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There are always comments about "why do they need X,000 people" every time a company's staffing gets talked about. I guess we are finally getting an answer. We

There are always comments about "why do they need X,000 people" every time a company's staffing gets talked about. I guess we are finally getting an answer. We will get to see whether the layoffs effect the technology and the development pace, although a lot of the real information will leak out through rumors. Personally, I am sad about these layoffs. Even if there are many many lazy Twitter engineers hanging out on the roof, it's still sad to see people treated so poorly. Elon just treats people with such disgust. I have seen the inside of companies like Twitter, and usually people check out because leadership fails to set any direction. An engineer joins, tries to get some things done, and then finds that they cannot within the company's structure. That engineer will give up and be "unproductive" for the rest of the time their. Elon could have handled the takeover in a serious and humane way. He could have set some product direction, given the employees some time to realign and get some of his features built, and then fired those who could not or chose not to keep up. Instead, he immediately forces everyone to work through the weekend on a random feature, and cuts people ASAP in the most malicious way he could. I am really disgusted by this brand of "leadership," and it's hard to reconcile this with someone I'd like to respect for bringing electric cars to the masses, and the U.S. back into the space race. I feel deeply sorry for the Twitter engineers who are being squeezed for no purpose but selfishness and meanness, and I hope it doesn't spread through the industry.

throw__2sdfw 4y ago
koonsolo 4y ago
> forces everyone to work through the weekend on a random feature Is this for real? In Belgium, most developers would have a good laugh, go home and enjoy the weekend.
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
- seibelj 4y ago
  It’s like HN discounts all his other successes and can’t believe he can attract high performing employees. He clearly solved much harder problems than short-form blog posting so it’s not a stretch to think he can flip Twitter back to an IPO quickly.
  - afavour 4y ago
    > He clearly solved much harder problems than short-form blog posting Right but that isn't the problem here, Twitter already solved that. What they haven't been able to do is make a short-form blog posting service that's profitable. Everything Musk has announced so far suggests he doesn't really understand how to change that.
    - Jerrrry 4y ago
      What they are doing is not profitable, he is changing that. what changes, if not these, would make Twitter profitable?
      - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        he is going to change ut from unprofitable to disasterous. Have you seen the interest payment that must be serviced on that loan? The whole enterprise is dead, you just dont know it yet
  - thelock85 4y ago
    Culture presents much harder problems than science when it comes to social media. Though I agree it’s not a stretch to think he can add Twitter to his successes.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    Its not luke hyperloop and the boring comosny were major failures and he was late for every deadline he has ever set. Past performance does indicate future success. Nothing about this twitter story, from waving due dilligence, to trying to pull of a signed deal, to treatnent of employees, indicates competent management
buscoquadnary 4y ago
So someone correct me if I'm wrong but didn't many Twitter employees start talking about how horrible Elon was and how they didn't want to work for him when the discussions were ongoing? Seems like if large chunks of the employee base are talking smack on the possible new CEO, not even as a corporation but as an individual, they shouldn't be unduly surprised if the CEO decides to show them the door when he gets in since he can't be sure they won't be actively hostile. And I know this is happening in such a way that they aren't just letting go of people that talked smack on musk, but still I don't know what supposed adults were thinking when they were s*t talking their new potential CEO.
- causality0 4y ago
  It's been clear for a while that Twitter only has the presence it has because it was the first out of the gate and not because they're actually good at what they do. Their talents seem to largely be the ability to amplify the most toxic aspects of both the left and the right at the same time.
- kodah 4y ago
  That is true, at least if you trust leaked discussions, however, this isn't an isolated example of Elon's leadership in action. All the points about the ideological captivity of Twitter employees are secondary to repeated behavior. So is, "Don't talk open shit about your future boss" a point? Yeah, but so is Elon treating this process like an inhumane animal. The latter trump's a bunch of plebians with loud opinions.
- keithalewis 4y ago
  - mjmsmith 4y ago
    Promise to pardon Jan 6 insurrectionists?
- weeblewobble 4y ago
  > So someone correct me if I'm wrong but didn't many Twitter employees start talking about how horrible Elon was and how they didn't want to work for him I think it's worth introspecting on where you got this impression and what "many Twitter employees" means. It seems to me there are many powerful people who want you to have this impression but that doesn't mean it's true. Twitter had thousands of employees and I'd bet a strong majority of them are not ideologues in the way you imagine. Just people who work 9-5 and value job security.
type-r 4y ago
We can be compassionate about the folks getting laid off while still realizing that the company was grossly inefficient and needed to restructure -- these are not contradictory feelings. For me personally, I have no idea what "technology and development pace" these layoffs even could effect, as I have seen no real change in the service in the past ~5 years I've used it. Actually, I have noticed that in the last year or two they refuse to show me more than a tweet or two until trying to force me to log in.
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  > Actually, I have noticed that in the last year or two they refuse to show me more than a tweet or two until trying to force me to log in. Things like that are usually UX driven, developers often don't have any recourse beyond implementing what's demanded in such a setting.
- x0x0 4y ago
  Ironically, I think Twitter started actually building product for the first time in a long time recently. One frame through which you could view Twitter is it was the place where famous / popular / important (athletes, movie stars, government officials) talk to the public. Spaces, enabling audio conversations for those people, makes tons of sense. So also Twitter Blue letting you read certain news w/o a paywall. If you're a serious consumer of news on Twitter, wsj/nyt/wapo/latimes/ft probably cost $1500/year. If the economics worked for the news orgs, there was huge value there. Of course, they really sat on the product for 5+ years, so oof...
- yolovoe 4y ago
  > as I have seen no real change in the service in the past ~5 years I've used it. You underestimate the effort it takes to keep a service as large as Twitter running. Constant software upgrades to maintain high standard of security, inevitable technological break-age, deprecated dependencies, operations, root-causing failures, migrations (you can't avoid hardware migrations; hardware will die out), planning fallacy, etc, etc.
  - killdozer 4y ago
chriskanan 4y ago
It is a large scale restructuring under new management. I'm sure the goal is to try to get this layoff phase done as quickly as possible to establish a new structure with the remaining employees. I'm optimistic for Twitter's future. I thought it had stagnated long ago, but I'm intrigued now.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
> I guess we are finally getting an answer. We will get to see whether the layoffs effect the technology and the development pace, although a lot of the real information will leak out through rumors. Except it won't take effect immediately. It's not like Twitter will only load 50% of the pages or it will be 2x slower the day the layoffs kick in. I think the main hypothesis is that Twitter will have an S-curve decline. Since so much work in a large org is communication, if they're able to do layoffs effectively and actually cut out the least productive people - 50% could take a while to have any visible external impacts. That's my guess at least. Sad for the people that lost good jobs, but I'm excited we get an opportunity to witness a massive cut like this and learn from it.
- sdwr 4y ago
  There's a sense in which leaders don't actually make decisions, just tell people what's already happening. From one perspective Elon is doing what Zuck doesn't have the balls to pull off. The product is mature, has passed peak enthusiasm already, time to stop growing+exploring, and start battening down the hatches?
  - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    My suspicion (and I think main stream?) is that 50%+ of the company is necessary just to stay afloat, sustainably. Sure, in the very short term you could probably fire 80% of people and make the other 20% work 7-16s. But that's not going to end well.
  - matthewdgreen 4y ago
    The major threat to Twitter right now is twofold: that (1) the mild user downturn it’s been experiencing since 2020 turns into a full-on death spiral, and (2) other social networks step in and pull a TikTok by gobbling up Twitter’s users. Both of these things could probably be averted by smart new leadership. Neither of these things is helped by loading the company up with debt and moving into layoff/cash extraction mode to service it.
- saagarjha 4y ago
mjr00 4y ago
> There are always comments about "why do they need X,000 people" every time a company's staffing gets talked about. I guess we are finally getting an answer. Yes, this is what people really need to be worried about. Not about Elon's policies ruining Twitter or whatever; that's the good outcome. The bad outcome is: what happens if Elon lays off 50% of Twitter, and a year later it turns from a floundering social media company that's not doing anything with its dominant market share into a profitable adtech powerhouse that rivals Meta and Google? If that happens, then your company's CEO is going to be laying off 50% of staff, too.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  You’re being downvoted at the moment, but if that timeline plays out I can definitely see copycat behavior in smaller companies, especially among the hustle culture bros.
- fullsend 4y ago
  Completely agree. Elon is so worshipped that just him doing this has already emboldened the financial analysts and wannabe founder types to more ruthlessly question total comp numbers and hiring. Everyone who works in technology should be worried. Whether it’s correct or not, what looks like waste and excess to the business class who are used to the “hard facts” of balance sheets could look to someone else like one of the few labor sectors on the planet where workers are paid something near what they are worth. Silicon Valley is the land of fat peasants. This is the beginning of the lords and ladies tightening the peasant’s belts.
  - hutzlibu 4y ago
    "Elon is so worshipped" Is that really still the case? Most of the time I read something about Elon the comment section is very negative, compared to some years ago and it seems rare to encounter a Musk fanboy anymore.
    - aaa_aaa 4y ago
      Nobody worshipped him anyway. Musk is openly against some major progressive liberal and left viewpoints. And he is an awkward impulsive super billionaire. So naturally there is a sour crowd here.
valenterry 4y ago
I don't know. It's not good that people are getting treated poorly - if anything, twitter should take more responsibility here. But if it's really "lazy developers" then maybe it's better if they work somewhere else and increase value for our society. Maybe some of them just went to twitter for the name and compensation but don't like to work for a corporate (like me for example). It's probably better for everyone if they go somewhere where they are happier and more productive.
- jesuscript 4y ago
  I think it’s a good lesson for people picking companies. In the honeymoon phase of tech, the mythology created was that these elite startups have the type of culture where the boss is a revolutionary, you pick your own hours, beer and food, company outings, meaningful work, prestige, unlimited vacation, etc. Well the truth is when you walk into a company that hires people for a quarter million dollars at scale, you are truly a number on a spreadsheet. The only way you can cut budget on 500 engineers at that price is not by firing Bob the underperformer, but instead 1/5 or 2/5 of that entire staff. It should make you wonder what is that leetcode for? You are not that important or expensive in the backroom of some enterprise or medium sized business to be slashed like that. But when you are part of a 50 million dollar budget, bet your ass you have a 50/50 chance of being part of that 25 million the company suddenly wants to save. The underperformer stuff has nothing to do with it.
WalterBright 4y ago
How would you go about doing layoffs?
hsn915 4y ago
Do you think it would be possible to build electric cars and rockets _without_ this brand of leadership? Both companies were very close to failure several times. There was never a room for slack.
- Retric 4y ago
  There was significant room for slack, he simply pushed growth over stability. Reusable rockets and Starlink for example are extremely expensive investments that paid off, but SpaceX didn’t need them to prosper. Tesla’s stability suffered from continuous expansion of manufacturing requiring continues investment as well as Self Driving and other R&D investments which weren’t actually needed. Which isn’t to say these where poor investments, but pushing the envelope simply increases risk.
- tempestn 4y ago
  Musk undeniably made these things happen sooner than they otherwise would have done. I would argue though, at least in terms of his public persona, this sort of abrasiveness has intensified significantly since those accomplishments. So yes, I think it is possible.
- lostdog 4y ago
  > Do you think it would be possible to build electric cars and rockets _without_ this brand of leadership? Absolutely yes. The sort of high performing people who join places like SpaceX and Tesla need very very little pressure to get them to work at full speed. Usually it just takes a nudge here and there, and they'll work themselves like crazy. The extra pressure on top is pure stress, and causes people to narrow their thinking and make mistakes. The most important thing that good leadership brings is clear direction and high standards. Elon has these qualities for sure, and he could do away with the overstressing of his employees and would still be just as successful. Happy employees are productive. This was obvious in the early days of many startups, with Google as the prime example, but now the copycats will think that treating people as disposable is how to be successful like Elon.
  - hsn915 4y ago
stephc_int13 4y ago
Not really. Twitter is much leaner compared to Meta or Google, and they can't really be compared on many levels. The experiment is nonetheless interesting. I bet that the major influence if the layoff is the internal company spirit and morale, if the damage is too deep, the company could sink. Fortunately for them, I don't think they really need a huge team to simply keep the lights on and the servers running.
mc32 4y ago
I guess an implicit questions is: Can you teach old dogs new tricks? Can you turn around people who are used to coming in at 10, getting coffee/snacks for the next 30 minutes who then talk shop for 30 minutes, figure out who's on-call this week, set up some meetings, train new onboard, then discuss lunch plans and when they'll head down to the gym, then return at 2 for a meeting, at 3 do some work, then talk about whether it's uber or something else back home while getting their favorite drink prepared. Can that be turned around, or are those apples spoiled?
- abledon 4y ago
  are you joking? is that most day-in-a-lifes for high paid senior workers there? damn I'm working at the wrong place
  - mc32 4y ago
    All? No. Obviously he'll be keeping a bunch and obviously some key people are productive. But, look, what are new revenue streams and features added in the last 5 years? One hand's digits can enumerate them. Here is a biz-dev at TWTTR: in her own words: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/skmAZHNuEP0 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/skmAZHNuEP0 Same, with MST 3000-style commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk6T1pmHCAE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk6T1pmHCAE
    - abledon 4y ago
      i am screaming, why am i grinding leetcode again? LOL
    - jwond 4y ago
      Reminds me of a similar video but from a LinkedIn employee https://youtu.be/X5TZVhKDwpk https://youtu.be/X5TZVhKDwpk
    - neilparikh 4y ago
      I don't see how you can infer anything at all from that video. It's not like she's going to show her screen while she's typing away at an email (I hope it's obvious why...). There's also no timestamps, so the video says nothing about how much time is spent slacking off vs working. The video snippets probably only accounted for 2 hours of her day (at most). That doesn't seem super wasteful to me. If your impression is that "smoothie and wine on tap = slacking off", I think that's your misconception to correct. That commentary video is also worse than useless; they're obviously not aware of how tech companies operate. They're commenting on things like the office being empty and the employee visiting the office for the first time. Are they not aware of WFH? The "gourmet" meals are also standard at many tech companies, and are an extremely small part of the cost. It's not like vegetables are more expensive when you prepare them in a way that looks good. On the net, offering the free food (and smoothie, foosball etc.) leads to much more value created than they cost to provide. This mentality is penny-wise, pound-foolish.
miketery 4y ago
Unfortunately, regardless of what one wished to do, the economics of this deal and the amount of debt means that there is a very short leash. The layoffs are a way to extend that leash.
memish 4y ago
This brand of leadership is how you end up with companies like SpaceX being able to build a Raptor engine per day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33436918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33436918) and Tesla advancing the electric car industry by many years. Now we'll see Twitter pivot from a stagnant rest & vest to high productivity. Here's Andrej Karpathy's (ex-Tesla head of AI) explanation of Elon's leadership style and effectiveness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbxladysbTE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbxladysbTE
- SanjayMehta 4y ago
  That's an interesting clip and reminiscent of an extremely effective manager I had. He would remove people from trouble projects one at a time to (a) reduce cost and (b) reduce meetings. The worst case project would have the single best engineer left on it. I also saw the complete opposite at two companies which were decades old, but were distracted by CSR and processes. Both ceased to exist a few years ago.
- pcj-github 4y ago
  I'm going to call B.S. on this one. with SpaceX and Tesla, many employees are driven by a sense of purpose independent of the behavior of their shared/part-time CEO based on the fundamental mission of the company. In Twitter's case, I doubt the notion of whipping engineers to making more advertising revenue via blue check marks is going to rouse a sense of pride, purpose, or productivity. I guess we'll see!
  - ryanhuff 4y ago
    I suspect that Musk has more in store than just keeping Twitter as we know it today.
  - vincnetas 4y ago
    Elon sees twitter as artificial brain made of humans (each user is a neuron). So i assume he has more ideas what to do with twitter than to just add paid blue marker.
- billti 4y ago
thereare5lights 4y ago
> Elon could have handled the takeover in a serious and humane way. Nothing I've ever read about him suggests that he operates in a humane manner. He's like a lot of billionaires, views humans as cogs in the machine.
Invictus0 4y ago
I don't like Elon either, but he didn't make the decision to hire those people and it's not really fair to blame him now that they need to be fired. If twitter had 100k headcount, would you still say he should have delayed a layoff and given people a chance?
renonn 4y ago
curious_cat_163 4y ago
> He could have set some product direction, given the employees some time to realign and get some of his features built, and then fired those who could not or chose not to keep up. True. He could have. In the meanwhile, he has signed Twitter up for massive amounts of loans whose annual interest exceeds the company's annual free cash flow. I am not up to speed with all of Twitter's finances, but this right here might be one of the fastest way to grow the free cash flow without affecting the core revenue stream of the ad business. I don't think this would be an act of leadership if it comes to pass. This is just a consequence of the straitjacket that Elon has put Twitter in. Sometimes, constraints help. Let's see what these financial conditions do for Twitter.
modeless 4y ago
Firing 50% is not disgusting or malicious if the company is 50% overstaffed and losing money. It's acknowledging reality. Letting people coast by in jobs they've given up on is not compassionate. Those people would be happier in a job where they can make a difference, and society would be better off too. I see a lot of people lamenting how the greatest minds of our generation have been stuck in big tech golden handcuffs putting eyeballs on ads. Well, this is what the fix looks like! It's unfortunate that it's happening in a downturn but it's not Musk's fault that the economy started tanking during the acquisition.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  > Those people would be happier in a job where they can make a difference, and society would be better off too Serious question: how many jobs can really make a difference? How well do they pay and with what risk factors? Compare that to a steady paycheck where your way of making a difference it to try to make political and other internet discourse slightly nicer or at least less troll friendly.
- arrrg 4y ago
  How do you identify the right 50% in the short time Musk had? He basically has to rely and trust people inside Twitter to make those decisions for him (can he, though?) or he has to fire people in an arbitrary way. I don’t really understand how you can make that call unless you believe people are pretty much interchangeable and their emotions play no role. It just seems inconceivable to me how you can meaningfully decide who to fire. It‘s not as though this was an acquisition and suddenly the sales department is redundant and you can fire them all. I would assume that you would need at least a couple months time to get to know the company and understand what and who might be redundant. I don’t think that question is easy to answer at all.
  - modeless 4y ago
    The answer is it's not really possible to do a much better job. With unlimited time the result would not be that much more fair or effective. Firing the bottom 50% is impossible even with unlimited time to think about it. Employee performance evaluation isn't very effective, and Musk has no reason to trust Twitter's previous performance evaluations, and forcing people to work 6 months under a new performance evaluation process with the threat of a 50% layoff over their heads is not compassionate either, nor would it have a much better result at the end anyway. There is no silver bullet. Better to rip off the band-aid in one go. You might say that a perception of fairness is important so that employees trust leadership. Well, what's likely to happen is the fired people will think it's unfair, and the people chosen to remain will think "well, at least the right choice was made in my case". Of course, the opinion of the remaining people is what matters to the company going forward.
ugh123 4y ago
I think Elon treats _human labor_ with disgust, not just assembly line crew but also in high tech labor. Likely he believes a significant percentage of the employed talent pool is waste at a company like Twitter (and probably many others), by showering a smaller group of heavy hitters with more money he could be more nimble in ways he is with SpaceX, maybe even Tesla.
- mapme 4y ago
  But Tesla and Spacex have notoriously low pay compared to their peers. Eg a Tesla swe makes 40% less than at Google
  - modeless 4y ago
    That's rank and file, but Tesla hires people like Andrej Karpathy and Jim Keller, are they paid low too? I bet not...
homeland221 4y ago
Elon is likely secretive Trump supporter. Over the years I noticed a lot of his thinking align with Trump. This take over is very expected when Twitter banned Trump. I was expecting something significant happening to twitter during Biden years. Lucky guess.

throw__2sdfw 4y ago

koonsolo 4y ago

> forces everyone to work through the weekend on a random feature Is this for real? In Belgium, most developers would have a good laugh, go home and enjoy the weekend.

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

seibelj 4y ago
It’s like HN discounts all his other successes and can’t believe he can attract high performing employees. He clearly solved much harder problems than short-form blog posting so it’s not a stretch to think he can flip Twitter back to an IPO quickly.
- afavour 4y ago
  > He clearly solved much harder problems than short-form blog posting Right but that isn't the problem here, Twitter already solved that. What they haven't been able to do is make a short-form blog posting service that's profitable. Everything Musk has announced so far suggests he doesn't really understand how to change that.
  - Jerrrry 4y ago
    What they are doing is not profitable, he is changing that. what changes, if not these, would make Twitter profitable?
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      he is going to change ut from unprofitable to disasterous. Have you seen the interest payment that must be serviced on that loan? The whole enterprise is dead, you just dont know it yet
- thelock85 4y ago
  Culture presents much harder problems than science when it comes to social media. Though I agree it’s not a stretch to think he can add Twitter to his successes.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  Its not luke hyperloop and the boring comosny were major failures and he was late for every deadline he has ever set. Past performance does indicate future success. Nothing about this twitter story, from waving due dilligence, to trying to pull of a signed deal, to treatnent of employees, indicates competent management

buscoquadnary 4y ago

So someone correct me if I'm wrong but didn't many Twitter employees start talking about how horrible Elon was and how they didn't want to work for him when the discussions were ongoing? Seems like if large chunks of the employee base are talking smack on the possible new CEO, not even as a corporation but as an individual, they shouldn't be unduly surprised if the CEO decides to show them the door when he gets in since he can't be sure they won't be actively hostile. And I know this is happening in such a way that they aren't just letting go of people that talked smack on musk, but still I don't know what supposed adults were thinking when they were s*t talking their new potential CEO.

causality0 4y ago
It's been clear for a while that Twitter only has the presence it has because it was the first out of the gate and not because they're actually good at what they do. Their talents seem to largely be the ability to amplify the most toxic aspects of both the left and the right at the same time.
kodah 4y ago
That is true, at least if you trust leaked discussions, however, this isn't an isolated example of Elon's leadership in action. All the points about the ideological captivity of Twitter employees are secondary to repeated behavior. So is, "Don't talk open shit about your future boss" a point? Yeah, but so is Elon treating this process like an inhumane animal. The latter trump's a bunch of plebians with loud opinions.
keithalewis 4y ago
- mjmsmith 4y ago
  Promise to pardon Jan 6 insurrectionists?
weeblewobble 4y ago
> So someone correct me if I'm wrong but didn't many Twitter employees start talking about how horrible Elon was and how they didn't want to work for him I think it's worth introspecting on where you got this impression and what "many Twitter employees" means. It seems to me there are many powerful people who want you to have this impression but that doesn't mean it's true. Twitter had thousands of employees and I'd bet a strong majority of them are not ideologues in the way you imagine. Just people who work 9-5 and value job security.

type-r 4y ago

We can be compassionate about the folks getting laid off while still realizing that the company was grossly inefficient and needed to restructure -- these are not contradictory feelings. For me personally, I have no idea what "technology and development pace" these layoffs even could effect, as I have seen no real change in the service in the past ~5 years I've used it. Actually, I have noticed that in the last year or two they refuse to show me more than a tweet or two until trying to force me to log in.

411111111111111 4y ago
> Actually, I have noticed that in the last year or two they refuse to show me more than a tweet or two until trying to force me to log in. Things like that are usually UX driven, developers often don't have any recourse beyond implementing what's demanded in such a setting.
x0x0 4y ago
Ironically, I think Twitter started actually building product for the first time in a long time recently. One frame through which you could view Twitter is it was the place where famous / popular / important (athletes, movie stars, government officials) talk to the public. Spaces, enabling audio conversations for those people, makes tons of sense. So also Twitter Blue letting you read certain news w/o a paywall. If you're a serious consumer of news on Twitter, wsj/nyt/wapo/latimes/ft probably cost $1500/year. If the economics worked for the news orgs, there was huge value there. Of course, they really sat on the product for 5+ years, so oof...
yolovoe 4y ago
> as I have seen no real change in the service in the past ~5 years I've used it. You underestimate the effort it takes to keep a service as large as Twitter running. Constant software upgrades to maintain high standard of security, inevitable technological break-age, deprecated dependencies, operations, root-causing failures, migrations (you can't avoid hardware migrations; hardware will die out), planning fallacy, etc, etc.
- killdozer 4y ago

chriskanan 4y ago

It is a large scale restructuring under new management. I'm sure the goal is to try to get this layoff phase done as quickly as possible to establish a new structure with the remaining employees. I'm optimistic for Twitter's future. I thought it had stagnated long ago, but I'm intrigued now.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

> I guess we are finally getting an answer. We will get to see whether the layoffs effect the technology and the development pace, although a lot of the real information will leak out through rumors. Except it won't take effect immediately. It's not like Twitter will only load 50% of the pages or it will be 2x slower the day the layoffs kick in. I think the main hypothesis is that Twitter will have an S-curve decline. Since so much work in a large org is communication, if they're able to do layoffs effectively and actually cut out the least productive people - 50% could take a while to have any visible external impacts. That's my guess at least. Sad for the people that lost good jobs, but I'm excited we get an opportunity to witness a massive cut like this and learn from it.

sdwr 4y ago
There's a sense in which leaders don't actually make decisions, just tell people what's already happening. From one perspective Elon is doing what Zuck doesn't have the balls to pull off. The product is mature, has passed peak enthusiasm already, time to stop growing+exploring, and start battening down the hatches?
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  My suspicion (and I think main stream?) is that 50%+ of the company is necessary just to stay afloat, sustainably. Sure, in the very short term you could probably fire 80% of people and make the other 20% work 7-16s. But that's not going to end well.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  The major threat to Twitter right now is twofold: that (1) the mild user downturn it’s been experiencing since 2020 turns into a full-on death spiral, and (2) other social networks step in and pull a TikTok by gobbling up Twitter’s users. Both of these things could probably be averted by smart new leadership. Neither of these things is helped by loading the company up with debt and moving into layoff/cash extraction mode to service it.
saagarjha 4y ago

mjr00 4y ago

> There are always comments about "why do they need X,000 people" every time a company's staffing gets talked about. I guess we are finally getting an answer. Yes, this is what people really need to be worried about. Not about Elon's policies ruining Twitter or whatever; that's the good outcome. The bad outcome is: what happens if Elon lays off 50% of Twitter, and a year later it turns from a floundering social media company that's not doing anything with its dominant market share into a profitable adtech powerhouse that rivals Meta and Google? If that happens, then your company's CEO is going to be laying off 50% of staff, too.

Godel_unicode 4y ago
You’re being downvoted at the moment, but if that timeline plays out I can definitely see copycat behavior in smaller companies, especially among the hustle culture bros.
fullsend 4y ago
Completely agree. Elon is so worshipped that just him doing this has already emboldened the financial analysts and wannabe founder types to more ruthlessly question total comp numbers and hiring. Everyone who works in technology should be worried. Whether it’s correct or not, what looks like waste and excess to the business class who are used to the “hard facts” of balance sheets could look to someone else like one of the few labor sectors on the planet where workers are paid something near what they are worth. Silicon Valley is the land of fat peasants. This is the beginning of the lords and ladies tightening the peasant’s belts.
- hutzlibu 4y ago
  "Elon is so worshipped" Is that really still the case? Most of the time I read something about Elon the comment section is very negative, compared to some years ago and it seems rare to encounter a Musk fanboy anymore.
  - aaa_aaa 4y ago
    Nobody worshipped him anyway. Musk is openly against some major progressive liberal and left viewpoints. And he is an awkward impulsive super billionaire. So naturally there is a sour crowd here.

valenterry 4y ago

I don't know. It's not good that people are getting treated poorly - if anything, twitter should take more responsibility here. But if it's really "lazy developers" then maybe it's better if they work somewhere else and increase value for our society. Maybe some of them just went to twitter for the name and compensation but don't like to work for a corporate (like me for example). It's probably better for everyone if they go somewhere where they are happier and more productive.

jesuscript 4y ago
I think it’s a good lesson for people picking companies. In the honeymoon phase of tech, the mythology created was that these elite startups have the type of culture where the boss is a revolutionary, you pick your own hours, beer and food, company outings, meaningful work, prestige, unlimited vacation, etc. Well the truth is when you walk into a company that hires people for a quarter million dollars at scale, you are truly a number on a spreadsheet. The only way you can cut budget on 500 engineers at that price is not by firing Bob the underperformer, but instead 1/5 or 2/5 of that entire staff. It should make you wonder what is that leetcode for? You are not that important or expensive in the backroom of some enterprise or medium sized business to be slashed like that. But when you are part of a 50 million dollar budget, bet your ass you have a 50/50 chance of being part of that 25 million the company suddenly wants to save. The underperformer stuff has nothing to do with it.

WalterBright 4y ago

How would you go about doing layoffs?

hsn915 4y ago

Do you think it would be possible to build electric cars and rockets _without_ this brand of leadership? Both companies were very close to failure several times. There was never a room for slack.

Retric 4y ago
There was significant room for slack, he simply pushed growth over stability. Reusable rockets and Starlink for example are extremely expensive investments that paid off, but SpaceX didn’t need them to prosper. Tesla’s stability suffered from continuous expansion of manufacturing requiring continues investment as well as Self Driving and other R&D investments which weren’t actually needed. Which isn’t to say these where poor investments, but pushing the envelope simply increases risk.
tempestn 4y ago
Musk undeniably made these things happen sooner than they otherwise would have done. I would argue though, at least in terms of his public persona, this sort of abrasiveness has intensified significantly since those accomplishments. So yes, I think it is possible.
lostdog 4y ago
> Do you think it would be possible to build electric cars and rockets _without_ this brand of leadership? Absolutely yes. The sort of high performing people who join places like SpaceX and Tesla need very very little pressure to get them to work at full speed. Usually it just takes a nudge here and there, and they'll work themselves like crazy. The extra pressure on top is pure stress, and causes people to narrow their thinking and make mistakes. The most important thing that good leadership brings is clear direction and high standards. Elon has these qualities for sure, and he could do away with the overstressing of his employees and would still be just as successful. Happy employees are productive. This was obvious in the early days of many startups, with Google as the prime example, but now the copycats will think that treating people as disposable is how to be successful like Elon.
- hsn915 4y ago

stephc_int13 4y ago

Not really. Twitter is much leaner compared to Meta or Google, and they can't really be compared on many levels. The experiment is nonetheless interesting. I bet that the major influence if the layoff is the internal company spirit and morale, if the damage is too deep, the company could sink. Fortunately for them, I don't think they really need a huge team to simply keep the lights on and the servers running.

mc32 4y ago

I guess an implicit questions is: Can you teach old dogs new tricks? Can you turn around people who are used to coming in at 10, getting coffee/snacks for the next 30 minutes who then talk shop for 30 minutes, figure out who's on-call this week, set up some meetings, train new onboard, then discuss lunch plans and when they'll head down to the gym, then return at 2 for a meeting, at 3 do some work, then talk about whether it's uber or something else back home while getting their favorite drink prepared. Can that be turned around, or are those apples spoiled?

abledon 4y ago
are you joking? is that most day-in-a-lifes for high paid senior workers there? damn I'm working at the wrong place
- mc32 4y ago
  All? No. Obviously he'll be keeping a bunch and obviously some key people are productive. But, look, what are new revenue streams and features added in the last 5 years? One hand's digits can enumerate them. Here is a biz-dev at TWTTR: in her own words: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/skmAZHNuEP0 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/skmAZHNuEP0 Same, with MST 3000-style commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk6T1pmHCAE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk6T1pmHCAE
  - abledon 4y ago
    i am screaming, why am i grinding leetcode again? LOL
  - jwond 4y ago
    Reminds me of a similar video but from a LinkedIn employee https://youtu.be/X5TZVhKDwpk https://youtu.be/X5TZVhKDwpk
  - neilparikh 4y ago
    I don't see how you can infer anything at all from that video. It's not like she's going to show her screen while she's typing away at an email (I hope it's obvious why...). There's also no timestamps, so the video says nothing about how much time is spent slacking off vs working. The video snippets probably only accounted for 2 hours of her day (at most). That doesn't seem super wasteful to me. If your impression is that "smoothie and wine on tap = slacking off", I think that's your misconception to correct. That commentary video is also worse than useless; they're obviously not aware of how tech companies operate. They're commenting on things like the office being empty and the employee visiting the office for the first time. Are they not aware of WFH? The "gourmet" meals are also standard at many tech companies, and are an extremely small part of the cost. It's not like vegetables are more expensive when you prepare them in a way that looks good. On the net, offering the free food (and smoothie, foosball etc.) leads to much more value created than they cost to provide. This mentality is penny-wise, pound-foolish.

miketery 4y ago

Unfortunately, regardless of what one wished to do, the economics of this deal and the amount of debt means that there is a very short leash. The layoffs are a way to extend that leash.

memish 4y ago

This brand of leadership is how you end up with companies like SpaceX being able to build a Raptor engine per day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33436918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33436918) and Tesla advancing the electric car industry by many years. Now we'll see Twitter pivot from a stagnant rest & vest to high productivity. Here's Andrej Karpathy's (ex-Tesla head of AI) explanation of Elon's leadership style and effectiveness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbxladysbTE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbxladysbTE

SanjayMehta 4y ago
That's an interesting clip and reminiscent of an extremely effective manager I had. He would remove people from trouble projects one at a time to (a) reduce cost and (b) reduce meetings. The worst case project would have the single best engineer left on it. I also saw the complete opposite at two companies which were decades old, but were distracted by CSR and processes. Both ceased to exist a few years ago.
pcj-github 4y ago
I'm going to call B.S. on this one. with SpaceX and Tesla, many employees are driven by a sense of purpose independent of the behavior of their shared/part-time CEO based on the fundamental mission of the company. In Twitter's case, I doubt the notion of whipping engineers to making more advertising revenue via blue check marks is going to rouse a sense of pride, purpose, or productivity. I guess we'll see!
- ryanhuff 4y ago
  I suspect that Musk has more in store than just keeping Twitter as we know it today.
- vincnetas 4y ago
  Elon sees twitter as artificial brain made of humans (each user is a neuron). So i assume he has more ideas what to do with twitter than to just add paid blue marker.
billti 4y ago

thereare5lights 4y ago

> Elon could have handled the takeover in a serious and humane way. Nothing I've ever read about him suggests that he operates in a humane manner. He's like a lot of billionaires, views humans as cogs in the machine.

Invictus0 4y ago

I don't like Elon either, but he didn't make the decision to hire those people and it's not really fair to blame him now that they need to be fired. If twitter had 100k headcount, would you still say he should have delayed a layoff and given people a chance?

renonn 4y ago

curious_cat_163 4y ago

> He could have set some product direction, given the employees some time to realign and get some of his features built, and then fired those who could not or chose not to keep up. True. He could have. In the meanwhile, he has signed Twitter up for massive amounts of loans whose annual interest exceeds the company's annual free cash flow. I am not up to speed with all of Twitter's finances, but this right here might be one of the fastest way to grow the free cash flow without affecting the core revenue stream of the ad business. I don't think this would be an act of leadership if it comes to pass. This is just a consequence of the straitjacket that Elon has put Twitter in. Sometimes, constraints help. Let's see what these financial conditions do for Twitter.

modeless 4y ago

Firing 50% is not disgusting or malicious if the company is 50% overstaffed and losing money. It's acknowledging reality. Letting people coast by in jobs they've given up on is not compassionate. Those people would be happier in a job where they can make a difference, and society would be better off too. I see a lot of people lamenting how the greatest minds of our generation have been stuck in big tech golden handcuffs putting eyeballs on ads. Well, this is what the fix looks like! It's unfortunate that it's happening in a downturn but it's not Musk's fault that the economy started tanking during the acquisition.

HWR_14 4y ago
> Those people would be happier in a job where they can make a difference, and society would be better off too Serious question: how many jobs can really make a difference? How well do they pay and with what risk factors? Compare that to a steady paycheck where your way of making a difference it to try to make political and other internet discourse slightly nicer or at least less troll friendly.
arrrg 4y ago
How do you identify the right 50% in the short time Musk had? He basically has to rely and trust people inside Twitter to make those decisions for him (can he, though?) or he has to fire people in an arbitrary way. I don’t really understand how you can make that call unless you believe people are pretty much interchangeable and their emotions play no role. It just seems inconceivable to me how you can meaningfully decide who to fire. It‘s not as though this was an acquisition and suddenly the sales department is redundant and you can fire them all. I would assume that you would need at least a couple months time to get to know the company and understand what and who might be redundant. I don’t think that question is easy to answer at all.
- modeless 4y ago
  The answer is it's not really possible to do a much better job. With unlimited time the result would not be that much more fair or effective. Firing the bottom 50% is impossible even with unlimited time to think about it. Employee performance evaluation isn't very effective, and Musk has no reason to trust Twitter's previous performance evaluations, and forcing people to work 6 months under a new performance evaluation process with the threat of a 50% layoff over their heads is not compassionate either, nor would it have a much better result at the end anyway. There is no silver bullet. Better to rip off the band-aid in one go. You might say that a perception of fairness is important so that employees trust leadership. Well, what's likely to happen is the fired people will think it's unfair, and the people chosen to remain will think "well, at least the right choice was made in my case". Of course, the opinion of the remaining people is what matters to the company going forward.

ugh123 4y ago

I think Elon treats _human labor_ with disgust, not just assembly line crew but also in high tech labor. Likely he believes a significant percentage of the employed talent pool is waste at a company like Twitter (and probably many others), by showering a smaller group of heavy hitters with more money he could be more nimble in ways he is with SpaceX, maybe even Tesla.

mapme 4y ago
But Tesla and Spacex have notoriously low pay compared to their peers. Eg a Tesla swe makes 40% less than at Google
- modeless 4y ago
  That's rank and file, but Tesla hires people like Andrej Karpathy and Jim Keller, are they paid low too? I bet not...

homeland221 4y ago

Elon is likely secretive Trump supporter. Over the years I noticed a lot of his thinking align with Trump. This take over is very expected when Twitter banned Trump. I was expecting something significant happening to twitter during Biden years. Lucky guess.