> Organizations tend to bloat.

Say I'm an engineer. And I write code all day. And I get paid by a company to do it. And it blows up in production. And I tell my boss "code tends to blow up".

Or I tell my boss "code tends to take longer than estimated to deliver".

I wouldn't be given lots of promotions/bonuses with that outlook.

We're talking about a Twitter CEO with $30m/yr+ in total compensation.

There's no way his/her view was "shrug, organizations tend to bloat" while racking in extremely competitive + good pay as somebody whose main job is to drive a company towards maximum growth/profitability.

There's no way the CEO was able to convince a majority of people responsible for paying him (the board), to pay award him $30m/yr in stock options, while he was also "bad at his job enough" to let the organization bloat without as much as an afterthought to it.

We, the people on the outside looking in, have to be missing something.

A friend of mine used to work for a private equity firm that had about a hundred C++ and Java developers working on a stock trading and prediction system. He quit and rewrote the essence of that system in F# single-handedly.

If you watch interviews with famous developers like John Carmack, they'll mention that working alone scales to about the equivalent of 5x developers. That is, adding 1-3 extra people might slow you down because of the overheads of communication and coordination. It's only around 5+ in a team that there is a definite advantage.

But what are the chances of putting together a team of 5 rockstar developers that all agree on language, style, and vision? Basically zero. So you have to settle for mediocrity. Popular languages, simple approaches, established design patterns.

If you're an experienced "rockstar" developer coding by yourself and use a fancy language like F#, you can outperform a team of 10+ people. If you're replicating a system you've seen already, 20-50 might not be out of the question, especially if you're smart enough to avoid "tarpits" and instead rely on good quality libraries and CotS components like databases, PaaS, and the like.

I think this is not too far wrong. I also think in addition that the really competitive job market of the last 2 years and the hiring they were doing inevitably resulted in some highly paid people who were not good fits or good at their jobs. I think that covid wage hikes and job competitiveness is doing a bit of reckoning now as there is finally enough data to evaluate performance relative to output.

OTOH, at non tech companies, all the research interviews and surveys I have done recently continue to show a talent shortage and fears of losing tech staff, so maybe it is just that Tech companies are saturated and have too much capital for their creativity.

The problem with having a lot of money sloshing around is that you can no longer say “no”. You estimate a new feature will take your team a year. But someone wants it in 6 months. “Why aren’t you hiring to meet the deadline?”

My first job out of Uni was a company that ran financial services, logistic fulfilment, and retail. They had at least a dozen large in-house retail brands, several large warehouses with automation that Amazon was probably behind at the time, and they also ran serviced some of the most well known brands in the country - from their website to customer support to logistics. They had delivery networks, networks of direct shipping, vast call centres with thousands of staff. We integrated with the banking system, with all sorts of external companies.

Our total headcount was under 10 000. Most of that was logistics and call centres (taking retail orders). Our IT dept was literally about 200 ish. All our office staff fit within a few floors of a medium sized building. IT was less than a single floor.

I’d say our software, whilst serving fewer users, was completing tasks orders of magnitude more complex than Twitter. We didn’t have much down time, in fact almost zero beyond physical damage to our networks and the once every few years disaster. Our critical support team was a handful of greybeards who spent much of the time playing solitaire. Code reviews were tight and access to production strictly controlled.

What we did have was a very lean culture, carefully managed over a long time. The company was over 100 years old.

I do not understand how, with far more sophisticated tech, companies like Twitter need so many staff. We could have run Twitter with a thousand folks, including sales. From an engineering standpoint a few hundred would do. And most of us weren’t great engineers. There were a few very experienced freelancers, though. We all worked 0900-1730, but we worked 7 full hours every single day, every minute of those 7 hours. No beanbags. Most of that time was sat quietly coding in a very cleverly designed open plan office (no cubicles) that was like a library.

Looking back, I think the key insight was that we were very cost driven and absolutely kept everything as simple as possible. We had all the usual project overrun problems, usually because things turned out to be more complex than previously imagined. But it baffles me when I hear engineering head count at places like Twitter. If you had given us 1000 engineers, we wouldn’t have known what to do with them.

Indeed. I watched a 30 headcount company that was quite productive getting ballooned up to 170 people after an acquisition. You won’t believe it, but productivity dropped _sharply_. Processes have been introduced that emphasized safety and risk mitigation so heavily that whole product lines are scratched before they can be released. Judging by products and improvements they released within the last year, you could be tempted to think they just stopped working altogether.

And the leads installed by the acquiring company seem to be highly intelligent - the company continues helicoptering in their brightest minds to fix this mess. It just so happens they are forced out every 12-24 months because it’s almost impossible to deliver anything there.

For example, last year they introduced SAFe. That caused an exodus which basically equaled a brain drain (still ongoing). Most people I valued for their straightforwardness and ability to cut through BS there have left or are leaving. The person pushing for SAFe introduction has resigned already.

The founders of that company have all left ofc, and are basically trying to restart the same company (or variations) with their own money. And their products are already picking up speed, becoming threats to the original one.