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Comment by bnycum | Hacker News Reader

Not to sound stupid, but this question has been on my mind. Why does Twitter have so many employees? Wikipedia says it's 900+ as of last year. Instagram had 13 when being bought out by Facebook, I think I read recently they are up to 50. I'm kind of a small town guy, with the 2 biggest software shops in town being ~50-60ish people that are WAY established compared to Twitter or Instagram. It's never made sense to me why they are so large. But they have cool offices, and seems like a place I would want to work.

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Support, marketing, sales, partnerships, there's a lot of things that Twitter engages in that are people heavy and wouldn't be present in a software shop. Take a look at their jobs page for an idea of the sort of people they're using: https://twitter.com/jobs & https://twitter.com/jobs/positions

For comparison Facebook has over 5,000 employees.

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.

For further comparison, Google has in the region of 50,000 permanent employees globally.

http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html

By my count, Google has 50 products they support.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/about/products/

1000 employees per product (many of them small) seems asinine to me. I could definitely be wrong, but this seems like extremely low productivity. Does anyone have any insights into this?

A huge number of those are in operations, building the data centers and making them scalable and reliable. They're not supporting or allocated to a single product, they're making possible the platform that all those products run on.

Running data centers takes people, but any significant chunk of 50k? There is huge datacenter in my area, and only ~10 people work there.

This list doesn't seem to include Google's skunkworks projects like Google Fiber and self-driving cars. It also doesn't include Android or Glass.

Apple's employee/product number would blow your mind, then.

Keep in mind that it's not 900 engineers.

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 think you might be underestimating the task of scaling an app to a quarter of a billion users.

True, but I'm also saying that Instagram had 13 employees at the time of being bought out. I don't have any numbers of users they had at the time but I know they had 1M+ new users on their Android launch. Which makes me assume a large iOS crowd.

If we figure that the engineer count scales linearly to the user count (which I don't actually think is true), then you've just justified twitter having 2,600 engineers. That is, if Instagram had 13 engineers for 1 million users. (they likely had less engineers but more users though).

Probably sales people. Twitter is an advertising/media company after all.

I don't think you can compare a software shop to one of the most used websites globally that has become recognized by major media.

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

Well I used the term software shop loosely. Both are fairly large in their reach nationally. The one I worked at did hosting in the building as well. No more than half a dozen on the IT staff, hosting hundreds of clients who had numerous employees. Obviously no millions, but they had what I would say is a lot more complicated product.

When you have a clear vision of your product, you don't need a lot of people to execute. The only thing in my experience doesn't scale well is customer support and sales. So, an early start up could do a lot with a small number of employees.

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've been thinking this too. Would love to know what they do all day?

Data analysis, maybe?

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