
- threeseed 4y ago> Nowhere near the level of IG Facebook and Google are in a completely different league which is why for most brands ~95% of online ad spend is spent there. Twitter has been slowly getting better until now when Musk's attitude has frightened the brands off i.e. GM, L'Oreal, Pfizer etc.
- marsven_422 4y ago
- pushkine 4y agoIt's crazy the number of people on HN somehow claiming that Twitter is this well run and well functioning tech company now that bad rocket man took the reigns and decided to lay off everyone... Isn't it a consensus among tech people that Twitter is the absolute worst tech company?
- KaiserPro 4y agoTwitter was a bit shit. But its up and running more or less in real time for millions of users. Thats pretty impressive. Its business is shit, yes. Musk looks like hes done the classic: "the office is clean why do I need cleaners" dance. I am surprised he can fire that many people that quickly and still expect momentum. It doesn't help that he appears to be shitting out product ideas that he's just "dreamt" up. Rather than talking to people to see why twitter didn't do it in the first place. He clearly has a low opinion of the entire company.
- petesergeant 4y agoSpaceX has many fewer customers and users though
- wreath 4y agoBut this is not a burger joint where you have to scale your number of employees as your number of customers increases.
- petesergeant 4y agoSure you do, just not linearly
- jejeyyy77 4y agoTo be fair software at space X is likely much less complex than Twitter’s stack.
- WalterBright 4y agoFor comparison, 400,000 people worked on the Apollo space program.
- tqi 4y agoAnd Walmart has over 2M employees, and they're just running a retail store!
- kulikalov 4y agothat's a labor intensive business
- MangoCoffee 4y agowe'll find out soon if Twitter really need 7500 employees. (IMO, i just don't see how and why you needs that many people to run Twitter)
- lkschubert8 4y agoOut of curiosity what do you think is a reasonable number?
- X6S1x6Okd1st 4y agoToo many variables changing at once to do proper attribution
- thomond 4y agoI wonder does this number include moderators or are they contractors who are not included in the headcount. I could see half that number being made of moderators if so.
- beowulfey 4y agoI was curious about the numbers that other tech companies may employ as a comparison... from some cursory googling: * Meta: 71,970 [2021] * Apple: 164,000 [2022] * Amazon: 1,298,000 [2020] * Netflix: 11,300 [2021] * Alphabet: 156,500 [2021] * Microsoft: 221,000 [2021] * The New York Times: 5000 [2021] * Fox Corporation: 9000 [2020] * Reddit: 700 [2021] (Anyone else I should add?) I can't really find any trends. I think Reddit is an outlier, and my impression is having only 3750 employees would probably put Twitter on the smaller end of the scale too.
- ryanwaggoner 4y agoReddit planned to double to 1400 in 2021 alone [1], it wouldn't surprise me if they were at 1500-2000 by now. 1. https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/9/22274077/reddit-funding-round-250-million-double-employees-investment https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/9/22274077/reddit-funding-ro...
- davedunkin 4y agoCraigslist: 50
- usrusr 4y agoImagine what the company would be "worth" if it did everything it does but with only three and a half employees. Company culture is a cost center.
- threeseed 4y agoAustralia newspapers are reporting [1] that local staff have been locked out of their accounts. They were responsible for local marketing and news curation. [1] https://www.theage.com.au/business/companies/musk-starts-mass-job-cuts-at-twitter-as-advertisers-hit-pause-20221104-p5bvna.html https://www.theage.com.au/business/companies/musk-starts-mas...
- nonethewiser 4y agoDoesn't seem like a big add
- LightG 4y agoPerhaps that's the point. It's not worth $44bn. Twitter rinsed Musk on the way out, which I deeply respect considering his behaviour. That will only be some salve for the employees losing their jobs, but hopefully their packages get some of that.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoPretty significant salve. I imagine the buyout netted most employees with stock hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- LightG 4y agoGood to hear. Thanks.
- zimpenfish 4y ago> I imagine the buyout netted most employees with stock hundreds of thousands of dollars. One of the theories knocking around last week was that these layoffs are just before a stock vesting was to happen, presumably in an attempt to avoid paying them.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoHowever, that theory was proven false. Today is Friday and vesting was Tuesday. I find it very odd that people keep mentioning it despite it not panning out, and not sure what to make of it. Out of honest curiosity, what was your intent for bringing it up?
- zimpenfish 4y ago> I find it very odd that people keep mentioning it despite it not panning out, and not sure what to make of it. Has anyone confirmed that the stock vests actually happened? Or did they get postponed whilst the layoffs where being organised? Haven't seen anything either way. And I don't think it's that odd to consider that a man well known for flaunting the law would flaunt the law on this as well.
- ben7799 4y agoDepends on how you value the company. Twitter is very overvalued if you look at accounting & finances more than influence and popularity and hype. Consider revenue and income (losses) and Twitter doesn't look good at all, they look horrible. They don't have that many employees, but they must be very very highly compensated and concentrated in very high cost areas. Otherwise the company is wasting serious money somewhere else, because to lose money on $5B/yr revenue with 7500 employees year after year in a business that's as high margin as pure software is incredibly terrible performance.
- kulikalov 4y agoThe finance folks have this term: "Intangible Assets", it affects the valuation big time.
- fleddr 4y agoMarket cap has always been a bullshit metric. It's not liquid.