Anyway, they need that org to get their 1.8B in "cost of revenue" down, which is presumably mostly the cost of massive server farms to store what are mostly text mesages. Although these days with all the machine learning/etc to sell ads they probably "needs" all that hardware to run their models and can't just optimize it down to a higher perf system painting web pages.

…and development. I assume “R&D” includes most of the engineers?

Still, it could be a lot more lean for sure.

I'm reminded of the reddit articles a few years back when they were talking about moving to AWS and having to batch database requests to maintain their database perf. Apparently, at the time they were literally sending tens/hundreds of thousands of database queries for each page load request for a logged in user because each comment was collecting all its up/down votes and adding them up rather than just having a per comment karma attached to the comment.

This is what happens when you hire a whole bunch of recent grads that frankly have no idea how to write code, and think they are the smartest people on the planet when it comes to distributed systems.