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They have their own datacenters, at least three of them, with hundreds of thousands of servers. 50 people would barely be enough to do the hands-on work of managing one datacenter.
Just swapping failed hard drives would probably take about two people datacenter. Assume 300k machines, 100k per datacenter, with ten percent of that footprint being machines with lots of disks, let's say thirty disks per machine. AFR for drives that are being constantly hammered as I would expect them to be is about 3%, especially if you try to stretch the lifetime of the drives.
10,000 machines * 30 drives per machine * 3% AFR = 9000 drives per year, or about 24 per day. Let's say each drive swap takes 30 minutes from the point of receiving the ticket, picking up the replacement, performing the swap, and some wiggle room for complications / ticket re-opens.
So an eight hour shift can do about 16 swaps per day. Typically datacenters don't staff drive swappers around the clock, so you need at least two people just for drive swaps.
Those people have no knowledge of how the replacement drives are stocked, someone else needs to do all the ordering of spare parts, and at least one person needs to receive and stock them. So at least three people per datacenter just for drive swaps.
Then someone needs to handle the relationships with Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi, etc. If you don't want to be surprised as you roll out new drive models you'll need at least a couple of people whose job is to qualify new drives by abusing them for a few months and running real workloads on them.
And someone needs to handle the OS / software side of the drives. Handling firmware updates, drive settings, all the automation that goes into failure detection, handling replaced drives, investigating problems, etc. That's at least a couple of people.
Someone needs to write nad run the inventory system that cuts tickets and registers spare parts as well, let's say another two people.
We're up to 9 people at the datacenters and 7 people outside. 16 total. We haven't even written the software that's going to be using the drives yet. And this is just for hard disk-based storage, and I'm being extremely conservative. In reality two people is not sustainable for any team that needs to be oncall, you'll burn out quickly if you're oncall half of the time.
I would be pretty surprised if these jobs weren't handled by contractors. I haven't read about any ex Twitter employees talking about how difficult it will be to replace their invaluable hard drive swapping experience.
Drive swappers almost certainly are contractors, but they're still people. The claim I was responding to was about people, and most claims of this sort are also about people.
The distinction between contractors and employees is pretty arbitrary, and makes for impossible to disprove claims. If I can sneak in contractors I could plausibly say that Twitter could be run by one employee (and 10,000 contractors).
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