I thought about that a lot too, and in the end I think it just comes down to stupid economics: What do you want them to do with all this money?

1) Most top US tech companies are flooded of money. Everyone dumps money in the SP500.

2) This money has to go somewhere. You can't just redistribute it as dividends, otherwise it's an admission that you won't grow and giving you more money would be a 0 sum game.

3) So you have to invest it somehow, somewhere.

4) Obviously you can spend that money buying whatever company you can.

5) Once you've bought realistically enough, you just hire more, and people will think that there should be some kind of linear relationship between resources spent and revenue growth.

6) You can also do grand projects, like the metaverse, convert all you software to blockchains, become AI native, etc. and dump billions on these.

So essentially it's all about projecting growth and potential.

Maybe a low value comment in the context of the article, but structurally I think it's a great comment that strikes a nice balance between curiosity, doubt, hope, and concern. I think a huge amount of SWE resources are tied up in the entertainment (broadly speaking) industry that drives an astonishing amount of money but little social utility.

I think it also touches nicely on what appears to be the take away of the article: people feel powerless to stop what may be a massive misallocation of resources that is only barely successful enough to avoid self-imploding.

My bias is heavily pro-AI, but I find articles like this to be much more informative and interesting than anything that aligns with my views. I'm extremely skeptical of voting-in positive change, and while "if you can't beat them, join them" seems practical in theory it also feels extraordinarily narrow in reality. I'm still doing all that I can to be proficient in adopting AI (also driven by self-interest in assistive/accessibility capabilities).

The result? I'm will be unsurprised by (but unsympathetic to) crudely aimed vigilantism (e.g. earth libration front style stuff).

I don't doubt that they were a bit overstaffed, but it doesn't seem unreasonable when you consider that "Messenger" is an umbrella that includes video calling, payments, games, integrations with business chatbots, Uber/Lyft integrations etc, across web/iOS/Android/Quest, internationally. If you took every feature Messenger has and multiplied it by even ~3 engineers for each one you could fill a few floors pretty quickly.

The economics of a service economy really just don't make sense. We pay way too much for software (which should trend towards zero-cost to distribute), we pay too much for ads. The value of it is inherently downstream of the real economy, which is about making and distributing goods and stuff people actually need to live. Especially a company like facebook only provides a glorified forum, which should be free or collectively subsidized.

If it's any consolation, this is also a mystery to non developers like me. And developers likewise wonder why a business needs so many managers and what they do all day.

DEC filled The Mill in Maynard and multiple huge office buildings along 495. How many people did it take to write code for the next version of VAX VMS?

WhatsApp managed both Android and iOS App along with backend serving half a billion customers with only 40 engineers.

And that was at a time they had to fix a lot of things and scabbily issues by themselves. Now FreeBSD, Erlang, CPU, SSD, RAM babe all improved a lot.

I honestly struggle to see why they need many floors of developers just for messenger.

Could there be more thrash on the back-end part of Messenger? I mean there must be. I mean I know that the client on my phone doesn’t update super-duper often, but I assume whatever value they get from the thing comes from analytics or whatever. So maybe they are all working on that and we just don’t really see it.

Its not that we are oversupplied with talent, I believe we are globally software constrained, the issue is that Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc make too much money. They take too large a share of profit and then overhire talent and take it away from other places that could use it. I had a post a while ago where I went into detail about how much money google makes off of home services, but the tldr is getting my house cleaned cost $350 (yes it was too high), but only 1/3 went to the person doing the actual cleaning, 1/3 went to google and 1/3 went to the lead generator. Google and the lead generator do not provide 2/3 of the value of getting my house cleaned, but that is how it stands. If companies can spend less on advertising then they could theoretically spend more on paying for software, but its all a bit pie in the sky.

Before the AI craze, Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?

Before a covid hiring spree twitter had around 4000 headcount, now they’re around 3000. Basically musk stopped moderating and fired the moderators. What he did demonstrate is that the market didn’t care about moderation, because active user counts increased instead of decreasing.

> Maybe we were already oversupplied with talent. In which case why the heck were we still hiring more, more, more developers? Before the AI craze, Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?

I don't think it's a matter of oversupply, it's a matter of allocation of resources. Are there more developers than what there would need to be in a hypothetically optimal allocation of headcount? Yes

Say you have X billions of dollars to spend on headcount. How do you determine where to put people such that the money is allocated efficiently and people are working on the right things? How do you make sure that the money gets used efficiently? It's in the billions, you don't have time to do this. So you have to delegate, which leads to managers gaming the system.

In smaller companies, it's easier to determine this because things are still simple enough for the top-level leadership to have some idea.

As the company gets bigger, more bad actors enter, there is more fabrication and empire building trying to frame where the headcount is "needed". Bigger companies handle this differently. Maybe they just get slower and pay less. Or maybe they do more layoffs. Moving people around internally is too complicated for the VPs, it's easier to just cut and hire later.

Why does software have this problem specifically? Idk, maybe it occurs in other places. But at least in the case of software, the systems become very specialized and it's hard to really figure out what matters and what doesn't

>What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really?

What makes you think it's a simple system to develop at scale?

LLMs will probably expose how much software work was coordination, bureaucracy, and marginal product churn. That could still be a big labor-market shock without requiring the technology to be magic

> What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I

It might sound like a waste, but at least they weren't finding ways to cram more ads into everything.

  > Maybe we were already oversupplied with talent.

Signal is also a good example, probably better than Twitter as Signal has done a lot with very few engineers since the beginning

> What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger?

The technical and organizational framework they operate under is so complex and full of jank that developer velocity slows to a crawl whenever a new feature comes down the pike. It's easier to throw a new pod of nerds at the problem than retask, and the reason they come in a pod is that there's nothing in the job long-term for anyone with the sort of intelligence they're asking for.

From my perspective, Twitter was a question of how many people you need to keep the lights on at an organization with low data rate/value. Musk could kill any non-devops department or project he wanted to because a social media company just doesn't have that many existential situations.

> What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really?

Multiply those floors by number of Facebook campuses and generous remuneration, and Messenger was probably very profitable. Being a global 800-pound gorilla is a sweet gig, having tubes sucking money from most countries on earth and depositing it to dozens of campuses makes a lot of sense.

> Before the AI craze, Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?

He basically killed the Twitter as a business. The only lesson here is that it is really hard to fail having infinite money.

That's roughly what Elon thought about Twitter. The app is so much worse now.

>What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger

I thought the point was to minimize the amount of talented devs who instead try to do their own startups that could compete with Messenger, by hiring them and paying them well so they've got no appetite to try their own thing.

> What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really?

Over 1 billion monthly users and over 100 billion messages a day, much of which is multimedia. Plus ads, payments, business integrations, a developer platform...

...you need quite a lot of devs for that, even if you freeze all feature development forever.

> Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?

It has panned out for Musk to have a radical right-wing echo chamber for him and his supporters. It has not panned out in terms of revenue growth, user growth, or site stability metrics. The President (another terminally online man), who he even helped elect, still posts on Truth Social instead.

> What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger?

The pessimist in me says that at least part of the intent isn't about what they do, but rather about who they work for.

Assume you can afford to hire unnecessary amounts of employees. Is it more cost effective to:

a) Hire them and have them essentially sit around, floundering

b) Not hire them, allowing competitors the chance to hire them to work on something that could be of importance

Sure, you could hire them and devote them to working on other projects, but there are also risks and costs associated with that. If you have already budgeted with X, Y, and Z for however many quarters, it may not make good sense to green light additional projects. Too many balls in the air adds extra complexity for middle management, which impacts their ability to communicate the state of things to upper management.

Reduce access to resources available to the enemy by hoarding what you can. When the stock price looks like it might take a hit, toss the excess.

I’ve asked a thousands of things out of Claude/Codex over the last month that it essentially returns in hours if not minutes. To put that into perspective, each of those changes would have to go into a sprint cycle and I might get what I wanted two weeks from now.

> Musk chopped an awful lot of headcount at Twitter, right, and proved it was overkill, has that panned out?

Has X-Twitter released a single new feature since?

Did WhatsApp spawn from Facebook Messenger? Perhaps this is what all those devs created.