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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

> Kraken actually handles money so it needs customer service and Twitter is just a bunch of already written code for posting stuff and sometimes (although much less now!) getting ad dollars.

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.

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It’s crazy how I bypass all that with simple adblockers. I don’t think I ever see ads on Twitter. Five billion dollars spent on information asymmetry from users that don’t know how to block ads. I guess I don’t even think about the ad part and workers needed for it.

You (like me) are probably an outlier: over 90% of Twitter users probably use the Twitter apps, which make adblocking much harder (although not impossible -- people maintain mass ignorelists!).

I also feel like people who know of and use adblockers are less likely to be persuaded by ads. So losing that segment is not such a big loss for a platform.

Again, Facebook had this much revenue and much better growth when they went public in 2012.

https://companiesmarketcap.com/facebook/revenue/

But why does it add up to 7000 headcount rather than 3500 headcount or 14000 headcount?

Moderation, customer support, sales, and then everyone to support all those people.

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.

> You don't think that matters,

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.

The parent poster, as an outsider, only makes informed, but speculative guesses about Twitter's business footprint, as does ~anyone who does not have T9 vision of the firm.

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.

> I didn’t express an opinion on that,

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.

Just count the number of employees to get the total headcount.

The accumulated events and decisions over the lifespan of the company.

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.

The point is, it’s easy to vomit a laundry list of reason why a company needs more staff. But it doesn’t shed light onto why a 7000 figure is reasonable until it justifies why other figures are too high or too low. Nor does your comment.

Your comment continues to presume that there is a specific correct value or range of values. That's simply not the case. The list of potential reasons is long because there are a lot of contributing reasons.

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.

> Your comment continues to presume that there is a specific correct value or range of values

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!

>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.

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.

Its very simple if you think about it. Can you think of other web services with the scale and popularity comparable to Twitter that run on much lower headcounts?

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.

Telegram has similar size user base, more functionality but less ads business. Last time I read there were 150 employees.

Telegram doesn't have "more functionality". It's significantly less performant and it doesn't have any global search or sophisticated recommendations system. It's also pretty lightly moderated.

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