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Comment by adrenalinelol | Hacker News Reader

I'd wager a bit more than that to maintain existing services. But they haven't given up on growth yet, disappointing news doesn't = throw in the towel. If these rumors are true, best of luck to those affected.

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Even to grow, does twitter really need 3,800 employees? The site hasn't exactly seen much change in the past few years.

Jonathan Blow gave a talk to Berekley college students a few months ago, complaining about the poor quality in modern software.

He picks on Twitter in one part, showing the graph of the number of employees by year, challenges their claims to the complexity of implementing Twitter, and mocks a UI problem he just had.

Twitter starts at 7 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k56wra39lwA

http://i.imgur.com/U4mHId3.png

Thanks. Good video.

How do you even grow like that? The current staff during that spike must have spent most of their time interviewing people.

That spike is misleading because the chart jumps from "Jan '11" to "Dec '13", 23 months. The other columns are all 12 months apart.

still, 100+ joining every month, that surely was not an easy task by any means.

But 3,750? Does anyone think Twitter needs that many people? Scale back to the bare essentials and regroup. Clearly the people there haven't been good for ambitious growth, time to shake it up, find a buyer (which will be easier with less overhead), or close the doors.

they should focus on being THE platform for key influencers, "thought leaders" and celebrities, mover-and-shaker types, kind of like Yahoo did with Katie Couric!

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