What exactly _is_ required for “running something at the scale of Vine”? Yes, they have/had a lot of traffic, but traffic in and of itself does not require a large staff to manage.
However, let's do some rough numbers. It says they had 3 product managers. I would guess this means 8-10 engineers. 3 QA folks would be a decent enough ratio. You've then got a GM, a head of product, head of UX, head of data science, head of BD, editorial lead, and head of engineering who all just left. We're up to 26 people already. Now we've got some HR staff, maybe a recruiter or two, finance team, people underneath the UX, editorial, data science and BD teams (let's generously assume 1-2 hires each), and we're over 40 people easily. We haven't even discussed marketing, help centre and customer support, a DBA, ops, or IT support.
Does that all make sense now? It's a company within Twitter and there are a lot of specialized roles to keep something with 25-30 million active users a month running smoothly. I'm not then going to go into what each person does each day, but with a product that you're trying to drive growth and new features for, while supporting existing customers, and just generally running a company, that takes a lot of bodies if you want to do it effectively and not cut corners.
All which presumably can be filled by pre-existing Twitter people. In the M&A world these are called "synergies".
Regardless, the point is whether 50 people is reasonable to run something like Vine.
Good thing I didn't ask you to.
> It says they had 3 product managers
Seems like a lot of product managers for a company with one product which isn't especially complicated. Smells like a sign of hiring really fast to try to grow.
> I would guess this means 8-10 engineers
The fuck do they even do? You don't need that many people to make something like Vine. Unless I'm missing something and there's more to the service than the video-related social CRUD app?
> You've then got a [bunch of dept heads]
Eh, I can see those I guess.
> Now we've got […snip handwaving about team sizes and numbers…] over 40 people easily.
OK.
> help centre and customer support
Yeah pretty sure Vine doesn't have a custom support team.
> ops [and] IT support
If they're managing their own servers that would add a lot of overhead I suppose. If they're just running off EC2 or Linode or whatever then there's not a whole lot of staff there.
> Does that all make sense now?
No.
> there are a lot of specialized roles to keep something with 25-30 million active users a month running smoothly
I think it takes more people to work out a revenue model for Vine than to sustain 25-30 million active users.
---
Basically, bullshit. In Vine's case, you really don't need a big engineering team, which means you don't need a lot of people to manage your engineering team. I find it much more likely that Vine hired a bunch of people (engineers and otherwise) with VC money when they were growing fast.
If you want to make an effective point with sarcasm, you need to stay a bit more grounded.
I believe they are perfectly normal, and if anything are slightly on the leaner side of average.
If PeCaN is right, and I'm wrong, then he/she should be starting a company much more efficient than the average, and benefiting from being that much more effective than his/her competition. There are plenty of opportunities out there - if someone like Vine is bloated, then surely PeCaN could be a consultant and not deal with barriers to entry, and still be wildly successful. There was no sarcasm.
I'm not personally interested in Silicon Valley brogramming for social video sharing sites, but thanks for your confidence that I could dominate the market.
The needed headcount in both cases is nearly identical as well as quite significant at Vine's scale and with their type of product, and your assumption otherwise is a pretty clear indicator that you don't have much experience managing an operations team. That's okay, not everyone does, but you should listen to those around you rather than assume you know best in this case.
In operations it gets pretty tiring having engineers explain our role, strategy, and headcount to us, most particularly when this takes the form of criticism such as "you don't need a lot of [or have too many] people to do that," which comes off extraordinarily condescending and diminutive. The one thing that does not exist in all of computing, ever, from Joe's Web Design through Twitter and beyond, is a perfectly-staffed operations team. There is always more work than operators, and always "there are too many of you" sentiment. Always.
Sizing operations is an inexact science but one which yields "too many operators" approximately 0% of the time. When your operators propose dropping GPUs in the fleet to mine cryptocurrency as an additional revenue stream, you might (might) have too many. But not until then.
I'm trying to give you credit here that you mean well but the rest of your comment is somewhat suggesting that I shouldn't, so take it as you will, I suppose.
I guess serving video is somewhat more complicated than delivering text messages (although texts need to be delivered in nearly real-time).
Maybe staff size follows a logistic curve w/r/t traffic?
It seems to me that WhatsApp and Vine have a similar staff to user to ratio.
(Also, stuff like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/2u7ddq/the_real_r...)