6 ms·

Twitter had 7,500 employees. most of the roles you mention (security engineers, code reviews, data architecture, HR, internal audit teams, content moderators, s

Twitter had 7,500 employees. most of the roles you mention (security engineers, code reviews, data architecture, HR, internal audit teams, content moderators, scrum master) are not bloat. So the question is what are the other 7000 people doing?

orwin 4y ago
I worked for a bank with 28000 total engineers. I know because part of what i did was crunching github and gitlab data and detecting double accounts (and deleting account from people not there anymore). I'd say 3/4th of them were just cost of doing business. Including me (my role wasn't really necessary, the stuff i did was cool and everything, but a bit useless).
- Xylakant 4y ago
  At this scale, having someone take care of deleting double/expired accounts is just good hygiene and I would not consider that useless. Forgotten accounts are a security risk.
  - papito 4y ago
    The bigger question is why such a large bank does not have solid off-boarding procedures.
    - Xylakant 4y ago
      Any off-boarding procedure fails - at that scale, if even one in one thousand fails, you can expect a couple of failures per year. ensuring these get caught is part of "solid offboarding".
    - orwin 4y ago
      They had that on the financial side. The eng/HR side was behind for sure.
    - anon400232 4y ago
      Hello tip, meet iceberg.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      Do you even begin to understand how many applications a large bank actually manages?
      - papito 4y ago
        That's not an excuse. If a bank can make sure that they do not mistakenly just deposit free money into people's accounts by mistake, they can ensure that a person who has left (possibly on bad terms) does not keep access to critical systems. That's an entity that specializes in RISK MANAGEMENT.
  - bushbaba 4y ago
    A security risk which only gets worth with time.
  - chasd00 4y ago
    forgotten account that a former employee can re-activate or login with? I would think banks would be fined by regulators or risk their license over even a single instance of that.
cal85 4y ago
Sitting on beanbags in group therapy sessions talking about imposter syndrome.
- andrew_ 4y ago
  what's sad is that the people who were there doing real work are being lumped in with the people who were there for adult daycare.
  - Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
    it showed up over night and now the phrase adult day care is everywhere. Where do y'all get your talking points from? Is it a rss feed I haven't heard about?
    - lightbendover 4y ago
      Adult day care has been used to describe tech companies for well over a decade in my circles. I usually saw it associated with start-ups in the past, but due to the recent trend of influencer-driven marketing videos (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgaZsbXeddY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgaZsbXeddY but there are much more egregious examples) for large tech companies it has seen a resurgence.
      - Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
        > in my circles. what circles are those? I cannot seem to find any references to the term beyond this year. > for large tech companies it has seen a resurgence. it seems more like a bad attempt at insulting people who are trying to make work less shit. i will save my opinion at whether those attempts are more or less useful, but seems entirely another dumb culture war
        lightbendover 4y ago
        I'm sorry, but allowing employees to put in a couple of barely-productive hours so THEIR work is less shit is utterly insulting to the people who strive to make companies function. Work is work -- if it wasn't, then it would be called something different. I would perhaps feel otherwise if compensation took this and a multitude of other intangible factors into account, but it doesn't so the derogative sticks for me at least.
wmil 4y ago
Twitter had a lot of people in marketing.
goosedragons 4y ago
They had over a thousand moderators. So maybe your estimate of how many people is required is a bit off.
- animitronix 4y ago
  And they absolutely sucked at it. Good riddance to a useless cost center.
  - donkeyd 4y ago
    There was a Twitter thread (ironically) on the front page recently where a Reddit founder explained why anyone will always suck at it. I recommend looking it up.
    - abirch 4y ago
      You need to pay for content moderates to prevent lawsuits. Lawsuits are very expensive but less so when you say we had thousands of people working on it. It looks like you can post entire movies to 2 Minutes per clip onto Twitter right now. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/users-uploading-entire-movies-twitter-115535910.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/users-uploading-entire-movies...
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    It's just evidence that a thousand moderators (plus many, many engineers for automated moderation systems to reduce the load) is still nowhere near enough to not suck at moderation on Twitter scale.
- fnord123 4y ago
  Then the question remains what the other 5000 people were doing.
CPLX 4y ago
If you spend a million dollars with a company do you expect them to call you back if you reach out to them? How many millions are in a billion?
avereveard 4y ago
7493 given the article mentions the sre team being a 3 man operation
- donkeyd 4y ago
  SRE for the Cache Team. I feel people are overlooking that part.
nemo44x 4y ago
I've heard stories of teams that were more or less dedicated to nothing useful except policing the company, product, and users for woke violations. All these "affinity groups" to ensure voices were "being heard" when decisions were being made or some garbage like that. In essence, at some point there was a takeover and senior leadership either agreed with it or simply didn't want to get into trouble like Google did with these things, so they just went along with it all.
valachio 4y ago
the answer is - not much. the power law applies to any big organization. 20% of the people do 80% of the work, whilst 80% of the people are just there for "support". whatsapp was run by a team of like 20 people or something when they got acquired for $20 billion. for a simple software product, you don't really need that many people. in fact, more people often means bad software. you just need a small group of very talented engineers to run the product and add new features when necessary. big (and especially public) companies often times need to hire a lot, just to look like a real company. now that twitter is private, elon has no responsibility to public investors and can focus less on looking like a real company and more on doing what needs to be done to cut bloat/costs and improve product

orwin 4y ago

I worked for a bank with 28000 total engineers. I know because part of what i did was crunching github and gitlab data and detecting double accounts (and deleting account from people not there anymore). I'd say 3/4th of them were just cost of doing business. Including me (my role wasn't really necessary, the stuff i did was cool and everything, but a bit useless).

Xylakant 4y ago
At this scale, having someone take care of deleting double/expired accounts is just good hygiene and I would not consider that useless. Forgotten accounts are a security risk.
- papito 4y ago
  The bigger question is why such a large bank does not have solid off-boarding procedures.
  - Xylakant 4y ago
    Any off-boarding procedure fails - at that scale, if even one in one thousand fails, you can expect a couple of failures per year. ensuring these get caught is part of "solid offboarding".
  - orwin 4y ago
    They had that on the financial side. The eng/HR side was behind for sure.
  - anon400232 4y ago
    Hello tip, meet iceberg.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Do you even begin to understand how many applications a large bank actually manages?
    - papito 4y ago
      That's not an excuse. If a bank can make sure that they do not mistakenly just deposit free money into people's accounts by mistake, they can ensure that a person who has left (possibly on bad terms) does not keep access to critical systems. That's an entity that specializes in RISK MANAGEMENT.
- bushbaba 4y ago
  A security risk which only gets worth with time.
- chasd00 4y ago
  forgotten account that a former employee can re-activate or login with? I would think banks would be fined by regulators or risk their license over even a single instance of that.

cal85 4y ago

Sitting on beanbags in group therapy sessions talking about imposter syndrome.

andrew_ 4y ago
what's sad is that the people who were there doing real work are being lumped in with the people who were there for adult daycare.
- Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
  it showed up over night and now the phrase adult day care is everywhere. Where do y'all get your talking points from? Is it a rss feed I haven't heard about?
  - lightbendover 4y ago
    Adult day care has been used to describe tech companies for well over a decade in my circles. I usually saw it associated with start-ups in the past, but due to the recent trend of influencer-driven marketing videos (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgaZsbXeddY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgaZsbXeddY but there are much more egregious examples) for large tech companies it has seen a resurgence.
    - Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
      > in my circles. what circles are those? I cannot seem to find any references to the term beyond this year. > for large tech companies it has seen a resurgence. it seems more like a bad attempt at insulting people who are trying to make work less shit. i will save my opinion at whether those attempts are more or less useful, but seems entirely another dumb culture war
      - lightbendover 4y ago
        I'm sorry, but allowing employees to put in a couple of barely-productive hours so THEIR work is less shit is utterly insulting to the people who strive to make companies function. Work is work -- if it wasn't, then it would be called something different. I would perhaps feel otherwise if compensation took this and a multitude of other intangible factors into account, but it doesn't so the derogative sticks for me at least.

wmil 4y ago

Twitter had a lot of people in marketing.

goosedragons 4y ago

They had over a thousand moderators. So maybe your estimate of how many people is required is a bit off.

animitronix 4y ago
And they absolutely sucked at it. Good riddance to a useless cost center.
- donkeyd 4y ago
  There was a Twitter thread (ironically) on the front page recently where a Reddit founder explained why anyone will always suck at it. I recommend looking it up.
  - abirch 4y ago
    You need to pay for content moderates to prevent lawsuits. Lawsuits are very expensive but less so when you say we had thousands of people working on it. It looks like you can post entire movies to 2 Minutes per clip onto Twitter right now. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/users-uploading-entire-movies-twitter-115535910.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/users-uploading-entire-movies...
- PeterisP 4y ago
  It's just evidence that a thousand moderators (plus many, many engineers for automated moderation systems to reduce the load) is still nowhere near enough to not suck at moderation on Twitter scale.
fnord123 4y ago
Then the question remains what the other 5000 people were doing.

CPLX 4y ago

If you spend a million dollars with a company do you expect them to call you back if you reach out to them? How many millions are in a billion?

avereveard 4y ago

7493 given the article mentions the sre team being a 3 man operation

donkeyd 4y ago
SRE for the Cache Team. I feel people are overlooking that part.

nemo44x 4y ago

I've heard stories of teams that were more or less dedicated to nothing useful except policing the company, product, and users for woke violations. All these "affinity groups" to ensure voices were "being heard" when decisions were being made or some garbage like that. In essence, at some point there was a takeover and senior leadership either agreed with it or simply didn't want to get into trouble like Google did with these things, so they just went along with it all.

valachio 4y ago

the answer is - not much. the power law applies to any big organization. 20% of the people do 80% of the work, whilst 80% of the people are just there for "support". whatsapp was run by a team of like 20 people or something when they got acquired for $20 billion. for a simple software product, you don't really need that many people. in fact, more people often means bad software. you just need a small group of very talented engineers to run the product and add new features when necessary. big (and especially public) companies often times need to hire a lot, just to look like a real company. now that twitter is private, elon has no responsibility to public investors and can focus less on looking like a real company and more on doing what needs to be done to cut bloat/costs and improve product