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manjose2018 | 3 years ago

Whatsapp had 1B users with far fewer eng, why is Twitter so big?

Here is my back of the envelope math of how big I think the company should be for their main offering. Over the past years Twitter has acquired a ton of companies, but I'm going to leave them out of this equation.

Eng (250)

===========

Backend/Storage: 100 eng

Subscriptions: 50

Front-End: 50 eng

iOS App: 20 eng

Android App: 20 eng

UX: 10

Abuse/Moderation (200) ========================= Abuse: 100 Moderation: 100

Marketing/Sales (210)

=======================

PR/Marketing: 30

Ad Sales: 180

Mgmt/overhead (40)

=====================

Legal/GDPR/compliance: 20

HR/Recruiting : 10

CEO/CFO/etc.: 10

What do you think? How far off am I? If more people turn to subscriptions perhaps the abuse/moderation team will shrink in the future.

discuss

ssnistfajen|3 years ago

Twitter isn't the same product(s) as Whatsapp. That difference is noticeable within 1 minute of opening both applications.

mrweasel|3 years ago

Yes, WhatsApp seem more complex.

In all seriousness, I think many of us are falling into the trap that the PayPal guy fell into. Twitter isn't just the app and the website. So it's much harder to run and maintain than it seems like from the outside. If it was just the Tweets, why would they ever need more than 10 iOS developers for instance?

If we cut Twitter into what it is on the surface, and perhaps lose some data retention, then sliming down the engineering organization significantly should be possible with the right people. Not to 50, that's really low for a platform the size of Twitter. That being said: 7500 employees is also way to many for what they do, or at least for how little money they make.

TylerE|3 years ago

You really think a total of 200 moderators could come even close?

Thats 1.7M tweets a day per moderator. A bit over 3500 per minute.

And thats assuming they work 7 days a week, never get sick, never take vacation.

davidguetta|3 years ago

Most of moderation is typically outsourced so it doesnt countin this list

DrBenCarson|3 years ago

On WhatsApp, your "post" can be seen by everyone you've exchanged phone numbers with. On Twitter, your "post" can be seen by the entire world.

dist1ll|3 years ago

You forgot operations, tooling, observability, SRE, incidence response, etc

layer8|3 years ago

With 5000 to 10000 tweets being sent per second (~500 million per day), 200 employees for abuse/moderation seems low.

myroon5|3 years ago

Related tech staffing thoughts of someone now directly involved:

https://sacks.substack.com/p/the-saas-org-chart

phillipcarter|3 years ago

I wonder if the author would change this post to show less employees and higher ARR. That's certainly been my experience today.

cromka|3 years ago

The picture isn't complete unless you also compare it with Toyota.

mkl95|3 years ago

Twitter's business model is a clusterfuck. Whatsapp's isn't.