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It’s running well because the old guard built it so well. Musk threw them all out, so it will slowly but surely degrade. There was a reason Twitter had such a l
by FranzFerdiNaN 4y ago
It’s running well because the old guard built it so well. Musk threw them all out, so it will slowly but surely degrade. There was a reason Twitter had such a large workforce.
- ipaddr 4y agoIs this the same twitter who almost died trying to scale when they started? They have been in worse spots. They will be fine and much of the old guard still works there.
- drstewart 4y agoSo under what conditions would you consider a company overstaffed?
- Lutger 4y agoI would say you are overstaffed if A) you can't afford them and / or B) you've grown so fast, you don't know how to make use of the staff you have. Perhaps there is a C) which is a variant of B) the business model you are running only requires so much staff and you hit a ceiling in growth.
- kohlerm 4y agoI would not claim to have enough information about twitter being overstaffed? They might have a lot of technical debt, which can cause the need for more people to run it. But that is not "overstaffing".
- hnbad 4y agoThe question is also how overstaffing is measured. If adding another person reduces the average productivity, you might define that as the cut-off due to the declining ROI for every other person added. But you probably also want some level of redundancy (aka reducing the bus factor) in order to account for the ongoing global health situation and general churn. Of course repeated waves of mass layoffs, demanding a pledge of allegiance to the company and revocation of all employee privileges at the threat of being fired and publicly throwing your employees repeatedly under the bus are also ways to reduce churn, so the bar for "overstaffing" might have actually lowered.
- dmitriid 4y agoThe tragedy of Twitter is that: - they were absolutely undoubtedly overstaffed - Musk's approach was absolutely undoubtedly insane shenanigans of a stupid rich cry-baby Both are true at the same time
- wpietri 4y ago> they were absolutely undoubtedly overstaffed Oh? What's your evidence here?
- disgruntledphd2 4y agoLook at FB's staff from back when they had comparable revenue and way more users. I believe that 2013-14 FB was comparable in terms of revenue and users, and they had approximately half the staff.
- wpietri 4y agoSo? WhatsApp had 35 developers and 350 million users. By that measure, every other company is grossly overstaffed. Personally, I could argue that every social network is grossly understaffed by the measure of how lax they are about what they are supporting. E.g., in 2017, that company you say is more appropriately staffed contributed to a genocide that left tens of thousands dead: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
- kortilla 4y agoWhatsApp wasn’t a social network with public posts of rich media. It’s trivial from an architectural perspective because there isn’t anything that needs to be sent to millions of users.
- danaris 4y agoOh? So you're saying a company with a similar, but not identical, product might have completely different infrastructure and staffing needs? So we might not, in fact, be able to meaningfully compare Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc by headcount alone?
- rightbyte 4y ago> It’s running well because the old guard built it so well. Twitter is a shitshow technically. Sub-tweets don't nest right and change order in a arbitrary way.
- jdminhbg 4y agoThe backend that handles the API has generally been relatively solid, but the official clients are a complete disaster.