Oh boy, another Hacker News commenter with zero experience running a large corporation telling experienced folks how they should run a large corporation. Better yet, with no explanation for why. The sheer arrogance.
I do find it curious that WhatsApp was operating at a much larger scale in terms of users and messages processed when they were sold to Facebook. And they had 55 employees.
So obviously you don't need 4,000 employees for the technology at this scale. I'm not sure what in the world the other 3,945 employees are doing though.
I don't know anything about Twitter's business, but just in general, I agree with your parent commenter that this entire thread of conversation (which happens every single time) is embarrassingly arrogant.
Let me put it this way: I think it's arrogant that management consulting companies think they can send in a couple recent ivy league grads to learn about a company for a few weeks and then suggest a bunch of changes. This is like that, but without even bothering to go in and learn about the company at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit https://stackoverflow.com/company/team
I'm guessing you would have called people arrogant for questioning Equifax's security practices. After all, it's an enormous company with thousands of skilled employees (interestingly, only about 2x as many employees as Twitter and an arguably much more complex tech stack) and security experts checking and consulting. How could they possibly be wrong!?!
I recommend you search around HN before you make sweeping generalizations, there are numerous threads that explain how or why WhatsApp were capable of doing what they were. From a technical perspective, as a "core product", Twitter's business has more abstractions
To get you started[0]
Twitter is bloated.
Their headcount has expanded quite a lot over the last few years - and for what? Their service has remained the same and 'scale' beyond a certain point does not matter.
What is 'labour intensive' - sales? Sure. Maybe some support staff? I doubt they're full time, more likely in Phillipenes off the books.
I don't doubt for a second that they didn't need all those staff members - I've worked enough 'fast growth' places to see how 'hiring for the sake of hiring' happens, it's a political orientation, not really an economic one.
Twitter is easily overstaffed by looking at what they have produced over the years. Even if you shaved the bottom 25% of employees they could still be operational and extremely profitable. They are a public company, growth is stagnant, and expenses are extraordinary. It's not rocket science even for someone with sheer arrogance and zero experience running a large corporation.
According to my Wikipedia research, they had ~2.5 billion in revenue last year and ~450 million in net losses
If they shaved the bottom 25%, to reach ramen profitability they'd need a savings of $450,000 per employee cut, and do that without having any negative impact on the productivity of the org as a whole (be it through hours worked or employee morale or additional churn)
Corporations are giant container ships moving in one direction, you can't just snap your fingers and turn 90 degrees
Soundcloud just had a similar shock happen, and after all the people they had to fire, I would not be surprised if that will kill the company in the mid-term, even with their new investment. If you have no ability to innovate due to missing staff, there is a good chance that your competitors will eat you alive.
Essentially, SC tried to pivot to Spotify, pissed off free users, and let it's actual paying user base stagnate for 2 years.
Then all that capital investment had no return and they're stuck in big contracts with hefty guaranteed payouts.
Anybody who has done better than that should feel free to give tips, in my view.
Idea: redirect Twitter.com to a Geocities page with ads for fidget spinners and fire everyone. I predict record profits.