One Hundred Engineers Are Enough to Run Twitter

In 2010, we applied to YC and got into the in-person interview.

After demoing the prototype, Paul Graham commented that our thing doesn't have technical depth. My immediate response was "twitter doesn't have technical depth either.", He was pissed by my answer... That concluded our interview.

> Not much. 100 engineers should be enough to ensure the continuity of microblogging. You’ll have to give up on a lot of features, services, and internal departments, but it’s not going to make any difference for users.

How about departments like sales, marketing and legal? The users won't miss it, but I imagine the shareholders would. You can argue about the other two, but Twitter makes all of its money from selling ads and data. The big money there is in selling to big companies and enterprise sales don't scale like engineering does. You end up hiring a lot of people when you have job listings like "Account Manager, Indonesia".

The writer of this post should have read a few entries at twitter’s engineering blog (https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us) before making this outrageous claim

It's always interesting to read such articles. 7,500 Employees? Bah, too much! 100 Engineers will do!!

I raise you to 50 employees, the number WhatsApp had when they reached 1 billion users.

So where's the mistake the author makes? Simple: Twitter is a globally active social media application and, as such, falls under local jurisdiction in a lot of countries. E.g. in the European Union, Twitter has to remove content flagged as "terrorist" within one (1) hour. 24/7. Yes, on Thanksgiving Day too.

And that's what the bulk of employees will be: content supervisors. Moderators.

Or "age verification" agents - Britain has it's "Online Safety Bill" in place, and it applies to any social media site accessible in Britain.

More than a decade ago, some HN commenters claimed "StackOverflow could be thrown together in a weekend", which is very similar to the sentiment expressed here.

StackOverflow employees reply here: https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/ and here: https://www.bitquabit.com/post/one-which-i-call-out-hacker-n...

Their main argument is that some developers take an incredibly myopic view of what it takes to run a software business, and I think the same applies here, if not more so, considering Twitter's business model of selling advertising.

From the linked posts:

> If you then tell a developer to replicate StackOverflow, what goes into his head are the above two SQL tables and enough HTML to display them without formatting, and that really is completely doable in a weekend. The smarter ones will realize that they need to implement login and logout, and comments, and that the votes need to be tied to a user, but that's still totally doable in a weekend; it's just a couple more tables in a SQL back-end, and the HTML to show their contents. Use a framework like Django, and you even get basic users and comments for free.

> But that's not what StackOverflow is about. Regardless of what your feelings may be on StackOverflow in general, most visitors seem to agree that the user experience is smooth, from start to finish. They feel that they're interacting with a polished product. Even if I didn't know better, I would guess that very little of what actually makes StackOverflow a continuing success has to do with the database schema--and having had a chance to read through StackOverflow's source code, I know how little really does. There is a tremendous amount of spit and polish that goes into making a major website highly usable. A developer, asked how hard something will be to clone, simply does not think about the polish, because the polish is incidental to the implementation.

5% of the work is getting it working. 95% is to make it polished and work well on all platforms, in all countries, in all legal and social contexts, and in all failure contexts. Most developers have zero clue what it takes to turn working code into a globally successful product.

Have to admit that as soon as he pulled up a page, looked at the visual layout and said “see there’s not that many features here”, I ducked out. What a strange article.

Is this satire?

The author seems to have reconsidered--I get a 404 trying to see the post.