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I 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, t

I 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 ago
I'd take that bet. 1BTC?
- gambiting 4y ago
  I'm good thanks. Not really into gambling.
- shagie 4y ago
  Linked 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 ago
    I 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 ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
- gambiting 4y ago
  I 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.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    That's not what the Pareto Principle says, when reasonably applied to the engineering department [or employees in general] at Twitter. It says that 80% of the results come from 20% of the sources. That's not 8/10 people are doing nothing, but rather 8/10 people are doing things that only contribute to 20% of what makes Twitter Twitter. On any given team of ten, it's likely that the entire team is in either the 80 or the 20 bucket, by virtue of what they're working on, not by virtue of how hard they're working or how talented they are.
    - shagie 4y ago
      Price's Law works better there. > Derek de Solla Price, a British physicist, historian of science, and information scientist, discovered something about his peers in academia. He noticed that there were always a handful of people who dominated the publications within a subject. Price recognized a pattern which was later named after him. > What is Price’s Law? > 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work. https://expressingthegeniuswithin.com/prices-law-and-how-it-applies-to-everything/ https://expressingthegeniuswithin.com/prices-law-and-how-it-... https://entreresource.com/prices-law/ https://entreresource.com/prices-law/
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        They’re getting at two different things: Pareto is getting at whether the work should be done at all; Price is getting at who does the work that gets done. Both are reasonable lenses to consider.
- kansface 4y ago
  Even if this were correct, the specific 20% matters.
- epistasis 4y ago
  These sorts of massive cuts, coupled with massively decreasing workplace quality, and with removing any chance of financial reward (no more liquidity in shares of the company!!), are going to cause the most talented people to go to greener pastures. The people who stay will be those with the least options. Musk has made employment at Twitter hugely risky, with no possibility of reward. Really boneheaded business, completely incompetent cutting off the workforce, honestly. Hard to imagine a worse way of pruning the workforce.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Yoofie 4y ago
    > are going to cause the most talented people to go to greener pastures. People keep repeating this trope as if Twitter is some paragon of technical excellence and innovation. It is no such thing. It is a popular website with a textbox for user input. You don't need "talent", you simply need to people who get the job done.
    - epistasis 4y ago
      Saying something like this just demonstrates that you have extremely limited technical knowledge, and are willing to say anything to defend Musk. And defenses like this go a looooong ways towards destructing the myth that Musk had technical acumen, because the only people defending him are those that can't do the work.
      - memish 4y ago
        The projection on here is getting cartoonish. John Carmack, "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."
        epistasis 4y ago
        Agreed that the projection is cartoonish, but looking at the actual actions at Twitter speak for themselves. And discounting the scale of Twitter is also quite cartoonish projection.
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  Simplistic answers to difficult and chaotic questions are bogus, heuristics. They may work on average, but twitter is not an average company.
GSimon 4y ago
80% imo could so very easily be bloat. Features/services that are underutilized and haemorrhaging money don't need to be upkept, teams dedicated to curating content like twitter headlines and moderating content don't need to be there (at the scale it's currently at). Staffing for hospitality services at Twitter HQ and all the ancillary services that are unnecessary or under-utilized. As long as the servers are running, people will be able to post 240 chars of content and some rich media images, the Twitter platform is not ground breaking tech
- gambiting 4y ago
  Well ok sure, but then I can't imagine that the cuts Musk has done would accurately get rid of the bloat and not just a random selection of 80% of their employees. If you were one of the 20% of people doing actual work, why the hell would you stay if the only future promise is working longer hours and "being more hardcore"? Frankly I'd only agree to that if I was already doing nothing, because zero multiplied by anything is still zero. If you already are doing your job and the company asks you to work even more than before, then get your severance and go. There no way in hell that this 80% of workforce was actual bloat.
- behringer 4y ago
  The problem is he's getting rid of the solid workforce and keeping the bloat. No decent engineer would work 80 hours a week in the office over 40 in the home.
- mandevil 4y ago
  A lot of the teams support advertisers (the actual customer, not the users). They would be either a) keeping conversations such that advertisers want to have their brands next to them b) keeping relationships with advertisers or c) running machine learning to match ads with users. If your advertisers go away, then a whole lot of the iceberg of complexity underneath the bird app goes away.
  - GSimon 4y ago
    A leaner organization could reduce reliance on advertising as payrolls go down, and if traffic increases (as Elon is claiming, who knows if true) than advertisers would pay more for greater exposure. Also FB using AI or target marketing to the extreme for their ads just ended up turning people away from the platform by sterilizing it of any actual content you’d like to see.
joenot443 4y ago
It seems you're in a narrow minority with that opinion, though it's closer than I would've guessed. 65% for No Outages by Dec 15, '22. https://polymarket.com/market/will-twitter-report-any-outages-by-december-15-2022 https://polymarket.com/market/will-twitter-report-any-outage...
- jaycroft 4y ago
  Current SSL cert is valid through 23:59 on Monday, December 12. If there's a big binary even to bet on causing quick failure, this would seem to be it - just inside the testing window. Now... if twitter can't report the outage because twitter is out, does Yes or No pay out?
rightbyte 4y ago
> Twitter must had some bloat, but there's no way that 80% of the workforce was bloat. I firmly believe, lets say 80%, of Twitter is bloat. But sacking them like this wont prove anything due to practicalities. You just can't unwind a mess like Musk is doing. If some employees sole productive task in a week is to reset a server that still has to be done and it will take a lot of work to figure out which button to press when the site falls over.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

AustinDev 4y ago

I'd take that bet. 1BTC?

gambiting 4y ago
I'm good thanks. Not really into gambling.
shagie 4y ago
Linked 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 ago
  I 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 ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

gambiting 4y ago
I 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.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  That's not what the Pareto Principle says, when reasonably applied to the engineering department [or employees in general] at Twitter. It says that 80% of the results come from 20% of the sources. That's not 8/10 people are doing nothing, but rather 8/10 people are doing things that only contribute to 20% of what makes Twitter Twitter. On any given team of ten, it's likely that the entire team is in either the 80 or the 20 bucket, by virtue of what they're working on, not by virtue of how hard they're working or how talented they are.
  - shagie 4y ago
    Price's Law works better there. > Derek de Solla Price, a British physicist, historian of science, and information scientist, discovered something about his peers in academia. He noticed that there were always a handful of people who dominated the publications within a subject. Price recognized a pattern which was later named after him. > What is Price’s Law? > 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work. https://expressingthegeniuswithin.com/prices-law-and-how-it-applies-to-everything/ https://expressingthegeniuswithin.com/prices-law-and-how-it-... https://entreresource.com/prices-law/ https://entreresource.com/prices-law/
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      They’re getting at two different things: Pareto is getting at whether the work should be done at all; Price is getting at who does the work that gets done. Both are reasonable lenses to consider.
kansface 4y ago
Even if this were correct, the specific 20% matters.
epistasis 4y ago
These sorts of massive cuts, coupled with massively decreasing workplace quality, and with removing any chance of financial reward (no more liquidity in shares of the company!!), are going to cause the most talented people to go to greener pastures. The people who stay will be those with the least options. Musk has made employment at Twitter hugely risky, with no possibility of reward. Really boneheaded business, completely incompetent cutting off the workforce, honestly. Hard to imagine a worse way of pruning the workforce.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Yoofie 4y ago
  > are going to cause the most talented people to go to greener pastures. People keep repeating this trope as if Twitter is some paragon of technical excellence and innovation. It is no such thing. It is a popular website with a textbox for user input. You don't need "talent", you simply need to people who get the job done.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    Saying something like this just demonstrates that you have extremely limited technical knowledge, and are willing to say anything to defend Musk. And defenses like this go a looooong ways towards destructing the myth that Musk had technical acumen, because the only people defending him are those that can't do the work.
    - memish 4y ago
      The projection on here is getting cartoonish. John Carmack, "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."
      - epistasis 4y ago
        Agreed that the projection is cartoonish, but looking at the actual actions at Twitter speak for themselves. And discounting the scale of Twitter is also quite cartoonish projection.
PartiallyTyped 4y ago
Simplistic answers to difficult and chaotic questions are bogus, heuristics. They may work on average, but twitter is not an average company.

GSimon 4y ago

80% imo could so very easily be bloat. Features/services that are underutilized and haemorrhaging money don't need to be upkept, teams dedicated to curating content like twitter headlines and moderating content don't need to be there (at the scale it's currently at). Staffing for hospitality services at Twitter HQ and all the ancillary services that are unnecessary or under-utilized. As long as the servers are running, people will be able to post 240 chars of content and some rich media images, the Twitter platform is not ground breaking tech

gambiting 4y ago
Well ok sure, but then I can't imagine that the cuts Musk has done would accurately get rid of the bloat and not just a random selection of 80% of their employees. If you were one of the 20% of people doing actual work, why the hell would you stay if the only future promise is working longer hours and "being more hardcore"? Frankly I'd only agree to that if I was already doing nothing, because zero multiplied by anything is still zero. If you already are doing your job and the company asks you to work even more than before, then get your severance and go. There no way in hell that this 80% of workforce was actual bloat.
behringer 4y ago
The problem is he's getting rid of the solid workforce and keeping the bloat. No decent engineer would work 80 hours a week in the office over 40 in the home.
mandevil 4y ago
A lot of the teams support advertisers (the actual customer, not the users). They would be either a) keeping conversations such that advertisers want to have their brands next to them b) keeping relationships with advertisers or c) running machine learning to match ads with users. If your advertisers go away, then a whole lot of the iceberg of complexity underneath the bird app goes away.
- GSimon 4y ago
  A leaner organization could reduce reliance on advertising as payrolls go down, and if traffic increases (as Elon is claiming, who knows if true) than advertisers would pay more for greater exposure. Also FB using AI or target marketing to the extreme for their ads just ended up turning people away from the platform by sterilizing it of any actual content you’d like to see.

joenot443 4y ago

It seems you're in a narrow minority with that opinion, though it's closer than I would've guessed. 65% for No Outages by Dec 15, '22. https://polymarket.com/market/will-twitter-report-any-outages-by-december-15-2022 https://polymarket.com/market/will-twitter-report-any-outage...

jaycroft 4y ago
Current SSL cert is valid through 23:59 on Monday, December 12. If there's a big binary even to bet on causing quick failure, this would seem to be it - just inside the testing window. Now... if twitter can't report the outage because twitter is out, does Yes or No pay out?

rightbyte 4y ago

> Twitter must had some bloat, but there's no way that 80% of the workforce was bloat. I firmly believe, lets say 80%, of Twitter is bloat. But sacking them like this wont prove anything due to practicalities. You just can't unwind a mess like Musk is doing. If some employees sole productive task in a week is to reset a server that still has to be done and it will take a lot of work to figure out which button to press when the site falls over.