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“There Seem to be 10 managers for every one dev at Twitter” – Elon
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- socialismisok 4y ago
- ETH_start 4y ago[flagged]
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
- saagarjha 4y agoSigh, I thought at least on Hacker News we wouldn’t have to explain how providing basic perks for your employees doesn’t mean that they’re sitting around doing nothing…
- gjsman-1000 4y agoIs having red wine, on tap, a “basic perk” to you? Edit @7e: I understand alcohol for weekly social events. Having red wine, on tap, for any employee to have, at anytime, is beyond belief. I can fully understand why anyone who has worked in a remotely blue-collar job would look on them with total disdain.
- 7e 4y agoMany tech companies have alcohol on-site for weekly informational/social events.
- malermeister 4y agoIs it some crazy luxury to you? In my part of the world, it's the norm for employers on construction sites to provide beer for their workers. How is this any different?
- thruway516 4y agoI think red wine is substantially more expensive. Plus I bet the free beer is about the only 'perk' those construction workers enjoy. Or do they also have nap rooms and eucalyptus tea face towels?
- strken 4y agoI don't think it's functionally very different from having a cask sitting in the breakroom cupboard for Friday drinks. Cheap red wine is $3/litre here. It's not sturgeon caviar and Cuban cigars, and I wouldn't imagine many employees drink during the day, at least beyond an occasional glass at lunch. Whether having always-available alcohol in the workplace is a good idea is debatable, but I don't understand why it's beyond belief.
- saagarjha 4y agoI honestly don't know if we have red wine on tap, but I'm sure one of the cafes will serve it to you. We do have beer and kombucha on tap. Not at all unreasonable. I mean I understand that this is privileged when you take into account the entire workforce, but it's nothing unusual for a tech company.
- Karunamon 4y agoNo, what implies the sitting around doing nothing part is the lack of anything useful being shipped for years combined with losing money for all but 2 years of their life as a public company combined with the absurd manager to engineer ratio. The cushy perks are just a cherry on top. Nothing Twitter is doing requires the amount of people they have. So what are all of those people doing?
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y agoLARPing welfare queens OFC.
- saagarjha 4y agoJust because things aren't shipping doesn't mean nobody is doing anything. Plenty of companies that circled the drain had lots of smart people doing excellent work while the rest of the company failed to make money.
- Karunamon 4y agoWhat would the external signs of a company with lots of deadweight be if not lack of shipping combined with serial unprofitability and a bunch of middle management with a headcount not commensurate with their activities?
- saagarjha 4y agoTo be entirely honest, I think Twitter is serially bad at shipping things and also hired too hard during the pandemic. That said I stand by my earlier point, which is that measuring this via "I see a bunch of people on TikTok drinking lattes" is about the dumbest way to do it, because it's nothing special in this industry. What you really want to look at is "how long is it taking to ship things" and "what does code churn look like" and "what stakeholders are involved in a new product launch", which are generally much harder to see.
- filoleg 4y agoDoes working 4 hours a day, which includes endless shitposting of "daily life of a software engineer at XYZ" while drinking and showing off on tiktok count as a basic perk now?
- russdill 4y agoAre we taking about musk or the engineers at Twitter?
- nayaketo 4y agoEngineers at Twitter, not Musk.
- russdill 4y agoOK, because he does spend a lot of time shitposting.
- belltaco 4y agohttps://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/elon-musk-says-he-is-sleeping-on-tesla-factory-floor-to-save-time.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/elon-musk-says-he-is-sleepin...
- saagarjha 4y agoI for one would not like my coworkers to sleep under their desk and not shower.
- tomjakubowski 4y agoExtrapolating this one video to "endless shitposting" of them is a real stretch.
- filoleg 4y agoI wasnt talking about "this one video" at all. When I said "endless shitposting", I was referring to tons of actual tiktok videos of such behavior flooding the feed if you look up the relevant tags. I naturally got recommended so many of those videos, i had to spend quite a bit of time just teaching the algorithm that I dont want that garbage on my tiktok FYP.
- femto113 4y agoHere's the thing about being an engineer who isn't "dead weight": you can always find a new job. To keep that 5% (or 20% or whatever the real number is) of truly productive engineers you need to make the company a place they want to work. So sure most of the people playing ping pong in your lounge aren't really worth the cost of a ping pong ball much less their salary, but your star engineers maybe like playing ping pong too, and like having someone to play with.
- fasthands9 4y agoI'm not sure how the Elon experiment will go but surely the star engineers would be easier to retain if they were just absorbing the salary of the unproductive ones - and maybe some of that extra money went to more fun games and non-tech assistants who also like ping pong. I don't have that much faith that it is that easy to always identify the slack or that it will be enough to make Twitter profitable, but it also seems a bit uncontroversial to say a lot of these companies having hiring patterns of a growth company in a low-interest rate environment even though their core product is relatively stable.
- reducesuffering 4y agoI think that tech co’s have a hard time identifying competence because it almost always comes top down from the manager, who usually spends most of their time in unrelated-to-tech meetings. What I don’t understand, is why isn’t competence strongly ascertained from other engineers on the team. Among my teammates in an extended 15 person team, it is very obvious who the high and low performers are.
- fasthands9 4y agoI would imagine some of Elon's bravado here is for people who are low-performers (who probably know they are) to either step up their game or to start looking for work elsewhere on their own. Not sure if it will be worth the costs - but I think its clear it has some benefit.
- ummonk 4y ago
- SanjayMehta 4y agoThat's no engineer, some kind of accountant.
- whateveracct 4y agoElon seems to have a thing against SV, remote work, and pure software work.
- koonsolo 4y agoI think he bought a brand and existing users, not an operational shop.
- rich_sasha 4y agoAdmittedly, I'd imagine Twitter tech, while no doubt decent and battle-tested, isn't super hard to replicate (famous last words).
- socialismisok 4y agoAll software looks easy from the outside. I'm willing to bet there's a lot more stuff happening than I'd imagine.
- esotericimpl 4y ago
- w1nst0nsm1th 4y agoThere seems to be 1 asshole for every Elon Musk on earth.
- w1nst0nsm1th 4y agoAnd on Mars...
- Gunax 4y agoClearly an exaggeration, but anyone have real numbers? I know it's nice to gripe about management being dumb, but my managers at Facebook and Amazon were the opposite. I often ran into managers who, after a 10 minute discussion would make key insights that I had not noticed.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- inerte 4y agoTo get real numbers first we have to parse if he meant meant product manager, program manager, ux manager, and account manager, or just engineering manager.
- BurningFrog 4y agoOf course he meant every employee with a "manager" title. And take "seems" to mean "I doubled the real number for effect". I assume it's a way of saying engineering is a tiny part of the organization.
- Gunax 4y agoI think Musk is a master of tapping into public sentiment. Griping about the uselessness of management is precisely the kind of folk wisdom that gets passed around. It's fun to divide the world into do-ers and managers, both because it rights the uncomfortable social hierarchy and encourages action over in-action.
- candiddevmike 4y agoThey have people skills; they're good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?
- ForHackernews 4y agoGod I really hope we get the Good Ending: Musk kills Twitter and loses $44B in the process.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago[flagged]
- whateveracct 4y agoTumblr is thriving btw Most HNers wouldn't survive there though
- jemmyw 4y agoBy survive do you mean they actually kill people or technically minded folk would leave because it's shite? I just went there out of interest and it didn't look great. Scrolled down, got annoying pop-up, left.
- whateveracct 4y agoTumblr requires a certain amount of tribal knowledge to get value out of. The site is newbie hostile almost on purpose. Doesn't affect me or all the people happily using it over all the SV alternatives though. It's not a site whose value can be judged in 5 min of viewing.
- whateveracct 4y agoAlso I said thrive For instance, if you wanna be in the know about your favorite band's tour, tumblr is probably the best place to do it (even better than twitter due to the quality of discussion). It's the closest thing to the fan forums of old we have in the social media era.
- ViViDboarder 4y agoWas this sarcastic? I’ve literally abandoned or avoided all those products as well. I don’t want to support abusive companies or exploit user privacy.
- grecy 4y agoGiven the number of posts we see here on HN from FAANG employees who say they're barely even working and getting away with it is easy, is anyone surprised there is a lot of cruft at Twitter?
- chris_wot 4y agoI don't recall seeing those posts.
- tjpnz 4y agoWell there is normally some misguided attempt to justify how much more productive they are in those two hours. If there's one thing they're not short of it's hubris.
- lupire 4y agoThe reporting cruft isn't overwhelmingly managers.
- vba616 4y agoI don't know when the word "cruft" started being applied to people, but I don't like it and think it should be prohibited.
- kaba0 4y agoWell, the average office worker pretty much only does 3 hours of effective work in 8 hours. And that’s more than OK. Anyone claiming that they are productive during the whole day are just lying to themselves, we are not machines.
- RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
- Nav_Panel 4y agoPlus, the spin on the story is so good (because Musk's character means they can use political rather than productivity reasons to justify getting laid off) that they'll have no trouble getting solid jobs elsewhere. I'm sure there's hundreds of smaller companies eagerly awaiting a lay off list so they can start reaching out to ex-twitter engs.
- sofixa 4y agoHow about Twitter Spaces? It's on par for the features added by other big social media companies - what feature has Facebook added in the last 5 years? What about Instagram? There is around one big one in each case (excluding redesigns), with Marketplace and Reels respectively. WhatsApp hasn't added anything. Snapchat same (might be wrong here, i don't use it). Social media rarely adds features outside of copying competition (everyone copied Snapchat's stories, then Clubhouse's audio stuff, than TikTok).
- belltaco 4y agoFacebook was/is quite profitable. Twitter is not.
- barbazoo 4y agoDidn't they increase the character limit of tweets?
- srj 4y agoAn exaggeration but there probably is some truth to this. Ten or so years ago even my director wrote code (at google). Now it's rare to see a first line manager code something.
- sdf4j 4y agoGlad that google fixed that anti-pattern.
- jasonpeacock 4y agoManagers should not be coding - they are there to grow their people. That's why they are called "people managers". Managers help organize their teams to be effective by hiring people with complimentary strengths, insulating them from distractions, and representing their team's work and achievements to leadership. Managers unblock their team and get out of the way. If a manager is writing code, they are not managing - they are developing. If there's not enough developers, they should be hiring. And directors...they should definitely not be writing code. The only valid example I've seen for leadership writing code is when they are acting as a customer and consuming their team's product (e.g. their team owns a service) with toy applications so they can understand the customer experience.
- spangry 4y agoI agree they shouldn't be writing code, but they should probably have a fair degree of knowledge about writing code. Otherwise, how do they decide which people to hire to write the code?
- omoikane 4y agoThey tell their engineers to interview those people, then make hiring decisions based on aggregated and distilled feedbacks from those engineers.
- Hermitian909 4y agoAnecdotally, this is basically always worse than having someone with significant coding experience. Two thoughts come to mind immediately: 1. Making key hiring decisions is hard: coding experience lets you better see how a potential hire's technical strengths, weaknesses, and opinions intersect with personality traits to produce value or dysfunction. 2.Coding experience helps you understand different kinds of value - it's very hard to explain to non-technical folks that while a developer is brilliant and productive, he's not careful enough and six months down the line we're going to be buried in tech debt if he's allowed to keep going.
- midislack 4y ago
- DeathArrow 4y agoYes, like Google, Amazon, Facebook.
- bakugo 4y agoSounds like par for the course for big tech companies. Hire a ton of HR people with no real skills beyond "people skills" because you MUST grow at all costs, those people in turn hire more people like themselves with no real skills, next thing you know you have hundreds of people sitting around collecting a paycheck for doing nothing.
- netjiro 4y ago> for doing nothing nope. plenty of stress, long hours, tons of work. just very little product output. often even negative output.
- DeathArrow 4y ago>next thing you know you have hundreds of people sitting around collecting a paycheck for doing nothing. That is socialism and it's no wonder why some leftists love corporations. It's because many corporations are examples of applied socialism.
- lamontcg 4y agoNow this is some fresh horseshoe theory.
- techdragon 4y agoI think I might have the lost it somehow over the years but I remember writing a short “fiction” thing about basically this “turned pro”… corporate driven socialism, natural humans are restricted to owning at most one personal share in the company, every share has the right to vote but the elected “board of directors” have term limits enforced by the articles of incorporation which require unanimous consent to modify, you don’t have social welfare, you have a “dividend” payed out from the collective “contractually obligated payments” required of shareholders who operate addition businesses with permits (business license, individual tax registration etc) which are basically just your Taxes … it was a pretty funny exercise in torturing the definitions of words around to take the most capitalist thing I could think of “the government is just the biggest company and basically owns you” and slowly twist it round till it was for all intents and purposes socialism, if not actually “communism”.
- kichik 4y agoI feel bad for Twitter employees learning about their future from realtime memes.
- davidguetta 4y agoPoor overpaid FAANG enginners who had 1 year to prepare for this. So sad
- yrgulation 4y agoMaybe there is one good trend that will come out of this - sack managers throughout the industry. Promote tech people where necessary, and have devs work directly with stakeholders. Also trim pdf certified scrum masters. Time to lean things out.
- Nav_Panel 4y agoI'm not confident this will lead to industry-wide trends, at least not immediately, because Twitter is specifically a massive company making negative profit. If Twitter was profitable, then this entire thing wouldn't have happened; they need to get lean because they're losing $$. In my eyes, this is not TOO much different than the kind of radical reorg that might take place at a company like Twitter anyway (although ofc I've never seen it first-hand), just weird that it's playing out entirely in public. That said, I think the public strategy is potentially interesting, as the engineers who remain at the company will probably feel like they're a part of a very exciting moment, will feel more aligned with leadership, etc.
- homeland221 4y agoTwitter old managements are not that commercial savvy. They only introduced blue mark like a couple years back even though Twitter has been more than a decade old. Also, almost every governments and celebrities in the world has twitter. That are gold mines. Imagine USA defence department or IRA being forced to pay 1 K usd a month (this is already consider low ), if not the twit handles given to North Korea or Putin to mess with. The old twit mgmnts are rather incompetent with their pursuit of affirmative, diversity, race theory type of agenda in the last 3 years. You can see those with conservatives view largely will get suspended while liberals and lefties (some questionable middle east groups) are allowed. I doubt that attracts ads money.
- type-r 4y agoTwitter verification was introduced over 13 years ago, a little over 3 years after Twitter was founded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_verification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_verification
- LarsDu88 4y agoThis man almost sounds reasonable, but then I remember he posted some Q-anon dribble earlier today and I realize this sage wisdom might be coming out of the wrong hole.
- russdill 4y agoYup, the same guy saying how important it is to avoid echo chambers and always interacting with and retweeting the same right wing characters over and over again.
- ramblerman 4y agoPeople can hold both reasonable and unreasonable opinions at the same time - especially across domains where they may be more or less knowledgeable. Best to ignore the cult of personality altogether and focus on the merit of the argument. If you remove politics, and focus on twitter. Then it takes someone a little wild to make the drastic changes discussed. If he makes the blue tick a paid option, promotes free speech from all sides, trims the fat, and explores new product ideas, then I think twitter could be in an interesting place in a year or two.
- prvit 4y agoWait, you think spreading crazy conspiracy theories is “politics”??
- ramblerman 4y agoI'm interested in talking about changes to twitter that might make it more profitable, and not derailing into another politics thread.
- prvit 4y agoBut what does any of this have to do politics? Why are you bringing up politics? The owner of twitter pushing crazy conspiracy theories on twitter is directly relevant to the topic you claim to be interested in talking about, it can significantly affect advertiser relationships (i.e profit). But I guess you have some bizarre political agenda that conflicts with the idea that Twitters owner may be self-sabotaging?
- throwawayo2022 4y agoAt my previous startup, more than 50% were good for nothing. they did not even know about indexes. As soon as i grasped their stupidity i ran away as fast i could.
- winrid 4y agoHalf of my job is teaching devs about indexes
- syntaxing 4y agoNot sure what I’m more surprised about HN, the amount of Musk believers or how many people do not work for tech/MAANG. I can’t believe how many people here are spewing bullshit like “oh, Google is heading this direction too” or “Good, fire these lazy fucks!”. Anecdotally, there are no tech companies with even 1:5 manager to IC ratio, let alone anything greater than 1:1. And why is there wine on tap for workers at Twitter? Because they want talent. Most major tech companies, each engineer makes more than 1M per year on NET revenue.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago> each engineer makes more than 1M per year on NET revenue. This is dated. More like 1.25 or 1.5 million.
- bheadmaster 4y agoI'd say about tree fiddy.
- angrycontrarian 4y ago
- thruway516 4y agoI think it's more like 1 employee makes 10M net revenue, and 9 employees coast on their success.
- returnInfinity 4y agoThe theory is that the superstar employee needs the support form 9 others to achieve the success. As an example, a super star programmer, requires support from DevOps, QA, PM, EM, UX, Docs to deliver the great results. Alone not a super star anymore.
- GauntletWizard 4y agoTo reuse and refocus an old quote: 50% of those people are probably useless. The problem is figuring out which ones.
- greybeardednyc 4y agoI’m guessing this is just a way for Elon to double down on his signaling of “cost cutting” to help hold the stock price right? Id suspect there are lots of managers involved in things other than managing devs at Twitter but love to see the commentary from the HN twitter engs here
- kenny11 4y agoThere is no stock price, it's a private company now.
- returnInfinity 4y agoit will still be valued based on revenue and profit.
- ggm 4y agoWas there not a desktop app for Sun employees which showed the value of their stock vesting? And microsoft? And I am talking about deep time here, not "in the last 5 years" but back into the dotcom boom and before.
- vegai_ 4y agoI'm sure he'll work hard to make that 100:1. Also, here's your daily reminder to check out Mastodon. https://joinmastodon.org/servers https://joinmastodon.org/servers
- DeathArrow 4y agoNow that there will be more free speech on Twitter I will gladly use it.
- vegai_ 4y agoWhat makes you think there will be?
- DeathArrow 4y agoI wonder if the managers manage each other or if they are all managing the developer.
- peterth3 4y agoRevenue/employee at Twitter is about $600k while it’s over $1.2M at Meta and Google [0]. Elon is winding up for a layoff with comments like this. Not sure if the accuracy of his comment is relevant. [0] https://twitter.com/RyanReeves_/status/1423013707190206464?lang=en https://twitter.com/RyanReeves_/status/1423013707190206464?l...
- rich_sasha 4y agoIs it more to do with revenue size, or inflated headcount? How do these things compare to some other measure, like say market cap?
- Railander 4y agoConsidering they did lay off 50% of their staff, your analysis was spot-on.
- ahahahahah 4y agoThis guys is just super fucking dumb. The absolute most generous reading of this would be that he looked at some org chart and saw there were devs with ten layers of management between them and the ceo. Only the stupidest fucking guy would then read that and make this inane claim.
- amrocha 4y agoSo the way to solve it is to give the very few engineers you have sudden unrealistic deadlines? And ask them to print their code for a quick judgement session????