

Ask HN: 300 employees, what is Twitter doing with them all? - joshfinnie

Twitter just announced their 300th employee [1].  I thought I would extend the question to people who might know.  What is a company like Twitter doing with 300 employees?  Of course this is all speculation, but I feel 300 is just too much.<p>I would love to hear what everyone here thinks!<p>[1] https://twitter.com/#!/twitter/status/28816319556
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mechanical_fish
Factors to keep in mind:

Twitter is a global, high-traffic operation with a pile of dedicated servers.
It takes a lot of facilities staff to deal with that.

Twitter is an HA service that is trying to build a reputation for reliability.
You need enough ops staff to keep a 24/7 NOC up and running and to deal with
illnesses and vacations.

Twitter is in an explosive growth phase. They are quite likely to be employing
lots of engineers on strategic projects. It can be a mistake to think of your
R&D team as some kind of cost that you need to contain. R&D is an investment
in the future. And Twitter has a lot of VC money to invest right now.

Not everything scales. In particular: Sales and customer service don't scale
perfectly unless you deliberately engineer that from day one. For example, if
you build Google Ads (and are able to compete with the _original_ Google Ads)
you can sell ads with Perl scripts. But traditional ad sales requires
salespeople. Customers like to be talked to, they like to get their problems
solved and their tickets closed by sympathetic humans. Depending on the
various business models that Twitter is considering, they may need a bunch of
sales people to negotiate deals with customers, and/or a bunch of systems
integrators to help customers learn to process the data coming out of the
firehose.

Twitter needs lawyers and moderators and ombudsmen. They receive DMCA takedown
notices. They receive reports of threats and spam. People steal credentials
and impersonate other people. There are privacy laws and telecom regulations.
They have to deal with these things in multiple languages and around the
world.

~~~
joshklein
Just to give some deeper understanding of why sales doesn't scale: here at The
Ad Agency, we're responsible for spending our clients' large budgets buying
media from people like Twitter (I don't think we ever buy from Twitter, but we
theoretically could). That process involves having Twitter come into our
offices to pitch their platform to us, justify an investment, provide us with
the tools to sell the idea to our clients, then provide us with ongoing
account management to coordinate, implement, track, and report on the
campaign. Ad agencies rarely do self-serve media buying, so media sellers need
to pound the pavement in NYC to get big brands on their platforms.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_Ad agencies rarely do self-serve media buying_

And why is that, one might ask?

I'll take a guess: Companies hire ad agencies to pursue advertising strategies
that go well beyond what's possible with self-serve media buys. It's not that
you can't do a lot with self-serve media, or that there's not a huge business
for such media. It's that ad agencies serve a different class of clientele,
one that has bigger scope and bigger budgets. And, once the budget and scope
grow beyond a certain point, it becomes worthwhile to have _actual humans_
negotiate the deals. After all, negotiation is pretty difficult to automate,
and most ads are not commodity products.

~~~
joshklein
Well said. There are better "self-service" marketplaces for TV, where the
media sellers have organized, but the online landscape is too fragmented. It
would be inane for an agency to train someone up in "Twitter buying", so
instead there are people trained in "media planning" (usually specialized in
TV, Print, or Digital) who then coordinate with specialists at individual
vendors (Twitter, Facebook, Google, other networks).

Ad agencies add value to their clients through strategy, creative, planning,
and experience in execution. The actual serving of ads is largely a pass along
expense, and therefore ripe territory for smart technology companies.

------
citricsquid
<http://twitter.com/positions.html>

That's a list of all open positions, maybe that will help give an idea.

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sprsquish
Jane answered this well on Quora: <http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Twitter-
need-300-employees>

~~~
andrewf
Nice to see that they have 20ish people on platform/API. That's about 3 times
as many people as Facebook supposedly have on theirs.

~~~
rbranson
... and it shows. Facebook's API and platform are terrible.

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Janteh
They have, for example, one person working full-time with relatives of
deceased people.

~~~
koevet
What does that mean? Deceased employees? Which kind of daily task does this
guy have?
[http://everything2.com/user/ataraxia/writeups/Professional+m...](http://everything2.com/user/ataraxia/writeups/Professional+mourners)

~~~
davidu
Dealing with the accounts of people who have died, handing them over to family
members or shutting them down, etc.

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staunch
Justifying their massive sale price to Google/Yahoo/Microsoft. You can't pay
$3 billion for a company that doesn't have at least a few hundred employeees.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Alternatively, businesses can go the boring route and actually make enough
profit to justify a $3 billion price.

------
ErrantX
I expect a lot of them are in customer service/business development/lead
generation roles.

~~~
michaelfairley
Almost exactly half (150) are engineers, leaving the other half for the
businessy roles.

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marcusfrex
People tells me that twitter guys are smart but it doesn't seems that way.
They changed whole architecture again and again but there are still downs time
by time. But that is another case. Anyway, with that point of view it might be
required to collect some experience and ideas together to brought more stable
product. But i'm sorry to say that if it is what they are thinking.. they are
in the wrong way.

------
points
Same as Digg. Betting they'll be acquired.

~~~
ceejayoz
I don't think you can compare rapid traffic growth and a traffic slump and
call them the "same".

~~~
points
Digg is just a couple of years ahead.

Lets see where Twitter is in 2 years.

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smackfu
You know how when people count lines of code, and other people say it is a
meaningless metric?

Number of employees is the same way. You can arbitrarily change the number by
outsourcing non-core-business jobs. Like HR or payroll or whatever.

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singer
I don't think they have enough employees.

When I send them DMCA takedown notices, they only remove the content if I
remind them 3 or 4 times. After weeks of reminding them, the content has been
seen by thousands. That kind of defeats the purpose of them even offering to
take down the content.

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grandalf
I hope they're re-releasing dabbledb for everyone to use...

------
bigtech
Defending Sparta from the Persians.

------
phlux
\--- Thinking out loud ---

There is yet a thing to come of twitter:

I design big systems; HQ campus networks, Hospital networks and systems,
RFID/RTLS tracking systems etc...

Back at Lockheed in 2002 we talked about this untapped M2M information layer
that was just becoming accessible.

We imagined that there was a ton of data, contextual and revealing about what
human actions were, that was happening and going to exponentially happen at a
machine to machine level...

this device is here, in this state, with this sensor data and tethered to this
owner... etc...

Twitter is kind of this sub-meta layer of information that has emerged - but
not about machines -- about the human psyche...

there is a lot to be said for the 140 limit -- think of it as a protocol spec
for the machine enabled telepathy that is the internet.

take that paradigm and apply it to the M2M idea previously stated: use twitter
as a platform (middle ware, much like Emergin) to deliver short context
messages between social systems, in an automated way) and then mine the fuck
out of it for intent, interest, trend, etc...

This is like using it to data(sift) mine the information users put into the
twitdome to determine such things as stock prices, national satisfaction on
[issue], etc...

the beauty is that much can be gleaned DUE to the fact that the inputs are of
a known, limited size.

I theorize THIS is exactly why the library of congress has chosen/forced? the
archiving of all tweets -- as it is immensely valuable for "opinion mining" a
populous due to the fact that all entrants are limited to post in a small, set
frame. (better be more informed than the populous you wish to control)

Thus the issues about mining are much more manageable.

------
bhiggins
Why don't you go start a company and show us how great you are at headcount?

