> I am convinced you can run the entire tech stack with a team of a 100 people
Please tell us in detail about the Twitter stack.
Because I always find it fascinating how people think they can estimate the effort to maintain it whilst having next to no understanding what so ever of the tech stack.
I assume the reason for statements like that goes something like:
1. A single person can run a mastodon instance in their spare time. Spinning up some containers for the app, a background worker and a database is quite simple.
2. Modern devops tooling makes it fairly trivial to spin up 10k instances of a container instead of 1, by just altering a number in a k8s manifest somewhere.
3. Ergo, a single person equipped with modern tooling (and sufficient funding) could spin up any number of mastodon instances.
4. Twitter is just a big mastodon instance.
5. Now that keeping everything up is sorted, add another 99 devs for feature development and you are done.
Now this is obviously faulty logic because points 3 and 4 are very false, but they look reasonable enough at first glance.
That is a straw man. There are other perfectly valid interpretations and distributions of a statement that 100 could maintain it, like this:
15 database admins
10 linux sys admins
5 kubernetes specialists
10 windows tech support
25 front end developers
15 back end developers w/ Scala
10 machine learning experts
Whether that makeup could or couldn't do it is a different question, or whether it would be a different mix; all of that is up for debate, but the 1/99 ratio is just one very specific, extreme, and laughable mix for anyone who has supported a system of any real size.
How is that valid for creating and maintaining Twitter? 15 backend engineers are not even sufficient for any single facet of Twitter. Plus, there are other initiaves that Twitter takes on that are probably outside the scope of what you consider Twitter. Take a look at just their open source initiatives: https://opensource.twitter.dev/projects/. Go to, e.g., Finagle's Github page and look at the number of contributors and commits. While you may disagree that all of this is essential for creating and maintaining Twitter, there are problems that creep in when your platform supports billions of users that are not solved either correctly or at all by existing libraries and services; plus, open source projects serve as important recruiting collateral for engineers, especially for companies that do not have a set of widely used tools that entrench engineers (e.g. AWS, GC, Azure).
Creating a husk of an app that looks vaguely like Twitter and supports hundreds of users is a weekend project for anyone with a modicum of talent; building a platform that supports billions of users and is monetized well enough to support itself is an entirely different beast.
> 1. A single person can run a mastodon instance in their spare time. Spinning up some containers for the app, a background worker and a database is quite simple.
There are some major pieces missing from your analysis: legacy code and infrastructure, and lack of good documentation.
These can make for a massive hairball of complexity that can swell the number of people needed to support it.
This reminds me of a talk I once saw by a Netflix SRE, who showed a crazy convoluted mess of a diagram with thousands of crisscrossing lines going everywhere, and him screaming "No one understands Netflix!!!"
If you think Netflix is bad, you should see architecture diagrams for one of the major ad platforms; 30+ service sub-systems get encapsulated as a tiny block of the massive diagram. Anyone who thinks complex systems can be built and maintained by a skeleton crew hasn't worked on complex systems or hasn't been exposed to their full scope.
also, iirc a database based architecture was why the failwhale image was made. iirc the threw out databases and went with something more analogous to email with tweets represented as files on file systems. That was was a lonnnng time ago though, they may have reinvented the architecture a dozen times since then.
I don't know why you are being down-voted. Premateralized flat files pushed out to heavy-duty CDNs would get you very, very far. I would think that dealing with CSAM, death-threats, and other things that would get your platform into trouble would be the more difficult problem to manage. I could very easily see the technical parts of Twitter being run with a few hundred people. I don't know what else would be involved for legal, finance, marketing, sales, etc. But I doubt it is 8,000+ people.
I couldn’t give you details, but I do know Instagram had 13 employees when Facebook bought them. Is Twitter really two-orders of magnitude more difficult to run?
Well, let’s see. IG was acquired by FB in April 2012 and had somewhere above 10M users at the time. Around the same time, Twitter had around 140M accounts in US alone, nearly 500M worldwide. Do we want to continue the apples vs oranges comparison further. Happy to keep citing scale differences. :)
Internal sources only, but topics like regionalization, localization, bespoke caching implementations, hardware-level optimizations, content moderation, policy adherence (e.g. GDPR, CCPA), long-term monetization (especially if supporting advertisers as a direct customer), 3P support, public APIs, documentation, SRE (a fledgling product doesn't need 5 9s), analytics (internal and for advertisers and 3P partners) and for the most part, security, are non-exhaustive examples of things you can mostly ignore when your product supports 10M users that are unavoidable when your product supports half of the US, a good chunk of the rest of the world, and other large businesses that consume you at large business scale.
> Well, let’s see. IG was acquired by FB in April 2012 and had somewhere above 10M users at the time. Around the same time, Twitter had around 140M accounts in US alone, nearly 500M worldwide.
So increasing your user base by one order of magnitude requires increasing the number of employees by more than two orders of magnitude? Rate of employee acquisition should probably never outpace rate of user acquisition, so I think that's a pretty clear sign that something was off.
Was instagram selling advertising to giant brands yet when they were bought? Sales staff balloon because they are really good at selling themselves to hiring staff and also because any brand that pulls in more than $10M in revenue expects to be treated like the only king of the world in pretty much every interaction and literally requires handlers, and the number of handlers required scales with the size of the brand.
You can potentially solve the handlers issue by being ruthlessly cutthroat. If they want hand-holding, they can hire a third party to manage advertising on Twitter. They probably already do in fact, so if you are a third-party, do your job and know your tools.
As for sales staff being good at selling themselves, agreed, so maybe Musk's ruthless firing spree will end up as a good thing. Maybe.
>You can potentially solve the handlers issue by being ruthlessly cutthroat
No, that just results in those businesses and brands leaving you, unless you can provide them a LARGE revenue stream that is impossible to get anywhere. A large brand will absolutely give up a little money just to spite you and your company for not treating them like god.
That's true, but also hardware and software hasn't stood still in the past decade.
I'd definitely like to hear more about the scale differences. So far at best, you've accounted for one order of magnitude. How do you explain the second?
In my mind the issue is less “is it conceivable that a small team can run a bare bones version of the Twitter app with hundreds of millions of users” and more “can a small team manage a big distributed system that was designed to be managed by many different teams, with no handoff period”.
The person I responded to was specifically talking about the tech stack. I wholeheartedly agree that the difficult part of running a service like Twitter lies in the soft problems.
But the profitability requieres a big tech team regarding ads and recomendation algos etc.
And moderation requieres humans but also a big tech team regarding bots, known offenders, etc.
it's not exclusively a tech problem but in a tech company tons of those responsabilities will be handled, addressed and solved by product and tech teams. And on 10 people, no matter how smart, they got no chance
Child safety advocates have praised Elon for his quick action in removing inappropiate child photos from Twitter, as well as dealing with the hashtags traffickers use. Something people have been asking for years for and little was being done.
Unless you wish to ask for people to openly post child porn guidance you're gonna have to rely on the people actually following the issue for years. For what it's worth business insider claims they checked said hashtags and the content was gone[0]. Said user is allegedly going to release today an article in a corporate outlet that did fact check it[1] so we'll see.
I have no reason to distrust her and can't see any reason for her to lie about it.
> Musk responded to the tweet saying that the issue is "Priority #1."
Obviously it's "top priority"! Is there any other acceptable answer? This answer means nothing except that he saw the question.
The reason for distrust is that the Q people have been insisting that Trump was secretly engaged in an enormous battle with pedophile rings, and using the typical, constant, and normal arrests of pedophile rings as proof. Now, another claim of a right-wing hero bravely picking up the sword and vanquishing the forces of evil, but again, no evidence! No proof at all. We just have to take her word for it, eh?
Of course, she can't give out the hashtags and allow independent verification, yet somehow hordes of pedophiles already know these hashtags? (How are they publishing those to each other, and if they have such a channel, why aren't they using that instead of Twitter?) So who is she keeping the hashtags from then?
>Obviously it's "top priority"! Is there any other acceptable answer?
the answer means nothing, yes, the supposed good action that triggered the question is the important thing. The only relevant part of the article is them claiming to have verified it, so it's Business Insider's word added to hers.
I'm not even going to touch the conspiracy theory madness, it's irrelevant, and the person in question has zero signs of being afflicted by it, her entire existence in the platform seem to have been focused on actually working against the issue.
Its also been pretty widely publicized twitter's issue with CP[0][1][2][3], and given how hastags are the way you find things in the platform it's natural that's the way they'd do it.
> Of course, she can't give out the hashtags and allow independent verification, yet somehow hordes of pedophiles already know these hashtags?
She is giving it out to journalists and apparently they are confirming it, it's not a tragedy that someone does not want to amplify possible child abuse, actually teaching even more pedophiles how to find it.
> How are they publishing those to each other, and if they have such a channel, why aren't they using that instead of Twitter?
Twitter is protected by its sheer scale, is huge making detection harder than dedicated sites, and is far far more stable, safe and accessible than some darknet website they'd have to run themselves on average.
> So who is she keeping the hashtags from then?
From the general public to not further humilliate the victims, from other pedophiles because its not some hivemind, the list goes on.
Not everything is about Trump, and you're falling for the same level of conspiracy if behind all this out of all this you see pizzagate Qanon.
I honestly don't understand how anyone reaches 2022, given all that we've experienced in the past several years, with enough faith in journalism remaining intact to pay any credence to "X happened, but we won't show you any evidence. Trust us."
For me, such a story is totally meaningless. It conveys no information about reality either way. The chances of truth or falsehood are exactly equal.
We have different epistemologies.
> from other pedophiles because its not some hivemind
Did you think critically about this? If so, for how long?
How are the pedophiles teaching the sooper-seekrit hashtags to each other? Is in the manual "So You've Decided to Become a Pedophile" that they send to new members of the vast conspiracy?
The problem with these conspiracy theories is that any inspection of how they might actually operate, day to day in the real world, is always neglected and handwaved away.
The whole point of a hashtag is that they spread virally, or are obvious terms. The very idea of a secret hashtag is an oxymoron.
When people say this it's because they assume there's not stupid ass politics or moat building.
THEY could probably do it with 100 people, YOU cannot.
100 people is most likely within the ballpark for a group of people whose sole purpose is to write and maintain twitter's tech stack. Unfortunately, that is not NEARLY the sole purpose of most people in businesses and that adds all kinds of productivity hits.
What happens is that people like yourself become convinced that's the only way to operate.
The question is not how many people to maintain an app with the functionality of Twitter, it's how many people to maintain Twitter. Twitter has to maintain Twitter's actual app, not an app that you built to be maintainable by 100 people. You can't say whether that's possible without knowing how Twitter actually works.
Not tech but I'm convinced that just answering LEO requests from all over the world takes at least 500 people. That's without their managers, payrolls, etc.
Likewise, bringing in Ad money would be a few more hundreds, because you need to chase leads in all countries.
Getting the Ads to work? That's tech and I'd be surprised if it was less than 100 people, too.
Tracking ads conversions, targeting, refinement of models, latency reduction , data analytics, ads sales, sales ops, etc. yeah easily 1000 employees all in.
I was only thinking of getting ads to work (from displaying ad previews to announcers to actually delivering them). If you add all the sales, analytics and performance, yeah, that climbs quickly.
For a second I was confused how Starlink requests were relevant for Twitter. Then I realized you meant 'law enforcement officer' not 'low-earth orbit'.
as someone who worked at an SSP, that is nowhere near what is needed for an established platform. There were a handful of engineers(10 if we are being generous including data science) keeping the lights on. The rest of the time was spent trying to prevent "senior" engineers from pushing code attempting to execute a sql query per each of the billions and billions of daily api calls.
Is there a reason to integrating ads into WhatsApp would require more than another 50 people? Twitter ads are certainly do not appear very complicated. The most complicated thing about Twitter is scale, which is why the comparison is made with WhatsApp.
> recommendations,
Does Twitter have recommendations? From what I understand, the front page was actively curated - that is, a human chose stories to put there. I guess you could count the god-awful default feed ordering as "recommendations", but there is nothing advanced about it.
> bots
If WhatsApp doesn't have bots, it's the only social media/chat app I've ever heard of that doesn't. What is needed for this other an an API?
> had to provide tooling for governments, regulators, content moderators etc.
I'm sure at least some of this exists for WhatsApp. Nevertheless, how many additional employees does this have take?
I am not sure why there is so pushback against the idea most companies are overstaffed. For the most part, yes, everyone has "work" to do. But most of the work is fundamentally unproductive. It's this way throughout the economy, but a few tech companies probably do represent extreme cases. I think the best argument for their case is that most of them are very profitable anyway (not Twitter, somehow), and they might as well throw money at thousands of people to do stuff in case one of them accidentally does something that ends up being wildly profitable. I am fairly neutral on the whole thing; I strongly dislike Elon, but I also think Twitter was horrifically mismanaged. While I doubt Twitter will come out better than it is, the idea that firing most of such a large organization would necessarily result in the immediate collapse of a mature product does not say much about the people that were fired.
I'm more sympathetic to the idea that it would get even worse over time, but I don't think there's anything necessary about this. You could focus on resolving longstanding issues while pausing most new work and probably come out perfectly fine.
> Twitter ads are certainly do not appear very complicated.
You see a couple of ads mixed in your feed; behind that there's a big machine selling that space to advertisers and mixing it into the timeline of every user based on whatever profile Twitter has created for you. Then the advertisers want to know how their ads are doing, or they'll stop buying them…and you'll probably need to have salespeople to get them to put money into your ad system in the first place.
> I guess you could count the god-awful default feed ordering as "recommendations", but there is nothing advanced about it.
Just because you don't like the ordering doesn't mean it's not advanced.
> I am not sure why there is so pushback against the idea most companies are overstaffed.
Twitter could be overstaffed. In fact it probably was overstaffed. But it's not overstaffed in the tune of of "it should be 10 people working out of a garage".
> You see a couple of ads mixed in your feed; behind that there's a big machine selling that space to advertisers and mixing it into the timeline of every user based on whatever profile Twitter has created for you. Then the advertisers want to know how their ads are doing, or they'll stop buying them…and you'll probably need to have salespeople to get them to put money into your ad system in the first place.
This is not crazily complex, bleeding-edge tech. This is something fairly well-understood and at any rate done by a lot of teams in a lot of places. (Twitter's ad profiling also seems awful. Maybe I am hard to pin down.) Probably the most complicated part is coming up with data to make advertisers think their campaign is working. (I am extremely skeptical most ad spend is actually worthwhile.)
> Twitter could be overstaffed. In fact it probably was overstaffed. But it's not overstaffed in the tune of of "it should be 10 people working out of a garage".
I agree 10 is too low for anything but bare-bones keep-the-lights-on-this-month maintenance, but it seems likely you could have a great and functional Twitter run by ~200 employees. I've seen more done with less.
Just as one data point that might tell you why you are misinformed - Twitter's AI team frequently publishes at the biggest venues in AI research and do a wealth of machine learning research on the data and processes they have. Some of that is used in advertising, among other things (recommendations, anti-spam, detecting abuse).
There are very few teams doing advertising at the scale of Twitter, saying "done by a lot of teams in a lot of places" is accurate just like "programming is done at a lot of places so why is programming hard".
No doubt you can have big teams doing highly complicated work.
That doesn’t mean your AI system performs better than a simpler one. Or that the system is useful in the first place (recommendations.) I’m not saying they were sitting around twiddling their thumbs. I’m saying the vast majority of Twitter staff were not actually improving the Twitter product noticeably to users. They were doing highly complex, cutting-edge engineering that was make-work.
If Twitter tech was so advanced, why were they losing so much money?
The complexity of your product has nothing to do with whether it is profit making or not. If that was the case, you wouldn't have loss making products in the AI space nor would you have profit making products in the garden shovel space.
Advertising is a hard problem that not many companies have solved at the scale of Twitter, that is what I am trying to get at. There are not too many social media networks out there which have hundreds of millions of users and billions of data points, and it's very misleading to say that work done in such a scenario is "something fairly well-understood and at any rate done by a lot of teams in a lot of places", when literally they're the only ones with Twitter type data outside of a couple of other Chinese social networks.
> The complexity of your product has nothing to do with whether it is profit making or not.
Yes, this is my point. All this incredible AI engineering did not actually make Twitter a better product. They could have just as well not spent the money. The work was ultimately futile for Twitter, even though it might have advanced our understanding of AI and have incredibly practical applications elsewhere. Conventional measures worked fine.
How is revenue the only metric for "scale"? It sounds like you really don't know what you're talking about if when comparing technical complexity, your metric to go to is how much money something makes and not how many user accounts need to be served or the geographical complexity of running a real time view consistent across the globe. By that metric, is Walmart or Saudi Aramco's tech stack more complicated and larger scale than a software company's?
This right here is why you can discount most replies on HN right off the bat. The "I can make software X in a day" posts are 99% bullshit because the posters making them have idea what business reality look like. If their program gained any popularity they'd be in a panic the first time the FBI dumped a warrant in their lap and their full stack developer is now spending a week with the lawyer trying to figure out how to untangle their data while the customers that paid for ads are yelling the metrics API went down 2 days ago.
Someone needs to interface with governments and law enforcements when they request data in criminal investigations. Someone needs to interface with lawmakers when new legislation is passed. Someone needs to handle data privacy requests from Europe. There's a lot of people working on this, or were at least.
Instagram had around 10M users at acquisition too when it was acquired a decade ago. IG has way way more staff now that they have scale. Must we continue to compare Apples and Oranges?
Agreed, there's decent starter comparables in the space.. IG, FB, DC, Goog all have public numbers. I've cobbled these together in the past week talking through with old friends from Goog and others. Please correct!
IG 13 employees at 30m users. Couldn't find # of servers.
FB had 10k servers in 2008 and 100m users, 850 employees.
I believe Doubleclick had ~500-1000 servers for ~10b daily impressions in mid-2000s.
Those numbers are all on circa 2010 hardware, so.. divide by a decade of performance doubling every 2 years (conservatively), or ~5x fewer servers in 2020.
The government takedown stuff, from personal experience, is tiny on the systems side; much more about moderators and expensive legal staffing.
These are very rough estimates, but I've heard 250k servers for Twitter.. that's much more on par with Goog/Amzn/Msft serving clouds at ~1m+ machines. That's a mystery to me.
What's their core business? Losing money on a platform where people can post racist comments?
Or do they have to earn money without getting sued for being used to spread CSAM and being a platform for harassment?
Because the first is very easy with 50 people. Elon can keep sinking money into it and never earn a dime (see Truth Social, they seem to be doing well!). The last is a lot more complicated and requires an ad platform, ad sales, content moderation, documentation writers, support agents, management, scrum masters, SREs, purchasing, et cetera.
IT people are really good at ignoring everything but the tech stack. Like tech is the only thing needed to run a profitable business. (It is... But not to run a 40B valued profitable business... And Twitter wasn't even profitable at all.)
> What's their core business? Losing money on a platform where people can post racist comments?
they've been running the same exact business for years now, if what you say it's true, maybe the answer is yes?
I never heard of Twitter making profit, so maybe their core business was "Losing money on a platform where people can post racist comments"
There was abundance of both, AFAIK, long before Musk
Remember when Dorsey tweeted nazi propaganda and then said his account was compromised? (which if true it means at Twitter they don't know what they are doing, if false, well...)
Remember when journalists wrote articles titled "Twitter is a Nazi haven for the same reason its CEO claims no bias" because Dorsey never actually distanced himself from the worst of the worst the platform hosted? Fearing he would be labeled as "too liberal"?
Remember when he started spamming crypto-bro propaganda?
Remember when a spy from Suadi crown worked at Twitter helping to uncover activists using the so called "free" platform and after he was discovered and reported to authorities, Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal bought 4.61% of Twitter shares?
Did the situation got better with more and more employees or it just revolved around banning prominent accounts? (not that I necessarily disagree with the reasons behind it, but if that is the best solution they've found, after years of fine tuning, they could have done it before with much less people involved)
> Or do they have to earn money without getting sued for being used to spread CSAM and being a platform for harassment?
it's easily provable that the 7,500 employees did not improve things on that front.
> IT people are really good at ignoring everything but the tech stack
that's a really odd proposition.
Looks to me that Twitter was in bad shape already, despite thousands of non tech employees, Facebook it's in no good shape either, despite tens of thousands of them, basically the only thing still working as intended in those companies is the tech stack.
I guess the real question you're asking is "why non IT people are so bad at doing their job"?
Not my opinion though, I never said IT over other departments, I simply said nobody is able to explain what makes WhatsApp so special that a hundred people can run it while Twitter requires 75 times that and still doesn't work as well.
Chats have a finite upper limit of participants, some accounts on Twitter have 100m+ followers. Storage is limited to buffer of not yet delivered messages, and avatars/stories.
They are entirely different technological challenges.
Sure, but nobody is upset if he sees twit 1 min later than someone else, since most of the time you can't even tell, a lot of people would bitch about 1 min latency on chats.
So twitter can afford to deliver those tweets with higher maximum latency than WhatsApp.
And it's scaling when you need to keep low latencies, that really kills you, at least in my experience.
WhatsApp and twitter’s latency calculations are on different things.
Twitter’s latency stems from calculating what tweets should show on a given request. Even if you try to show tweets from 1 minute ago, it’s hard to cache that stuff using traditional systems because of the fan out. If an account with 50 million followers tweets, you need to update 50 million timelines. How do you do that quickly?
And you would have to define maximum latency, is it seconds, minutes, hours? because you can’t have the timelines be inconsistent for too long as that leads to some people getting news faster than others.
now you have to deliver them, exactly one time, to each recipient or groups of recipients, through different network topologies, with different challenges and vastly different bandwidth and latency guarantees, in exact order, while also keeping track of who is online e who's not, and distributing that information in real time, only to the edge nodes that should know about it, all of that fully E2E encrypted but stored (indefinitely?) in case the recipient is currently offline and unless that recipient blocked the sender.
let's agree that both companies solve hard problems and that it's not the technical difficulties that make the two companies sizes so different.
right, because WhatsApp is a small company that makes very little money and has virtually no users and it mostly does not work nor scale...
We could all write that in a single weekend, if only we had no family to spend time with.
It's interesting how the prospective shifts when people are told "yeah, that's impressive per se, not very impressive compared to what the others are doing"
It's like discounting Sputnik 1 because the Russians did not employ an army of people selling ads, but just the people necessary to launch a satellite in orbit, which is actually the real achievement.
Anyway, from the news: Nearly 1200 software engineers left Twitter last week
Suddenly the Twitter engineering team sounds not so capable, which clearly is not the truth, the truth is that if you have hundreds of managers, you'll end up with hundreds of small teams competing to boost the ego of the manager, usually wasting thousands of man hours on miniscule returns (if not losses) while those power point slides will help someone else to get promoted for the new project that nobody uses.
Been there, done that, I don't know why a demographic so well versed in the dichotomies of the tech industry such us the users of HN is so baffled by the claim that 2,000 engineers for a single company that does what Twitter does is a complete waste of human potential.
Elon Musk is a person I would never work for and I think he's not even a good entrepreneur, but one thing he does right: he calls the shots and then executes them.
He said he would fire people and he did, many helped him by leaving on their own, which left Musk with the responsibility of proving he was right.
If Twitter will still be up and running in a year time, we can be sure that there were 1,200 engineer too many working there.
because, honestly, who really believes that the "influencers" will actually leave for the fediverse, where they'll have to work hard and compete with mere mortals, while they could keep cashing from advertisers to promote shit to their already established audience?
nobody believes that.
Also because the fact that Twitter will sell less ads in the next future doesn't mean that advertisers won't spend that money on Twitter, they will simply not pay Twitter, but the Twitter users. For them it's exactly the same thing, for Twitter celebrities it's a giant opportunity.
1 message broadcasting to 10 silo'd people is a completely different system than ensuring a celebrity tweet gets to 100 million people within a couple minutes, which is what twitter considered their task.
Who is defining and managing the PRDs and the roadmap in this scenario? What about user testing and customer development? By “graphic design”, do you mean User Interface design? If so, who is responsible for the user experience beyond just UI?
The point I’m trying to make is that it takes some effort (beyond just the plumbing) to create an experience that folks actually want to use on an ongoing basis
> Who is defining and managing the PRDs and the roadmap in this scenario?
Mainly the project manager.
> What about user testing and customer development?
Testing could be done by everyone, mainly the project manager, although you could perhaps add a tester to the team. Don't know what customer development is.
> By “graphic design”, do you mean User Interface design? If so, who is responsible for the user experience beyond just UI?
Yes, UI design. The graphic designer would be primarily responsible for UX, but also the project manager and developers.
This is based on my experience with mobile app development. Right now, it's a fairly complex product, users often say that it's much better for many use cases than the alternative by Google, which I guess may be developed by a 10x larger team.
We are not talking future development, just maintaining status quo.
Rode map is just: keep it working, or whatever EM twitted about hour ago :)
But I agree it's way to optimistic number. You need at least a few for each platform, just because of bus factor, you also need people to keep in touch with Apple/Google reps etc., making sure bills are paid etc.
I imagine it will mostly be just minor tweaks and no major features, you can easily do both mobile targets by cca 10 people, not working crazy hours. There are plenty of successful apps with smaller teams, that make it work.
Eh, tossing the direct comparison to Twitter out here because they seem to have gone too far the other way, this is much like saying "I can make 1,000,000 screws a day, so assembling at least 100 cars a day should be easy".
Well graphics design isn't hard. I'm sure one of the Devs could do that. And I'm sure there are tools to convert an iOS app to/from Android, so one dev can do both.
And a website is easy. You could do it with 1 person.
But Elon is such a machine, he could keep it running by himself.
You still have to read them to work out that user X saying they can't log in is the same as user Y saying authentication is failing at A stage, issue is present on B and C platforms version D.E
Further the issue of 'site using the wrong font' is not equally as important as 'site is exposing private user data'. And you're likely to get many people reporting the former, and maybe only one reporting the latter, so a sample isn't likely to catch the really important stuff.
Indeed. Just translating it could be a team of at least N+0.5 people, where N is the number of languages you want to translate your product to (the +0.5 accounting for translation verifications). Even if you outsource it that just slows down feature deployment IME.
The people shouting loudly about how Twitter must have been so bloated are really just shouting their obvious inexperience working at global scales or their localized ambitions.
Could there be too many employees at Twitter? Sure. Most companies have dead weight.
The number who were "extra" is probably not 9/10ths the employees though.
> I am convinced you can run the entire tech stack with a team of a 100 people.
This is because you don't see the complexity. What you see as a Twitter user is a fraction of what's actually there.
You have to build a platform for ads. Not just serving ads, but allowing advertisers to prepare their collateral, preview them, get their results, and be billed. So that's an entire content and invoicing platform separate from your main feed.
And since your platform is all user generated content, you've got to build a moderation pipeline. A place for users to make reports, but also an interface for your content moderators to view content and make decisions. Oh, and while you're there you'd better build a portal for law enforcement to make data requests, along with your DMCA takedowns. Oh yeah, DMCA - that's another whole thing you've got to worry about.
Then the EU comes along and needs you to build something to support your GDPR obligations. Then India wants something similar, but only for its citizens. Your users also want verification, so better build that platform for securely verifying accounts and awarding checkmarks.
It snowballs. Was Twitter's engineering group bloated? Probably. Most large companies are. Could you run the whole Twitter tech stack as it exists today with a hundred people? Absolutely not.
Ads isn't just serving, but targeting. The better you target, the more your ads are worth. When you have $5B of advertising, a 0.01% improvement is breakeven for $500k of fully-loaded comp. So you should add as many engineers / data scientists / etc as can generate an 0.01% annual improvement. Or maybe you want to take 3x their annual salary: that's still an 0.03% improvement in ad relevance.
Separately, some commenters here are flatly delusional about the effort to ship a site, android and ios apps, internal mod tools, help docs, support, and legal docs in 34 supported languages. Not to mention obeying laws in all the countries that implies.
Or image and video hosting! With recoding of videos, resizing of images, and the management of what is surely petabytes of images and videos with very high reliability! That is not a 1, 2, or 3 person job to do well.
A lot of commentators are either not engineers, incredibly poor engineers or utterly ignorant to how much work it is to manage a global company, as you've mentioned. Doing anything at the scale of Twitter is a nightmare crossing multiple languages, laws, domains and expertise much of which we'll only see start burning when governments step in and start taking chunks out of Twitter.
Anyone who has used Twitter, have you seen any evidence they do this beyond extremely basic geographical targeting.
Like people keep listing off all this stuff when we’ve all used the site and can see if it does have a team working on it then they’re not doing it to the levels of their competitors.
>> "These are some of the interests matched to you based on your profile, activity, and the Topics you follow. These are used to personalize your experience across Twitter, including the ads you see. You can adjust your interests if something doesn’t look right. Any changes you make may take a little while to go into effect."
They're not good at identifying interests and making them targetable, but they try.
To be honest, growth. I work at a tech company of a similar size, and keeping the lights on, so to speak, from a systems perspective is something we can do with a few engineers. By far the bulk of employees at my company are in R&D, sales, business operations, infrastructure growth, etc. If you build a resilient architecture, keeping something like Twitter simply running wouldn’t take that many people.
>If you build a resilient architecture, keeping something like Twitter simply running wouldn’t take that many people.
It takes an army of engineers to build a resilient architecture at Twitter's scale.
And why are we even talking about "keeping the lights on"? Elon is claiming he's going to build a better video platform than YouTube, complete with better tools and for creators, for crying out loud.
He also said we’d have robo taxi’s by now. I’m not sure how much faith you can put into anything he says because so little of anything he has said has been true. Hell, if he told me I was fired, I probably wouldn’t believe him. Sadly, HR probably would.
i see your point but you should always put > 0 faith in Musk IMO. No robo taxi's but, even after being laughed out of the room quite literally, landing orbital class boosters is common place now. I don't doubt there's the talent at Twitter required to do amazing things and Musk seems to find ways to push and motivate talent to crazy levels of results. I'm not saying things like a more youtube than youtube is destiny but don't completely write it off.
I didn't say 0 faith, I just said I wasn't sure how much. :p
SpaceX is an interesting result, but it is starting to look more like a fluke than what we'd expect from him. Perhaps rocket scientists "get him" and understand the stakes better, after all, if you screw up a rocket you could die in the aftermath.
Tesla is certainly similar stakes -- except one mistake can kill every passenger on the road instead of your fellow employees. Twitter is basically 0-stakes, and is unlikely to take itself that seriously. If they screw up, maybe a bad government won't get overthrown somewhere, or trolls will take over the internet. But mostly, people will survive -- or rather, the outcomes are far more abstract.
He doesn't seem like a good fit for this kind of environment.
A script that takes text from input field and displays it along with previous submissions in chronological order is trivial; the difficulty comes from serving millions of people.
For US only? This sounds like the comment complaining about app size when an Uber engineer showed up and talked about handling 100s of methods of worldwide payments. Many in the US seem to think the internet only exist in the US, and that US rules apply everywhere.
Googling "how many people work at stack overflow" gives a number less than 400. If true I think you could put together and run Twitter with less than 400 people from an engineering stand point. However Twitter probably has a much higher soft skills head count for moderation and what not. Though it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of that was contractors not direct head count.
I don't see any comparison at all. Does Stack have to maintain mobile apps? Their moderation is mostly handled by users, but Twitter must write and maintain tools for handling that. I doubt anyone is trying to upload illegal porn to Stack. Latency of 30 minutes would be noticed by very few Stack users. Twitter probably really needs at least 10x the SREs of Stack.
Yeah, but that 400 is everyone at stack not just engineering. A team to put together a mobile app should be less than 10.
>Their moderation
Above I assumed their moderation team was probably larger than their engineering team, and mostly contractors. Thus I kept my estimate to the size of their engineering team.
