[peckrob]

I am glad I'm not the only person who has had this thought, and I think it every time I see how many people some of these random tech companies employ. Those are the kinds of employee numbers I would expect from a much larger company than Twilio.

For reference, in the past I worked for an immensely profitable eCommerce business and I don't think our entire engineering department ever reached more than 40 people at its absolute largest.

I know all those employees aren't engineers, and I've been around long enough to know that what we see from the outside is just the tip of the iceberg. But if we assume even 25% of them are engineers directly working on the product, that is still nearly 2,000 people. That must be a huge iceberg.

So what on Earth are all those people doing? I am not being sarcastic or obtuse, I am genuinely curious because the only organization that I have ever worked for that was that size or larger was the US government. Is it administrative/managerial bloat? Are there a bunch of different pivot projects going on? What does Twilio have going on that needs nearly 8,000 employees?

[christophilus]

When I worked at a VC-backed firm, headcount was a bragging point and seemed to be a metric they were concerned about in the opposite direction you’d expect— that is, if I was a business owner, I’d be concerned about having too much headcount. They were always busy seemingly trying to maximize headcount. I never understood it.

[polski-g]

Twitter has 7500 employees. Its absurd. You could fire 7000 of them and still run the infrastructure just fine.