[edderly]

I think it'll be fine. You don't need 7000 people to run a micro blogging service. It's really that simple.

[falcolas]

> I think it'll be fine. You don't need 7000 people to run a micro blogging service. It's really that simple.

When you're generating and distributing and moderating multiple TB of tweets in real time every day to billions of people and also feeding other corporations parts of that data... maybe you do.

[jlangenauer]

Twitter has around 190m daily active users. You're going to struggle to run something like that with an engineering team of 20-30 people (although WhatsApp did exactly that for many years), sure.

But I don't see why an company and an application of that size couldn't be run by a company of, say, 1500 people, instead of 7000. 250 engineering staff, 250 doing moderation/support, 800 doing sales & account management and 100 in management and 100 doing sundry tasks.

[joshribakoff]

Maybe, maybe not. I don’t think the number of engineers needs to scale with the servers. You can scale out servers without scaling out your number of engineers. As far as moderation, Twitter is already poorly moderated and moderation can be outsourced.

The types of things that require scaling out engineers is supporting video embeds from 100s of different video hosting platforms.

[robotresearcher]

I've seen this statement a lot, and I think it's missing something.

Public companies typically have growth as a goal. Twitter was not making a lot of money. Some of these people were working on building a future Twitter that would grow bigger and richer. I'm not saying they were on the path to success, just that I expect a lot of the activity there could be described that way.

Five years ago you could say of Uber 'You don't need 5000 people to run a freelance taxi app', when they had hundreds (thousands?) of people working on autonomous driving. Amazon didn't seem to need scores of backend engineers to run a web store, but now AWS is a huge business. Google employs vast numbers of people but has a relatively small number of impactful products, only some of which make money.

Again, not claiming they were doing it well, just that they were trying stuff beyond maintaining what we see.

[harlequinn77]

To be frank, twitter hasn't changed in 10 years.

So in this hypothetical, the people building the future of the company have achieved nothing during this time and should absolutely be removed or replaced.

[chasd00]

i think 7000 is too high as well but don't forget, in a business, the technology part is maybe 10% of the overall effort. There's a lot that goes into running a business beyond the tech.

[dclowd9901]

Yes, where would businesses be without a fleet of energy sucking middle managers.

I don’t like EM at all, but truth is internet companies are making so much goddamn money, they have employee pools absolutely full of turds.

[oneeyedpigeon]

It's possible you need 100 engineers and 6,900 moderators.

[idlewords]

I believe a lot of the moderation is contracted out and isn't part of employee headcount.

[duhast]

Why do you think so?

[reitanqild]

Look at early WhatsApp until they were aquired.

Vastly more innovative and scaled crazy fast without fail whales or anything.

Or look to Telegram today. Delivering a vastly more complex product with a fraction of the company size it seems.

[rockostrich]

I don't disagree that 7000 people is too many for what Twitter has become but Twitter has been at the bleeding edge in terms of building web and data systems that can handle scale (while also open sourcing most of that work).

[SalmoShalazar]

Not sure how this is relevant given that Twitter is not a “micro blogging service”

[CountSessine]

What is it then? That seems like the best description to me.

[humanistbot]

You don't if you don't need any content moderation.