Why did all of them not stop this headcount increase if it's as easily reduced as "too much headcount bad, smaller headcount good"? These are paid professionals who are supposedly wealthy, good at their jobs, smart, informed, etc.
How can us commenters on HackerNews sit from our armchair and say "ah, goofballs should've just not let headcount get so high!"
These qualified people thought at the time it was a good idea to get up to 7.5k people. How were they all wrong?
It's not goofballs. It's generally misaligned incentives. Managing a 10,000 org leads to better job prospects than a 1000 person org, than a 100 person org, than a pizza box team.
Organizations tend to bloat.
Random, rapid cuts might not be the fix here, but headcount was too high.
Say I'm an engineer. And I write code all day. And I get paid by a company to do it. And it blows up in production. And I tell my boss "code tends to blow up".
Or I tell my boss "code tends to take longer than estimated to deliver".
I wouldn't be given lots of promotions/bonuses with that outlook.
We're talking about a Twitter CEO with $30m/yr+ in total compensation.
There's no way his/her view was "shrug, organizations tend to bloat" while racking in extremely competitive + good pay as somebody whose main job is to drive a company towards maximum growth/profitability.
There's no way the CEO was able to convince a majority of people responsible for paying him (the board), to pay award him $30m/yr in stock options, while he was also "bad at his job enough" to let the organization bloat without as much as an afterthought to it.
We, the people on the outside looking in, have to be missing something.
> There's no way his/her view was "shrug, organizations tend to bloat" while racking in extremely competitive + good pay as somebody whose main job is to drive a company towards maximum growth/profitability.
> There's no way the CEO was able to convince a majority of people responsible for paying him (the board), to pay award him $30m/yr in stock options, while he was also "bad at his job enough" to let the organization bloat without as much as an afterthought to it.
Why not? Why would those board members have ever called him out? The more they're paying him, the more they can pay themselves too.
Yep, my understanding is that cronyism between the executive and the board is a huge issue driving CEO pay. (Boards can also just be out to lunch.)
One way to fix this is to make corporate takeovers easier. This sort of cronyism ends up being a con on the shareholders (and the con is especially easy to pull off if the "shareholders" are passive index funds that don't pay much attention to their holdings).
By removing legal protection on corporate raiding, the board+CEO have to worry about activist investors who ask inconvenient questions like "why are you paying yourself $30M a year instead of giving shareholders a dividend?"
This is a appeal to imperfect authorities that make mistakes all the time. By that logic, Elon was able to convince banks to loan 14B to acquire and gut Twitter. There was no way the staff and shareholders of those organizations, much larger and more proven than Twitter could have been so complacent and ignorant to make such a mistake.
Elon himself is a CEO with a better track record than Parag, why is he not more legitimate if we are pretending leaders can't make mistakes
This is exactly what happens. It's also why CEOs buy other firms even though research shows the majority of takeovers fail. Just pick up any management book in the last 20 years.
There's a clear correlation between org size and CEO pay, even when not in the company's interests. Some CEOs and managers also love the power. Politics is also at work.
> Or I tell my boss "code tends to take longer than estimated to deliver".
I've used variations of that phrase throughout my career. I'm very well paid, partly because I account for this and make certain that other stakeholders are aware.
> We're talking about a Twitter CEO with $30m/yr+ in total compensation.
Jack, who was once the CEO of Twitter, has said that they hired too many people too fast.
Elon, who is "paid" way more than $30 million/year to run several companies, also apparently thinks it was very bloated.
I'm not necessarily saying the billionaires are right and the millions are wrong. I'm just pointing out the clear counterexamples to your appeal to authority. I honestly don't understand why you would be so surprised to find out that millionaires also make plenty of mistakes. The Twitter stock price to a degree is one indicator that the Twitter executives were making mistakes.
> How can us commenters on HackerNews sit from our armchair and say "ah, goofballs should've just not let headcount get so high!"
The cliche HN comment on sites like Twitter (and many, many others, any time headcount comes up) has always been "why do they need so many people?" I've mostly dismissed it the same way I dismiss "I could build Uber in a weekend," but with every other tech giant laying people off, maybe I shouldn't. Maybe the effect of all that extra money sloshing around in the system was to incentivize hiring everyone to make sure you didn't accidentally get a false negative, and not all of those hires were good ones.
A friend of mine used to work for a private equity firm that had about a hundred C++ and Java developers working on a stock trading and prediction system. He quit and rewrote the essence of that system in F# single-handedly.
If you watch interviews with famous developers like John Carmack, they'll mention that working alone scales to about the equivalent of 5x developers. That is, adding 1-3 extra people might slow you down because of the overheads of communication and coordination. It's only around 5+ in a team that there is a definite advantage.
But what are the chances of putting together a team of 5 rockstar developers that all agree on language, style, and vision? Basically zero. So you have to settle for mediocrity. Popular languages, simple approaches, established design patterns.
If you're an experienced "rockstar" developer coding by yourself and use a fancy language like F#, you can outperform a team of 10+ people. If you're replicating a system you've seen already, 20-50 might not be out of the question, especially if you're smart enough to avoid "tarpits" and instead rely on good quality libraries and CotS components like databases, PaaS, and the like.
I think this is not too far wrong. I also think in addition that the really competitive job market of the last 2 years and the hiring they were doing inevitably resulted in some highly paid people who were not good fits or good at their jobs. I think that covid wage hikes and job competitiveness is doing a bit of reckoning now as there is finally enough data to evaluate performance relative to output.
OTOH, at non tech companies, all the research interviews and surveys I have done recently continue to show a talent shortage and fears of losing tech staff, so maybe it is just that Tech companies are saturated and have too much capital for their creativity.
I'm not doing interviews or surveys, but this also matches with my anecdotal experience with non-"tech" companies, who are all still starving for talent. I guess it makes sense, given that tech companies disproportionately pay in stock and tech companies were disproportionately highly-valued during the 2020-22 Covid weirdness.
>OTOH, at non tech companies, all the research interviews and surveys I have done recently continue to show a talent shortage and fears of losing tech staff
I wonder if any science fiction writer could have predicted silliness like Snapchat having fewer outages than serious government websites because Snapchat is better at hiring engineers. Tech hiring is so bizarre.
The problem with having a lot of money sloshing around is that you can no longer say “no”. You estimate a new feature will take your team a year. But someone wants it in 6 months. “Why aren’t you hiring to meet the deadline?”
My first job out of Uni was a company that ran financial services, logistic fulfilment, and retail. They had at least a dozen large in-house retail brands, several large warehouses with automation that Amazon was probably behind at the time, and they also ran serviced some of the most well known brands in the country - from their website to customer support to logistics. They had delivery networks, networks of direct shipping, vast call centres with thousands of staff. We integrated with the banking system, with all sorts of external companies.
Our total headcount was under 10 000. Most of that was logistics and call centres (taking retail orders). Our IT dept was literally about 200 ish. All our office staff fit within a few floors of a medium sized building. IT was less than a single floor.
I’d say our software, whilst serving fewer users, was completing tasks orders of magnitude more complex than Twitter. We didn’t have much down time, in fact almost zero beyond physical damage to our networks and the once every few years disaster. Our critical support team was a handful of greybeards who spent much of the time playing solitaire. Code reviews were tight and access to production strictly controlled.
What we did have was a very lean culture, carefully managed over a long time. The company was over 100 years old.
I do not understand how, with far more sophisticated tech, companies like Twitter need so many staff. We could have run Twitter with a thousand folks, including sales. From an engineering standpoint a few hundred would do. And most of us weren’t great engineers. There were a few very experienced freelancers, though. We all worked 0900-1730, but we worked 7 full hours every single day, every minute of those 7 hours. No beanbags. Most of that time was sat quietly coding in a very cleverly designed open plan office (no cubicles) that was like a library.
Looking back, I think the key insight was that we were very cost driven and absolutely kept everything as simple as possible. We had all the usual project overrun problems, usually because things turned out to be more complex than previously imagined. But it baffles me when I hear engineering head count at places like Twitter. If you had given us 1000 engineers, we wouldn’t have known what to do with them.
It is amazing how quickly complexity comes about to serve complexity. Like at $CURRENT_JOB we split everything into a few dozen microservices with their own DBs. Turns out that we need all the data in one place to make some decisions. Shocking I know.
Cue a team of engineers working for a year+ to build a complicated data pipeline to bring all that data back together into a graph DB (not a clue why a graph DB) and build a DSL to write the code to make these decisions.
That's where the engineers go. It's complexity that is introduced setting off a chain reaction of increased complexity to account for the complexity introduced. Then you need complexity to account for that complexity and so on.
Not that it's all self inflicted wounds. Running a site that counts 1/10 of humanity as active users is a hard thing to do
> These qualified people thought at the time it was a good idea to get up to 7.5k people. How were they all wrong?
Come on, just look at the tech industry. When rates were low and stock prices kept going up, "headcount" was used as an indicator of future growth. Grow headcount, investors are happy. After all, the promise of tech stocks was "growth". Usually you're not looking to cut costs until you think growth is over. Of course, Twitter was a dog and did nothing useful for years, no innovation, no new products, nothing. But tech investors definitely saw rising headcount as a good thing...
Indeed. I watched a 30 headcount company that was quite productive getting ballooned up to 170 people after an acquisition. You won’t believe it, but productivity dropped _sharply_. Processes have been introduced that emphasized safety and risk mitigation so heavily that whole product lines are scratched before they can be released. Judging by products and improvements they released within the last year, you could be tempted to think they just stopped working altogether.
And the leads installed by the acquiring company seem to be highly intelligent - the company continues helicoptering in their brightest minds to fix this mess. It just so happens they are forced out every 12-24 months because it’s almost impossible to deliver anything there.
For example, last year they introduced SAFe. That caused an exodus which basically equaled a brain drain (still ongoing). Most people I valued for their straightforwardness and ability to cut through BS there have left or are leaving. The person pushing for SAFe introduction has resigned already.
The founders of that company have all left ofc, and are basically trying to restart the same company (or variations) with their own money. And their products are already picking up speed, becoming threats to the original one.
>Why did all of them not stop this headcount increase if it's as easily reduced as "too much headcount bad, smaller headcount good"?
For the same reason that colleges and universities have seen their administrative bloat skyrocket at 10x the rate of student enrollment. Administrative bloat inevitably creeps into all large organizations. Many of the people in the trenches making hiring decisions weren't considering the overall financial performance of Twitter as a company. They were making hiring decisions based on what was happening in their own department, or how that decision would help advance their own agenda, or increase their budget, or increase manpower on a favored project. When you further consider that many at Twitter openly conceded (and in many cases, bragged about) that they viewed their role at Twitter as moral arbiters of society, crucial to policing the discourse of the public, it is not hard to see how enlisting as many true believers as possible to the cause would be seen as desirable, regardless of the larger financial implications.
> These are paid professionals who are supposedly wealthy, good at their jobs, smart, informed, etc.
Wealth is not a valid indicator of ability.
I'm not judging the execs and board members individually but rather questioning your assumption. I have read you mention "supposedly", yet it can be read as a rhetorical term.
I've worked in multiple financial services companies where management is incentivised to be as ruthless as possible and they are always overstaffed in areas and understaffed in others. I've been in teams of 10 people that could be staffed by 2.
Hiring often isn't done because of current requirements. Senior execs come and go and with them so do strategic objectives. You accumulate people and they're often not laid off when the thing they work on becomes redundant. Large scale layoffs are awful for morale and usually only come after a 'crisis' occurs.
Has no company ever been mismanaged? Have they they ever grossly misallocated funds? The answer is of course yes, that happens all the time. Corporate leaderships are not not infallible.
There were multiple executives making $10m/yr+
There were board members
There were shareholders
Why did all of them not stop this headcount increase if it's as easily reduced as "too much headcount bad, smaller headcount good"? These are paid professionals who are supposedly wealthy, good at their jobs, smart, informed, etc.
How can us commenters on HackerNews sit from our armchair and say "ah, goofballs should've just not let headcount get so high!"
These qualified people thought at the time it was a good idea to get up to 7.5k people. How were they all wrong?