I won’t disagree that Twitter was massively bloated, but part of that is because they had so many different business areas of focus.
People like to oversimplify what it does, if it was only sharing tweets and images, sure you could get by with 20 or 30 engineers. But they are a self service ad network, a video upload site, a live streaming service, an analytics service and I’m sure I’m missing others.
Now, if you figure 20 engineers per service, plus moderation staff, sales, g&a, etc… you can easily hit hundreds (if not thousands) of people necessary to just keep things going.
People like to oversimplify what it does, if it was only sharing tweets and images, sure you could get by with 20 or 30 engineers. But they are a self service ad network, a video upload site, a live streaming service, an analytics service and I’m sure I’m missing others.
Now, if you figure 20 engineers per service, plus moderation staff, sales, g&a, etc… you can easily hit hundreds (if not thousands) of people necessary to just keep things going.