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Comment by jjeaff | Hacker News Reader

Although few have any experience operating at that scale, one can make comparisons.

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.

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You don't see how person to person and small group messaging is a more difficult engineering challenge than personalized feed multicast? It's also simpler to sell subscriptions than to sell targeted ads - there's at least one whole other product we don't see, which Twitter's advertisers use, and it's probably a few different ones for different sizes and kinds of advertisers. Clearly, there's also a whole group working on the firehose product discussed elsewhere in this thread.

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.

But as with many engineering challenges, throwing more people at the problem doesn't solve it faster and often makes things worse. A harder problem to solve might just need and other person or two or more time but thousands of people? It does seem excessive, right?

Honestly, it's impossible for me to say whether it seems excessive, because I have no idea what it takes to run their business. But I don't think you have any inside information either, do you?

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.

No, I don't know anything more that you. But I can contrast the scale of Twitter with other comparable, realtime, multi user sites like reddit and stackoverflow. Both of those sites have 230 and ~330 (I didn't count all the SO employees), respectively. And Stackoverflow is actually selling a product. Is Twitter so different from these sites?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit https://stackoverflow.com/company/team

Yes, I see some differences and added complexity. I don't see a nearly 100x difference. Sure, it's arrogant to question them with little inside knowledge. But I have been in business long enough to know that big, public companies do really, really stupid things sometimes.

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 don't think anyone should assume security practices at companies either are or aren't sufficient, without any knowledge one way or the other. Same thing with company size. Without actual knowledge, it doesn't make sense to assume it's too many, too few, or exactly the right amount.

> 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

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]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10225096

Does Twitter's business have 100x more abstractions? Because they have about 100x more employees.

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