That's what I am thinking. E.g. I am looking at lichess which has a massive user base and is developed by one full time developer and a few dozens volunteers. Twitter is obviously bigger, but I simply don't buy that you need more than 7000 people to run that site.
I have been an independent consultant for almost my entire career - working with clients large and small, mostly on solo projects.
Took a FT job at a megacorp a few years ago and assigned a new project - I read the specs/requirements and in my IC mind thought to myself - if I was hired as contractor to develop this tool, how much would I charge? and how long would it take me? - and came up with 1 person, for 2 months, and would have been delighted to be able to bill $40K for it, but probably would have went it at $60K on a fixed bid (I always preferred fix bids).
Of course this wasn't a project I was bidding on, I was just the lead dev - the company pulled together a team of almost a dozen people and a budget of just over a million dollars with a 8 month timeframe to get it done - they also budgeted another $120K/year to host it when it was done on multiple big servers in the internal data center.
We spent the full million dollars and got it done - I did however have one small win and pushed them to micro-services solution in S3 and Aws Lambda and got the whole thing to run within the free-tier of an AWS account.
If you ever start a small software company, don't ever hire people that have only worked in large enterprises - they just don't know how to get things done cost or time efficiently.
Maybe you don't need 7000, but software is even worse than icebergs (Only 30% visible). How many people at Twitter are there to fulfill functions we aren't even aware of? Compliance, privacy, legal, internal tooling, etc and god knows what else.
My experience at a tech company with around the same number of employees is that it actually feels understaffed in some of the areas I've seen. It's surprising how much responsibility some teams have.
The whole reason it feels understaffed is because there's too many people.
I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but software doesn't really scale linearly. Unless they're 100% independent, the communication overhead will always be there. Fred Brooks and all that.
With 7000 developers working in a connected system, it probably feels slower and less things get done than if there were less people.
It's not simple to go back to having less people, however. The architecture is most certainly tied to the organizational structure (Conway's Law), and firing people will make it worse in the meantime.
Please elaborate. It doesn't feel understaffed because of communication overhead or being in a connected system, but because of the level of responsibility (I.e. critical system) or product surface area a team is responsible for.
Sure. The things you mention (Compliance, privacy, legal, internal tooling) also have to grow together with the number of developers to scale. Not only those, but also support, QA, management, UX/UI. All those ares have to increase when the dev headcount increases. But since most of those need some degree of centralization and coordination, they can't escape communication overhead and orgs slow to a crawl.
Also, software development teams have to assume more responsibilities just to escape this communication/interconnection overhead: devops is a good example, you no longer have to depend on another team, but now you gotta do operations yourself. An example of avoiding interconnection overhead is having isolated services: now you don't run queries on team Y's database, but you still have to maintain that data on your own DB. Isolation is a good alternative, but it also has its costs.
Unless we're talking about 7000 software developers working on 400 completely different and completely isolated products and answering to different people, there's gonna be a lot of invisible communication overhead, or overhead because of the need to work together with the other 6999. We developers tend to abstract it as being "part of the job", even though it is definitely non-essential complexity.
Even consulting companies doing different projects can fall prey to that: I know lots of cases of internal frameworks/libraries/UI-toolkits being adopted to accelerate development, but they ended up being a bottleneck in development because the team that owned had a full backlog.
Honestly why I'm considering not starting my own business. Getting the product to work is the first 80% of the work. The remaining 96% is billing, authentication, and marketing.
Companies like twitter operate at a different scale. Lichess can off load hiring devs by using out of box solutions like paying for AWS, paying for cdn, using adsense to serve ads, utilizing thirdparty libraries, etc. For large companies, a lot of these are in house solutions, because at that scale, it could be cheaper, they wont as dependent on other companies for reliability, they have more control over where the data is being used or stored. etc.
