I personally have never seen this complaint leveled against the mighty Goog, nor really any company that's cash positive. When I see people giggle at bloat, it's more often than not twitter and still more often than not, it's not intrinsically because big company = waste, but because company that should be small is made to be big either by VCs or Wall Street, and then can't turn a profit anymore.
No, maybe if twitter was still a tiny company you couldn't use it in Arabic but maybe they also wouldn't constantly be on the edge of going out of business.
Edit: I think this is also a regular criticism of Twitter because Twitter has spent the last several years trying to Facebook itself and strayed far from the original idea. You can argue the pros and cons all day since they're pretty much infinite on both ends, but Twitter as a company has spent vast amounts of money on a lot of features that none of it's original userbase really wanted (and drove a lot of people off in the process).
Me, I only really ever used it as a time-waster so I'm not awfully attached but I listen to a ton of podcasts and I can't count the number of hosts who disliked more or less every new thing Twitter did.
Things like Dropbox are striking. I guess it was mostly written originally by Drew Houston over a year or so and was cool.
Then 2011, 50 million users 70 employees. Seems fair enough.
Now about 1500 employees. It worked fine and scaled fine with 70 employees so you wonder if hiring the other 1430 was good business. I guess if VCs are throwing money at you you may as well spend it on something. Though that's probably what Yahoo was thinking when it went to 11,700 employees and that didn't play out so well.
Sales persons are necessary when continuing growth requires efforts that do not scale as effectively. Marketing and advertising campaigns work sufficiently well for b2c with 1-2 people but you hit a wall if you want to selling to, for example, the Pentagon because the way those with the deepest pockets buy is nothing like how most efficient individuals and organizations buy. Groupon's massive needs for salespeople is an example of how even lower margin b2b even needs sales due to how scaling out b2b is so much less cost-effective. But for investors, landing a huge contract is not as much about the revenue as much as an indicator of stability in terms of both revenue and market signal (no Fortune 100 will buy some random fly-by-night vendor's stuff without code escrow even if it's the best thing ever because their sourcing overhead is so poor and big companies are immensely risk-averse by design).
They definitely have sales roles in more recent years and have a sales ops team [1][2][3]. The Federal channel manager description even acknowledges that there's unique challenges in selling to the government that necessitates someone that knows the different contracting vehicles. What they've done with little turn to sales culture is pretty admirable but at the same time only possible with organic, engineer-to-engineer driven growth Github and Atlassian suites.
Salesforce grew somewhat similarly via rogue accounts on expense accounts, but to actually clinch the biggest growth there was no way to avoid salespeople to get over $500MM in revenue probably.
I think those people miss the point that not all engineers are working on the core products.
For example, as one grows they need to have a dedicated HR teams. These teams will demand for a HR software to make their life easier.
If the software is an on premise solution then you require engineers to manage that software.
Most HR systems require a RDBMS backend, so there is an additional need for a DBA.
As this adds to the company, there is a need for a hosted Identity Management solution, which again requires dedicated engineers...so and so forth.
While there are many reasons for a company to be loosing money and most of them are related to building a sustainable business, from an engineering point of view it has a lot to do with hiring. Companies with lot of cash want to hire talented engineers and there is nothing wrong with that when getting the company off the ground. But as they grow the talented pool they can hire from gets smaller. So either they start overpaying for a great talent or offering above market rates for a mediocre talent. Its mostly the latter people who offer negligible intrinsic value while getting boat loads of money.
I'm definitely not claiming to know what's good/bad for a company I've never worked for, I'm saying the perception from outside is that companies hit these sizes, hire massive amounts of people to do something, and then the products almost universally become worse.
Right, I feel like the author has a good angle with which to tackle some of this criticism, but choosing Google as the example company is really unpersuasive for me. I'd agree that Twitter would be a better example (or Uber, 2,000 engineers - doubled in size over the last year)
Joking aside I enjoyed that video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb-m2fasdDY - for those who didn't see it), the presenter was pretty honest and way more open than I expected. I'm just so curious how those services break down - if it's genuinely on the "lstrip as a service" level or whatever, whether that's "1,000 services" figure was actually a relatively simple API with 10 versions at various levels of deprecation, whether he meant it was 1,000 different service endpoints (250 services each with POST, GET, PUT, DELETE) or what. I want to know more basically :)
I am usually not someone who falls into the "what do they need so many people for, it should be simple"-trap but I was still surprised to learn that Lyft has 400 engineers and Twilio has around 300 too. I am note sure they would be that big if they had to finance everything out of their profits, but i guess it's a good way to maximize progress, on the other hand they also had a lot of challenges with growing dev teams.
What features has Twitter shipped? Moments??? Pfft.
On the contrary I'd argue they've hardly done anything new, and that is why they are struggling. Think of all the things Facebook has done and abandoned in the same time.
But I like Twitter - I just wished they fixed some pretty obvious issues. I mean... Tweetstorms are like a request for a feature right there, and Twitter's response is... silence.
No, maybe if twitter was still a tiny company you couldn't use it in Arabic but maybe they also wouldn't constantly be on the edge of going out of business.
Edit: I think this is also a regular criticism of Twitter because Twitter has spent the last several years trying to Facebook itself and strayed far from the original idea. You can argue the pros and cons all day since they're pretty much infinite on both ends, but Twitter as a company has spent vast amounts of money on a lot of features that none of it's original userbase really wanted (and drove a lot of people off in the process).
Me, I only really ever used it as a time-waster so I'm not awfully attached but I listen to a ton of podcasts and I can't count the number of hosts who disliked more or less every new thing Twitter did.