[koolba]

> Because running the ads team at Twitter alone would take 75 people.

Then make it 150 people. 75 for tech and 75 for ad sales. Right now it's something like 3500-4000 people working there. What do they do?

I think WhatsApp had something like 50-60 employees around the time they got acquired by Facebook. Sure the request/response ratios are different (few publishers, lots of subscribers), but at the end of the day I don't understand how you can have, literally, thousands of people to run something like that.

[s_kilk]

> Right now it's something like 3500-4000 people working there. What do they do?

I can't find it now, but there was a comment on here a few months back from someone who worked at Twitter for a while (in the recent past). Supposedly there's a lot of staff basically hanging around playing ping-pong, waiting for the chance to cash out their shares.

Not sure I believe it fully, but hey, anecdote.

[daveFNbuck]

I worked at Twitter for about 2 years, ending 3 years ago. By the end of my time there I was working maybe 4 hours a day and most of that was in meetings. At the same time, I got told off by my manager for meeting too many of my quarterly goals and he held a meeting to tell the whole team to be less productive in general. If we were waiting on an A/B test to validate the outcome of project 1, we were not to start working on project 2 until that experiment was complete and a launch decision could be made. A/B tests typically last 1-2 weeks, during which there is nothing more to be done on project 1.

[busted]

If you read this comment and believe it you are an idiot.

[daveFNbuck]

It sounds too crazy to be true, but that's the situation I was in when I left Twitter. I was told that meeting all of my goals meant that I wasn't taking enough risks in setting my goals. Being a bit burnt out after working long hours to meet these goals, I responded by working less.

Our team was told that we were letting projects slip past their external deadlines because we'd shifted our focus to the next thing. In order to prevent that, we were no longer going to start on a second project until the first one was finished. When a company has over a thousand engineers and is heavily committed to not innovating on its core product, predictability is more important than productivity.

[chetanahuja]

"he held a meeting to tell the whole team to be less productive in general."

WTF?? What was the stated objective for this sort of instruction? Or was it just blatant gaming the system to keep everybody's jobs?

[paulddraper]

Reading between the lines, it was probably more along the lines of instructions that don't have efficiency a priority.

Like only do one project at a time. Doesn't sound terrible, but it increases wait times.

[daveFNbuck]

Pretty much what paulddraper guessed, the stated goal was to ensure that the first project is completed as quickly as possible so that our output would be more reliable for other teams. That meeting happened during my last week, so I can only hope that it wasn't strictly enforced.

[shostack]

Was this a play to grab more budget and resources (and thus power)? "We need to do XYZ, but the team is all tied up on these things. We need to grow headcount."

[Houshalter]

There is a popular theory that most people, or at least white collar workers, are employed in jobs that aren't economically necessary/worthwhile. Because of the way corporate politics incentivizes having more employees and making people busy. This would seem to add evidence to that.

[daveFNbuck]

The stated reason was that we needed to be more predictable so other teams could rely on our output. By focusing on one project at a time, it was less likely that the project would fall behind schedule.

[rezashirazian]

I would be miserable at a company like this.

[daveFNbuck]

A lot of good talent left around this time.

[spacehome]

This one?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12252995

[s_kilk]

Yes! Thanks!

[Animats]

It's fear. Twitter was a neat little idea that scaled easily. It doesn't need many people to keep it going. Twitter could have been the next Craigslist - so cheap to run it takes only a tiny team, but so powerful in concept it crushed the classified ad industry.

But it's such a simple idea that Facebook or Google or WeChat could add a "tweet" capability and perhaps crush Twitter. So there's a desperate attempt to get big enough to fight back, or come up with a second product, or something. Sometimes that doesn't work.

[snowwrestler]

> But it's such a simple idea that Facebook or Google or WeChat could add a "tweet" capability and perhaps crush Twitter.

So why don't they?

The reality is that both Google and Facebook have made their attempt to own "real time" and both efforts failed. Google even had to pay for the Twitter firehouse for a while, and eventually just gave up.

When people need to know what's going on RIGHT NOW, neither Google nor Facebook is where they turn. Twitter is the fastest publishing platform on the planet. Tweets beat an earthquake from Virginia to New York, just like XKCD joked they would. Contrary to popular belief, this is is not easy to do.

[slim]

> this is is not easy to do

Man, google and facebook are streaming live video

[overcast]

Scaled easily? Did you miss fail whale era?

[hinkley]

The little bits of the funding process that I've been able to observe tell me that you can get a round of funding on hype, but if you can't get it on hype then the investors tend to demand a better burn rate from the company. Or at least that's always the story I've heard right before the startup I or a friend worked at started making big changes.

It's entirely plausible at this point that the next time they go for more cash, they'll have to lay off 10% of their workforce to make their financials look more appealing.

[Rapzid]

This is a really good point. I remember when all of Rackspace had just that many.. Around when swift launched there were about 1k employees in the cloud division, and about the same number as twitter across all business segments.