> Now consider scale and profitability and you need even more people to grow tech cost consciously.
This seems intuitively false. Adding more people to tech domains can actually decrease effectiveness with more expense, resulting in lower profits. Obviously, there is a sweet spot, but Twitter is a basic product regardless of how many countries it operates within.
I'm curious about your opinion on this. I may be thinking about this incorrectly.
Suppose you are Twitter and operating in, say, {Ghana, Russia, Korea, Mexico, and Pakistan}. You're served with subpoenas and legal IP requests in each country. If you dont respond in time, your license to operate may be revoked. Each request is in the native language. How do you "scale" this technically? Can one lawyer handle these across the world? How?
First recognize that lawyers are not a technical issue and that mostly they handle independent cases and subpoena requests. Since the work is fairly compartmentalized (unlike software development) throwing more people at the problem has less of a consequence. Hire a law firm in each country to handle your cases; No need to have lawyers all over the world as employees. Have a small team of international lawyers as employees or hire them as contractors to oversee the contracted teams of lawyers around the world and negotiate when needed.
Furthermore, developing tech for managing this is likely to be unnecessary as there are existing software packages already out there. Doing business across the world and handling legal issues is not unique to Twitter.
>> Hire a law firm in each country to handle your cases; No need to have lawyers all over the world as employees. Have a small team of international lawyers as employees or hire them as contractors to oversee the contracted teams of lawyers around the world and negotiate when needed.
I generally agree with your response, but note that you've just converted FTEs to contractors/outsourcers and "reduced" FTEs that way. You'd have to do the same with accountants and many other country-level positions. But w2-->1099 isnt really a "win".
This seems intuitively false. Adding more people to tech domains can actually decrease effectiveness with more expense, resulting in lower profits. Obviously, there is a sweet spot, but Twitter is a basic product regardless of how many countries it operates within.