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Wild prediction: Twitter will continue to work as it did even after that ~80% workforce haircut. Make of that what you will.
by Moctogo 4y ago
Wild prediction: Twitter will continue to work as it did even after that ~80% workforce haircut. Make of that what you will.
- rybosworld 4y agoThat's the one thing I think Musk has been spot-on about: Twitter had far too many employees, many of them doing what amounts to nothing.
- madeofpalk 4y agoOn the other hand, he hasn't stopped giving signals to his best talent that they're going to have a miserable time, and they should just quit. They would have a better time literally anywhere else. Even if we agree that company is 80% bloated, you probably want the best 20% to stay. --- In referring to a bunch of employees laid off, he said "I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses. Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere"[1]. About another specific employee he said "A tragic case of adult onset Tourette’s"[2]. Why would talent ever want to work for a CEO who will fire you on the spot for whatever reason, turn around and say this about them publicly (or privately!). If I was still working at twitter, this would make me quit. [1]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592569305941807104 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592569305941807104 [2]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592582828499570688 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592582828499570688
- tootie 4y agoI think it's unlikely to just crash, but you're going to see more downtime, more security breaches, less effective moderation and they're probably going to lose revenue. Also, you'll just see more and worse ads. Unclear if they're actually saving more money than they're going to stop earning.
- mckirk 4y agoI was thinking the same thing with regards to security. If anyone wanted to attack Twitter, there probably won't come a better time than right now. I suspect there's a ton of disgruntled employees with some leftover access, and I doubt anyone has any idea who is responsible for patching servers and services at the moment.
- gambiting 4y agoI very much doubt that. Twitter must have had some bloat, but there's no way that 80% of the workforce was bloat. I'd be extremely surprised if Twitter(as in, the website/app, not the registered legal entity) still exists and works by the end of this year.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- AustinDev 4y agoI'd take that bet. 1BTC?
- gambiting 4y agoI'm good thanks. Not really into gambling.
- shagie 4y agoLinked elsewhere in this thread - https://polymarket.com/market/will-twitter-report-any-outages-by-december-15-2022 https://polymarket.com/market/will-twitter-report-any-outage... And no, I don't gamble on events or crypto.
- AustinDev 4y agoI understand why cowards will proclaim both the death of twitter and bitcoin and not back it up with their wallet. However, you are neither thanks for the link.
- memish 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
- gambiting 4y agoI mean, it's possible, but the organisation would need to be extremely disfunctional for that to be the case - that's the level of bloat I'd expect out of a government agency not a private corporation. If you have teams where 8 out of 10 people do literally nothing or pretend, it should be obvious.
- pxeboot 4y agoI completely agree. But, stirring the pot like this often encourages the best employees to leave, so there is still considerable risk of his plan not working out.
- throwaway2729 4y agoBut the advertisers might leave.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- partiallypro 4y agoIf the audience is there, advertisers won't leave. Some of the ad pauses right now are mostly performative art. Every ad business is suffering right now with people cutting ad budgets, so pausing Twitter ads as a PR move was free advertising and also covered for the fact that advertisers needed to cut budgets anyhow. People that claim "brand safety" honestly kind of make me laugh, look at all the World Cup sponsors...don't you think Qatar using slaves (some of which have died) to build the stadiums would be...not safe for your brand to associate with? I would, but they still are advertising, because the audience is massive. I think people dying from something you're helping to fund through advertising is probably worse to be associated with than a tweet saying "own the libs" is 3 pegs down from your ad. Call me crazy.
- Yoofie 4y agoNo they wont. Its corporate virtue signalling. As one example, I remember back in 2020 1000+ vowed to leave Facebook [1], but guess what...they came back. The sad thing is that people are suckers who actually believe alot of this corporate PR. [1]:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/business/media/facebook-boycott.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/business/media/facebook-b...
- throwaway2729 4y agoHow many companies advertise on Tumblr or Digg? They continue to exist but are not seen as the next bastion of advertising. How will they target well when the platform is a cesspool? Sure they'll get impressions but not the clicks. Fewer celebrities will want to hang out on Twitter if anyone can easily impersonate them or if they don't have people at Twitter to give them white glove service.
- mehrdada 4y ago100% agree. Once the dust settles my prediction is productivity will also soar.
- jakelazaroff 4y agoWhy would this happen? From the outside, it seems like Elon is absolutely decimating employee morale. See for example this thread from an engineer who has no beef with Elon and wants to see Twitter succeed, but still took the severance: https://twitter.com/peterclowes/status/1593458225533313025 https://twitter.com/peterclowes/status/1593458225533313025
- anonymousab 4y agoIf you burn everything to the ground and then basically hire a whole new team to work on a whole new app and platform, then your productivity has nowhere to go but up.
- tgma 4y agoMmm... to be clear the baseline is not after you burn it to the ground, but before the acquisition.
- orangepurple 4y agoNobody in their right mind would publicly support Elon right now because they would be mobbed
- kibwen 4y agoNobody in their right mind would publicly support Elon right now because he's acting like a lunatic and therefore undeserving of support. Regardless of what you think of Twitter's future prospects, none of these destructive antics make it stronger. Twitter could still be saved, but it could have been saved even easier without all of this pointless and public display of arrogance and incompetence.
- 4y ago
- Ekaros 4y agoIssue that I see that it might be that workforce losses are not uniform. But there might be a few critical teams entirely lost. And what ever they are doing might be mission critical. Now chance of such teams having fully out is anyone's guess.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- negamax 4y agoTell me you have never worked in a large enterprise without telling me that you haven't. Elon seems completely out of his depth in handling Twitter. And so does many people endorsing him. For them, Twitter is a glorified website.
- dmitriid 4y agoTwitter is undoubtedly overstaffed. Their website is a trash fire that fails in spectacular ways to deliver the most basic funcionality inherent in the browser: show some text and some pictures. And it's been this way for years while they are patting themselves on the back for "creating the best PWA app in the world". However, what Musk is doing is absolutely hillarious, and is a much bigger trash fire that has nothing to do with optimizing the head count, or figuring out how to correctly reduce staffing etc. Steve Jobs returning to a flailing Apple he is not.
- babelfish 4y agoWhat are you talking about? Twitter’s resiliency program is widely known to be one of the best in the world. They’ve been around so long that they’ve literally had to invent a lot of what we consider basic modern distributed computing from scratch. It will become a trash fire with everyone who maintained these massive systems gone, but don’t imply that they created bad systems, or failed at ‘just displaying text’, because they clearly haven’t.
- runarberg 4y agoI don’t believe workers are this expendable. Something is sure to go wrong at some point and there won’t be a worker with the correct knowledge to fix it. This can happen anywhere within the company. It can be an infrastructure problem (e.g. database failure), a software problem (i.e. a bug that could be fixed in minutes lingers for months), administrative problem, a payroll problem (and you’ll loose even more workers because payroll is flaky), PR problem, legal issue, etc. With only 20% of your workers, there is no way these problems will be addressed with equal ease.
- bdcravens 4y agoMany tech companies are over-staffed: R+D pet projects, full time OSS devs, dev rel, etc. Some companies probably have staff who literally do one task like managing webpack config. I disagree with Musk about A LOT, but most companies have opportunities to trim fat before they even touch the core product.
- ebiester 4y agoAs long as you're willing to accept a company that is not growing in revenue due to new value created, you can build a system entirely dedicated to maintenance of existing features with a small group. In Twitter's case, however, how long is it until they're sued for child porn (lack of moderation) or get 50 million euro fines for running afoul of Germany's Network Enforcement Act?
- orangepurple 4y agoImagine going to jail because someone uploaded a file to your computer
- madeofpalk 4y agoWhich, by the way, is exactly what "Section 230" prevents.
- jcranmer 4y agoChild porn is explicitly carved out from the section 230 immunity.
- bdcravens 4y agoI'd consider staff in those areas core to the product. Many of the dozens of projects at https://opensource.twitter.dev/projects/ https://opensource.twitter.dev/projects/, not so much. Staff whose job revolves around standing at booths at conferences and handing out swag, ditto.
- jcranmer 4y agoYou're assuming that someone leaving immediately causes things to break down. A lot of things will take some time to see the effects of people leaving. Fire your entire payroll department. No one will notice... until the biweekly paychecks don't go out, and now your employees aren't getting paid. Fire badge security. No one will notice... until you need someone to make a new badge for a new employee. Fire your IT staff. No one will notice... until the server crashes and no one can reboot it. Fire your system reliability engineers. No one will notice... until the World Cup is on and you have 10x regular traffic and now the site is crashing under the load. Fire your lawyers. No one will notice... until you're now being sued for violating all the laws in all the countries for posting child porn (because you previously fired all the content moderators who were preventing that from being posted).
- lijogdfljk 4y agoAlso imagine job postings. Ignoring Elon for sake of discussion, it would be a big a big boon for my career to work at Twitter.. but when 80% of the staff left? I'd be worried onboarding would be a mess. That i'd be handed several projects that no one knows how they work or what the ramifications are. Ignoring all the red flags and focusing solely on onboarding sounds like misery.. not sure i'd want to take that job. I imagine many will.. but .. oof.
- UncleOxidant 4y ago> it would be a big a big boon for my career to work at Twitter.. And I'm not even sure it would be a big career boost to join twitter at this point. The way things are going there you'd probably be burned out pretty quickly which would mean a shortish tenure.
- eachro 4y agoJust one brand name on your resume can entirely change the trajectory of your career compensation. I see so many people working as SWEs at these small businesses or even fortune 500 companies. Sure they make 6 figures usually but their compensation is not in the same stratosphere as even entry level big tech SWE since so much of big tech pay is in equity.
- dboreham 4y agoFor sure Twitter could continue to function as before with 20% of staff. Problem is : not the 20% that they actually have.
- partiallypro 4y agoHow can we definitely say that though? We don't even know what staff has left, nor what the plans are to replace them if they were critical.
- time_to_smile 4y agoThis is exactly the point I was going to make. I have no doubt Twitter and most companies could be run in maintenance mode with 20% of the current staff. However figuring out which 20% is the tricky part. Typically I only need 20% of the lights in my house to do what I need, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea for Elon Musk to come into my house and just randomly remove 80% of my lightbulbs. To successfully pull off such a major change in staffing in such a short window would require knowing the ins and outs of the company extremely well.
- phailhaus 4y agoThis is equivalent to saying "I've decided not to go to the mechanic anymore. And look, five days later, my car is totally fine!"
- deely3 4y agoNot a good analogy. You can't easy rebuild or upgrade car. In software you rebuild and upgrade every day without stopping.
- phailhaus 4y agoYeah, a better analogy would be stepping out of the driver seat while you're on the highway. Sure it'll coast for a while, but on the first turn...
- systemvoltage 4y ago5 days is good enough time to find a better mechanic that does a high quality job, for less, and doesn't want to collude with federal agencies [1] about where you can drive and where you cannot: https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/ https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...
- edmundsauto 4y agoI bet 20% of their workforce was support + inside sales reps for advertisers. I'd further guess that 10-20% of their workforce was staying on top of regulations. If twitter works, but does not comply with the FTC consent order and gets fined out of business, that is not a technical failure but still is failure. Large enterprises, especially those under consent orders, spend a TON of effort in compliance. Given that environment is constantly changing, there is net new work needed in almost a Red Queen effect.
- AustinDev 4y agoWhen has the FTC ever levied a fine that put someone out of business for an internet privacy related consent decree? I don't think it's ever happened.
- DimitriPetrova 4y agoTwitter was fined $765 million in 2021. Not sure by what organization.
- edmundsauto 4y agoFacebook was fined $5 billion dollars in 2019-ish, that would put most companies out of business. If Twitter doesn't have people actively working to keep up with new privacy directives in every jurisdiction they are in (every country in the world, every region/state in each country has different requirements), they will get hit with fines all day every day.
- ibejoeb 4y agoProbably will. But, if not, absolutely no harm will come of it. What would be the worst part of losing twitter entirely?
- rco8786 4y agoHighly doubtful. Will it go down immediately? No. Will the bitrot accelerate and things start breaking/deteriorating with no one around to fix them? Yes. It's hard to argue that Twitter wasn't incredibly overstaffed. Maybe even 80% overstaffed. But ripping 80% of the humans out of the equation basically overnight is not a recipe for a successful transition.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- paxys 4y agoEvery well built tech product will continue to “work” indefinitely with a small maintenance crew if no one touches or changes anything. Not changing anything, however, is not exactly what Elon has planned for Twitter. The company will only start to get tested when the current code and deploy freezes are lifted and new features start to ship.
- throw_nbvc1234 4y agoGood thing there's not a peak event like the world cup starting in a few days that will possibly stress test all their services that no longer have any devs owning them.
- chewz 4y ago> Wild prediction: Twitter will continue to work as it did even after that ~80% workforce haircut. Not only that. If Elon succeeds that opens a new era in Sillicon Valley. An era where programmers are like steelworkers and coalminers in 1980s. You can raid large tech company (think Google or Apple), make workers redundant, cut costs mercilesly and return value to shareholders.
- SkyMarshal 4y agoIf George Hotz joins Twitter, as he recently offered [1], you may be right. I think people may be underestimating Elon's ability to bring in folks from the "secret guild of silicon valley" [2] to help him in this task. Of course, some of the Twitter employees who left are probably already part of it, but George coming on, even temporarily, might help bring in replacements. [1]:https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/1593391466981691392 https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159339146698169139... [2]:https://medriscoll.com/2011/08/19/the-guild-of-silicon-valley/ https://medriscoll.com/2011/08/19/the-guild-of-silicon-valle...
- norwalkbear 4y agoHoly shit, yea that's a good point. Elon could get a dream team to rebuild the fundamentals, and switch over to a maintenance team later. Often done in the game dev world.
- cycomanic 4y agoI seriously doubt that. The dynamics play out completely different. Let's look at the admin/security teams. These are the people that literally keep things running. If a significant percentage of people from those teams quit, the others have to immediately pick up the slack (much longer on calls...) the added workload then leads to an avalanche where more and mor epeople quit. And it is always in the most business critical teams where these dynamics play out.
- munificent 4y agoThere are many people who could lose half their bodyweight and end up even healthier than they were before. But they won't get there by doing it with an axe. Twitter certainly had bloat, but separating the fat from the critical healthy connective tissue requires care, which has clearly not been spent here.
- r00fus 4y agoMy timeline has radically changed - like 80% of the tweet volume is gone since last night. People are leaving or algorithms are failing to promote tweets.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]