Because at scale small changes can save or make a company more money than an engineers salary.

Simply making a process 2% more efficient can save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Or increasing advertising conversions by 1%. etc etc.

Even though this article's title sounds like it, this isn't meant to be flippant: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/

Also see the other child comment: Once you have a significant amount of revenue, investing the effort improve things by 0.1% (or even 0.01%) can have a not-insignificant impact on the bottom line.

I have always wondered this too. On the surface, Twitter doesn't seem like a very elaborate service. I'm sure there's serious thorny scaling problems to deal with. But how many engineers does that really take?

Twitter has 321 million monthly active users.

WeWork has 466 thousand members.

The scale is quite different.

As a company grows, development becomes harder due to the need to interface with so many teams -- a feature that you used to be able to implement a couple days after a lunchtime discussion with your coworkers turns into a detailed design and design review, design revisions to prevent breaking functionality that other teams use, a revised design review and approval, security review and approval, and then finally implementation, but you find that in the 3 months since you started the design, the functionality you were planning on using was changed by yet another team and the affect on your feature was missed during that project's design review.

Plus, the problems you need to solve get more complicated, you have new compliance needs, paying customers are demanding new features that may require changes across your entire stack, performance is more of an issue (saving 3% of your compute costs didn't matter when you were paying $500/month for infrastructure, but saving 3% of 10 million dollars/month starts turning into real money) and writing and deploying software used by hundreds of millions of people is literally orders of magnitude harder than software a few million people use.

So you'd freeze the feature creep, but keep working on the set of features you listed? I think you answered your own question.

One of Twitter's main challenges at this stage is content moderation and fraud detection, a technical challenge for which solutions are not straightforward or easily scalable.

Consumer VC companies are businesses that require growth at all costs. So they need to invest in man-hours to churn out features.

If they were a normal company, they’d focus on the top x projects that generate value and spend as little as possible on the rest.

Twitter runs an entire advertising platform. If you've ever logged into Adwords or Adsense you'll know how complicated that is.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the basic twitter.com tweeting/commenting/retweeting system isn't remotely the most complex system that Twitter even has.

8 people work on the tweeting part, 4000 on ad sales.

1500 is the rough total number of employees, including non-tech ones, but the question is more along the lines is what the need is for 500 programmers/sysadmins/etc.

EDIT: Nevermind, I got confused with this part of the article:

> New York-based WeWork has roughly 15,000 employees

is this breakdown based on experience with the wework tech stack?

Every feature requires 2 people to build the endpoints, 3 people to wire up the auth and 2 people to add it to the web app? And that's all they do going forward?

40 people with this kind of breakdown for a product, sure. This huge team for a feature? Lol, no