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Agreed. There was a poster here who argued that Twitter could run on 50 engineers because WhatsApp did as well. It was a response to Elon firing most of Twitter
by senttoschool 4y ago
Agreed. There was a poster here who argued that Twitter could run on 50 engineers because WhatsApp did as well. It was a response to Elon firing most of Twitter's engineers.
In terms of actual revenue per employee, Twitter (pre-Elon) actually beat Whatsapp (pre-Facebook).
A better measure of success might be employees/revenue.
In 2014, Whatsapp made $10m and lost $140m. That's only $200k/engineer.[0]
By comparison, Apple is at 2.3m/employee. Meta is 1.6m/employee. Twitter is 680k/employee. These include non-engineers of course.
When you need to start making money, you suddenly need to a lot more engineers. Now you need developers to make sales tools, compliance, moderation, finance, A/B test engineers for growth ideas, niche features for big customers, engineers to bring down cloud costs, etc.
[0]https://www.theverge.com/2014/10/28/7085905/facebooks-prized-acquisition-whatsapp-lost-140-million-last-year https://www.theverge.com/2014/10/28/7085905/facebooks-prized...