6 ms·

Documents detail plans to gut Twitter’s workforce

97 points by minimaxir 4y ago

mzs 4y ago
Imagine how much worse moderation will become after the cuts. Twitter will become the online equivalent of "Charlie Goes America All Over Everybody's Ass."
minimaxir 4y ago
How does a 75% workforce cut even work logistically for a company not on its deathbed?
- sn0w_crash 4y ago
  How does a company like this need 7,500 people?
  - phillipcarter 4y ago
    Because it's a set of massive engineering systems, applications, advertising market, social institution, etc.? Big, complex sociotechnical systems require a lot of human beings to keep moving along.
    - sn0w_crash 4y ago
      This is not a company with multiple products. The ad platform is just barely usable, with an only slightly better UI than LinkedIn. Its core product has not changed meaningfully in 10 years. The company down much of its developer-facing offering years ago. There are e-commerce websites with a more complex stack than Twitter. This is a product that can run on 1,000 people and nothing about the user experience will be different. There is probably so much administrative, HR, and operational bloat that the company probably rivals most universities.
      - phillipcarter 4y ago
        I think you're doing a bunch of speculation. I disagree with most of what you wrote.
      - shaburn 4y ago
        The balance sheet has been a public market charity for tech employees who want paid hiatus since they IPO'd.
      - toofy 4y ago
        all of this is based on what? this seems like an awful lot of speculation regarding one of the largest social networks on the planet. is there waste? highly likely. but the kind you’re implying? sounds ridiculous. what are you basing this on?
      - batmanturkey 4y ago
        Well, heck, you can shrivel it down to ONE employee and then fire them, if you just wanna tank Twitter. It seems like the sorta crackhead move we have come to expect from mister attention whore extraordinaire. He’s in a competition of some kind with Kanye, apparently. Why is he wasting 40 billion on a trumpet of little worth if it’s worth so little? What a weird mid life crisis sports car to buy, it’s not even red.
- bob1029 4y ago
  25% of twitter's current employee base is still ~1,900 people... I don't see why this would be infeasible.
  - thefreeman 4y ago
    You think the top performing 25% are going to want to stick around when you fire 3/4 of their coworkers?
    - mikecoles 4y ago
      Would be worth sticking around since you don't need to keep the dead weight afloat any longer.
    - mentos 4y ago
      What if you double their salaries?
      - phphphphp 4y ago
        At which point you’re taking on a huge risk for less savings, savings that’ll shrink over time and introduce new challenges: after-all, doubling the remaining employee’s salaries gives those employees all the power when it comes to negotiating — suddenly, each and every one knows just how valuable and important they are… and the company has much less room to negotiate to retain them. And that assumes they can even cut the right 75%: what if the measure they use to determine the “valuable” employees turns out to be wrong? How do you even begin to undo / address that when everyone is being paid 2x?
        sieabahlpark 4y ago
        Sounds like a great opportunity to ride while you also look elsewhere. It has Elon behind it so it's not like it will have a lack of funding.
      - Balgair 4y ago
        Why would they not just go make another Twitter without Elon?
- StanislavPetrov 4y ago
  Sometimes a 75% workforce cut is exactly what a company on its deathbed needs. In the case of Twitter they wouldn't even need to fire anyone. Just make employees sign a statement reaffirming their commitment to free speech and the 1st Amendment (ala forced DEI statements at other companies) and 75% of Twitter employees would likely depart on their own.
  - arlcode 4y ago
    Unlikely. Most Twitter employees (like people everywhere) go there to earn a living and as long as employment conditions remain acceptable they'll sign whatever management ask them to. In particular if it's a meaningless broad statement such as "commitment to free speech and 1st amendment". Most people there don't have anything to do with policy enactment or enforcement so why would they care (case in point those other companies, you mentioned which also retained their workforces). If the real consequence is a work culture in which bullying and harassment is sanctioned (or even encouraged) by management THEN people will leave because it's unpleasant to work in such an environment. The ones remaining won't necessarily be your high performers
  - LegitShady 4y ago
    I don't think people should sign political affidavits from their employer. That's not useful or reasonable.
  - alephxyz 4y ago
    Why would employees need to reaffirm their commitment to what the US Congress can or can't do?
  - ytpete 4y ago
    The First Amendment only constrains the government - not any private company. So it's meaningless with regard to Twitter's moderation policies. Nor is it useful as a voluntary limit on content moderation. Any social media site that allows absolutely anything First Amendment protected would quickly be overrun by porn and blood and gore.
- 0xB31B1B 4y ago
  1) cut 35% of engineering team, including all L4s and L3s, and people who have scored 2/5 or lower on perf reviews 2) Cut 100% of marketing team, Elon is marketing team now. 3) Cut 100% of policy team. Elon is policy team now 4) Cut 80% of sales team. Elon is sales team now. 5) Cut 95% of Product team. They don't ship anything too much time talking, not enough time shipping 6) Cut support team by 90%, only highest tier gets support, 7) hire new leadership ASAP, probably before firing and agreements probably happening now to rebuild teams with people who actually want to work and ship.
  - phillipcarter 4y ago
    This is a pretty funny take. Suffice to say, you need a lot more than engineering to run a global enterprise, even if it's a tech company.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > Cut 80% of sales team. Elon is sales team now. That can work for direct-to-consumer sales. It's unlikely to work for advertising sales. > Cut support team by 90%, only highest tier gets support Twitter has a support team? Not much, in my experience.
  - x86x87 4y ago
    Look at me! I'm marketing and sales now! Elon probably.
conro1108 4y ago
https://archive.ph/HvaqT https://archive.ph/HvaqT
samketchup 4y ago
I can't wait!
barbariangrunge 4y ago
I can’t imagine many engineering teams that would hold up very well if 75% of the team vanished —- you would lose so much knowledge of your own codebase for starters, and morale would be a disaster. 90% of those who remained would start thinking of switching jobs out of pure pessimism. Then again, I bet it won’t happen. The actual cuts will be far smaller once it’s actually time to do it… Unless his finances are too strained I guess
- x86x87 4y ago
  By the time they make the cuts everyone that can find another job will be gone
- helsinkiandrew 4y ago
  700 have already resigned since Musk spoke to everyone in the company in September. I'm guessing there will be need to be a very good share option scheme to keep those that stay, but Twitter isn't a startup - it already has a $44B valuation and lots of expensive debt. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-exodus-turnover-acquisition-2022-9?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-exodus-tur...
- SilasX 4y ago
  >I can’t imagine many engineering teams that would hold up very well if 75% of the team vanished —- you would lose so much knowledge of your own codebase for starters, If so, then, to be blunt, that means their documentation was crap and they had unnecessary choke points to begin with. We need to stop normalizing tribal knowledge.
phillipcarter 4y ago
A plan to reduce staff by 75% and double revenue in three years doesn't make a lot of sense to me. There's almost certainly a good deal of wasted money at Twitter, like at every large tech company. Dumb bets like NFT profile pics come to mind. But not to the tune of 75%. I cannot see how they can meaningfully operate, let alone meaningfully evolve to generate _more_ revenue, one of the largest social networks on earth with 1/4 staff.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  I think they're assuming MAGA types come back in force and that advertisers will be unable to resist the lure of so many eyeballs, but I have my doubts about the demand for dumpster fire branding opportunities.
  - toofy 4y ago
    are there really that many of them? the numbers we’re seeing from truth social and it’s similars seem to indicate otherwise. my guess is, we’ll see far more users abandon twitter than we see of maga users swarming.
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      I don't believe so, but they are a very vocal demographic and in many respects have superior communication skills. Right leaning ideologues in recent years often come at discourse as a competitive sport or a kind of cognitive warfare, whereas liberals and leftists are more concerned with gaining external approval (of an audience or some third part) and pursue some sort of objective correctness or consistency, often tot he detriment of the argument they're making. So while there are not that many MAGA types, they tend to punch above their weight in terms of what passes for debate on social media. Conversely, I'm nots ure as many liberals would leave as threaten to, because where would they go - Mastodon? Discord? People use twitter because it's a large flat platform rather than one with a lot of silos. That's why things can go so viral so quickly, but also why there are so many dumpster fires; anyone can find and address/respond to/ be seen by anyone else, with no need to know the address of the super sekrit server where the cool kids hang out. I do think the likely outcome of all this is best visualized as a smoking crater surrounded by poop emojis, and have my doubts that large advertisers will want to associate their brands with it. On the other hand all sorts of other trash is commercially successful for reasons that completely elude me.
programmarchy 4y ago
Sounds like this plan was in place before Musk’s offer, but one way to do this would be to “authenticate all humans” as Musk said he wanted to do in order to remove bots. That would drastically reduce the content moderation workload.
- Balgair 4y ago
  I would assume it would also reduce the number of users. Also, why would it reduce the moderation workload?
avrionov 4y ago
Here are Twitter financials for the last year. Revenue $5,078 (in millions) Cost of Revenue $1,798 35.40% Sales and Admin $1,760 34.67% R&D $1,247 24.55% Interest $52 1.02% Unusual Items $441 8.69% Their biggest expense 34.40% is "Cost of Revenue" followed by "Sales and Admin". For a company like twitter "Cost of Revenue" includes operations and Customer Care. I don't think that they can cut 75% at once, just the severance payment will be huge and they may not have the money for that. With R&D being only 24% it is possible to make large cuts in "Cost of Revenue" and "Sales and Admin" and keep more of the engineering team.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > I don't think that they can cut 75% at once, just the severance payment will be huge and they may not have the money for that. What if the plan is just to scare away as many current employees as possible now, before the deal is completed, thereby minimizing layoffs? I know a lot of engineers who have already left, but the prospect of a 75% cut may inspire more. Heading into a possible/probable recession, it may be wise to secure one's next job immediately rather than waiting for the axe to fall.
  - datavirtue 4y ago
    Ha ha...watch them unionize real quick.
  - rexstjohn 4y ago
    You are correct. If you lay them off there are lots of expenses. If you scare them off then they will leave for free. He is attempting to shake the tree before taking over on purpose.
error_salad 4y ago
I get that over employment is an issue, but cutting 75% of the workforce seems a bit too much. At that point I don't understand how the engineering team can cope, not even mentioning the loss of knowledge in the codebase and the loss of morale.
cbeach 4y ago
I’ve reported content which blatantly goes against Twitter’s policies and the moderators chose not to remove it. Twitter moderators allowed Taliban leaders to tweet all sorts of dangerous horrible stuff. But they permanently banned the democratically elected leader of the free world* I think it’s clear at this point the moderator staff aren’t fit for purpose and a Scorched Earth approach is probably the only way to sort out Twitter *Trump repeatedly tweeted calling for calm and discouraged violence by his supporters - in no way did he he incite the Capitol riots.

97 points by minimaxir 4y ago

mzs 4y ago

Imagine how much worse moderation will become after the cuts. Twitter will become the online equivalent of "Charlie Goes America All Over Everybody's Ass."

minimaxir 4y ago

How does a 75% workforce cut even work logistically for a company not on its deathbed?

sn0w_crash 4y ago
How does a company like this need 7,500 people?
- phillipcarter 4y ago
  Because it's a set of massive engineering systems, applications, advertising market, social institution, etc.? Big, complex sociotechnical systems require a lot of human beings to keep moving along.
  - sn0w_crash 4y ago
    This is not a company with multiple products. The ad platform is just barely usable, with an only slightly better UI than LinkedIn. Its core product has not changed meaningfully in 10 years. The company down much of its developer-facing offering years ago. There are e-commerce websites with a more complex stack than Twitter. This is a product that can run on 1,000 people and nothing about the user experience will be different. There is probably so much administrative, HR, and operational bloat that the company probably rivals most universities.
    - phillipcarter 4y ago
      I think you're doing a bunch of speculation. I disagree with most of what you wrote.
    - shaburn 4y ago
      The balance sheet has been a public market charity for tech employees who want paid hiatus since they IPO'd.
    - toofy 4y ago
      all of this is based on what? this seems like an awful lot of speculation regarding one of the largest social networks on the planet. is there waste? highly likely. but the kind you’re implying? sounds ridiculous. what are you basing this on?
    - batmanturkey 4y ago
      Well, heck, you can shrivel it down to ONE employee and then fire them, if you just wanna tank Twitter. It seems like the sorta crackhead move we have come to expect from mister attention whore extraordinaire. He’s in a competition of some kind with Kanye, apparently. Why is he wasting 40 billion on a trumpet of little worth if it’s worth so little? What a weird mid life crisis sports car to buy, it’s not even red.
bob1029 4y ago
25% of twitter's current employee base is still ~1,900 people... I don't see why this would be infeasible.
- thefreeman 4y ago
  You think the top performing 25% are going to want to stick around when you fire 3/4 of their coworkers?
  - mikecoles 4y ago
    Would be worth sticking around since you don't need to keep the dead weight afloat any longer.
  - mentos 4y ago
    What if you double their salaries?
    - phphphphp 4y ago
      At which point you’re taking on a huge risk for less savings, savings that’ll shrink over time and introduce new challenges: after-all, doubling the remaining employee’s salaries gives those employees all the power when it comes to negotiating — suddenly, each and every one knows just how valuable and important they are… and the company has much less room to negotiate to retain them. And that assumes they can even cut the right 75%: what if the measure they use to determine the “valuable” employees turns out to be wrong? How do you even begin to undo / address that when everyone is being paid 2x?
      - sieabahlpark 4y ago
        Sounds like a great opportunity to ride while you also look elsewhere. It has Elon behind it so it's not like it will have a lack of funding.
    - Balgair 4y ago
      Why would they not just go make another Twitter without Elon?
StanislavPetrov 4y ago
Sometimes a 75% workforce cut is exactly what a company on its deathbed needs. In the case of Twitter they wouldn't even need to fire anyone. Just make employees sign a statement reaffirming their commitment to free speech and the 1st Amendment (ala forced DEI statements at other companies) and 75% of Twitter employees would likely depart on their own.
- arlcode 4y ago
  Unlikely. Most Twitter employees (like people everywhere) go there to earn a living and as long as employment conditions remain acceptable they'll sign whatever management ask them to. In particular if it's a meaningless broad statement such as "commitment to free speech and 1st amendment". Most people there don't have anything to do with policy enactment or enforcement so why would they care (case in point those other companies, you mentioned which also retained their workforces). If the real consequence is a work culture in which bullying and harassment is sanctioned (or even encouraged) by management THEN people will leave because it's unpleasant to work in such an environment. The ones remaining won't necessarily be your high performers
- LegitShady 4y ago
  I don't think people should sign political affidavits from their employer. That's not useful or reasonable.
- alephxyz 4y ago
  Why would employees need to reaffirm their commitment to what the US Congress can or can't do?
- ytpete 4y ago
  The First Amendment only constrains the government - not any private company. So it's meaningless with regard to Twitter's moderation policies. Nor is it useful as a voluntary limit on content moderation. Any social media site that allows absolutely anything First Amendment protected would quickly be overrun by porn and blood and gore.
0xB31B1B 4y ago
1) cut 35% of engineering team, including all L4s and L3s, and people who have scored 2/5 or lower on perf reviews 2) Cut 100% of marketing team, Elon is marketing team now. 3) Cut 100% of policy team. Elon is policy team now 4) Cut 80% of sales team. Elon is sales team now. 5) Cut 95% of Product team. They don't ship anything too much time talking, not enough time shipping 6) Cut support team by 90%, only highest tier gets support, 7) hire new leadership ASAP, probably before firing and agreements probably happening now to rebuild teams with people who actually want to work and ship.
- phillipcarter 4y ago
  This is a pretty funny take. Suffice to say, you need a lot more than engineering to run a global enterprise, even if it's a tech company.
- lapcat 4y ago
  > Cut 80% of sales team. Elon is sales team now. That can work for direct-to-consumer sales. It's unlikely to work for advertising sales. > Cut support team by 90%, only highest tier gets support Twitter has a support team? Not much, in my experience.
- x86x87 4y ago
  Look at me! I'm marketing and sales now! Elon probably.

conro1108 4y ago

https://archive.ph/HvaqT https://archive.ph/HvaqT

samketchup 4y ago

I can't wait!

barbariangrunge 4y ago

I can’t imagine many engineering teams that would hold up very well if 75% of the team vanished —- you would lose so much knowledge of your own codebase for starters, and morale would be a disaster. 90% of those who remained would start thinking of switching jobs out of pure pessimism. Then again, I bet it won’t happen. The actual cuts will be far smaller once it’s actually time to do it… Unless his finances are too strained I guess

x86x87 4y ago
By the time they make the cuts everyone that can find another job will be gone
helsinkiandrew 4y ago
700 have already resigned since Musk spoke to everyone in the company in September. I'm guessing there will be need to be a very good share option scheme to keep those that stay, but Twitter isn't a startup - it already has a $44B valuation and lots of expensive debt. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-exodus-turnover-acquisition-2022-9?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-exodus-tur...
SilasX 4y ago
>I can’t imagine many engineering teams that would hold up very well if 75% of the team vanished —- you would lose so much knowledge of your own codebase for starters, If so, then, to be blunt, that means their documentation was crap and they had unnecessary choke points to begin with. We need to stop normalizing tribal knowledge.

phillipcarter 4y ago

A plan to reduce staff by 75% and double revenue in three years doesn't make a lot of sense to me. There's almost certainly a good deal of wasted money at Twitter, like at every large tech company. Dumb bets like NFT profile pics come to mind. But not to the tune of 75%. I cannot see how they can meaningfully operate, let alone meaningfully evolve to generate _more_ revenue, one of the largest social networks on earth with 1/4 staff.

anigbrowl 4y ago
I think they're assuming MAGA types come back in force and that advertisers will be unable to resist the lure of so many eyeballs, but I have my doubts about the demand for dumpster fire branding opportunities.
- toofy 4y ago
  are there really that many of them? the numbers we’re seeing from truth social and it’s similars seem to indicate otherwise. my guess is, we’ll see far more users abandon twitter than we see of maga users swarming.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    I don't believe so, but they are a very vocal demographic and in many respects have superior communication skills. Right leaning ideologues in recent years often come at discourse as a competitive sport or a kind of cognitive warfare, whereas liberals and leftists are more concerned with gaining external approval (of an audience or some third part) and pursue some sort of objective correctness or consistency, often tot he detriment of the argument they're making. So while there are not that many MAGA types, they tend to punch above their weight in terms of what passes for debate on social media. Conversely, I'm nots ure as many liberals would leave as threaten to, because where would they go - Mastodon? Discord? People use twitter because it's a large flat platform rather than one with a lot of silos. That's why things can go so viral so quickly, but also why there are so many dumpster fires; anyone can find and address/respond to/ be seen by anyone else, with no need to know the address of the super sekrit server where the cool kids hang out. I do think the likely outcome of all this is best visualized as a smoking crater surrounded by poop emojis, and have my doubts that large advertisers will want to associate their brands with it. On the other hand all sorts of other trash is commercially successful for reasons that completely elude me.

programmarchy 4y ago

Sounds like this plan was in place before Musk’s offer, but one way to do this would be to “authenticate all humans” as Musk said he wanted to do in order to remove bots. That would drastically reduce the content moderation workload.

Balgair 4y ago
I would assume it would also reduce the number of users. Also, why would it reduce the moderation workload?

avrionov 4y ago

Here are Twitter financials for the last year. Revenue $5,078 (in millions) Cost of Revenue $1,798 35.40% Sales and Admin $1,760 34.67% R&D $1,247 24.55% Interest $52 1.02% Unusual Items $441 8.69% Their biggest expense 34.40% is "Cost of Revenue" followed by "Sales and Admin". For a company like twitter "Cost of Revenue" includes operations and Customer Care. I don't think that they can cut 75% at once, just the severance payment will be huge and they may not have the money for that. With R&D being only 24% it is possible to make large cuts in "Cost of Revenue" and "Sales and Admin" and keep more of the engineering team.

lapcat 4y ago
> I don't think that they can cut 75% at once, just the severance payment will be huge and they may not have the money for that. What if the plan is just to scare away as many current employees as possible now, before the deal is completed, thereby minimizing layoffs? I know a lot of engineers who have already left, but the prospect of a 75% cut may inspire more. Heading into a possible/probable recession, it may be wise to secure one's next job immediately rather than waiting for the axe to fall.
- datavirtue 4y ago
  Ha ha...watch them unionize real quick.
- rexstjohn 4y ago
  You are correct. If you lay them off there are lots of expenses. If you scare them off then they will leave for free. He is attempting to shake the tree before taking over on purpose.

error_salad 4y ago

I get that over employment is an issue, but cutting 75% of the workforce seems a bit too much. At that point I don't understand how the engineering team can cope, not even mentioning the loss of knowledge in the codebase and the loss of morale.

cbeach 4y ago

I’ve reported content which blatantly goes against Twitter’s policies and the moderators chose not to remove it. Twitter moderators allowed Taliban leaders to tweet all sorts of dangerous horrible stuff. But they permanently banned the democratically elected leader of the free world* I think it’s clear at this point the moderator staff aren’t fit for purpose and a Scorched Earth approach is probably the only way to sort out Twitter *Trump repeatedly tweeted calling for calm and discouraged violence by his supporters - in no way did he he incite the Capitol riots.