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I'm no Elon fan, but why does essentially everyone in these threads automatically assume he is wrong? Has no one here worked at companies where there was more

I'm no Elon fan, but why does essentially everyone in these threads automatically assume he is wrong? Has no one here worked at companies where there was more dead weight than talent? Where 80% of the work being done is by 20% of the people, and there are whole teams that do almost nothing? What if there is no clean, efficient way to discover who should be fired and so Elon's fallback plan is to test for who really wants to continue working for the company vs. who is apathetic? I'm not saying it will necessarily work, but I'm also not going to assume he is grossly incompetent either.

drchopchop 4y ago
That would make more sense if 1) he had a coherent plan 2) he could motivate the good 20% to stick around 3) he had some way to differentiate high vs low performers. Instead, he now gets an effectively random layoff, with potentially whole/important teams vanishing, and biased so that the best people (who can easily find jobs) are most incentivized to leave.
- b112 4y ago
  he had a coherent plan So if he doesn't share his actual plan with you, the media, and his competitors, he doesn't have a plan?
  - sidibe 4y ago
    When has Elon not shared a plan? He tends to announce everything before they've even started working on.
  - _ugfj 4y ago
    Based on leaked texts and his answers to personalities like catturd, he is in a right wing filter bubble and truly believes there was a censorship problem with Twitter. In a leaked text he was outright asked whether he could buy Twitter after Babylon Bee was suspended. https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1591813699840495616 https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1591813699840495616 He made an offer for Twitter at a nonsensical price and only went through with the sale because of the looming court case. Chances are extremely low there is a plan hiding in this mess.
  - martin_a 4y ago
    You read the news that he cancelled working from home and then locked everybody out of office? Does that look like a plan to you? Does anything that happend in the last weeks look like a plan to you? The blue checkmark disaster for example?
    - nemo44x 4y ago
      It looks like MBA-101, just accelerated a lot. Drop the bottom, identify the best of the best, ask everyone else to commit or get out. The solid core replaces them with the top performers in their network they want to work with. I'm convinced Twitter Blue was a test to see who gets shit done there, to help identify the top performers. Obviously the trick is keeping the top performers.
      - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
        But the cost of Twitter Blue was to actively drive away your major revenue stream, the advertisers. When you're saddled with a ton of debt actively driving away your revenue doesn't seem like MBA-101 to me.
        b112 4y ago
        Unless those advertisers won't be coming along into the new, changed twitter anyhow.
        PuppyTailWags 4y ago
        That still doesn't look good to your future revenue stream, because you've costed at least one client over a billion dollars. Why would your future revenue stream pay you?
        bagels 4y ago
        The client didn't lose a billion dollars. Their investors did.
      - 4y ago
  - some-guy 4y ago
    He keeps changing Twitter Blue, he tried to back out of the deal but then came back, he randomly changes his mind based on questionable troll account replies. For every good idea he has (I'm not convinced the engineering of Tesla or SpaceX was mainly his ideas), he has many other terrible ones (Hyperloop, Tesla Boring tunnels as transport, etc). I believe he's just an attention-seeker and is becoming far more unhinged in the public sphere, whether it's drugs, manic-depression, or some combination. Given his recent behavior, I don't think the success of SpaceX or Tesla had _anything_ to do with his actual CEO or engineering skills, but rather his public image attracting the right people under him willing to work for smaller pay.
    - robocat 4y ago
      Jim Keller talks about his impression of Elon after working with him - skip to 1:20:50 and watch the next 4 minutes of this interview: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA (the whole interview is full of effing amazing insight, IMHO). Jim also talks about Elon’s engineering skills at the 50 minute mark for about 6 minutes in this interview: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1TmuJSbms9c https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1TmuJSbms9c Elon seems like a complete tool to me. But here is Jim, a proven smart engineer-type, give a strongly positive opinion on Elon’s engineering ability. Many effective people have personality traits I abhor. Unless you have worked with Elon yourself, and you are a good engineer yourself, you are just making shit up. I think it is normal to hate, but at least try to be honest.
      - ModernMech 4y ago
        I don't know, it's hard to trust anyone who has worked for a narcissist like Musk to tell the truth about said narcissist in public media. Powerful narcists love to surround themselves by people who are willing to use their credentials to launder the reputation of the narcissist. My favorite example comes from Dr. Deborah Birx regarding fmr. President Trump during the pandemic: "He's been so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data. I think his ability to analyze and integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit during these discussions about medical issues.” This is just about what Jim Keller says about Musk in the first video. You'll notice when he talks about what he learned from Musk he's very vague, and then he pivots directly to a story about how his friend invented a more efficient electric motor that was better than anything they had. That's a story about engineering prowess, but that story is pointedly not about Musk. Why does he need to pivot to another engineer when talking about engineering prowess? Because he doesn't have anything to say about Musk's engineering prowess, and can only speak to his technical philosophies. Of course those may be sound, and perhaps helps the engineering team, but having ideas about local maxima doesn't make one an engineer. The second link isn't any better. Jim says Musk is the "real deal" and a great engineer, but instead of examples of that, just talks about how Musk prefers to receive presentations with solutions first, and got upset when they weren't frontloaded. Which is a fine point of view I guess, and maybe is related to managing an engineering process, but all the technical work was done by others. And finally, as a robotics engineer myself, I have a very hard time listening to anyone from the Tesla autonomous group unless they want to explain why they are testing Tesla's beta quality AP (that is in fact lethal and has caused deaths) on the general public without their awareness or consent. Or explain why after the first decapitation caused by Musk's insistence on not using LIDAR in their cars, this group failed to step up and course correct. Instead they doubled down, and their decisions resulted predictably in nothing getting fixed, leading to a second decapitation. Who exactly made the call on those decisions? That's really all I need to hear from them.
  - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    Unless his plan is to destroy the value of Twitter (such as it is) then his actions do not suggest a coherent plan.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - generj 4y ago
    Yes? The CEO’s role is to articulate a vision to workers (particularly to middle management). If it’s a secret plan, then functionally there is not a plan. Good plans can be executed even if competitors know it because they rely upon competitive advantages the firm has. Even if this is only true in the short to medium term, by the medium term when competitors can pivot the company is executing on another plan.
softwaredoug 4y ago
For one, there's more thoughtful ways of joining a company and remaking the culture that aren't a shitshow. Instead of starting with 50% layoffs, you could have started with the ultimatum to stay for 'hardcore twitter' or not. Then you have a loyal set of employees AND reduced headcount.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  The problem with that is you're skipping a step. You need to drop the dead weight so-to-speak before locating the people that can ship code and are loyal. He has been very aggressive to be sure, but the media is following this unlike any other reorg because Twitter is their livlihood.
  - toofy 4y ago
    > ... but the media is following this unlike any other reorg because Twitter is their livlihood. i think this is a strange read on the importance of twitter for the media. twitter itself, as a technology just doesn't matter. it isn't the tech that creates the network of value, its the people. and we know from centuries of history, people will just shift to the next spot over--the bar that was popular last week is just... empty. the media, like general society, doesn't care which platform they're swarming around. it was myspace for a while, digg for a while, facebook... etc... we just move to the whichever captures a critical mass. the media will just simply move to wherever we all go. i suspect they're just covering it so much because hes like a jester--that weirdo kid in the hall screaming "look at me. look at me. LOOK AT ME! im a contrarian. im being contrarian! honestly i hate attention. quit staring at me. but LOOK AT ME!" and we all love watching jesters and contrarians fall over. even if they accidentally reach their destination. we still can't help but watch them fumble.
    - nemo44x 4y ago
      Lol ok. No one is going anywhere other than a few nerds that are having meltdowns desperately trying to find an alternative. It’s hilarious to watch!
nemo44x 4y ago
It's pretty much what they have been doing since the acquisition. It's based on 80/20 rule thinking and is taught in MBA programs. First they dropped orgs and teams they just didn't find useful any longer like large swaths of the HR team, marketing, etc. Then they asked leaders to identify the bottom ~30% of performers and culled them. Now you're left with the "better half" of the company. But Musk isn't through yet - he needs to identify of that remaining 50% who the top performers are. So he created a variety of things to do to locate the people that get things done and those that have silently quit or are just resting on their reputations from previous accomplishments. Now that you've identified the top talent you let everyone else know they can stay or go. This is the loyalty test to see who is culturally compatible and is invested in the mission. to many it comes off as crass and hurried and unplanned, but the entire point is to create an easy exit for people. Musk has done all this rapidly and aggressively, but none of it is weird. He is unique in that he has access to resources others don't and answers to no one which can be good or bad. The end goal is he must believe that there's a solid core and a lot of rotten culture around it. Get rid of that and give that core the resources they need to succeed. Twitter will be hiring a lot of people in the coming months and this core of people will be doing the recruiting. We'll see if this plan works!
- orange_joe 4y ago
  Why would top performers stick around after being told they’ll be forced to work long hours without any benefit? It seems like only the desperate would stay. From what we’ve read the majority of those who stayed did so because they are on visas, meaning they would be deported if they left the company.
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    It's a good question, especially since he has been so aggressive in this reorg that it would be very unsettling to many people. I'm sure he lost some because of it. However, I would imagine that everything we are hearing is not the whole story in terms of what the identified top performers are hearing. They are likely getting 1-on-1 calls, comp adjustments, and promises on how they will be able to build the future. For some that won't be enough I'm sure. But for many it will be and this is the core - these are the people Elon builds Twitter with. The other ones are sent a loyalty notice and if they stay, then great because they know their orders now. Elon did tweet he feels most of the best people are staying, so there's that. And he doesn't seem too nervous about things. But only he would know I guess.
torben-friis 4y ago
>I'm no Elon fan, but why does essentially everyone in these threads automatically assume he is wrong? Have you seen any move these past weeks that can potentially be constructed as a good idea, without invoking a brilliant master plan that nobody else understands? Occam’s razor, etc.
JeremyNT 4y ago
> What if there is no clean, efficient way to discover who should be fired and so Elon's fallback plan is to test for who really wants to continue working for the company vs. who is apathetic? That's presumably what he thinks he's selecting for, but is it really? In my experience on sinking ships the least useful people are the ones who often stick around longer, simply because they're worried they can't easily find another job. That aside, I'm not sure that willingness to submit to the whims of Musk (and be really hardcore or whatever) correlates in any way with actual capability to contribute. Even if it does, the trait is unlikely to be distributed evenly across the myriad departments in Twitter, so in the best case it's going to impact certain parts of the business disproportionately. But realistically, my gut check is that selecting for sycophants and masochists is more likely to leave you with a bunch of dysfunctional psychopaths than it is to leave you with highly competent contributors.
orange_joe 4y ago
I understand wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt, but his decision making around twitter has basically been disastrous from the start. 1. Bought the company at an overinflated price and tried to back out, but was ultimately forced by the court to buy it 2. Half baked rollout of the twitter blue which caused brands to flee the platform after major reputation damage. 3. Laying off half the company, and then having an uncapped layoff of remaining individuals (probably violated labor law, by placing the voluntary layoff days after the top down layoff, he had 0 control over the effects, which by some reports has meant 88% of people no longer work at the firm) 5. Company was purchased with 12B in debt, meaning he has 1-2B/year in debt payments alone, meaning a path to profitability is challenging. 6. Has had to go back to critical workers to try and retain them. outside of the leveraged buyout, I’m not grading him on assumptions, but rather the ways in which his actions don’t seem to align with his stated goals. He wanted a reduction of 75%, may have gotten 88% He wanted no WFH, he had to roll that back He wanted to verify for money, he (effectively) had to roll that back. He wanted to grow revenue, and it’s declined. He didn’t want to buy the company and was then forced to do so.
- martijnvds 4y ago
  Almost sounds like it's a spite thing. "You made me go through with the deal, now I'll destroy your toy after torturing it."
  - jerlam 4y ago
    Spiteful against who? The previous owners and shareholders got paid well above market value when the company went private. The resigning employees aren't being "tortured", they're getting a fresh break. Musk appears to love Twitter and constantly tweets to his fans, it's his own toy that he's destroying.
- belligeront 4y ago
  He's also acted with hubris with his engineering claims. For example claiming that the reason twitter is slower in india is that there are 1200 RPC calls, which is pretty absurd. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592176202873085952 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592176202873085952
plextoria 4y ago
The problem is not that Elon is getting rid of the dead weight, but in the fact that he seems to be alienating the good talent in the process.
crooked-v 4y ago
Well, there's that part where he's telling people to fly in to the office with 14 hours notice the week before Thanksgiving.
lamontcg 4y ago
> Where 80% of the work being done is by 20% of the people, and there are whole teams that do almost nothing? Nope. Strongly doubt that Twitter is that kind of place either, bet its closer to no more than 20% that do almost nothing, and maybe 60% who work inefficiently because they have to. And firing more than half the people won't make them any more efficient, it just means that now you start doing things like using zero code review or oversight and everyone gets swamped with 40 hours a week of CI failures because it turns out that team everyone liked to hate on actually did a whole bunch of work nobody ever saw and now all the internal tooling is completely broken.
giantrobot 4y ago
The "whole teams doing nothing" is a giant canard. Any large organization will have groups that can't remain 100% busy 100% of the time. Projects go from development to maintenance and the teams don't necessarily jump immediately to the next project or take time planning the next project while doing relatively light maintenance work on the just released project. Even at Apple which runs very lean engineering teams, verging on understaffed, would have times of year where most engineers were doing nothing. After an OS released in the fall there would be a month or two of planning sessions for the next OS' features. It would be a lot of meetings of middle management with little input from ICs. After the new year work would begin in earnest but from October-December most engineers were spinning their wheels or doing relatively light work chasing down bug fixes for point releases for the recently released OSes. The idea that any team is going to put in a constant 40+ hours of typing code is farcical. Time needs to be taken to actually plan out projects even if you're doing some seat of the pants Agile bullshit. Putting everyone on a death march schedule for something as ultimately irrelevant as Twitter is just burning people out for no reason. There's no upside for Twitter's engineers to burn out. Unless they're being offered equity or bonuses or something their new "hardcore" schedule is all sacrifice and no reward.
- whateveracct 4y ago
  Also, engineering is not solely about output. In fact, for something as big and established as Twitter, output is probably secondary to availability. Good managers ensure their teams have "slack." Because if something is on fire, or a pressing deadline appears, etc..you need to not be at 100% to absorb that. People disrespect maintenance work & being available. Even here on HN.
ben7799 4y ago
I keep trying to figure out how many employees actually built twitter in the first place. I've been on there a long time, but have never been a heavy user. Twitter seems like it was mostly complete a long long time ago. It's changed far far less than say facebook over the years. I'm sure stuff has changed but I would struggle to remember what's different than say 10 years ago. They had 2000 people when they IPOed. But that was 5+ years after launch. If a hundred people had 90% of the functionality working the first couple of years it really does make you wonder how they got to 7500 employees. From the outside it doesn't look like that much to show for 7500 employees. It makes me wonder what the infrastructure looks like. Is the software to sell ads that most of us don't see much bigger and more sophisticated than Twitter itself? How many people are taking care of data centers and doing "toil" ???
- toofy 4y ago
  at the time of their ipo, the user base was smaller. as your user base grows, obviously you need significantly more people to run the organization. when the user base grew (we'll ignore the insane chaotic ways scaling impacts technological needs) so did the needs of a significant existence in other countries, those countries laws, the societal and cultural impacts, advertising in other countries, etc...
- lamontcg 4y ago
  > I'm sure stuff has changed but I would struggle to remember what's different than say 10 years ago. Didn't have to comply with the GDPR because it didn't exist. Wasn't scrutinized as much over issues of speech and harassment (GamerGate hadn't happened yet). Didn't have nation states attempting to manipulate the platform for propaganda purposes.
- user_named 4y ago
  You think that Twitter is a code base. It's not. It's a business.
happytoexplain 4y ago
>Has no one here worked at companies where there was more dead weight than talent? It's perfectly possible (even common, I might guess) that most people do understand that this is a realistic scenario and that it might be the case at Twitter, and that the goal of cutting the fat might be for the best even though it's harsh - but also that Elon's behavior is absolutely absurd.
dont__panic 4y ago
A good question to ask. I think you're spot on about most tech companies. But I don't believe this kind of behavior will incentivize high performers to stick around. In fact, I would guess that the best employees have already left. With this kind of uncertainty and the threat of working long hours and then being fired on a whim if you disagree with Musk... ask yourself, who would stick around? The only people I can imagine are the Musk cult worshippers and those with no other speedy alternative -- H1B holders and other similarly "stuck" people. So basically Musk is trying to kick everyone out of the company except for his cultists (who will worship him no matter what) and the people who can't leave otherwise. Open to alternative explanations... but even if I truly believed in a leader, I don't think I would stick around for this kind of abuse. Perhaps I'm just not "hardcore" enough to work at a social network, though.
bagels 4y ago
I think you will find much more support for the idea that Twitter could operate with fewer people than the idea that Musk's execution of this idea is the right path to get there.

drchopchop 4y ago

That would make more sense if 1) he had a coherent plan 2) he could motivate the good 20% to stick around 3) he had some way to differentiate high vs low performers. Instead, he now gets an effectively random layoff, with potentially whole/important teams vanishing, and biased so that the best people (who can easily find jobs) are most incentivized to leave.

b112 4y ago
he had a coherent plan So if he doesn't share his actual plan with you, the media, and his competitors, he doesn't have a plan?
- sidibe 4y ago
  When has Elon not shared a plan? He tends to announce everything before they've even started working on.
- _ugfj 4y ago
  Based on leaked texts and his answers to personalities like catturd, he is in a right wing filter bubble and truly believes there was a censorship problem with Twitter. In a leaked text he was outright asked whether he could buy Twitter after Babylon Bee was suspended. https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1591813699840495616 https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1591813699840495616 He made an offer for Twitter at a nonsensical price and only went through with the sale because of the looming court case. Chances are extremely low there is a plan hiding in this mess.
- martin_a 4y ago
  You read the news that he cancelled working from home and then locked everybody out of office? Does that look like a plan to you? Does anything that happend in the last weeks look like a plan to you? The blue checkmark disaster for example?
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    It looks like MBA-101, just accelerated a lot. Drop the bottom, identify the best of the best, ask everyone else to commit or get out. The solid core replaces them with the top performers in their network they want to work with. I'm convinced Twitter Blue was a test to see who gets shit done there, to help identify the top performers. Obviously the trick is keeping the top performers.
    - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
      But the cost of Twitter Blue was to actively drive away your major revenue stream, the advertisers. When you're saddled with a ton of debt actively driving away your revenue doesn't seem like MBA-101 to me.
      - b112 4y ago
        Unless those advertisers won't be coming along into the new, changed twitter anyhow.
        PuppyTailWags 4y ago
        That still doesn't look good to your future revenue stream, because you've costed at least one client over a billion dollars. Why would your future revenue stream pay you?
        bagels 4y ago
        The client didn't lose a billion dollars. Their investors did.
    - 4y ago
- some-guy 4y ago
  He keeps changing Twitter Blue, he tried to back out of the deal but then came back, he randomly changes his mind based on questionable troll account replies. For every good idea he has (I'm not convinced the engineering of Tesla or SpaceX was mainly his ideas), he has many other terrible ones (Hyperloop, Tesla Boring tunnels as transport, etc). I believe he's just an attention-seeker and is becoming far more unhinged in the public sphere, whether it's drugs, manic-depression, or some combination. Given his recent behavior, I don't think the success of SpaceX or Tesla had _anything_ to do with his actual CEO or engineering skills, but rather his public image attracting the right people under him willing to work for smaller pay.
  - robocat 4y ago
    Jim Keller talks about his impression of Elon after working with him - skip to 1:20:50 and watch the next 4 minutes of this interview: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA (the whole interview is full of effing amazing insight, IMHO). Jim also talks about Elon’s engineering skills at the 50 minute mark for about 6 minutes in this interview: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1TmuJSbms9c https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1TmuJSbms9c Elon seems like a complete tool to me. But here is Jim, a proven smart engineer-type, give a strongly positive opinion on Elon’s engineering ability. Many effective people have personality traits I abhor. Unless you have worked with Elon yourself, and you are a good engineer yourself, you are just making shit up. I think it is normal to hate, but at least try to be honest.
    - ModernMech 4y ago
      I don't know, it's hard to trust anyone who has worked for a narcissist like Musk to tell the truth about said narcissist in public media. Powerful narcists love to surround themselves by people who are willing to use their credentials to launder the reputation of the narcissist. My favorite example comes from Dr. Deborah Birx regarding fmr. President Trump during the pandemic: "He's been so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data. I think his ability to analyze and integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit during these discussions about medical issues.” This is just about what Jim Keller says about Musk in the first video. You'll notice when he talks about what he learned from Musk he's very vague, and then he pivots directly to a story about how his friend invented a more efficient electric motor that was better than anything they had. That's a story about engineering prowess, but that story is pointedly not about Musk. Why does he need to pivot to another engineer when talking about engineering prowess? Because he doesn't have anything to say about Musk's engineering prowess, and can only speak to his technical philosophies. Of course those may be sound, and perhaps helps the engineering team, but having ideas about local maxima doesn't make one an engineer. The second link isn't any better. Jim says Musk is the "real deal" and a great engineer, but instead of examples of that, just talks about how Musk prefers to receive presentations with solutions first, and got upset when they weren't frontloaded. Which is a fine point of view I guess, and maybe is related to managing an engineering process, but all the technical work was done by others. And finally, as a robotics engineer myself, I have a very hard time listening to anyone from the Tesla autonomous group unless they want to explain why they are testing Tesla's beta quality AP (that is in fact lethal and has caused deaths) on the general public without their awareness or consent. Or explain why after the first decapitation caused by Musk's insistence on not using LIDAR in their cars, this group failed to step up and course correct. Instead they doubled down, and their decisions resulted predictably in nothing getting fixed, leading to a second decapitation. Who exactly made the call on those decisions? That's really all I need to hear from them.
- disgruntledphd2 4y ago
  Unless his plan is to destroy the value of Twitter (such as it is) then his actions do not suggest a coherent plan.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- generj 4y ago
  Yes? The CEO’s role is to articulate a vision to workers (particularly to middle management). If it’s a secret plan, then functionally there is not a plan. Good plans can be executed even if competitors know it because they rely upon competitive advantages the firm has. Even if this is only true in the short to medium term, by the medium term when competitors can pivot the company is executing on another plan.

softwaredoug 4y ago

For one, there's more thoughtful ways of joining a company and remaking the culture that aren't a shitshow. Instead of starting with 50% layoffs, you could have started with the ultimatum to stay for 'hardcore twitter' or not. Then you have a loyal set of employees AND reduced headcount.

nemo44x 4y ago
The problem with that is you're skipping a step. You need to drop the dead weight so-to-speak before locating the people that can ship code and are loyal. He has been very aggressive to be sure, but the media is following this unlike any other reorg because Twitter is their livlihood.
- toofy 4y ago
  > ... but the media is following this unlike any other reorg because Twitter is their livlihood. i think this is a strange read on the importance of twitter for the media. twitter itself, as a technology just doesn't matter. it isn't the tech that creates the network of value, its the people. and we know from centuries of history, people will just shift to the next spot over--the bar that was popular last week is just... empty. the media, like general society, doesn't care which platform they're swarming around. it was myspace for a while, digg for a while, facebook... etc... we just move to the whichever captures a critical mass. the media will just simply move to wherever we all go. i suspect they're just covering it so much because hes like a jester--that weirdo kid in the hall screaming "look at me. look at me. LOOK AT ME! im a contrarian. im being contrarian! honestly i hate attention. quit staring at me. but LOOK AT ME!" and we all love watching jesters and contrarians fall over. even if they accidentally reach their destination. we still can't help but watch them fumble.
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    Lol ok. No one is going anywhere other than a few nerds that are having meltdowns desperately trying to find an alternative. It’s hilarious to watch!

nemo44x 4y ago

It's pretty much what they have been doing since the acquisition. It's based on 80/20 rule thinking and is taught in MBA programs. First they dropped orgs and teams they just didn't find useful any longer like large swaths of the HR team, marketing, etc. Then they asked leaders to identify the bottom ~30% of performers and culled them. Now you're left with the "better half" of the company. But Musk isn't through yet - he needs to identify of that remaining 50% who the top performers are. So he created a variety of things to do to locate the people that get things done and those that have silently quit or are just resting on their reputations from previous accomplishments. Now that you've identified the top talent you let everyone else know they can stay or go. This is the loyalty test to see who is culturally compatible and is invested in the mission. to many it comes off as crass and hurried and unplanned, but the entire point is to create an easy exit for people. Musk has done all this rapidly and aggressively, but none of it is weird. He is unique in that he has access to resources others don't and answers to no one which can be good or bad. The end goal is he must believe that there's a solid core and a lot of rotten culture around it. Get rid of that and give that core the resources they need to succeed. Twitter will be hiring a lot of people in the coming months and this core of people will be doing the recruiting. We'll see if this plan works!

orange_joe 4y ago
Why would top performers stick around after being told they’ll be forced to work long hours without any benefit? It seems like only the desperate would stay. From what we’ve read the majority of those who stayed did so because they are on visas, meaning they would be deported if they left the company.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  It's a good question, especially since he has been so aggressive in this reorg that it would be very unsettling to many people. I'm sure he lost some because of it. However, I would imagine that everything we are hearing is not the whole story in terms of what the identified top performers are hearing. They are likely getting 1-on-1 calls, comp adjustments, and promises on how they will be able to build the future. For some that won't be enough I'm sure. But for many it will be and this is the core - these are the people Elon builds Twitter with. The other ones are sent a loyalty notice and if they stay, then great because they know their orders now. Elon did tweet he feels most of the best people are staying, so there's that. And he doesn't seem too nervous about things. But only he would know I guess.

torben-friis 4y ago

>I'm no Elon fan, but why does essentially everyone in these threads automatically assume he is wrong? Have you seen any move these past weeks that can potentially be constructed as a good idea, without invoking a brilliant master plan that nobody else understands? Occam’s razor, etc.

JeremyNT 4y ago

> What if there is no clean, efficient way to discover who should be fired and so Elon's fallback plan is to test for who really wants to continue working for the company vs. who is apathetic? That's presumably what he thinks he's selecting for, but is it really? In my experience on sinking ships the least useful people are the ones who often stick around longer, simply because they're worried they can't easily find another job. That aside, I'm not sure that willingness to submit to the whims of Musk (and be really hardcore or whatever) correlates in any way with actual capability to contribute. Even if it does, the trait is unlikely to be distributed evenly across the myriad departments in Twitter, so in the best case it's going to impact certain parts of the business disproportionately. But realistically, my gut check is that selecting for sycophants and masochists is more likely to leave you with a bunch of dysfunctional psychopaths than it is to leave you with highly competent contributors.

orange_joe 4y ago

I understand wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt, but his decision making around twitter has basically been disastrous from the start. 1. Bought the company at an overinflated price and tried to back out, but was ultimately forced by the court to buy it 2. Half baked rollout of the twitter blue which caused brands to flee the platform after major reputation damage. 3. Laying off half the company, and then having an uncapped layoff of remaining individuals (probably violated labor law, by placing the voluntary layoff days after the top down layoff, he had 0 control over the effects, which by some reports has meant 88% of people no longer work at the firm) 5. Company was purchased with 12B in debt, meaning he has 1-2B/year in debt payments alone, meaning a path to profitability is challenging. 6. Has had to go back to critical workers to try and retain them. outside of the leveraged buyout, I’m not grading him on assumptions, but rather the ways in which his actions don’t seem to align with his stated goals. He wanted a reduction of 75%, may have gotten 88% He wanted no WFH, he had to roll that back He wanted to verify for money, he (effectively) had to roll that back. He wanted to grow revenue, and it’s declined. He didn’t want to buy the company and was then forced to do so.

martijnvds 4y ago
Almost sounds like it's a spite thing. "You made me go through with the deal, now I'll destroy your toy after torturing it."
- jerlam 4y ago
  Spiteful against who? The previous owners and shareholders got paid well above market value when the company went private. The resigning employees aren't being "tortured", they're getting a fresh break. Musk appears to love Twitter and constantly tweets to his fans, it's his own toy that he's destroying.
belligeront 4y ago
He's also acted with hubris with his engineering claims. For example claiming that the reason twitter is slower in india is that there are 1200 RPC calls, which is pretty absurd. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592176202873085952 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592176202873085952

plextoria 4y ago

The problem is not that Elon is getting rid of the dead weight, but in the fact that he seems to be alienating the good talent in the process.

crooked-v 4y ago

Well, there's that part where he's telling people to fly in to the office with 14 hours notice the week before Thanksgiving.

lamontcg 4y ago

> Where 80% of the work being done is by 20% of the people, and there are whole teams that do almost nothing? Nope. Strongly doubt that Twitter is that kind of place either, bet its closer to no more than 20% that do almost nothing, and maybe 60% who work inefficiently because they have to. And firing more than half the people won't make them any more efficient, it just means that now you start doing things like using zero code review or oversight and everyone gets swamped with 40 hours a week of CI failures because it turns out that team everyone liked to hate on actually did a whole bunch of work nobody ever saw and now all the internal tooling is completely broken.

giantrobot 4y ago

The "whole teams doing nothing" is a giant canard. Any large organization will have groups that can't remain 100% busy 100% of the time. Projects go from development to maintenance and the teams don't necessarily jump immediately to the next project or take time planning the next project while doing relatively light maintenance work on the just released project. Even at Apple which runs very lean engineering teams, verging on understaffed, would have times of year where most engineers were doing nothing. After an OS released in the fall there would be a month or two of planning sessions for the next OS' features. It would be a lot of meetings of middle management with little input from ICs. After the new year work would begin in earnest but from October-December most engineers were spinning their wheels or doing relatively light work chasing down bug fixes for point releases for the recently released OSes. The idea that any team is going to put in a constant 40+ hours of typing code is farcical. Time needs to be taken to actually plan out projects even if you're doing some seat of the pants Agile bullshit. Putting everyone on a death march schedule for something as ultimately irrelevant as Twitter is just burning people out for no reason. There's no upside for Twitter's engineers to burn out. Unless they're being offered equity or bonuses or something their new "hardcore" schedule is all sacrifice and no reward.

whateveracct 4y ago
Also, engineering is not solely about output. In fact, for something as big and established as Twitter, output is probably secondary to availability. Good managers ensure their teams have "slack." Because if something is on fire, or a pressing deadline appears, etc..you need to not be at 100% to absorb that. People disrespect maintenance work & being available. Even here on HN.

ben7799 4y ago

I keep trying to figure out how many employees actually built twitter in the first place. I've been on there a long time, but have never been a heavy user. Twitter seems like it was mostly complete a long long time ago. It's changed far far less than say facebook over the years. I'm sure stuff has changed but I would struggle to remember what's different than say 10 years ago. They had 2000 people when they IPOed. But that was 5+ years after launch. If a hundred people had 90% of the functionality working the first couple of years it really does make you wonder how they got to 7500 employees. From the outside it doesn't look like that much to show for 7500 employees. It makes me wonder what the infrastructure looks like. Is the software to sell ads that most of us don't see much bigger and more sophisticated than Twitter itself? How many people are taking care of data centers and doing "toil" ???

toofy 4y ago
at the time of their ipo, the user base was smaller. as your user base grows, obviously you need significantly more people to run the organization. when the user base grew (we'll ignore the insane chaotic ways scaling impacts technological needs) so did the needs of a significant existence in other countries, those countries laws, the societal and cultural impacts, advertising in other countries, etc...
lamontcg 4y ago
> I'm sure stuff has changed but I would struggle to remember what's different than say 10 years ago. Didn't have to comply with the GDPR because it didn't exist. Wasn't scrutinized as much over issues of speech and harassment (GamerGate hadn't happened yet). Didn't have nation states attempting to manipulate the platform for propaganda purposes.
user_named 4y ago
You think that Twitter is a code base. It's not. It's a business.

happytoexplain 4y ago

>Has no one here worked at companies where there was more dead weight than talent? It's perfectly possible (even common, I might guess) that most people do understand that this is a realistic scenario and that it might be the case at Twitter, and that the goal of cutting the fat might be for the best even though it's harsh - but also that Elon's behavior is absolutely absurd.

dont__panic 4y ago

A good question to ask. I think you're spot on about most tech companies. But I don't believe this kind of behavior will incentivize high performers to stick around. In fact, I would guess that the best employees have already left. With this kind of uncertainty and the threat of working long hours and then being fired on a whim if you disagree with Musk... ask yourself, who would stick around? The only people I can imagine are the Musk cult worshippers and those with no other speedy alternative -- H1B holders and other similarly "stuck" people. So basically Musk is trying to kick everyone out of the company except for his cultists (who will worship him no matter what) and the people who can't leave otherwise. Open to alternative explanations... but even if I truly believed in a leader, I don't think I would stick around for this kind of abuse. Perhaps I'm just not "hardcore" enough to work at a social network, though.

bagels 4y ago

I think you will find much more support for the idea that Twitter could operate with fewer people than the idea that Musk's execution of this idea is the right path to get there.