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Comment by rocket_surgeron | Hacker News Reader

>Twilio had 7,867 employees as of Dec. 31, 2021.

Every single layoff story stupefies me. Confuses. Flabbergasts.

What are these companies doing with so many people? What are they doing? Like, what are their day-to-day tasks?

My employer has more people but we build nuclear reactors and spacecraft. Our revenue per employee is nearly double Twilio's and is low for a "tech" firm due to the extremely high capital costs and labor-intensive nature of our work.

Nearly 8,000 people (surely, 8,000 with contractors) to build an SMS and VOIP marketing spam, sorry, ahem, communications, platform?

Are they all in marketing or customer support?

It is incomprehensible.

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I am glad I'm not the only person who has had this thought, and I think it every time I see how many people some of these random tech companies employ. Those are the kinds of employee numbers I would expect from a much larger company than Twilio.

For reference, in the past I worked for an immensely profitable eCommerce business and I don't think our entire engineering department ever reached more than 40 people at its absolute largest.

I know all those employees aren't engineers, and I've been around long enough to know that what we see from the outside is just the tip of the iceberg. But if we assume even 25% of them are engineers directly working on the product, that is still nearly 2,000 people. That must be a huge iceberg.

So what on Earth are all those people doing? I am not being sarcastic or obtuse, I am genuinely curious because the only organization that I have ever worked for that was that size or larger was the US government. Is it administrative/managerial bloat? Are there a bunch of different pivot projects going on? What does Twilio have going on that needs nearly 8,000 employees?

When I worked at a VC-backed firm, headcount was a bragging point and seemed to be a metric they were concerned about in the opposite direction you’d expect— that is, if I was a business owner, I’d be concerned about having too much headcount. They were always busy seemingly trying to maximize headcount. I never understood it.

Twitter has 7500 employees. Its absurd. You could fire 7000 of them and still run the infrastructure just fine.

"What are these companies doing with so many people? What are they doing? Like, what are their day-to-day tasks?"

I don't know but I will say that I had the time of my life at the Signal 2018 conference where they rented out Bill Graham Arena and booked OK GO to play ... open bar and an arena full of indoor food trucks ...

... and earlier that day Tony Hawk was doing a halfpipe demo ... related to Twilio somehow ... ?

Hard to say where their business is going but it has all worked out very well for me.

Silicon Valley was a documentary.

Twilio recentky acquired Segment and Sendgrid.

There is overhead per customer in each of their segments for compliance, revenue retention, contract growth, and support.

From a technical standpoint, engineers are required for each of these aspects as well.

Then there is overhead for employees, in terms of managers, human resources, and it.

Based on my experience bloat causes more bloat. People get hired to work on fringe projects/products, those people cause work for other staff that are already at 100% capacity on higher priority work, so additional staff are hired.

I wrote about what drives this previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32171468

Maybe I should be able to guess but mind providing your employer, curious who makes reactors and space craft?

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