| Agreed. There was a poster here who argued that Twitter could run on 50 engineers because WhatsApp did as well. It was a response to Elon firing most of Twitter's engineers. In terms of actual revenue per employee, Twitter (pre-Elon) actually beat Whatsapp (pre-Facebook). A better measure of success might be employees/revenue. In 2014, Whatsapp made $10m and lost $140m. That's only $200k/engineer.[0] By comparison, Apple is at 2.3m/employee. Meta is 1.6m/employee. Twitter is 680k/employee. These include non-engineers of course. When you need to start making money, you suddenly need to a lot more engineers. Now you need developers to make sales tools, compliance, moderation, finance, A/B test engineers for growth ideas, niche features for big customers, engineers to bring down cloud costs, etc. [0]https://www.theverge.com/2014/10/28/7085905/facebooks-prized... |