Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not going to explain the individual job functions of 50 people, and for folks who work in the industry this should seem like a reasonable number just from their own experience. 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…
> I'm not going to explain the individual job functions of 50 people 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 li…
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.