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Comment by MontyCarloHall | Hacker News Reader

If this actually ends up being a success (massive if!), it will be a harbinger of other tech companies realizing their headcounts are bloated and downsizing accordingly. Does Zoom really need 6700 employees? Does Slack really need 2500? Zendesk 5800?

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Counter point is that hundreds of millions of people use these products across the entire world, with thousands of corporations relying on them to work 24/7, yet the total number of global employees would barely fill half of the Chase Center.

Maybe? I'm pretty skeptical of this whole vibe that companies are overstaffed by 100% or more. It seems to me to be driven by executives and investors who have lost touch with what it takes to execute on their companies' current operations and future ambitions.

While I think the answer is "no", I also think that we need to remember that users want features, lots of features, and so in some sense bloated software requires bloated organizations.

This article might be useful: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/12/09/simplicity/

Users want support first of all

Probably. This is a view that is already starting to get a lot of transaction in SV/VC circles from what I've seen. In VC they obviously have a vested interest in that they want the "overpaid" big tech engineers to get fired and come work for cheap at their startup, but still.

The thing about Twitter is that it is so obviously overstaffed (on a Revenue/Employee basis when comparing to other META/AAPL/MSFT/etc) that there isn't an easier company to get the ball rolling with.

What are the breakdowns of job function? Sales, various tiers of support, infosec, solution engs, etc add up beyond the C-suite, devs and admins.

I’d imagine that these companies really do need this headcount. Think about how many relationships they need to manage.

My friends at Big Tech assure me that Twitter slimming down and revving up won't change the way their companies do business, but I'm not at all sure about that. If Twitter is successful (a big if) then the pressure to follow will be tremendous, especially at public companies.

You may be right, but the difference is that these are enterprise software companies. They will scale depending on the number of customers they have. My guess is about 80 percent of these roles are in sales, support and customer success.

Yeah like what they can manage millions of customers with 100 guys? Support is already shit but it will go to totally extinct.

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