Dave Burge (aka @Iowahawk on the Twits) beautifully encapsulates the lifecycle of most successful tech startups:
I like the thing where people assume everybody working at Twitter is a computer science PhD slinging 5000 lines of code daily with stacks of job offers for Silicon Valley headhunters, and not a small army of 27-year old cat lady hall monitors
Successful social media companies begin in a shed with 12 coders, and end up in a sumptuous glass tower with 1200 HR staffers, 2000 product managers, 5000 salespeople, 20 gourmet chefs, and 12 coders
True story, I was in SV a few weeks ago and visited a startup that’s gone from $4MM to $100+MM rev in 2 years. HQ currently cramped office with 30-40 coders in a strip mall, but moving to office tower soon. I’m like, man, you’ll eventually be missing this.
Why do successful tech companies have so many seemingly useless employees? For the same reason recording stars have entourages
Here’s the sociology: 5 coders form startup. Least embarrassing one becomes CEO. The other ones, CFO, COO, CMO, and best coder becomes CTO.
Company gets big; CFO, COO CMO hold a dick measuring contest to hire the biggest dept.
CTO still wants to be the only coder.
I suspect it really does takes 1000 or more developers to keep Twitter running; backend, DB, security, adtech/martech etc. But I’d guess a significant # of Twitter devs are basically translating what triggers the cat ladies into AI algorithms.
