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So back in 2015/16 when I worked at Facebook somebody asked Mark Z if Twitter was overstaffed. First someone told him how many employees they had, he was shocke
by disgruntledphd2 4y ago
So back in 2015/16 when I worked at Facebook somebody asked Mark Z if Twitter was overstaffed. First someone told him how many employees they had, he was shocked and replied that they were definitely over staffed. Obviously anecdotal but given their sales/userbase I think that they have been historically over staffed.
- teleforce 4y agoCompletely agree. WhatsApp is a real-time messaging service and famously had only 50 engineers when its userbase is close to one billion [1]. [1]Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/amp https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...
- threeseed 4y agoI wish people would stop with this pointless comparison. WhatsApp did not have recommendations, advertising, content moderation, GDPR, DCMA etc or the volume of bots. It is simply not a comparable system. And it is the backend systems you don't see that make up most of the tech stack.
- postalrat 4y agoOr might do if people stop saying twitter's scale is why it needed so many engineers.
- norwalkbear 4y agoDo those system justify have 10-20x the engineers? Honest question, I'm a game dev. In my industry, we outsource a lot of that stuff.
- tredre3 4y agoI personally could see a need for 10-20x the engineers, they're solving a very different problem. But twitter had 7500 employees in 2021, of which about half were engineering (reports I found vary between 3500 to 4500), so that's at least 65x the engineers!
- s1artibartfast 4y agoA Counterpoint is that Twitter had 350 employees in 2013 and about 200 million users
- disgruntledphd2 4y agoNo, but Fb had 1500 employees in 2011, and it was much bigger and profitable at that time. I think that's the more appropriate comparison.