[bombcar]

This comes up every time a company’s employees is listed, in the software world.

If someone mentions that Walmart employs more people than the US Military, nobody blinks an eye. We can “Richard Scarry” imagine what they are doing, because there are lots of stores and we see what they do. (Reference: https://www.comicsbeat.com/if-your-job-wasnt-performed-by-a-... )

But a company like eBay or Google; we only see a website and can’t imagine what they’re doing. And Xitter continuing to not be completely on fire lends to this.

What do those balls of employees do? Sales, marketing, localization, etc. You can get some 50-80% of the total with a smallish group, but to get it all you need more and more people. And then you need management on top to keep everything moving. At some point it turns from “what do we need to do X” and becomes “do we get more revenue from this hire than it costs”.

[camdenreslink]

I think Walmart is a bad example because there are thousands of giant stores across the United States full of employees. I think most people assume they also do their own distribution/fulfillment shipping of goods to their stores and customers, which requires warehouses also full of employees.

eBay doesn't do fulfillment, or payment processing, or really anything other than running the website/mobile apps/api, customer service, marketing, etc. There has to be a lot of waste there.

[rainonmoon]

The way people bring up "X is basically fine" on this site (not you, other comments) drives me insane. It's gone through multiple seriously breaking issues, its valuation has plummeted, and there's no indication that it's solved the bot and misinformation issue Musk was very loud about before purchase (but some indication it's worsened.) Regardless of your political leaning it's hard to imagine the site being a better experience than it was three years ago (unless you were chronically moderated for posting ToS-violating content.) Maybe nobody can speak with certainty yet that the layoffs have contributed to those issues. It's not hard to imagine that some of this carnage could have been avoided by not slicing out everyone with domain knowledge so the new owner could go on some extreme ideological warpath. Yes, the domain resolves to an IP address and renders a page in the browser. If this is the baseline to justify laying everyone off, we've gotta expect more from the web.

[bombcar]

For me, and perhaps a decent number of users, it does what it always did, be links I could look at now and then when linked, and laugh.

I can't do that with Facebook and Instagram anymore as there are logins up the wazoo.

So for my use case (and I'm not a customer or even a user), it's still the same.