zlacker

>>rexree+(OP)
I thought the headline meant that this was going to present Signal as an example of the bloat, but it's the reverse: the article says Signal has only 50 employees but still successfully operates a major communications service, where other companies have thousands of employees.

Apart from Signal just generally doing a good job here, I see a few other possible factors:

* Signal doesn't see user content, so it doesn't have a content moderation team

* Signal is designed in such a way that it can't comply with most kinds of legal requests for user data, so it doesn't need a large team responding to those requests

* Signal gets some amount of pro-bono legal help, so it might not have as large an in-house legal team as other organizations

* Signal isn't trying to directly profit from user activity, so it doesn't need to study user activity or engagement metrics with a view towards profiting from them; similarly, it doesn't need to manage relationships with advertisers

* Similarly, it doesn't need to try hard to grow its user base (that would be desirable, but it doesn't necessarily increase revenue much)

* Similarly, it probably doesn't need to try hard to expand into other business areas

(I think these things are generally great. Yay Signal!)

>>schoen+K2
I agree - this shows Signal in a good light. But it does beg the question what is the real financial incentive discussed in the article for the large tech companies to have such employee bloat? You'd think that employee bloat would be a hindrance to company value but it seems to be the opposite? The more employees it seems the better from a shareholder perspective? It does lead to wild hiring / firing swings but there must be a market logic to it somehow?

>>rexree+33
One of the arguments I saw in years past was that there was an element of “make sure our competitors can’t get the best people by just hiring them even if you don’t need them”. I suspect that the mass layoffs at google etc were at least partially due to that.

There’s also an element of large companies working on many different things, and the more you silo projects the more people you need because many projects end up duplicating work.

You also don’t necessarily see the output of teams at large companies, potentially for years, so you see large numbers of people working but there’s no external/publicly visible product.

But then you also have “we’re successful right now so let’s pretend that the current growth rate will continue forever and hire accordingly” which is mismanagement that eventually needs to be corrected.