The marginal value of each extra employee is negative but you rake in so much cash from monetising all the free content users are making for you you'd be stupid not to spend it on wild ass bets.
If you have a product that takes 100 people to run but generates billions in revenue it is standard practice in public companies to just hire lots more people. It's mostly speculative in that you hope that one of those thousands of people will come up with something else that makes billions.
I know nothing of how such massive-scale tech companies work, but just seeing what Twitter does, the ~8000 number seems crazy, doesn't it?
Headcount is an artifact rather than a choice, the amount of people working on Twitter will be a consequence of decisions made more than a decade ago, not as a consequence of how many people Twitter needs today to operate as they are today — which is true for all companies.
If we fail to effectively manage our growth, our business and operating results could be harmed.
We continue to experience rapid growth in our headcount and operations, which will continue to place significant demands on our management, operational and financial infrastructure. As of June 30, 2013, we had approximately 2,000 employees, an increase of over 1,800 employees since January 1, 2010.
..As we continue to grow, we are subject to the risks of over-hiring, over-compensating our employees and over-expanding our operating infrastructure, and to the challenges of integrating, developing and motivating a rapidly growing employee base in various countries around the world. In addition, we may not be able to innovate or execute as quickly as a smaller, more efficient organization. If we fail to effectively manage our hiring needs and successfully integrate our new hires, our efficiency and ability to meet our forecasts and our employee morale, productivity and retention could suffer, and our business and operating results could be adversely affected.
Our corporate culture has contributed to our success, and if we cannot maintain this culture as we grow, we could lose the innovation, creativity and teamwork fostered by our culture, and our business may be harmed.
Moreover, liquidity available to our employee securityholders following this offering could lead to disparities of wealth among our employees, which could adversely impact relations among employees and our culture in general. Our transition from a private company to a public company may result in a change to our corporate culture, which could harm our business.
I get that most view it as a proxy for business growth, but I fear there's a growing group of non-technical investors/leaders/founders who see FAANGs with 4000 engineers, so you're only successful if you have that many too.
It is possible that some of them will be replaced by other people who now work elsewhere and who will try their luck with remodeled Twitter.
There will likely be a major cultural shift at Twitter; for someone, deeply repulsive, for other people, possibly very attractive. So there might be significant staff churn even though the total numbers may stay similar.
That is, unless, you mean the massive manual censorship organization needed to "run" the current "algorithm", which Twitter will no longer be needing.
And they'll still have some kind of 'manual censorship organization' to enable them to operate legally in different countries, handling people posting illegal content and responding to law enforcement requests, bot detection, reports of harassment etc - that's going to be more than 500 people, for a company with the number of users Twitter has.
Are you seriously trying to tell me that some smooth operator can just come waltzing into a well oiled operation like Twitter Inc and simply purge thousands of highly skilled specialized knowledge workers assigned to an extremely complicated web scale project willy nilly?
What of all the accumulated institutional knowledge. Countless man (and woman) years of code optimizations. The massive ETL pipelines. The company culture. Truly the most valuable asset Twitter has is the talented people that work there. Surely it would all come crashing down.
But, what's it that they say -- pride goeth before a fall?
If Twitter collapses into a burning hulk is that -really- a bad thing?