It's hard for me to understand how Twitter has so many employees when:
a) The site has relatively few major features beyond displaying lots of text in chronological order.
b) The site is so overwhelmingly shitty.
They had a great thing going for themselves years back when developers were really excited about building on the Twitter API and experimenting with it in all kinds of ways and creating great new apps daily. That stopped when Twitter started running wild and harassing devs and making investment into the Twitter ecosystem practically impossible. They could have kept their costs down and just needed a small number of employees to keep the infrastructure up.
I'd wager a bit more than that to maintain existing services. But they haven't given up on growth yet, disappointing news doesn't = throw in the towel. If these rumors are true, best of luck to those affected.
Jonathan Blow gave a talk to Berekley college students a few months ago, complaining about the poor quality in modern software.
He picks on Twitter in one part, showing the graph of the number of employees by year, challenges their claims to the complexity of implementing Twitter, and mocks a UI problem he just had.
But 3,750? Does anyone think Twitter needs that many people? Scale back to the bare essentials and regroup. Clearly the people there haven't been good for ambitious growth, time to shake it up, find a buyer (which will be easier with less overhead), or close the doors.
they should focus on being THE platform for key influencers, "thought leaders" and celebrities, mover-and-shaker types, kind of like Yahoo did with Katie Couric!
Nah, WA started as a 1:1 direct messaging service with next to no server storage - so all the backend had to do was to distribute the incoming messages to the recipient ASAP in order to keep storage load low.
Twitter's backend is far more complex, you have a 1:n distribution (with n occasionally drifting into the double-digit million counts, like President Obama), and all the messages have to be archived and live searchable.
Agreed. The keys to making whatsapp work were tuning an XMPP server for and the Erlang VM for performance, which takes a few very smart people, but not a large quantity.
Twitter's reputation as a haven for trolls was one of the key reasons both Disney and Salesforce declined to make bids for Twitter, according to reports from Bloomberg and CNBC host Jim Cramer.... the family-friendly animation giant had even hired two investment banks to work out a bid for the service, but eventually decided not to put a deal on the table, fearing that Twitter's sexist, racist, and otherwise unpleasant abusers would sully Disney's image..... Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff had expressed concerns about Twitter's problems with user abuse directly to him. "What's happened is, a lot of the bidders are looking at people with lots of followers and seeing the hatred," Cramer said, claiming that Salesforce was "very concerned about this notion."
If they need more than 100 people I'd be really shocked.