Googling "how many people work at stack overflow" gives a number less than 400. If true I think you could put together and run Twitter with less than 400 people from an engineering stand point. However Twitter probably has a much higher soft skills head count for moderation and what not. Though it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of that was contractors not direct head count.
I don't see any comparison at all. Does Stack have to maintain mobile apps? Their moderation is mostly handled by users, but Twitter must write and maintain tools for handling that. I doubt anyone is trying to upload illegal porn to Stack. Latency of 30 minutes would be noticed by very few Stack users. Twitter probably really needs at least 10x the SREs of Stack.
Yeah, but that 400 is everyone at stack not just engineering. A team to put together a mobile app should be less than 10.
>Their moderation
Above I assumed their moderation team was probably larger than their engineering team, and mostly contractors. Thus I kept my estimate to the size of their engineering team.