[onion2k]

As always you have to remember that the public UI of a SaaS business is rarely telling the whole story about why the headcount is what it is, and without significantly deeper knowledge of everything the business is doing, including future products in development, it's really hard to say if there are too many people or not.

Most engineers are not in a business to support the day to day running of an app. They're there to build new things to provide growth and support change. This is why you can do an Elon and fire 75% of the staff without something collapsing immediately. That strategy even works in the long term if you're happy to scale back future ambitions and focus on a single app. It wouldn't work for most companies that are constantly fighting for market share though.

[bydlocoder]

That's why I mentioned "incoherent and probably useless other tools". Apparently, they launched some sort of no-code tool for stringing APIs together but still not ready with their GraphQL client.

For reference, another company that sells developer tools, JetBrains, has around 2000 employees.

[cooperadymas]

I can't tell where you're driving with the JetBrains comparison. Truthfully, I'm a little surprised they only have 2000 employees.

They have a suite of IDEs supporting a multitude of languages, that are almost universally considered best in class. IDEs are not an easy thing to build. They developed and maintain the Kotlin language which has all but become the standard for Android dev. And they have integrated team collaboration tools that range from project management to CI to cloud dev environments.

[krooj]

I am not surprised. Hire carefully with specific requirements in mind, stay hyper-focused on your product(s), and eschew corporate trends towards bloat, fomo, and "feel good" initiatives.

[bydlocoder]

Isn't it obvious? Postman Labs is bloated and overvalued, compared to what JetBrains does their product is just nothing.

[notimetorelax]

Margins are still very high for a tech company, so the business can be sustainable even with high R&D costs. What’s happening is the end of a cycle where everyone pulled back on their spending and companies try to keep the same margins by managing their expenses as they cannot attract more revenue.

[philliphaydon]

But JetBrains has a whole suite of tools, supporting many plugins, creating their own jvm lang, with support team who actually respond and verify tickets.

Atlassian on the other hand lol.

[SecretDreams]

> This is why you can do an Elon and fire 75% of the staff without something collapsing immediately.

It is to be determined if "doing an Elon" will work out for Twitter in even the short term. Give Twitter 1-2 years of "doing an Elon" before we judge the success of this approach.

[marcosdumay]

Oh, man, I guess you are just repeating the point that every company is bloated.

The public UI (and performance) of a SaaS business is the one thing that adds value to society and is valued by its customers. Yes, new products development is a really great place to put some people, but how often do you see those large companies develop something good by themselves?