Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

251–252 of 252 posts

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#251

Post by bhandziuk » Mon, Oct 30, 2017, 9:38 PM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #239

bhandziuk wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But as with many engineering challenges, throwing more people at the problem doesn't solve it faster and often makes things worse. A harder problem to solve might just need and other person or two or more time but thousands of people? It does seem excessive, right?

Honestly, it's impossible for me to say whether it seems excessive, because I have no idea what it takes to run their business. But I don't think you have any inside information either, do you? Let me put it this way: I think it's arrogant that management consulting companies think they can send in a couple recent ivy league grads to learn about a company for a few weeks and then suggest a bunch of changes. This is l…

No, I don't know anything more that you. But I can contrast the scale of Twitter with other comparable, realtime, multi user sites like reddit and stackoverflow. Both of those sites have 230 and ~330 (I didn't count all the SO employees), respectively. And Stackoverflow is actually selling a product. Is Twitter so different from these sites?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit https://stackoverflow.com/company/team

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#252

Post by sanderjd » Sat, Nov 04, 2017, 10:51 PM UTC

jjeaff wrote: post #248

sanderjd wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't see how person to person and small group messaging is a more difficult engineering challenge than personalized feed multicast? It's also simpler to sell subscriptions than to sell targeted ads - there's at least one whole other product we don't see, which Twitter's advertisers use, and it's probably a few different ones for different sizes and kinds of advertisers. Clearly, there's also a whole group workin…

Yes, I see some differences and added complexity. I don't see a nearly 100x difference. Sure, it's arrogant to question them with little inside knowledge. But I have been in business long enough to know that big, public companies do really, really stupid things sometimes. I'm guessing you would have called people arrogant for questioning Equifax's security practices. After all, it's an enormous company with thousands…

I don't think anyone should assume security practices at companies either are or aren't sufficient, without any knowledge one way or the other. Same thing with company size. Without actual knowledge, it doesn't make sense to assume it's too many, too few, or exactly the right amount.

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