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Kraken actually handles money so it needs customer service and Twitter is just a bunch of already written code for posting stuff and sometimes (although much le

Kraken actually handles money so it needs customer service and Twitter is just a bunch of already written code for posting stuff and sometimes (although much less now!) getting ad dollars. What do (did) 7000 people do at Twitter? I hate to ask the question because it aligns me with Elon whom I despise right now. But what do all the employees do at tech companies? I thought the beauty of tech and why the valuations were so high is that it scales quite easily since it is all code. What do 32,500 employees at Uber do?

woodruffw 4y ago
The value proposition of decentralized finance was supposed to be a replacement for traditional finance: automating away the hundreds of manual roles that banks currently employ as part of their regulatory requirements and customer services. Do you have a source that shows that a substantial percent of Kraken's headcount is customer service? They've tried recruiting me a handful of times, and each time they highlighted their voracious appetite for engineering talent (and corresponding rapid growth of their engineering teams). As I said: Twitter was one of the largest social media networks on the planet, one that ran its own datacenters and independent ad business (along with moderation teams, service teams, etc.). I'm not particularly interested in defending a headcount of 7000 people; only that it makes far more sense to me than roughly half that number at a cryptocurrency firm.
- proto-n 4y ago
  To be fair cexes are like a bridge between defi and regular finance and need tech and knowledge in both areas. Ask how larga a headcount dexes like uniswap need, and your argument makes more sense.
vkou 4y ago
> Kraken actually handles money so it needs customer service and Twitter is just a bunch of already written code for posting stuff and sometimes (although much less now!) getting ad dollars. If you view Twitter as a 'service for posting 140 characters', they don't need 7000 employees. If you view it as a 'service for supporting five billion dollars worth of ad spend across the entire world', with all the proprietary software, ads front-ends, ads back-ends and reporting services, weird one-off partner integrations, ads account management, sales, advertiser support, moderation and compliance, legal compliance... Well, all that quickly adds up to a lot of headcount.
- SilasX 4y ago
  But why does it add up to 7000 headcount rather than 3500 headcount or 14000 headcount?
  - jasonlotito 4y ago
    Moderation, customer support, sales, and then everyone to support all those people. You don't think that matters, but it has a real impact on your bottom line. Companies are stopping advertising now, not because Musk took over, but because they can't support for advertising (probably because they were sacked). It was one of the worlds largest social media platforms! Couple that with the reality that Twitter needs at LEAST twice as many people to function than it currently has, even after Musk sent everyone packing. How do I know this? Because the remaining people need to work at least twice as much to make up for the people that left. And this of course ignores all the things that have failed since he took over. The current people are NOT keeping Twitter at 100%. It's already failing.
    - SilasX 4y ago
      > You don't think that matters, I didn’t express an opinion on that, and actually believe the opposite of what you just hastily attributed to me. My point is that, when gauging whether 7000 is a reasonable figure, it’s not enough to vomit a laundry list of work that the company needs to do — because that kind of argument would apply equally well to justifying 3500, 7000, 14000, or a million. To justify a specific figure, you need more rigor than hand waving about general work categories. The parent didn’t.
      - vkou 4y ago
        The parent poster, as an outsider, only makes informed, but speculative guesses about Twitter's business footprint, as does ~anyone who does not have T9 vision of the firm. I am not going to tell you that their right size is 3500, or 1500, or 7000, or 14000, because I don't know what it is. But I will say that it's very likely to be measured in the thousands. [1] [1] Although you can always try to shrink the business... A Twitter that doesn't work, and has no revenue could probably be ran by ~0 employees.
f1recat 4y ago
Uber eng count is about 3500 and given the scope this can be considered as very lean
- disgruntledphd2 4y ago
  That's not lean. FB had less than that in total employees before they went public, at which point they were already profitable and had over a billion users.
hardwaregeek 4y ago
Huh what? Do you assume that code just works? Something's always breaking and there's always new features that people want. Editing tweets just barely became a thing. Which, btw, is the exact sort of feature that would be easy peg as trivial, but likely is not when you're running at Twitter scale. Before, a tweet had two states: created or deleted. Now it can have arbitrarily many states and possibly even interleaved ones. In a distributed system that's a lot more complicated. Twitter runs its own infrastructure too. That takes a bunch of people. Computers don't just run themselves and they certainly don't provision themselves. Traffic is likely super spiky too because of how Twitter reacts to current events. That probably requires cutting edge load balancing and real time code. Not to mention all of the work getting everything translated and accessible to the entire globe. And of course moderating a site with millions of people so that literal civil wars do not start. And keeping in contact with various governments who probably contract each other and themselves on a regular basis. These are problems that are not as scalable as writing a bunch of code. You need real, physical people to handle these issues. And now setting up a creator economy and their Clubhouse competitor.
- Mistletoe 4y ago
  I’m sorry I just don’t find the ability to edit tweets a groundbreaking new feature that is difficult to implement in 2022.
  - insanitybit 4y ago
    Having an immutable ordered log + a single bit flag for "deleted" is radically more efficient than an arbitrarily mutable ordered log. ex: You could store every tweet compressed in S3 with a bitmap for which are deleted (a bit that can be cached forever). That assumes you aren't going to ever have to update the object in S3. Once you have to update it that entire design is horrible, you'll need something completely different. Consider that there are thousands of tweets per second with significant fan out for reads. There's search, relationship data (did you @ someone? did your edit remove that @?), business analytics, and more.
    - 4y ago
skorpeon87 4y ago
> What do (did) 7000 people do at Twitter? I don't know, but Discord has a small fraction of the employees. They have hundreds of millions of active users, handle tons of live audio streams in addition to the text traffic, and their client software has a lot more features than twitter. Why can Discord do more with less?
Stranger43 4y ago
At lot of that is dealing with large customers(advertisers etc.) who need to be able to talk to someone at those companies to make sure they get their money's worth of services, and isn't left alone to sort out their issues based on bad documentation and internet hearsay. Another big part of it is simply admin, for twitter a lot of that is babysitting the moderation algorithms as their customers(who is not the people tweeting) can be pretty sensitive about what kind of content they are associated with. Then there is defensive research i.e. any big company in a particular space wants to have prototypes and technology ready to compete with anything their competitors might come out with especially if they expect a growth in overall sector revenue. For uber they are also a de-facto employer for a lot of drivers and a provider of real world services so they need the full range of hr and customer support services that those kind of services and driver numbers would require had it not been a tech company.

woodruffw 4y ago

The value proposition of decentralized finance was supposed to be a replacement for traditional finance: automating away the hundreds of manual roles that banks currently employ as part of their regulatory requirements and customer services. Do you have a source that shows that a substantial percent of Kraken's headcount is customer service? They've tried recruiting me a handful of times, and each time they highlighted their voracious appetite for engineering talent (and corresponding rapid growth of their engineering teams). As I said: Twitter was one of the largest social media networks on the planet, one that ran its own datacenters and independent ad business (along with moderation teams, service teams, etc.). I'm not particularly interested in defending a headcount of 7000 people; only that it makes far more sense to me than roughly half that number at a cryptocurrency firm.

proto-n 4y ago
To be fair cexes are like a bridge between defi and regular finance and need tech and knowledge in both areas. Ask how larga a headcount dexes like uniswap need, and your argument makes more sense.

vkou 4y ago

> Kraken actually handles money so it needs customer service and Twitter is just a bunch of already written code for posting stuff and sometimes (although much less now!) getting ad dollars. If you view Twitter as a 'service for posting 140 characters', they don't need 7000 employees. If you view it as a 'service for supporting five billion dollars worth of ad spend across the entire world', with all the proprietary software, ads front-ends, ads back-ends and reporting services, weird one-off partner integrations, ads account management, sales, advertiser support, moderation and compliance, legal compliance... Well, all that quickly adds up to a lot of headcount.

SilasX 4y ago
But why does it add up to 7000 headcount rather than 3500 headcount or 14000 headcount?
- jasonlotito 4y ago
  Moderation, customer support, sales, and then everyone to support all those people. You don't think that matters, but it has a real impact on your bottom line. Companies are stopping advertising now, not because Musk took over, but because they can't support for advertising (probably because they were sacked). It was one of the worlds largest social media platforms! Couple that with the reality that Twitter needs at LEAST twice as many people to function than it currently has, even after Musk sent everyone packing. How do I know this? Because the remaining people need to work at least twice as much to make up for the people that left. And this of course ignores all the things that have failed since he took over. The current people are NOT keeping Twitter at 100%. It's already failing.
  - SilasX 4y ago
    > You don't think that matters, I didn’t express an opinion on that, and actually believe the opposite of what you just hastily attributed to me. My point is that, when gauging whether 7000 is a reasonable figure, it’s not enough to vomit a laundry list of work that the company needs to do — because that kind of argument would apply equally well to justifying 3500, 7000, 14000, or a million. To justify a specific figure, you need more rigor than hand waving about general work categories. The parent didn’t.
    - vkou 4y ago
      The parent poster, as an outsider, only makes informed, but speculative guesses about Twitter's business footprint, as does ~anyone who does not have T9 vision of the firm. I am not going to tell you that their right size is 3500, or 1500, or 7000, or 14000, because I don't know what it is. But I will say that it's very likely to be measured in the thousands. [1] [1] Although you can always try to shrink the business... A Twitter that doesn't work, and has no revenue could probably be ran by ~0 employees.

f1recat 4y ago

Uber eng count is about 3500 and given the scope this can be considered as very lean

disgruntledphd2 4y ago
That's not lean. FB had less than that in total employees before they went public, at which point they were already profitable and had over a billion users.

hardwaregeek 4y ago

Huh what? Do you assume that code just works? Something's always breaking and there's always new features that people want. Editing tweets just barely became a thing. Which, btw, is the exact sort of feature that would be easy peg as trivial, but likely is not when you're running at Twitter scale. Before, a tweet had two states: created or deleted. Now it can have arbitrarily many states and possibly even interleaved ones. In a distributed system that's a lot more complicated. Twitter runs its own infrastructure too. That takes a bunch of people. Computers don't just run themselves and they certainly don't provision themselves. Traffic is likely super spiky too because of how Twitter reacts to current events. That probably requires cutting edge load balancing and real time code. Not to mention all of the work getting everything translated and accessible to the entire globe. And of course moderating a site with millions of people so that literal civil wars do not start. And keeping in contact with various governments who probably contract each other and themselves on a regular basis. These are problems that are not as scalable as writing a bunch of code. You need real, physical people to handle these issues. And now setting up a creator economy and their Clubhouse competitor.

Mistletoe 4y ago
I’m sorry I just don’t find the ability to edit tweets a groundbreaking new feature that is difficult to implement in 2022.
- insanitybit 4y ago
  Having an immutable ordered log + a single bit flag for "deleted" is radically more efficient than an arbitrarily mutable ordered log. ex: You could store every tweet compressed in S3 with a bitmap for which are deleted (a bit that can be cached forever). That assumes you aren't going to ever have to update the object in S3. Once you have to update it that entire design is horrible, you'll need something completely different. Consider that there are thousands of tweets per second with significant fan out for reads. There's search, relationship data (did you @ someone? did your edit remove that @?), business analytics, and more.
  - 4y ago

skorpeon87 4y ago

> What do (did) 7000 people do at Twitter? I don't know, but Discord has a small fraction of the employees. They have hundreds of millions of active users, handle tons of live audio streams in addition to the text traffic, and their client software has a lot more features than twitter. Why can Discord do more with less?

Stranger43 4y ago

At lot of that is dealing with large customers(advertisers etc.) who need to be able to talk to someone at those companies to make sure they get their money's worth of services, and isn't left alone to sort out their issues based on bad documentation and internet hearsay. Another big part of it is simply admin, for twitter a lot of that is babysitting the moderation algorithms as their customers(who is not the people tweeting) can be pretty sensitive about what kind of content they are associated with. Then there is defensive research i.e. any big company in a particular space wants to have prototypes and technology ready to compete with anything their competitors might come out with especially if they expect a growth in overall sector revenue. For uber they are also a de-facto employer for a lot of drivers and a provider of real world services so they need the full range of hr and customer support services that those kind of services and driver numbers would require had it not been a tech company.