Twitter ran one of the world's largest social media networks with around 7000 people; what in the world is Kraken doing with ~3400[1]?
Kraken is one of the OG cryptocurrencies exchange. Maybe the oldest still around. They're in the business since 2013 or so.
Since then the Crypsy, Quadriga, Mt Gox, FTX, etc. have all come and gone (with their customers' money) but Kraken is still there. If they are on a scam, it's a really long con: a decade and a half of a con?
They're not "Binance big" but they do nearly as much volume as Coinbase, so 3 400 employees doesn't feel that surprising.
I don't think BlockFi did anywhere near the volume of trades Kraken is doing. As I understand it BlockFi was some kind of a "fire and forget" thing where you'd loan your crypto and get some yield in return. So very little things actually happening there compared to Kraken.
Yes, 900 employees was insanely huge for BlockFi. But I don't think 3 400 employees for Kraken looks that crazy.
> If they are on a scam, it's a really long con: a decade and a half of a con?
How is 9 years "a decade and a half"?
But yup, I got my math really wrong there!
What do (did) 7000 people do at Twitter? I hate to ask the question because it aligns me with Elon whom I despise right now. But what do all the employees do at tech companies? I thought the beauty of tech and why the valuations were so high is that it scales quite easily since it is all code. What do 32,500 employees at Uber do?
Do you have a source that shows that a substantial percent of Kraken's headcount is customer service? They've tried recruiting me a handful of times, and each time they highlighted their voracious appetite for engineering talent (and corresponding rapid growth of their engineering teams).
As I said: Twitter was one of the largest social media networks on the planet, one that ran its own datacenters and independent ad business (along with moderation teams, service teams, etc.). I'm not particularly interested in defending a headcount of 7000 people; only that it makes far more sense to me than roughly half that number at a cryptocurrency firm.
If you view Twitter as a 'service for posting 140 characters', they don't need 7000 employees.
If you view it as a 'service for supporting five billion dollars worth of ad spend across the entire world', with all the proprietary software, ads front-ends, ads back-ends and reporting services, weird one-off partner integrations, ads account management, sales, advertiser support, moderation and compliance, legal compliance... Well, all that quickly adds up to a lot of headcount.
You don't think that matters, but it has a real impact on your bottom line. Companies are stopping advertising now, not because Musk took over, but because they can't support for advertising (probably because they were sacked).
It was one of the worlds largest social media platforms!
Couple that with the reality that Twitter needs at LEAST twice as many people to function than it currently has, even after Musk sent everyone packing. How do I know this? Because the remaining people need to work at least twice as much to make up for the people that left.
And this of course ignores all the things that have failed since he took over. The current people are NOT keeping Twitter at 100%. It's already failing.
I didn’t express an opinion on that, and actually believe the opposite of what you just hastily attributed to me. My point is that, when gauging whether 7000 is a reasonable figure, it’s not enough to vomit a laundry list of work that the company needs to do — because that kind of argument would apply equally well to justifying 3500, 7000, 14000, or a million. To justify a specific figure, you need more rigor than hand waving about general work categories. The parent didn’t.
I am not going to tell you that their right size is 3500, or 1500, or 7000, or 14000, because I don't know what it is. But I will say that it's very likely to be measured in the thousands. [1]
[1] Although you can always try to shrink the business... A Twitter that doesn't work, and has no revenue could probably be ran by ~0 employees.
Don't be pedantic. It's worthless.
> My point is that, when gauging whether 7000 is a reasonable figure
Evidence shows you need 7324 people, exactly.
What's done in house, what's done elsewhere? What "bus factor" do you want your engineering teams to have? What events have left scars on the organization? What prejudices and preferences does the executive leadership have? How does the company handle the fiefdom builders who hire just to make their org size increase? How does the company handle attrition?
It's not like there's one "correct" staffing for a large company. There's hundreds of factors, some large some small, that add up over time. The company has goals to reach and problems to solve as each of those decisions are made, and those evolve as the company evolves.
What are Twitter's goals pre-buyout? Are those the same as Twitter's goals post-buyout? What are the decisions the company makes in pursuing those goals, in each of those contexts?
Analyzing all the decisions that brought Twitter or any other company to a specific count of employees is an extensive undertaking, and would require extraordinary memory and honesty of a huge number of people. And you'll still have a giant pile of decisions that could have gone either way depending on slight changes in conditions.
No, I was replying to a comment that was attempting to justify ~7000 as a reasonable figure for what Twitter’s app needs to do.
Don’t take my word for it! Read the thread history if you don’t believe me!
Let's look at the comment you were replying to:
>If you view Twitter as a 'service for posting 140 characters', they don't need 7000 employees.
>If you view it as a 'service for supporting five billion dollars worth of ad spend across the entire world', with all the proprietary software, ads front-ends, ads back-ends and reporting services, weird one-off partner integrations, ads account management, sales, advertiser support, moderation and compliance, legal compliance... Well, all that quickly adds up to a lot of headcount.
You characterize this comment as justifying ~7000 as a reasonable figure "for what Twitter's app needs to do." The comment makes an important distinction between what you might need to run the most essential aspects of a thing that allows Twitter-like social media interactions to occur versus an enterprise that leverages those social media interactions as one part of a larger system. It says outright that you wouldn't likely need 7k just for the essential "let people make tweets" aspect.
TBH you appear to be the one with comprehension issues in this thread.
Go ahead and make a Twitter clone this weekend. There are plenty of tutorials. Then let's assume you go viral and now your little service needs to scale. Then the email and issues start to come in. Now you have to balance fixing bugs and tending to customer support. Oh, are you going to outsource all cloud services or hire a 200k+ a year SRE to scale it out? One wont be enough you will soon find out. Did yo do your research on compliance? Are you sure your app is legal in every country it serves? Pretty soon you have a team whose salaries + benefits are costing you several million dollars a year. And you only have 10 people.
I could go on and on. Yes, creating a twitter clone is trivial. Scaling it and tending to real customers is a completely different story.
Twitter runs its own infrastructure too. That takes a bunch of people. Computers don't just run themselves and they certainly don't provision themselves.
Traffic is likely super spiky too because of how Twitter reacts to current events. That probably requires cutting edge load balancing and real time code.
Not to mention all of the work getting everything translated and accessible to the entire globe. And of course moderating a site with millions of people so that literal civil wars do not start. And keeping in contact with various governments who probably contract each other and themselves on a regular basis. These are problems that are not as scalable as writing a bunch of code. You need real, physical people to handle these issues.
And now setting up a creator economy and their Clubhouse competitor.
ex: You could store every tweet compressed in S3 with a bitmap for which are deleted (a bit that can be cached forever). That assumes you aren't going to ever have to update the object in S3. Once you have to update it that entire design is horrible, you'll need something completely different.
Consider that there are thousands of tweets per second with significant fan out for reads. There's search, relationship data (did you @ someone? did your edit remove that @?), business analytics, and more.
Also has the benefit that retweets and likes point to the old version, which is how it should be.
Oh and of course you now have a linked list structure you have to traverse every time you want to resolve a tweet. Cool.
It's almost like this is hard.
I don't know, but Discord has a small fraction of the employees. They have hundreds of millions of active users, handle tons of live audio streams in addition to the text traffic, and their client software has a lot more features than twitter. Why can Discord do more with less?
Another big part of it is simply admin, for twitter a lot of that is babysitting the moderation algorithms as their customers(who is not the people tweeting) can be pretty sensitive about what kind of content they are associated with.
Then there is defensive research i.e. any big company in a particular space wants to have prototypes and technology ready to compete with anything their competitors might come out with especially if they expect a growth in overall sector revenue.
For uber they are also a de-facto employer for a lot of drivers and a provider of real world services so they need the full range of hr and customer support services that those kind of services and driver numbers would require had it not been a tech company.