Many tech companies are 2-10x overstaffed

Maybe every CEO isn't stupid. Maybe these companies were simply structuring their businesses to maximize their chances of capturing new growth opportunities in an environment of incredibly cheap capital. Most companies could hire 5 engineers who will completely transform their businesses. And they'll hire 50,000 in an effort to find those 5.

It's probably true you could run twitter with under 1,000 people. But it's probably not true that you can easily figure out who those 1,000 people are and get them to stay whilst you fire the other 6,500, and it's absolutely true that if the current CEO of twitter had tried that he would've got fired before he had a chance to pull it off. Go ask investors, do they want Twitter to reduce their ongoing costs significantly, with a significant chance it does long term damage to their growth plans, or do they want to grow revenue 30% YoY?

But no need to click, the entirely of the content (a bad HN comment) is in the title. No evidence or argument.

Wow, if only the owners and execs could realize this $100B idea to cut costs.

As an outsider it’s easy to say that tech companies often have too many staff, but internally it’s much easier to see what they’re all doing, and it’s often a lot of exploring new product ideas. That’s an expensive thing to do.

Do these companies need to be doing all that R&D? Maybe, maybe not, but as much as you criticise (for example) Meta for Instagram stories, not making those sorts of changes presents a huge business risk of falling into obscurity by not keeping up with the market, or finding and controlling the next generation of technology.

I like small companies as much as anyone, but I recognise that for big companies this sort of thing is an existential issue and something that we need to accept and learn to live with.

Yes there’s still bloat, but it’s a common bias to see others as bloated/ineffective and see yourself as justified.

Many of the companies I have worked at had management issues which prevented the existing tech staff from performing at optimal levels or even inhibited it.

Just one example of this is a startup which grew to a 1500 person company under the same CIO, and that CIO was comfortable with what had gotten them that far. Consequently, we had 65 engineers in silos, often strugging with the same problems and reinventing the same wheels.

Those of us who pushed for some platform level focus were politely listened to and then forgotten, presumably because new is scary and what has gotten them this far is "good enough".

However, at every monthly company meeting, they would promote the recruitment compensation bonuses because we "desperately" needed more tech staff. No, we didn't need more tech staff. We just needed the freedom to do things smarter.

At some other companies I've worked at, tech staff is an unfortunate necessity, a cost whose ability to enable the rest of the company and business itself was rarely recognized. If a tech employee left, management would intentionally drag its feet on replacing them (because it made budgets easier to maintain).

Granted, I haven't lived in the startup VC world where money magically appears within the right circles. There it would seem that proving to a VC that you are scaling up for big gains means you're growing your staff at a phenomenal pace. In those places, yeah I bet there are people who aren't necessary. I still bet there are management who aren't necessary or who are preventing some of those devs from doing useful things...

There is room for bootcamp programmers but it isn’t in working on and maintaining some ball of yarn that does A/B testing, deployment, analytics, ad delivery, CRUD, caching, text search, route handling, animated transitions, real-time chat, event notifications, etc.

Bootcampers, aka product developers, should be working with a language and runtime that moves all of these features into the language itself.

The language and runtime should be built and maintained by a smaller team of computer engineers. Perhaps this underlying language is from another vendor and is extensible or perhaps it is built in-house.

This would allow for product developers to rapidly iterate on product ideas and for the computer engineers to work on longer timescales while worrying about scaling, deployment, resource management, etc.

If valuations continue their path towards coming in line with actual fundamentals, many companies will soon find they can’t afford the number of workers they have. Dilution will become quite severe at lower valuations