Snekay VLM skill, don't tell anyone... business leaders will pretend internal organization is confidential, so all the twitter.com website reports is 40% of personnel are technical and if you've been around the block a few times, thats a way of saying 60% are in sales. So secret of them like trying to peer into the NSA. Then HR posts 50 bazillion job openings totally dropping the docs on every strategy the company has ... if I know which cities are hiring data center operations employees and what skill set they want, then I can tell you where the data centers roughly are, and in some cases exactly how they operate.
So don't tell any business leaders, let them stay in the dark about secrecy, but I can tell you purely as an outsider using their own websites for "about" and "careers" they have about 2000 people in sales, about 200 in engineering support of sales (aka data engineers). About 600 in operations (even 24x7 what is that small army doing?). Several hundred software developers of various requirement sets. A couple hundred deep research R+D types. My numbers are wrong and not in a quantity large enough to matter, at least for investment decisions.
In a way your estimate is about right, takes a couple hundred front line people to literally make it roll. Everyone else is trying to sell or support or develop or otherwise glom on. And are more or less disposable in that they aren't needed day to day to make the place roll. Yeah yeah I know, no accounting dept will get noticed after a couple quarterly taxes are missed, but just on a pure "who needs to show up tomorrow or else the doors close forever" that number is only in the hundreds.
I've been doing this since the 80s for my own investment purposes and stock trading based on published newspaper job reqs and more recently based on job postings is not legally insider trading. If I were to apply and gather data with or without signing a NDA that would be open and shut example of insider trading, so I never invest in companies I apply to work at, just to keep things perfectly clean.
I do extensively research jobs I apply to, and that sometimes freaks people out when I walk in and have insider level knowledge of their operations just from reading the last couple years of employment ads. Gotta keep the power level masked when its unnecessary. "wait wait wait, how could you know we're secretly opening a new engineering center in XYZ when we haven't even told our current employees they're all getting downsized?" "Well you put an ad in the paper to hire them in XYZ so what do you think I should assume, not my problem if your employees don't read the papers."
I was originally inspired by blackhat social engineering stuff from decades ago.. if they're trying to hide the make and model of the minicomputer you're dialing into, don't spend days trying everything when you can just read off the info from the employment ad for the "rsts 10.0 sysadmin" in the newspaper a year ago or whatever.
So don't tell any business leaders, let them stay in the dark about secrecy, but I can tell you purely as an outsider using their own websites for "about" and "careers" they have about 2000 people in sales, about 200 in engineering support of sales (aka data engineers). About 600 in operations (even 24x7 what is that small army doing?). Several hundred software developers of various requirement sets. A couple hundred deep research R+D types. My numbers are wrong and not in a quantity large enough to matter, at least for investment decisions.
In a way your estimate is about right, takes a couple hundred front line people to literally make it roll. Everyone else is trying to sell or support or develop or otherwise glom on. And are more or less disposable in that they aren't needed day to day to make the place roll. Yeah yeah I know, no accounting dept will get noticed after a couple quarterly taxes are missed, but just on a pure "who needs to show up tomorrow or else the doors close forever" that number is only in the hundreds.
I've been doing this since the 80s for my own investment purposes and stock trading based on published newspaper job reqs and more recently based on job postings is not legally insider trading. If I were to apply and gather data with or without signing a NDA that would be open and shut example of insider trading, so I never invest in companies I apply to work at, just to keep things perfectly clean.
I do extensively research jobs I apply to, and that sometimes freaks people out when I walk in and have insider level knowledge of their operations just from reading the last couple years of employment ads. Gotta keep the power level masked when its unnecessary. "wait wait wait, how could you know we're secretly opening a new engineering center in XYZ when we haven't even told our current employees they're all getting downsized?" "Well you put an ad in the paper to hire them in XYZ so what do you think I should assume, not my problem if your employees don't read the papers."
I was originally inspired by blackhat social engineering stuff from decades ago.. if they're trying to hide the make and model of the minicomputer you're dialing into, don't spend days trying everything when you can just read off the info from the employment ad for the "rsts 10.0 sysadmin" in the newspaper a year ago or whatever.