Most of you are probably aware that Pavel Durov, the CEO of the messenger app Telegram, the messenger of choice of the discerning gentleman, has recently been arrested in France. This presumably happened at the behest of the United States. In this article, though, I am not going to discuss how the globo homo government deals with opinions it does not like but instead there is an interesting aspect about the company Telegram that does not nearly get enough attention: Telegram is run by an extremely small team of only about 30 engineers. Keep in mind that the Telegram app has about one billion active users.

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Pavel Durov mentioned that he is the only product manager in the company, that they have one engineer per 30 million users, and that they do not have an HR department. If you look at how many people are employed by tech companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Twitter, and many others, you may wonder how it is even possible to run a small and efficient organization.

Large organizations are incredibly inefficient. What is worse, large companies, if they are located in the West, are political by necessity. This is due to governments directly influencing how they have to conduct their business. You may not want to hire a bunch of lefties, women, and minorities who are not qualified for any work, but the government may simply mandate that you have to have such people on your payroll. Of course, once there is a critical mass, these people engage in ethnic hiring as well as push their Marxist agenda, thus undermining the last remnants of meritocracy.

Another issue is that large companies are normally risk-avoidant. This does not just apply to the CEO and the other top-level officers who want to keep cashing their yearly million-dollar paychecks. This kind of thinking you will find at all levels of a large organization. The goal of every manager seems to be to “build an empire”, i.e. a bloated organizational unit that primarily serves to justify the position of the manager. Basically any person at that level I have ever spoken to was primarily concerned about justifying the need for more “headcount”, i.e. additional people directly or indirectly reporting to him.

To give you an easy example of how to “build an empire” within the confines of a large organization, imagine you come in as a first-level manager, and your responsibility is some component X. You have a team of eight people. Let’s assume it is a small app, for simplicity, one of many that your company has released. First, you want to make your app more resilient so you geographically distribute it, and of course there is local redundancy as well. Then you split the app into a bunch of “microservices” — the more, the merrier — which increases the communication overhead between the resulting components. It also makes maintenance and feature development more difficult. Every small change is now a big release, due to the added complexity.

Now that you have positioned your app for future success, you may want to tell your manager that you need more people. After all, deployment is more difficult, there are industry-best practices to follow, and of course you also want to reduce cognitive load of your team. As a consequence, you split your one team of eight guys into three or four teams, basically as many as you can get away with. For each team, you hire a dedicated manager, product manager, perhaps even an “agile coach”, and of course more engineers. You want to ensure business continuity, so you argue that you should have two or three junior, mid-level, and senior engineers in each of your team. Before you know it, you are in charge of 3o+ people.

With the dilution of ownership comes an increased communication burden. No longer is there one person “owning” the entire app. No, not at all. Now that you have professionalized your organizational unit, and perhaps got a promotion to Head/VP of Engineering, there need to be rigid processes and clearly delineated areas of responsibility. There is one meeting after another and hardly anything gets done anymore. Yet, everybody pretends to be busy.

You may think that I am joking but nothing could be farther from the truth. I have seen such excesses during the time of free money and now that ZIRP is over, many companies have a hard time with getting their costs under control. There was so much money around that companies hired people even if they did not need them. There were even perverse evaluation metrics used by some investors. For instance, if your company did not make money but you had 250 engineers, then obviously your company has to be worth more than another company with similar revenue figures that only has 50 people on payroll. It should be the exact opposite. The reasoning, however, was that if you have a lot of unneeded engineers in your company, you are better able to seize all the unknown future opportunities in your business niche you may encounter.

When Elon Musk fired 80% of Twitter, it caused quite an uproar. Yet, Twitter/X nowadays works better than it ever has. What is perhaps an even less comfortable thought is that Twitter could perhaps be run by a fraction of its current workforce. They have about 2,000 people. Yet, I really wonder why they would need more than 200 people. Twitter is not a complicated app. On that note, the big threat to people working in tech is not AI. I do not foresee that AI coding assistant are going to replace a significant part of the workforce. A much bigger threat is putting competent technical managers instead of former consultants in charge. Elon Musk is a decent enough example but Pavel Durov is arguably a better one as he prevented Telegram from bloating. Most CEOs in his position would have happily raised billions and hired thousands of people. I would not be surprised if every traditionally run tech company out there could easily lose 2/3 of their employees without any negative effect, ignoring leftist boycott campaigns, of course.