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Musk plans to eliminate half of Twitter jobs to cut costs
- jleyank 4y agoHope he listens to the employment lawyers or he’ll spend his remaining days fighting lawsuits…
- mikkergp 4y agoWell he already wasn’t listening to the employment lawyers since he fired the exec team for cause and took away their golden parachutes. He’ll be fighting those lawsuits for a while.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y agoDollars to donuts he's just using this to reduce their payouts, but unless he has pretty strong proof of wrongdoing, they'll all just settle. The execs will take home, say, $70 million instead of the ~$120 they were entitled (yeah, I'm crying a river on all sides) and everyone's happy.
- mikkergp 4y agoMaybe, though if there is anything Elon has underestimated so far it’s the extent to which rich people will fight him for money.
- jleyank 4y agoWell, there’s laws for the procedure of larger layoffs to protect the little people and prevent discrimination. Ignoring them will spawn lawsuits as well.
- programmarchy 4y agoHe might. Shortly after firing them, he tweeted: > Wachtell & Twitter board deliberately hid this evidence from the court. Stay tuned, more to come … https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586885887341645824 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586885887341645824
- throwaway5959 4y agoYeah right. With Musks level of credibility, I wouldn’t hold your breath on him releasing this “evidence”.
- programmarchy 4y agoPersonally, I find the person who delivered on electric cars and reusable rockets more credible than a random anonymous account.
- piva00 4y agoYou are also omitting all the instances where the person who delivered on electric cars and reusable rockets has been a total piece of shit. The person who is saying that FSD is just around the corner, upcoming next year™, since 2016 should also take a hit on credibility, no?
- fbdab103 4y agoLike the Twitter buyout itself, I think the execs have a strong legal right to the money. Why would they settle? Presumably they are already quite wealthy, and can wait out the courts.
- xqcgrek2 4y agohttps://archive.ph/ncuPc https://archive.ph/ncuPc
- minimaxir 4y agoBetween laying off 50% of jobs and pushing employees to work 12 hours a day, how is there enough morale at Twitter to even develop the myriad of new features Elon wants?
- mikkergp 4y agoElon and the 50 super engineers from Tesla are going to sleep at the office until it’s fixed
- dragontamer 4y agoI've heard rumors that Tesla engineers are Python while Twitter engineers are Scala. Is this true? If so, what could 50 Tesla engineers do?
- mapme 4y agoNothing, because they don’t understand RecSys which is half of ML at social media companies. Probably could help with prediction for ads but the domains are very different.
- shaburn 4y agoAd targeting at Twitter has always been shit. Also effectively deprecated. Best starting from scratch.
- John23832 4y agoIt was a joke bro.
- dragontamer 4y agoBut ~50 Tesla engineers being pilfered using public funds to try and help Twitter is obviously happening right now. I agree this is a joke, but maybe not the kind you were looking for. Is Twitter even paying for this? And if so, who would think that Twitter could possibly benefit from a bunch of programmers who don't even know the codebase?
- xqcgrek2 4y agoIt still boggles the mind Twitter has 7000 employees when Whatsapp had fewer than 50. There must be a huge amount of deadweight.
- jacooper 4y agoWhatsapp literally has nothing to moderate or do. The infrastructure is basically just a mail man to deliver messages, and that's it. Almost everything is encrypted, there is nothing to moderate really.
- version_five 4y agoIs moderation a material part of Twitter's headcount? Like is that what 1000 people are doing?
- jacooper 4y agoThere is also development on social features like topics, the algorithm, spam filters, Ad management and much more. So its not really a fair comparison.
- type0 4y agoI could be wrong but I somehow imagined most of this people doing nothing other than banning regular users for twits taken out of context or some other bs activism on Twitter to create "engagement"
- res0nat0r 4y agoYes, or hundreds at least. Every platform has to deal with this problem, if they want to keep users and advertisers. https://sports.yahoo.com/twitter-locks-hundreds-content-moderation-195004648.html https://sports.yahoo.com/twitter-locks-hundreds-content-mode...
- mikkergp 4y agoI also have to imagine the graph and recommendation engine exponentially increases the infrastructure requirements and code complexity.
- jacooper 4y agoAre we witnessing a sinking ship ? He loaded the company with a 1 billion dollar interest per year, and the best twitter has done is 600 million in profit. Its sad because as a Twitter user their is really no alternative. And no, Mastodon with its garbage discoverability is not an alternative, more details on why here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33428254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33428254
- rel2thr 4y agoDo you mean 600 million in profit? Twitter has done over a billion in revenue in each of the past several quarters
- jacooper 4y agoEdited
- mikkergp 4y ago> are we witnessing a sinking ship Im not saying I’m all the way there in thinking this but I’m really starting to wonder if everyone got caught with their pants down. The banks heard Elon Musk and probably didn’t do their due diligence in the loan, with the speed of this thing it’s not hard to imagine he is not as in command of the situation as he’d like people to believe. Either way it’s going to make a great business school case study.
- suction 4y ago[dead]
- grappler 4y agoThis is incentive to build a better fediverse or decentralized social network or whatever you want to call it. There are lots of projects working on it, obviously, and lots of people already doing it to some extent, but this is one of those events that illustrate why it's a thing worth continuing to push on and move forward.
- 4y ago
- version_five 4y agoThere was an LBO craze in the 80s, culminating (so the story goes) with the bidding war for RJR Nabisco - documented in Barbarians at the gate They were unpopular with many, the idea was that a PE firm would buy the company with debt and then sell off parts and make other parts more efficient to service the debt. But underneath that was the idea that companies at the time were not using their assets efficiently, and it was possible to essentially use that efficiency to buy the company. Tldr, I wonder if we're reaching that phase with big tech, where companies are sl inefficiency that they are ripe for the plucking by buying them off and cutting staff (the new versions of an asset) and streamlining operations. Twitter is maybe an edge case, but it's plausible. I wouldn't be surprised to find that 90% of Google's recurring revenue comes from < 10% of their operations, and that an efficiency focused operator could capture most of their profit at a significantly lower headcount. Maybe this is the start of something
- dugmartin 4y agoThis happens a lot with mature enterprise software companies. They are bought and R&D is cut to the bone and existing customers that have too high of switching costs are milked for revenue. I’m not sure that model would work for ad revenue companies but you never know.
- VHRanger 4y agoYou mean Oracle's entire business model?
- cosmodisk 4y agoOracle is a law firm that happens to have a development team attached to it.
- missedthecue 4y agoA lot of the companies that get bought in LBOs aren't R&D heavy. For instance, you'll rarely see a pharma company LBO'd. Even in tech, the type of companies you see bought out are ones like Rackspace. Not exactly cutting edge scientific research firms. LBO firms typically want a lot of physical assets and stable cash flow, i.e old economy firms like utilities and manufacturers and retailers.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cloudking 4y agoAnyone at Twitter care to chime in anonymously? If the HN community can help, let us know.
- datalopers 4y agoTwitter employees will get severance and their RSUs paid out at far better rates than any other tech company excluding Apple. They’re doing just fine.
- type-r 4y agoSource for getting severance?
- halfmatthalfcat 4y agoIf the Twitter layoff is ran like the Tesla one, they’ll get 1 week severance and an Uber ride home.
- ergocoder 4y agoToo many fake news about Musk + Twitter on Hacker News. Can't tell what is true or not anymore. We forgot about printing code on paper, huh?
- mapme 4y agoPrinting code on paper definitely happened. Confirmed by multiple folks. The layoff 75% numbers and layoffs before Nov 1 were false though. https://twitter.com/leahculver/status/1586145696163373056?s=20&t=SFqAAx5XB-oferwHezy23A https://twitter.com/leahculver/status/1586145696163373056?s=...
- jazzyjackson 4y ago??? The tweeter you linked printed out her code as a joke, her tweet right below this is quoting Elon, "Comedy is now legal", you taking a joke as confirmation that something happened is a great example of why twitter is a net negative on humanity.
- mapme 4y agoHoly moly you should relax buster, I was joking!
- stevespang 4y ago[dead]
- codevark 4y ago
- rr808 4y ago> return to office That seems a bigger deal. TBH they should just enforce this and most people will quit anyway.
- aaron695 4y ago
- datalopers 4y agoMusk and Calacanis literally discussed doing this in the texts that were made public in the lawsuit. Called it a “gentleman’s layoff” [1] https://fortune.com/2022/10/06/elon-musk-jason-calacanis-return-to-office-gentlemens-layoffs-twitter/ https://fortune.com/2022/10/06/elon-musk-jason-calacanis-ret...
- kweingar 4y agoHow dumb do you have to be to put stuff like that in writing? It’s just ammunition for a lawsuit.
- joegahona 4y agoEspecially if he moves HQ to Texas.
- Lanz 4y agoIt still shocks me that Twitter has more than 3 employees. It's not exactly complicated software.
- caeril 4y ago3 is excessively low, but yes, they shouldn't need more than 500 employees total to build and run their platform.
- MontyCarloHall 4y agoIf this actually ends up being a success (massive if!), it will be a harbinger of other tech companies realizing their headcounts are bloated and downsizing accordingly. Does Zoom really need 6700 employees? Does Slack really need 2500? Zendesk 5800?
- rsj_hn 4y agoWhile I think the answer is "no", I also think that we need to remember that users want features, lots of features, and so in some sense bloated software requires bloated organizations. This article might be useful: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/12/09/simplicity/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/12/09/simplicity/
- greatpatton 4y agoUsers want support first of all
- quantified 4y agoWhat are the breakdowns of job function? Sales, various tiers of support, infosec, solution engs, etc add up beyond the C-suite, devs and admins.
- kweingar 4y agoI’d imagine that these companies really do need this headcount. Think about how many relationships they need to manage.
- sanderjd 4y agoMaybe? I'm pretty skeptical of this whole vibe that companies are overstaffed by 100% or more. It seems to me to be driven by executives and investors who have lost touch with what it takes to execute on their companies' current operations and future ambitions.
- boc 4y agoCounter point is that hundreds of millions of people use these products across the entire world, with thousands of corporations relying on them to work 24/7, yet the total number of global employees would barely fill half of the Chase Center.
- papichulo4 4y agoQuestion: For those that stay, all their (vested) shares have been bought at $54.20, right? What do they replace the RSUs with as part of the compensation package moving forward?
- aaomidi 4y agoIt vests as cash
- htrp 4y ago> Engineers and director-level staff from Tesla reviewed the lists, the person said. Layoff lists were drawn up and ranked based on individuals’ contributions to Twitter’s code during their time at the company, the people said. The assessment was made by both Tesla personnel and Twitter managers. This process sounds shambolic
- piva00 4y agoUsing outside people who never contributed to the company to judge who in the company actually contributed. This is Elon going the "hire business consultants to tell you bullshit you want to hear" way but instead of business consultants he is cheaping out and hiring people from his other companies to act as them.
- mzs 4y ago>… Musk also intends to reverse the company’s existing work-from-anywhere policy, asking remaining employees to report to offices … v. back in March: https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1499422876134371329 https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1499422876134371329