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<...there were no immediate plans for layoffs..> Heh, we all know the truth, hence why the question pop-up in the first place. Elon will cut deep in left and r

<...there were no immediate plans for layoffs..> Heh, we all know the truth, hence why the question pop-up in the first place. Elon will cut deep in left and right among employees within an year. I guess only 30% of existing ones will still work at Twitter in a year after deal is done.

inglor_cz 5y ago
IDK why are you getting downvoted. Twitter is barely profitable, so layoffs are definitely in the picture, though I wouldn't go as far as predicting the total percentage of cuts. (Also, some people may decide that they are no longer a cultural fit and subsequently go elsewhere, where the workplace politics will be closer to their ideals. So there will be certain turnaround of staff just from that.) As for the top managers, they face a much more uncertain future, given that they are co-responsible for the current unsatisfactory situation.
recuter 5y ago
Well that's just impossible bud. The number of twitter employees in 2018 was 4000 and it is about double that now. What on earth do you think they've all been doing? You can't possibly run something like twitter with just 2000 employees like you suggest. The fail whale might reappear.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  If I read him correctly, he is saying that only 30 per cent of current employees will be there in a year. It is possible that some of them will be replaced by other people who now work elsewhere and who will try their luck with remodeled Twitter. There will likely be a major cultural shift at Twitter; for someone, deeply repulsive, for other people, possibly very attractive. So there might be significant staff churn even though the total numbers may stay similar.
- johnmorrison 5y ago
  You can run something like Twitter with 500 good employees. That is, unless, you mean the massive manual censorship organization needed to "run" the current "algorithm", which Twitter will no longer be needing.
  - helsinkiandrew 5y ago
    No offence but that sounds a little naive. Twitter isn't just the app and feed algorithm - I imagine there's more that 500 people needed to run the advertising side of the business alone (multiple countries, different tax regimes, payment processing, big customer relationship managers etc). Even the low level data centre, network engineering will number into the hundreds. And they'll still have some kind of 'manual censorship organization' to enable them to operate legally in different countries, handling people posting illegal content and responding to law enforcement requests, bot detection, reports of harassment etc - that's going to be more than 500 people, for a company with the number of users Twitter has.
- djbebs 5y ago
  Do you also think that you can't just fire 12 floors worth of people?
  - recuter 5y ago
    When has that ever worked out for anybody? What are you even saying, life isn't some sort of Joseph Heller novel bucko. This is the big leagues, you need all those people to keep the trains running on time. Are you seriously trying to tell me that some smooth operator can just come waltzing into a well oiled operation like Twitter Inc and simply purge thousands of highly skilled specialized knowledge workers assigned to an extremely complicated web scale project willy nilly? What of all the accumulated institutional knowledge. Countless man (and woman) years of code optimizations. The massive ETL pipelines. The company culture. Truly the most valuable asset Twitter has is the talented people that work there. Surely it would all come crashing down.
    - GordonAShumway 5y ago
      I agree. But, what's it that they say -- pride goeth before a fall? If Twitter collapses into a burning hulk is that -really- a bad thing?
    - djbebs 4y ago
      It was a reference to what actually happens, and improves the business as a result.
- toolz 5y ago
  While I agree it's silly to think musk is going to fire everyone, Whatsapp hit 1 billion messages a day with only 11 engineers. I certainly think twitter could function at a base feature set with far fewer than 2k.
  - ruh-roh 5y ago
    "Number of engineers" has become another vanity metric in the VC ecosystem and it needs some pushback. I have viewed of a ton of tech leadership job postings in the last year+, and almost all of them have a requirement/bullet of "grew Engineering team from X to XXX", or something like it. As an engineer, building & supporting products with the right / a limited amount of engineers should be the goal. The Whatsapp example is fantastic and should be lauded. It might be extreme, but we need more stories like that, not less. I get that most view it as a proxy for business growth, but I fear there's a growing group of non-technical investors/leaders/founders who see FAANGs with 4000 engineers, so you're only successful if you have that many too.
- adlpz 5y ago
  Actual question for anyone familiar with the company inner workings: What are those ~8000 people doing at Twitter?!? I guess they do sales and advertising stuff. Would that be a large chunk? The tech doesn't seem that crazy and they don't really ship much so I wouldn't thing they need that many technical people. Is it mostly an army of moderators? I know nothing of how such massive-scale tech companies work, but just seeing what Twitter does, the ~8000 number seems crazy, doesn't it?
  - phphphphp 5y ago
    You can have literally infinite numbers of people working on things that might seem like they don’t need that many people from the outside, because every organisation is very different. If you walked into Twitter, and spoke to people, you’d probably find that there’s a justification within the context of Twitter for most people even if a different company could do more with less (or less with more). Headcount is an artifact rather than a choice, the amount of people working on Twitter will be a consequence of decisions made more than a decade ago, not as a consequence of how many people Twitter needs today to operate as they are today — which is true for all companies.
    - recuter 5y ago
      If we fail to effectively manage our growth, our business and operating results could be harmed. We continue to experience rapid growth in our headcount and operations, which will continue to place significant demands on our management, operational and financial infrastructure. As of June 30, 2013, we had approximately 2,000 employees, an increase of over 1,800 employees since January 1, 2010. ..As we continue to grow, we are subject to the risks of over-hiring, over-compensating our employees and over-expanding our operating infrastructure, and to the challenges of integrating, developing and motivating a rapidly growing employee base in various countries around the world. In addition, we may not be able to innovate or execute as quickly as a smaller, more efficient organization. If we fail to effectively manage our hiring needs and successfully integrate our new hires, our efficiency and ability to meet our forecasts and our employee morale, productivity and retention could suffer, and our business and operating results could be adversely affected. Our corporate culture has contributed to our success, and if we cannot maintain this culture as we grow, we could lose the innovation, creativity and teamwork fostered by our culture, and our business may be harmed. Moreover, liquidity available to our employee securityholders following this offering could lead to disparities of wealth among our employees, which could adversely impact relations among employees and our culture in general. Our transition from a private company to a public company may result in a change to our corporate culture, which could harm our business. - Twitter S-1 IPO filing October 3, 2013
- __alexs 5y ago
  There is no relationship between total head count and operating work load in most companies. Twitter isn't a factory. They don't need 8000 people to churn out widgets and every extra person means another extra widget they can make per day. The marginal value of each extra employee is negative but you rake in so much cash from monetising all the free content users are making for you you'd be stupid not to spend it on wild ass bets. If you have a product that takes 100 people to run but generates billions in revenue it is standard practice in public companies to just hire lots more people. It's mostly speculative in that you hope that one of those thousands of people will come up with something else that makes billions.
bko 5y ago
My limited experience in engineering organizations, I have found that the core task can be accomplished with probably 25% fewer engineers. The rest are working on products that are going nowhere or are generally inefficient at their jobs. It's not even "50% of the people don't do anything, we just don't know what 50%". It's pretty obvious to everyone. Is this the norm? Are there any eng orgs that exist without this padding? Is that spare capacity working on meaningless projects ever worth it?
- stutsmansoft 5y ago
  It’s absurd how huge engineering teams have become. Remember the twitter app was originally written by one guy - I bet that team has 50 people on it now, and it’s not better for it.
  - snowwrestler 5y ago
    The Twitter app written by one guy did not have scale, analytics, reporting, advertising, compliance, or moderation features. Engineers are constantly surprised at how necessary it becomes to do those things as a company grows, and how hard it is to do them well. Musk himself has been repeatedly surprised at how hard it is to scale operations efficiently, at both SpaceX and at Tesla.
- thaeli 5y ago
  Very lean eng orgs that rely heavily on offshoring. Every software engineer at my work, I know what they do and they're important to our core tasks. But probably 95% of our actual dev is done by offshore project teams, so the eng org itself is very senior/lead heavy and primarily supervises rather than writing a lot of code themselves.
  - newswasboring 5y ago
    Doesn't it scare you that your actual product is written by someone else? As i am moving away from what is called IC positions in silicon valley, i am increasingly afraid of this. The projects i am passionate about and responsible for are actually developed by other people. And these are people whom I know are at least as good at if not better at the job than me.
ryandrake 5y ago
And if I were a Twitter employee who survived the cuts, I'd still be worried that now I'm working for Elon Musk. Suggest all Twitter employees reach out to the engineering teams at Tesla and ask them how their work-life balance, energy level, and burnout level is. How do decisions get made there, how frequently are they over-ruled? How chaotic are things? How frequent are the angry outbursts? How's overall satisfaction? Do they feel they work in a nice place? I admire Elon's companies and the achievements they've made, but he has an extreme reputation of riding his employees like horses.

inglor_cz 5y ago

IDK why are you getting downvoted. Twitter is barely profitable, so layoffs are definitely in the picture, though I wouldn't go as far as predicting the total percentage of cuts. (Also, some people may decide that they are no longer a cultural fit and subsequently go elsewhere, where the workplace politics will be closer to their ideals. So there will be certain turnaround of staff just from that.) As for the top managers, they face a much more uncertain future, given that they are co-responsible for the current unsatisfactory situation.

recuter 5y ago

Well that's just impossible bud. The number of twitter employees in 2018 was 4000 and it is about double that now. What on earth do you think they've all been doing? You can't possibly run something like twitter with just 2000 employees like you suggest. The fail whale might reappear.

inglor_cz 5y ago
If I read him correctly, he is saying that only 30 per cent of current employees will be there in a year. It is possible that some of them will be replaced by other people who now work elsewhere and who will try their luck with remodeled Twitter. There will likely be a major cultural shift at Twitter; for someone, deeply repulsive, for other people, possibly very attractive. So there might be significant staff churn even though the total numbers may stay similar.
johnmorrison 5y ago
You can run something like Twitter with 500 good employees. That is, unless, you mean the massive manual censorship organization needed to "run" the current "algorithm", which Twitter will no longer be needing.
- helsinkiandrew 5y ago
  No offence but that sounds a little naive. Twitter isn't just the app and feed algorithm - I imagine there's more that 500 people needed to run the advertising side of the business alone (multiple countries, different tax regimes, payment processing, big customer relationship managers etc). Even the low level data centre, network engineering will number into the hundreds. And they'll still have some kind of 'manual censorship organization' to enable them to operate legally in different countries, handling people posting illegal content and responding to law enforcement requests, bot detection, reports of harassment etc - that's going to be more than 500 people, for a company with the number of users Twitter has.
djbebs 5y ago
Do you also think that you can't just fire 12 floors worth of people?
- recuter 5y ago
  When has that ever worked out for anybody? What are you even saying, life isn't some sort of Joseph Heller novel bucko. This is the big leagues, you need all those people to keep the trains running on time. Are you seriously trying to tell me that some smooth operator can just come waltzing into a well oiled operation like Twitter Inc and simply purge thousands of highly skilled specialized knowledge workers assigned to an extremely complicated web scale project willy nilly? What of all the accumulated institutional knowledge. Countless man (and woman) years of code optimizations. The massive ETL pipelines. The company culture. Truly the most valuable asset Twitter has is the talented people that work there. Surely it would all come crashing down.
  - GordonAShumway 5y ago
    I agree. But, what's it that they say -- pride goeth before a fall? If Twitter collapses into a burning hulk is that -really- a bad thing?
  - djbebs 4y ago
    It was a reference to what actually happens, and improves the business as a result.
toolz 5y ago
While I agree it's silly to think musk is going to fire everyone, Whatsapp hit 1 billion messages a day with only 11 engineers. I certainly think twitter could function at a base feature set with far fewer than 2k.
- ruh-roh 5y ago
  "Number of engineers" has become another vanity metric in the VC ecosystem and it needs some pushback. I have viewed of a ton of tech leadership job postings in the last year+, and almost all of them have a requirement/bullet of "grew Engineering team from X to XXX", or something like it. As an engineer, building & supporting products with the right / a limited amount of engineers should be the goal. The Whatsapp example is fantastic and should be lauded. It might be extreme, but we need more stories like that, not less. I get that most view it as a proxy for business growth, but I fear there's a growing group of non-technical investors/leaders/founders who see FAANGs with 4000 engineers, so you're only successful if you have that many too.
adlpz 5y ago
Actual question for anyone familiar with the company inner workings: What are those ~8000 people doing at Twitter?!? I guess they do sales and advertising stuff. Would that be a large chunk? The tech doesn't seem that crazy and they don't really ship much so I wouldn't thing they need that many technical people. Is it mostly an army of moderators? I know nothing of how such massive-scale tech companies work, but just seeing what Twitter does, the ~8000 number seems crazy, doesn't it?
- phphphphp 5y ago
  You can have literally infinite numbers of people working on things that might seem like they don’t need that many people from the outside, because every organisation is very different. If you walked into Twitter, and spoke to people, you’d probably find that there’s a justification within the context of Twitter for most people even if a different company could do more with less (or less with more). Headcount is an artifact rather than a choice, the amount of people working on Twitter will be a consequence of decisions made more than a decade ago, not as a consequence of how many people Twitter needs today to operate as they are today — which is true for all companies.
  - recuter 5y ago
    If we fail to effectively manage our growth, our business and operating results could be harmed. We continue to experience rapid growth in our headcount and operations, which will continue to place significant demands on our management, operational and financial infrastructure. As of June 30, 2013, we had approximately 2,000 employees, an increase of over 1,800 employees since January 1, 2010. ..As we continue to grow, we are subject to the risks of over-hiring, over-compensating our employees and over-expanding our operating infrastructure, and to the challenges of integrating, developing and motivating a rapidly growing employee base in various countries around the world. In addition, we may not be able to innovate or execute as quickly as a smaller, more efficient organization. If we fail to effectively manage our hiring needs and successfully integrate our new hires, our efficiency and ability to meet our forecasts and our employee morale, productivity and retention could suffer, and our business and operating results could be adversely affected. Our corporate culture has contributed to our success, and if we cannot maintain this culture as we grow, we could lose the innovation, creativity and teamwork fostered by our culture, and our business may be harmed. Moreover, liquidity available to our employee securityholders following this offering could lead to disparities of wealth among our employees, which could adversely impact relations among employees and our culture in general. Our transition from a private company to a public company may result in a change to our corporate culture, which could harm our business. - Twitter S-1 IPO filing October 3, 2013
__alexs 5y ago
There is no relationship between total head count and operating work load in most companies. Twitter isn't a factory. They don't need 8000 people to churn out widgets and every extra person means another extra widget they can make per day. The marginal value of each extra employee is negative but you rake in so much cash from monetising all the free content users are making for you you'd be stupid not to spend it on wild ass bets. If you have a product that takes 100 people to run but generates billions in revenue it is standard practice in public companies to just hire lots more people. It's mostly speculative in that you hope that one of those thousands of people will come up with something else that makes billions.

bko 5y ago

My limited experience in engineering organizations, I have found that the core task can be accomplished with probably 25% fewer engineers. The rest are working on products that are going nowhere or are generally inefficient at their jobs. It's not even "50% of the people don't do anything, we just don't know what 50%". It's pretty obvious to everyone. Is this the norm? Are there any eng orgs that exist without this padding? Is that spare capacity working on meaningless projects ever worth it?

stutsmansoft 5y ago
It’s absurd how huge engineering teams have become. Remember the twitter app was originally written by one guy - I bet that team has 50 people on it now, and it’s not better for it.
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  The Twitter app written by one guy did not have scale, analytics, reporting, advertising, compliance, or moderation features. Engineers are constantly surprised at how necessary it becomes to do those things as a company grows, and how hard it is to do them well. Musk himself has been repeatedly surprised at how hard it is to scale operations efficiently, at both SpaceX and at Tesla.
thaeli 5y ago
Very lean eng orgs that rely heavily on offshoring. Every software engineer at my work, I know what they do and they're important to our core tasks. But probably 95% of our actual dev is done by offshore project teams, so the eng org itself is very senior/lead heavy and primarily supervises rather than writing a lot of code themselves.
- newswasboring 5y ago
  Doesn't it scare you that your actual product is written by someone else? As i am moving away from what is called IC positions in silicon valley, i am increasingly afraid of this. The projects i am passionate about and responsible for are actually developed by other people. And these are people whom I know are at least as good at if not better at the job than me.

ryandrake 5y ago

And if I were a Twitter employee who survived the cuts, I'd still be worried that now I'm working for Elon Musk. Suggest all Twitter employees reach out to the engineering teams at Tesla and ask them how their work-life balance, energy level, and burnout level is. How do decisions get made there, how frequently are they over-ruled? How chaotic are things? How frequent are the angry outbursts? How's overall satisfaction? Do they feel they work in a nice place? I admire Elon's companies and the achievements they've made, but he has an extreme reputation of riding his employees like horses.