At Twitter

Also, although well intentioned, that a company serves 3 meals a day, has snacks and recreation, makes me a little fearful that I'm not accepting a job but rather a lifestyle. Hopefully this gets cleared up in the interview process. Because I'm leaving at 5 unless there's a fire to put out.

My current startup follows the "open floor plan" model epitomized by Twitter. To be honest, it's great when I want to socialize, and pretty terrible when I want to put my head down and concentrate on something.

After realizing that I wasn't the only freak/outcast/weirdo who preferred to work in a quiet(er) environment, we implemented a "quiet room" at our office. Basically, we converted a conference room into the equivalent of a library. So far it's working out pretty well.

I know offices are pretty much relics of a bygone era at this point, reserved only for the likes of Apple, Cisco, Oracle, and other tech giants who came of age before the 2010s. But there's something to the office that we've lost in its passing. Offices may not be cost efficient, and they may not inspire "collaboration" or foster "culture." But it's nice to have a place to go to get shit done.

[For the record, I suffer from a condition known as misophonia, which is sort of like a hypersensitivity to certain sounds. I have exceptional hearing, but I can't tune out background noises the way most people can. For those of you who've seen the new Superman movie: those scenes in which Clark Kent suffered from all the background noises involved in "super hearing" really hit home with me. I know I'm not alone here, but unfortunately, people like me are kind of screwed in the new workplace paradigm.]

I don't know - when I viewed those pictures I just got the sense of slaves or prisoners, shackled in their galley^H^H^H^H^H^H workstation, looking longingly out windows to the outside world, etc. I recognize I am just looking at a few photos and my impression is likely to be completely wrong.

Besides programmers there is probably a small army of sys admins to handle their data centers in additional to daily operational IT, business development folks working with partners, the entire ad/sales platform, lawyers and accountants. Plus all of the facility staff for that crazy office (kitchen staff, janitorial, gardeners, etc).

I agree though. That is a lot of people and it's hard to wrap my brain around that since I work at a very small software company of less than 10 people.

At the time Instagram was bought by Facebook, (and still I think) they didn't have any kind of ads and thus no need for sales people and a reduced need for engineering, product management, biz dev, etc. as well.

Media outlets hadn't really picked up on Instagram yet (at least, not as a tool to use themselves), so no need for media relations people. They didn't really need biz dev people yet like Twitter certainly does. (e.g. you need people to make the integration of Twitter in other platforms like iOS and OS X happen)

Also, Twitter is older than Instagram. Over time, if success is still going, it's somewhat normal to increase your staff just because there are things you can improve all over the place (product-wise as well as company-wise).

And now that Instagram is part of another company, it's hard to compare the numbers since they might take advantage of Facebook resources here and there which are hard to account for.

I don't know why they need 900+ employees though, there are probably good reasons for it.

Now, once you need to generate revenue, you will need to add people (a lot of them) for sales and support. It gets worse if the revenue model doesn't prove to work well, then you'll need to hire more to try out new things in the hope that you get to something before your funding runs out.

I think the license restrictions on its firehose partners will become more strict as Twitter realizes it can go vertical and use the data itself to create platforms for social media analytics and advertising.