To be clear I’m not saying it’s in accurate I’m just saying it depend on the rest of the domain. Social media is different than cloud providers, and require different investments. Social media doesn’t require a hoard of sales and support and legal for B2B and B2G clouds for example. So we can note that in the list the closest example is Facebook to twitter, which also has the closest business domain. So maybe Facebook is bloated too or maybe both just have more engineers as a percentage of their workforce because of the domain. (Sorry I didn’t read the article if this is addressed their)
All good points. If you look online for industry-wide comparisons, you tend to find them behind paywalls. That's why I used SEC filings, which are public. It's also very tedious. I suppose that's why people think they can charge for having done it.
A list of "comparables" for Twitter might be hard to compile. If you take a really new company, of course they have to invest in R&D, a lot. Twitter really isn't coming out with radically new products, AFAICT.
