16 ms·

You can fire 80% of software engineers and the company will survive

80 points by victorronin 4y ago

IanDrake 4y ago
lovich 4y ago
I think we need to define “survive” to discuss this without just talking past each other. If “survive” means, won’t immediately collapse and can continue on for months to years while extracting value I’d agree. If “survive” instead means that they can’t both do required maintenance to keep the company operating _and_ simultaneously build out new features and aspects of the business, Kim not sure I’m as convinced
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  Do we really need new features in everything? I mean, I understand the business point, more features, higher price, higher chances someone will buy product for feature X.. but I've seen feature creep, where a good app that did one thing great, now becomes a bloated mess, because they added one feature, and another, and another,... First it's just a file browser.. then it starts with a text editor.. then image viewer, pluus cloud support (dropbox, onedrive,...), then file sync, backup solution, package management, image editor, music player, video player, and in the end, with all the "streamlining" added, you've got a 300mb app that just lost the ability to sort files by size, but which can now order food delivery for you. What new features does eg. twitter need?
  - threeseed 4y ago
    > What new features does eg. twitter need? Advertising features. It's overall advertising story lacks a lot of the capabilities of Facebook/Google which is why it's a distant 3rd in total ad-spend. This is where those employee cuts are going to be most felt because this is directly tied to revenue. And whilst overall advertising is down there was still a huge opportunity for Twitter to grow.
  - kingTug 4y ago
    Just running thru some software in my head and there's a ton of stuff I'd still use the MVP version of. If Reddit was developmentally arrested in 2010 I'd still be wasting the same number of hours there everyday. Talk about a company that creates bloat!
    - 6510 4y ago
      I don't know what units to use but if we count the buckets of progress from the first computer to today the industry has become like government tinkering with a tiny number of laws while most buckets of law had already been developed. Our food? Our culture? Our language? What part did we play in making those? We added the word tweeting and are now trying to figure out what it should mean? ha-ha
    - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
      Does anyone that used old reddit even use the new redesign? Yep, a lot of older version were a lot better than the current ones
  - lovich 4y ago
    The new features Twitter needs might be as simple as implementing new standards that keep the status quo. No tech company produces 100% of the software it relies on and eventually they hit changes that go beyond maintenance and hit “rearchitect the platform”. Just in my own experience I once inherited ~20 .net 3.5 projects that needed to be updated to support tls 1.2 which required going up to 4.5?4.7? Can’t recall beyond it needing a major version update. The company was then hit with the decision of either doing a multi month effort to update all the inconsistencies between those version for the minimum viable product of updates or spend a year ish to get onto .net core and be ahead of the update schedule. That was one set of decisions and work for a team of 8, solely to maintain status quo, for a relatively tiny company. Tech companies as they have all currently organized themselves, cannot just run with minor maintenance
  - acdha 4y ago
    Ongoing improvement in tools for dealing with abuse. This has three major components, none trivial: ensuring that users keep enjoying the service and aren’t turned off by spam or harassment, keeping things appealing to advertisers, and complying with government regulations. I describe this as ongoing because it has human adversaries and they’re often quite dedicated and/or paid to do things like spam or shape public option so the problem shifts but is never solved.
    - autotune 4y ago
      It's funny that Lord Elon whined about abuse from bots then immediately fired the teams that could prevent it.
  - nickthegreek 4y ago
    Twitter needs whatever features the customers want so they can increase their DAU’s to a rate that will drive their profits to pay off the debt. He can’t coast with the current feature set as it has shown that it can’t pay the bills.
  - rrwo 4y ago
    You need people to monitor bwhat users are doing. They realize that users are doing X and Y manually to do Z. So you implement feature Z. If you don't, then a competitor that implements Z might become more appealing to users. But features are not always user-visible. New features are regularly added to web browsers and phones, and it's often in your interest as a web site or app developer to make use of them.
- odessacubbage 4y ago
  how many of twitter's new features marked an increase in revenue or market-share? it seems like twitter's main innovation in recent years has been inventing increasingly byzantine procedures to cull users from their platform, including their most revenue generative power-user: donald trump.
dehrmann 4y ago
I'm curious to see how this pans out for Twitter. I suspect this is true in theory, but in practice, finding the right 20% is hard, you can't do it as bluntly as Musk, and the "extremely hardcore" ultimatum will scare away people in that 20% who will take a few months severance to be done with the drama.
bediger4000 4y ago
Shouldn't you put a reasonable time limit on "survive", like oncologists do? A 5 year survival on 20% staff seems unreasonably long, but a couple of weeks is too short for such a verdict.
logicalmonster 4y ago
1) I think most software companies can probably survive with far fewer programmers if they were willing to cut dumb features. Are they though? Bloat is kind of a lot of businesses business. 2) For what it's worth, the Twitter employees let go were not just programmers, but also fulfilled other roles. I'm not quite sure what percentage of programmers Twitter lost, but I bet they lost a much higher percentage of other roles such as HR and content moderators. > BTW. Figuring it who is the core team is not that complicated. You just ask everybody to name five people who are doing well and who they want to work with again (in the next company). For what it's worth, this might yield a misleading answer because it could become a popularity contest. The charismatic guy who plays office politics and tries to make everybody their pal might score highly here, but the smart engineer who just sits down quietly and churns out good features might be forgotten.
- mikrl 4y ago
  > The charismatic guy who plays office politics and tries to make everybody their pal might score highly here, but the smart engineer who just sits down quietly and churns out good features might be forgotten. Well it is a software engineering company/business is it not? The socially connected engineer will know more people who can be leveraged to meet the goals of the organization, even if they themselves are not as capable in isolation. If businesses were judged on metrics like “most autonomous engineers who can write perfect code” then the businessy types would be disadvantaged (and the company would fold)
  - dopidopHN 4y ago
    Yeah exactly. Having someone who know reliably who knows what and how to get that person time and attention is important. Specially in corporate settings where the gears need greasing. People are not gonna magically do the right things. They want context and understand why you are talking to them.
    - mikrl 4y ago
      I constantly get told off by my boss for trying to be too clean and extensible at the expense of timely delivery (ie yesterday) but I am also the socially connected engineer who knows who’s good at what, and how to butter them up. In my mind I’m not getting paid to write nice code, I’m getting paid to help ensure the software side of things keeps expanding without breaking within constraints of time and money. I’m very happy when this involves writing code but I’m also happy if this involves brokering, nudging, reminding, motivating, flirting, cajoling or otherwise positively interacting with the highly talented people I work with. Social skills don’t come naturally to me, but the time investment spent figuring out the rules/heuristics has given me more bang-for-buck than any other lang.
rosywoozlechan 4y ago
Since this claim about company survival after firing 80% of engineers has been presented without evidence, it can be dismissed without evidence. The author doesn't seem credible looking at their LinkedIn either.
88913527 4y ago
Can you fire 80% of doctors and a hospital will survive? Probably, the janitorial staff will still come in, and the light switch will still light a bulb. As a sibling comment notes, the degree to which employees are expendable and measure of survivability is key. Business types will erroneously think they can fire 80% of the staff, keep the lights on, and keep up new feature development. The biggest risk with this sort of minimizing thinking is thinking you can achieve more with less: you often can't, especially when it comes to the large business environments this article specifically carves out (the concept does not apply to small and medium sized businesses). Growth often comes with dead weight. You can't 10x your staff overnight and expect the same output per engineer. And as you grow, your organizational structure impacts your architecture (Conway's law). The downsizing frequently is an unwinnable scenario, and people need to recognize that going into it.
- 3a2d29 4y ago
  I mean you can certainly fire 80% of engineers and the software still runs. Most workers if you fire 80%, there is an immediate drop in production. I think the loss of engineers is felt on a more long-term basis.
  - dopidopHN 4y ago
    I mean, it’s all about building fancy automation right? It’s not surprising that our faithful machines keep generating heat and maybe money. Then, how long can that last ? Probably a while. I’ve been in mostly sinking ships. People are way more replaceable that we think. In a good way. But mistake are made. Quality drop. New features halt. Turnover rise….
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > Can you fire 80% of doctors and a hospital will survive? Probably the hospital, the building, would survive even with no doctors, but the patients wouldn't. It's not the same thing for software. Software is not really alive in the first place and doesn't need anything more than electricity to keep running.
ck2 4y ago
How does the joke go? "It's called medium because most of the articles aren't very well done" ? Enough with the twitter analysis already, just let him finish running it into the ground and after he fails to make the first or second billion dollar annual financing payment someone else will finally just take over or sell the domain.
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  isn't it much too early to know where Elons decisions are positive or negative for twitter? I understand they're negative for the emotional well being of a lot of twitter users, but for the company itself, we surely need to wait for data to come through.
  - ck2 4y ago
    It's not rocket science and doesn't need a "million man hours" to figure out what he is trying to do. Twitter takes in $5 Billion per year but spends most of that on costs to operate. So he thinks he's clever and just has to cut operating costs by a billion per year and "tada" profitable enough to pay financing of a BILLION PER YEAR Except you can't kick out three legs of a table and expect it to keep working like it used to, or at all. Anyway he can do whatever he wants, my only curiosity is if this teaches people they can just quit twitter as there are plenty of better alternatives or will be soon. Once people learn the "quitting skill" then maybe they can use it on Facebook etc.
  - ReflectedImage 4y ago
    It's not too early, there are already cracks appearing in Twitter.
jmuguy 4y ago
If you fired 80% of just the developers at Twitter yeah you’re right, it would probably survive at least in the short term. That isn’t what happened. Entire departments serving all sorts of functions were wiped out. Hell you have advertisers, you know… Twitters customers, backing out just bc they can’t get anyone on the phone there. It’s stupid, period.
dehrmann 4y ago
> BTW. Figuring it who is the core team is not that complicated. You just ask everybody to name five people who are doing well and who they want to work with again (in the next company). Then, sort employees by votes, and viola, at the top, you will get your true core team (which may not match perfectly to seniority, number of lines of code written, etc.). This will get you a list of solid team players. It's a list of who can keep a company going, but not the company.
ZephyrBlu 4y ago
Something I've come to believe is that in large tech companies the Pareto principle is not true because only 20% of SWEs are good and the rest suck. More likely, the majority of engineers are blocked in some way from delivering. Dependencies on other teams, management constantly changing their mind, having to put out fires, helping other teams, etc. There are very few teams where this kind of thing doesn't happen. Also, something to keep in mind when saying things like "you can fire 80% of your SWEs and survive" is slack. You might survive, but have no slack which means any sort of tail event is going to destroy your company.
- 88913527 4y ago
  There's smart, but then there's creative. Smart engineers might be wizards of mastering the technology, but creative engineers will re-define the problem domain such that their team can deliver without being blocked by other teams, which is a frequent problem in large organizations. Solving business problems effectively is a different skillset from pure mastery of technology (though, you really do need both).
  - ZephyrBlu 4y ago
    I understand this. I've been told a few times I can unblock myself very quickly, but at some point it becomes unreasonable. As a non-Staff IC, I probably can't unblock myself if my problem spans across multiple teams. For a manager/Staff eng, unblocking across a different org is probably infeasible. It feels like Director+ is when it becomes your responsibility to unblock things no matter what. Ex: the "Being a Leader Means Never Saying “That’s Not My Problem”" section in this article https://staysaasy.com/leadership/2022/08/15/how-to-break-into-senior-management.html https://staysaasy.com/leadership/2022/08/15/how-to-break-int...
  - lazide 4y ago
    Large companies build up armies of folks to stop SWEs from doing this. It’s literally what auditing, compliance, etc. do. Because short term optimizations teams do to get things out almost always cause larger (global) risks, from everything from new attack surfaces to yet-another-copy-of-user-data that now can get leaked because it isn’t actually protected the way it is supposed to be. Near as I can tell from stories, Twitter was already maxing out the auditing and compliance bypassing to get things done, so yikes on the long term fallout here.
syrrim 4y ago
I think many people would have argued beforehand that twitter in particular was overstaffed, and that you could safely cut large portions of their employees without much loss. In properly run companies, employees are already justified in terms of revenue or other value they bring to the company. If you fire them, you know concretely what the company will lose. Twitter was notoriously unprofitable, and the employees were instead justified in terms of the greenfield work they were doing to bring the company into profitability in the future. Except that clearly wasn't happening, and probably would never happen if they continued down the same trajectory. I don't think there are many lessons regarding that that generalize to other companies. We might carve out a category of company called a "post-startup", being a company that has gone through the startup phase of rapid growth in userbase, but that never moved onto the stage of "established company", owing to a difficulty finding their proper business model. Such a company might reasonably benefit from a large staff reduction. For other companies this is less clear.
- threeseed 4y ago
  > many people would have argued beforehand that twitter in particular was overstaffed Based on what. Have any of these people worked at Twitter or have any metrics benchmarking it against its peers.
  - nindalf 4y ago
    Based on "many people are saying". It's circular reasoning at best. 80% of employees were fired because it was overstaffed, and since the site is still up afterwards, Twitter was overstaffed.
    - threeseed 4y ago
      Plane without a pilot will still fly for quite some time. Doesn't mean the pilot is superfluous. And my point still stands that there is no empirical evidence that Twitter was overstaffed. We do know that their revenue/employee back in 2020 was better than many other startups e.g. Shopify, Zoom. https://twitter.com/RyanReeves_/status/1423013707190206464?lang=en https://twitter.com/RyanReeves_/status/1423013707190206464?l...
woodruffw 4y ago
> The Pareto principle is “80% of consequences come from 20% of causes”. And as an extension of this, 80% of results are delivered by 20% of engineers. As an extension of this, I propose we remove 4/5ths of each airliner. The 20% that remains, so long as we pick the right 20%, will surely fly correctly. Seriously: who writes this dreck? You don't have to believe that every single employee at a company is productive or necessary to understand that you can't saddle your remaining employees, even if you picked the "right" ones, with the remaining workload.
- whateveracct 4y ago
  The management class does not want this Twitter ordeal (likely a huge public failure) making engineers think their skills give them power over companies.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    I agree completely. On top of that, it feels like classic "magical" thinking by a manager who doesn't understand technical scope or split responsibilities. Why bother to understand why you've hired so many people before blithely opining that 4/5ths of them are fireable? Who the hell wants to work for someone who says things like that? Certainly not the "high-quality" engineers who are supposedly being separated from the chaff.
  - mmmpop 4y ago
    How do you define "public failure"? My definition would be entirely contingent upon the intentions of the new owner since it's his to do with what he pleases. If said owner is well into middle age and bored, but has more money than literally any other person...? Who am I to judge what he decides to do with it? "It's just money" says Elon and if his goal were to be the world's most massive troll (which I suspect is a large part of it), then it's achievement accomplished, full stop.
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      At least to my mind, "public failure" includes but isn't limited to embarrassing outages and service degradation on one of the world's most popular social media sites, one that was more or less running smoothly immediately prior.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gonzo41 4y ago
You can't grow though, and you'll continue to degrade. Your market position will be static. You will get disrupted. Fat staffing at tech companies is about securing the future as much as the present.
- prawn 4y ago
  I agree. I have a semi-social website that I neglect for months on end and it trundles along, but it certainly doesn't grow and mostly erodes. With larger social companies, outside the tech part, there are inevitably marketing/outreach teams in popular/growth regions of the world building campaigns in conjunction with niches or brands.
kristopolous 4y ago
This is all wrong. You can only build great products with people who have enough wherewithal to exercise their personal agency. When the agency being exercised is departure you get two remainers - the zealots and the hanger-ons. You can try to roll the clock back to a nimble pivot or preserve startup but you're looking at wildly different skillsets to make that work and those people have likely just left. It's possible to pump out great things with this configuration, but only a fool would sign up for the task. Or maybe a Michael Milken who fancies himself as a Steve Jobs.
egberts1 4y ago
Ah, it's a good idea to be giving ideas to CEOs and shareholders, oh wait.
throwyawayyyy 4y ago
Sure, you can cut 80% of anything and things will run just fine for a while. You could even stop paying your bills, and nothing bad would happen for a month or two, as invoices pile up. In fact I'd guess that you could cut 100% of UX and Product and no one would much notice for a year or so. So, why not do that? Because for all that we talk about short-termism, companies are long-term entities. Shares in a company are valuable now _because they will probably be valuable in 20 years time too_. So such self-mutilation is rare. > And one last thing. The company that has deep enough pockets can survive tons of shit. If you wave a check big enough, you will find people willing to go through hell and back and who will drag the company forward. I believe this is a very important point. I felt that we (software engineers) sometimes have too big egos believing that if enough software engineers left, the company will fall apart. The reality is that (big money) can help navigate quite dire circumstances for companies. Does Twitter have deep pockets? And if it offered you whatever it would take for you to spend some months in hell, do you trust that it would be able to pay? Twitter is in an awful situation, and in sharp distinction to Musk's previous near-death experiences, there's no government coming to bail him out.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  Musk’s thesis was that twitters product team was utterly ineffective though. If you think “this business hasn’t built anything that provides an ounce of value for a decade” why wouldn’t you go into “survival” mode while you attempt to rebuild the culture?
  - vernon99 4y ago
    Exactly this. This survival mode is obviously temporary to do a hard reset of culture, processes and codebase. With Twitter getting a much better balance sheet, what would stop them from hiring more great folks again in 3-6 months? I think a lot of people and in this thread included really underestimate negative impact of poor product innovation culture. This hard reset is the only way imo.
    - YokoZar 4y ago
crackercrews 4y ago
Seems important that there have been lots of layoffs elsewhere. Some percent of those laid off would take a job at Twitter. This is a big change from the last many years, when SWE hiring was very competitive. New hires won't know the internals of Twitter but they can dive in and help. They can also be motivated by equity-heavy comp packages.
- threeseed 4y ago
  If you are good at your job I doubt you will put up with Twitter's treatment of employees e.g. lack of vision, late nights and long weeks, inflexible work arrangements, public belittlement of your contributions etc. And given that it's a private company not sure whether you would expect compensation other than salary.
  - crackercrews 4y ago
    Good point about private company equity. Probably they'd use cash bonuses instead. I think you underestimate how much some people would like to see Twitter 2.0 succeed. Lots of people didn't love how censorious Twitter had become and want to help build something better. I have several friends who are interested in working there. It does sound like it will be long hours. But for some people that will be a badge of honor. Most of my interested friends are not married so have fewer other priorities.
    - nebula8804 4y ago
      This is just my thought but I think you are overestimating the intersection of people who truly care about culture war stuff and the "deeply experienced" engineering community that values gaining the skill and experience to be able to build something like Twitter. When that engineer explained the RPC calls to Musk the other day the replies were very telling in the sense that people who spend their time talking about how "freedom is back at Twitter" or how the employees are getting their comeuppance don't seem to really internalize how much effort is required to build and maintain these services. Maybe there is a cadre of conservative freedom loving experienced techies hiding in the shadows but I haven't seen them. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, I watched the whole Parler collapse saga caused by a lack of mastery and experience in their chosen technologies and it really instilled in me the idea of appreciating the drive of learning and open mindedness. The conservative movement seems to have a disdain for deep learning of a specific field. They are setting themselves up to be left behind in the tech revolution.
ohCh6zos 4y ago
For most of my career I've worked at or consulted with very small companies. I had a bit of a shock taking a short job at a very large company. The sheer number of people who didn't seem to do anything was massive.
- sibeliuss 4y ago
  Truth. I'm shocked by it every day. Folks can easily get by without pushing a single commit for a month.
somesortofthing 4y ago
This might be slightly true for a small subset of companies, but given that this is clearly about Twitter, you absolutely can't "survive" in any meaningful way. What is possible without 80% of the engineers is keeping the core services running at the current capacity, with no room for dealing with emergent issues. That's about it, and that's all Twitter has really demonstrated so far. Forget about new products, forget about improvements to existing products, forget infrastructure work/cost optimization, forget not having major data breaches regularly, forget mitigating large-scale security vulnerabilities(i.e. log4j), forget being able to capitalize on market trends on a useful timescale, and forget about the ability to deal with situations that require more engineering capacity that your company uses on an average day. Entering "survival mode" and keeping only enough engineering capacity on board to keep the service running on a normal day is implicitly a bet that no emergent events are going to demand more capacity from you than is needed on that normal day. The product might be standing now, but you can't do anything useful with a paralyzed company that's going to topple over the first time it faces a stiff breeze.
- typingmonkey 4y ago
  Isnt that what twitter has already done in the last years?
  - kaba0 4y ago
    I don’t think so. The tech stack is (was) quite impressive, if we don’t forget that Twitter is basically a real-time read-write database which is famously hard to scale/distribute.
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      WhatsApp did it for a billion daily active users (Twitter has/had more or less 200 million active users/day) with 50 engineers. Using Erlang. Tiwtter uses Scala that should be much more scalabale, considering the staggering amount of money spent on the JVM compared to the BEAM.
unwise-exe 4y ago
BTW. Figuring it who is the core team is not that complicated. You just ask everybody to name five people who are doing well and who they want to work with again (in the next company). Then, sort employees by votes, and viola, at the top, you will get your true core team (which may not match perfectly to seniority, number of lines of code written, etc.). --- Are those newfangled 360 reviews really that much more effective than other review processes? And of course this fails to account for how nobody likes, say, those meddling busybodies on the security team, or those idiots at the support desk who always make you unplug and restart things before letting you explain what the real issue is; or how everyone likes that one person who always brings donuts and spends more time being friendly with other teams than actually working.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  > newfangled 360 reviews well they were an exercise in bullshit back at amazon in 2001...
  - baby 4y ago
    I would agree, same at Meta
lamontcg 4y ago
> BTW. Figuring it who is the core team is not that complicated. You just ask everybody to name five people who are doing well and who they want to work with again (in the next company). Then, sort employees by votes, and viola, at the top, you will get your true core team (which may not match perfectly to seniority, number of lines of code written, etc.). Doubt. Employees often have very imperfect information into what other employees are doing in their day to day jobs. The team that looks lazy because they don't immediately prioritize your bugs and requests may be understaffed compared to the operational load. And unsexy jobs that keep the operation running may be done very well by people who aren't part of the most popular kids, but you'll wind up missing them once they're gone.
layer8 4y ago
This has interesting consequences when applied recursively.
- tbatchelli 4y ago
  Right, same as the saying “you can control expenses but you cannot control revenue”, as the logic to cut expenses; if applied recursively you end up with $0 expenses…and and $0 revenue.
hayst4ck 4y ago
> On the other hand, Elon Musk (and Twitter) can dangle a big enough carrot to pursue a reasonable number of workaholics to stick around (and +hire some new ones) to move the company forward. I couldn't help but read "H1B slaves" in place of workaholics. That might sound mildly hyperbolic, but if you can force someone out of the country, that gives you tyrannical power over them. The power imbalance is so large it must be seen as coercive. I'd be very interested to see the H1B demographics of post Musk Twitter. https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/politics/twitter-layoffs-visas-h1b https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/politics/twitter-layoffs-visa... > “Firing folks who are on a H-1B in a major economic downturn is not just putting them out of the job, it’s tantamount to ruining their lives,” one former employee told CNN, adding that some people who had accepted Musk’s ultimatum had accepted it “out of self-preservation.” > For that reason, some staff at Twitter who are on H-1B visas are staying on despite wanting to leave the company, a former employee told CNN, adding that they’re “concerned with being forced into a flooded job market where they may be unable to find a job and before being forced out of the country.”
- iwillbenice 4y ago
4b11b4 4y ago
Everyone is speculating for now. My speculation is they will entirely rewrite the core of the software.
- random314 4y ago
  And what purpose would that serve?
  - Macha 4y ago
    I also suspect they will attempt this. A system to be maintained by 100 engineers needs to be simpler than one maintained by 2000 engineers but in a normally run business that kind of simplification would never get pursued over short-medium term incremental revenue. However pulling that off successfully while maintaining the existing platform on a skeleton crew and also replicating everything their users and customers expect (when said customers are already pausing spending in concern) doesn't lead me to expect success
    - random314 4y ago
      I don't think any engineer left would have the bandwidth to attempt anything like a rewrite. It would be DOA.
      - Macha 4y ago
        Oh, I don't think they'd have the bandwidth to pull it off either. But I think Elon has whittled the engineering team down to those who think as he does and those too scared to contradict him and he's publicly stated that he thinks their microservices based architecture is too complicated. So I don't see a successful rewrite happening but I do see an attempted one coming.
        random314 4y ago
        True.
Gustomaximus 4y ago
See Prices Law https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/ https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/ The key question is how to you find & keep the 100 or so key people from a 7,500 company when reducing numbers.
atishay811 4y ago
You can also fire the CXOs and keep promoting from within at 1% the current CXO stock options with a 10 year vesting cliff and the company will survive - may actually do a lot better.
chrismcb 4y ago
You can probably fire 4/5ths of any company and they would survive. But that doesn't mean only 20% of the people are working You'll lose parts of the businesses. You will fall to grow. Things would take longer to get done. That doesn't mean you need all those employees either. But it isn't just about survival
rrwo 4y ago
A company like Twitter isn't made up of just "software engineers". Besides writing software, (likely different) people are deploying and running it, testing and integrating it with other systems, monitoring it, securing it. Also, some of the people who have been working at a company for a long time know the systems in detail. They may not be the people who'd win a popularity contest, but you don't want these people to suddenly leave.
sargstuff 4y ago
Ummm.... devil's advocate: allowing for just integer value software engineer count, 80% percent of startup with just 1 software engineer leaves 0 software engineers in startup company of 1. Allowing for accountant, still gives an off by 1 error. Including a legal professional & accountant will at least allow for resolution of company issues without rehiring a software engineer. Still think if a company needs to involve software engineer, removal of 80% of software engineer, the total software engineer count less 80% needs to total 1 or more. Hopefully this wasn't the bean counter reasoning for minimum employees required for company health plan.
andrewflnr 4y ago
Even if Twitter survives, I think we'll find "survive" is a far cry from "provides ROI for $44B". Anyway, there's every indication that Elon took no particular effort to keep the "right" 20%. Also the whole argument is much more tenuous when applied to ops and moderation staff, rather than "software engineers". It's the loss of ops staff that (to me at least) seems most likely to kill Twitter.
albertopv 4y ago
No serious company would survive if so many sw eng left, because also clients/customer will leave the moment they know it, fearing loss of functionality, security, support...
jemmyw 4y ago
That's a generalisation and I don't think it works. Many companies run a lean engineering team that makes sense for their product. Twitter didn't and I really truly don't believe they needed as many as they had to work on their product. I know, from talking to someone who left just before the buy out that they just had too many people working on too many things that never even saw the light of day. Hire to work on your core product and for specific purpose. Don't let managers hire willy nilly to grow their fiefdom.
whatever1 4y ago
My car also keeps on going when I release the throttle. It also self drives if I let the steering wheel. Until it doesn’t.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
physicsguy 4y ago
You can probably survive if you fire the right 80%, but if you fire people who are pretty integral to particular services at random, you might not keep the lights on for long enough…
PeterStuer 4y ago
Since this is about Twitter, let us not pretend all of those fired were software engineers.
LatteLazy 4y ago
You can tell this was written by a human. If an Algo wrote it, it would be better.
rhaway84773 4y ago
The author is right that money can correct a lot of wrongs, and that’s what we will probably see in Twitter for a while. One of the problems with cutting 80% of the workforce even if you know which 20% is useful and manage to only spare them is that competitors exist. You don’t just need people to make sure your product works, but you also need people to make sure your product runs slightly better than every competitor. An existing social graph is a significant moat, but it’s not foolproof. The problem is that if we assume that the 20% useful people can be identified perfectly, then someone else could build a company that has 25% more useful people than the company that just cut 80% of its staff and probably out deliver you for long enough that they’d be able to easily chip into the moat you’ve built fairly quickly. As an aside, the Pareto principle is often misused and isn’t close to being any sort of law. It applies in vastly fewer situations that it doesn’t apply in…try applying the Pareto principle to the floor of any manufacturing facility, for example.
Markoff 4y ago
"If the company is left only with 20% of engineers (even the best ones), it will be way deep in survival mode (just barely providing support for an existing product, not building some new exciting things or even improving existing ones)." This is completely ignoring the number of engineers you start with. Let's say you have Twitter with 10000 engineers and Twitter with 40000 engineers, in one case I end up with 2000 engineers, in other with 8000 engineers, you are telling me the result will be same? First you need to find out how big overemployment and how productive employees you have to come up with some percentages, some companies are efficient, some companies ar stagnating hardly introducing any new features over years (cough Twitter cough), so clearly there is big overhead of engineers.
Onanymous 4y ago
And maybe even do better. The trick is to know who exactly to put in those 80%.
rugina 4y ago
If the Pareto principle is always true, just keep on firing 80% of the remaining engineers until the company runs without developers.
windex 4y ago
Stupid broad brush articles and theories like this will screw everyone. The author thinks work is a game show.
fooker 4y ago
I think a lot of people are not considering something important here. What if it actually works out for Twitter? If it does, this will set the baseline for how you can treat software developers. The special treatment (in compensation, flexibility, etc) we seem to enjoy over other white collar professions will be gone.
- nebula8804 4y ago
  Some have talked about this being the ultimate goal for Musk and his tech buddies. A repeat of the 80s style of acquiring a company, stripping it down and turning it around for a quick profit which reduced any power left from the employees. So far that hasn't happened with tech and tech workers have had a unique position that others have not had in a long time. This Twitter saga might be a proof of concept of how many tech companies can be stripped bare (if it succeeds at Twitter) I hate to think about it but from my point of view it seems as if I should be rooting for Twitter to catastrophically fail so that the tech elitists who are trying to make this a thing will have to go back to the drawing board for now.
oh_my_goodness 4y ago
Yeah, viola. Sure.
Havoc 4y ago
I don’t think the vote 5 people approach would work. Popularity and pleasant to work with does not equal core team. Not even close
vinyl7 4y ago
Lots of engineers in this thread think they're more important than they really are
Communitivity 4y ago
Maybe, but consider this. First, you are unlikely to get a 1:1 overlap between the 20% staff you retain and the most impactful 20%. Next, business is not a sprint, it's a marathon relay race - the people you need will depend on the product, development phase, and market changes. Last, there is a difference between survive and thrive. Your business may limp along on life-support until it recovers (in part from re-hiring enough staff), or more likely, dies a slow agonizing death. If you cut 80% of your staff I think the loss of institutional knowledge alone could prevent thriving. These are some of the reports to consider: * Twitter had around 7500 staff when Elon Musk purchased it. Twitter by many accounts now has less than 1000 staff. Some accounts place that number less than 500. * I think the losses aren't done. Elon Musk reportedly started reviewing every coder's performance, accomplishments over the last six months, and code snippets. He might be going to give the best of them a bonus (inciting jealousy and possible resignations in some of the others). More likely in my opinion, he's going to fire more people. * Advertisers are seeming to shun Twitter now. See GroupM's labeling of Twitter a 'high risk' [1]. Hiring, or re-hiring, needed staff will be hard with the volatility perceived and with a lack of money as inducement. I love Twitter, and use it for many things. It's too early to say Twitter's ultimate fate for certain, but I suspect this Thanksgiving will be Twitter's last. Banks could always buy a failing Twitter and bring it back. Who knows? [1] https://digiday.com/marketing/never-been-critical-twitters-ad-boycott-is-starting-to-look-like-a-long-goodbye/ https://digiday.com/marketing/never-been-critical-twitters-a...
dTal 4y ago
In other news, on the same page of HN discussions, Twitter is beginning to fail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33692179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33692179
tyronehed 4y ago
thefz 4y ago
Programmers are one thing. But what about DevOps, internal infrastructure engineers and general IT, cloud architects... ?
taylodl 4y ago
Since we're talking about Twitter, let me point out the Titanic didn't immediately sink when she struck the iceberg. Things can appear fine for some time before they catastrophically fail. Software is no exception. Twitter is no longer positioned to add any new services or abilities. The Twitter we had is the best Twitter will ever be. Maybe that's enough. More likely is people have left who are key to maintaining operational excellence. Like the Titanic, their absence may not be noticed for some time. My initial takeaway from this disaster isn't you can let 80% of your engineers go and you'll be just fine. Though I'm quite happy for my competitors to draw that conclusion!
- abirch 4y ago
  Apple could absolutely fire 80% of their engineers. It'd be stupid, but they could do it and look great for 6-12 months until everything starts to fall apart.
  - taylodl 4y ago
    Exactly. It's a short-term play. I'm hoping my competitors would believe they can make this a long-term play! :)
jti107 4y ago
this guy is completely misapplying the Pareto principle. if you lose the devs that are responsible for 50-80% of the work, your company is crippled. another point is twitter isn’t a pure tech company…it’s an ad business on a tech platform. if all the sales and content people quit or are fired I question the long term (2+ years) survivability especially with 10+ billion in debt and annual 1+ billion loan payments
FrontierPsych 4y ago
What that guy says, and most of the posts here say, are not correct, IMO. 20% of the customers pay 80% of the revenue. You can't just willy-nilly cut any 80%. You have to look at the actual sales per customer and only then cut the 80% that are time wasters. If you have 1000 engineers, you MUST know which specific engineers are the 200 that are delivering 80% of the results. If you have 200 salespeople, you have to know which exact and specific 40 salespeople you keep and the 160 that you fire. . But the problem in many companies that suck, or it was a good company and now it sucks, is that generally, the best employees, the 20%, have the most options. If they get too much problems, those 20% will be the first out the door. So the company starts getting into a death spiral. As more of the top 20% leave, that means the remaining top 20% will have to do the work of the ones that left. And soon they will say no way and they will quit, until all that is left is the 80% that does 20% of the work. I have nothing against the 80/20 heuristic, but like most things, you better know exactly what you're talking about. Also, in any company, every company, top management should know exactly who the best employees are, and treat them way better than anyone else. You bend over backwards for them. You do not treat all employees equally. It is an utter disaster to lose a golden goose employee, in any capacity, a top 20% receptionist, a top 20% janitor - doesn't matter. All top 20%-ers are top 20%-ers. Bend over backwards to keep your top 20% janitor if you have 100 janitors because you have a really really big building, treat the 20% top priority - get the CEO to talk the top 20% janitor if needed. If nothing else, it is good corporate self-discipline. Because the more top 20's you have in every area, they all feed off of each other's energy.

80 points by victorronin 4y ago

I think we need to define “survive” to discuss this without just talking past each other. If “survive” means, won’t immediately collapse and can continue on for months to years while extracting value I’d agree. If “survive” instead means that they can’t both do required maintenance to keep the company operating _and_ simultaneously build out new features and aspects of the business, Kim not sure I’m as convinced

ajsnigrutin 4y ago
Do we really need new features in everything? I mean, I understand the business point, more features, higher price, higher chances someone will buy product for feature X.. but I've seen feature creep, where a good app that did one thing great, now becomes a bloated mess, because they added one feature, and another, and another,... First it's just a file browser.. then it starts with a text editor.. then image viewer, pluus cloud support (dropbox, onedrive,...), then file sync, backup solution, package management, image editor, music player, video player, and in the end, with all the "streamlining" added, you've got a 300mb app that just lost the ability to sort files by size, but which can now order food delivery for you. What new features does eg. twitter need?
- threeseed 4y ago
  > What new features does eg. twitter need? Advertising features. It's overall advertising story lacks a lot of the capabilities of Facebook/Google which is why it's a distant 3rd in total ad-spend. This is where those employee cuts are going to be most felt because this is directly tied to revenue. And whilst overall advertising is down there was still a huge opportunity for Twitter to grow.
- kingTug 4y ago
  Just running thru some software in my head and there's a ton of stuff I'd still use the MVP version of. If Reddit was developmentally arrested in 2010 I'd still be wasting the same number of hours there everyday. Talk about a company that creates bloat!
  - 6510 4y ago
    I don't know what units to use but if we count the buckets of progress from the first computer to today the industry has become like government tinkering with a tiny number of laws while most buckets of law had already been developed. Our food? Our culture? Our language? What part did we play in making those? We added the word tweeting and are now trying to figure out what it should mean? ha-ha
  - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
    Does anyone that used old reddit even use the new redesign? Yep, a lot of older version were a lot better than the current ones
- lovich 4y ago
  The new features Twitter needs might be as simple as implementing new standards that keep the status quo. No tech company produces 100% of the software it relies on and eventually they hit changes that go beyond maintenance and hit “rearchitect the platform”. Just in my own experience I once inherited ~20 .net 3.5 projects that needed to be updated to support tls 1.2 which required going up to 4.5?4.7? Can’t recall beyond it needing a major version update. The company was then hit with the decision of either doing a multi month effort to update all the inconsistencies between those version for the minimum viable product of updates or spend a year ish to get onto .net core and be ahead of the update schedule. That was one set of decisions and work for a team of 8, solely to maintain status quo, for a relatively tiny company. Tech companies as they have all currently organized themselves, cannot just run with minor maintenance
- acdha 4y ago
  Ongoing improvement in tools for dealing with abuse. This has three major components, none trivial: ensuring that users keep enjoying the service and aren’t turned off by spam or harassment, keeping things appealing to advertisers, and complying with government regulations. I describe this as ongoing because it has human adversaries and they’re often quite dedicated and/or paid to do things like spam or shape public option so the problem shifts but is never solved.
  - autotune 4y ago
    It's funny that Lord Elon whined about abuse from bots then immediately fired the teams that could prevent it.
- nickthegreek 4y ago
  Twitter needs whatever features the customers want so they can increase their DAU’s to a rate that will drive their profits to pay off the debt. He can’t coast with the current feature set as it has shown that it can’t pay the bills.
- rrwo 4y ago
  You need people to monitor bwhat users are doing. They realize that users are doing X and Y manually to do Z. So you implement feature Z. If you don't, then a competitor that implements Z might become more appealing to users. But features are not always user-visible. New features are regularly added to web browsers and phones, and it's often in your interest as a web site or app developer to make use of them.
odessacubbage 4y ago
how many of twitter's new features marked an increase in revenue or market-share? it seems like twitter's main innovation in recent years has been inventing increasingly byzantine procedures to cull users from their platform, including their most revenue generative power-user: donald trump.

dehrmann 4y ago

I'm curious to see how this pans out for Twitter. I suspect this is true in theory, but in practice, finding the right 20% is hard, you can't do it as bluntly as Musk, and the "extremely hardcore" ultimatum will scare away people in that 20% who will take a few months severance to be done with the drama.

bediger4000 4y ago

Shouldn't you put a reasonable time limit on "survive", like oncologists do? A 5 year survival on 20% staff seems unreasonably long, but a couple of weeks is too short for such a verdict.

logicalmonster 4y ago

1) I think most software companies can probably survive with far fewer programmers if they were willing to cut dumb features. Are they though? Bloat is kind of a lot of businesses business. 2) For what it's worth, the Twitter employees let go were not just programmers, but also fulfilled other roles. I'm not quite sure what percentage of programmers Twitter lost, but I bet they lost a much higher percentage of other roles such as HR and content moderators. > BTW. Figuring it who is the core team is not that complicated. You just ask everybody to name five people who are doing well and who they want to work with again (in the next company). For what it's worth, this might yield a misleading answer because it could become a popularity contest. The charismatic guy who plays office politics and tries to make everybody their pal might score highly here, but the smart engineer who just sits down quietly and churns out good features might be forgotten.

mikrl 4y ago
> The charismatic guy who plays office politics and tries to make everybody their pal might score highly here, but the smart engineer who just sits down quietly and churns out good features might be forgotten. Well it is a software engineering company/business is it not? The socially connected engineer will know more people who can be leveraged to meet the goals of the organization, even if they themselves are not as capable in isolation. If businesses were judged on metrics like “most autonomous engineers who can write perfect code” then the businessy types would be disadvantaged (and the company would fold)
- dopidopHN 4y ago
  Yeah exactly. Having someone who know reliably who knows what and how to get that person time and attention is important. Specially in corporate settings where the gears need greasing. People are not gonna magically do the right things. They want context and understand why you are talking to them.
  - mikrl 4y ago
    I constantly get told off by my boss for trying to be too clean and extensible at the expense of timely delivery (ie yesterday) but I am also the socially connected engineer who knows who’s good at what, and how to butter them up. In my mind I’m not getting paid to write nice code, I’m getting paid to help ensure the software side of things keeps expanding without breaking within constraints of time and money. I’m very happy when this involves writing code but I’m also happy if this involves brokering, nudging, reminding, motivating, flirting, cajoling or otherwise positively interacting with the highly talented people I work with. Social skills don’t come naturally to me, but the time investment spent figuring out the rules/heuristics has given me more bang-for-buck than any other lang.

rosywoozlechan 4y ago

Since this claim about company survival after firing 80% of engineers has been presented without evidence, it can be dismissed without evidence. The author doesn't seem credible looking at their LinkedIn either.

88913527 4y ago

Can you fire 80% of doctors and a hospital will survive? Probably, the janitorial staff will still come in, and the light switch will still light a bulb. As a sibling comment notes, the degree to which employees are expendable and measure of survivability is key. Business types will erroneously think they can fire 80% of the staff, keep the lights on, and keep up new feature development. The biggest risk with this sort of minimizing thinking is thinking you can achieve more with less: you often can't, especially when it comes to the large business environments this article specifically carves out (the concept does not apply to small and medium sized businesses). Growth often comes with dead weight. You can't 10x your staff overnight and expect the same output per engineer. And as you grow, your organizational structure impacts your architecture (Conway's law). The downsizing frequently is an unwinnable scenario, and people need to recognize that going into it.

3a2d29 4y ago
I mean you can certainly fire 80% of engineers and the software still runs. Most workers if you fire 80%, there is an immediate drop in production. I think the loss of engineers is felt on a more long-term basis.
- dopidopHN 4y ago
  I mean, it’s all about building fancy automation right? It’s not surprising that our faithful machines keep generating heat and maybe money. Then, how long can that last ? Probably a while. I’ve been in mostly sinking ships. People are way more replaceable that we think. In a good way. But mistake are made. Quality drop. New features halt. Turnover rise….
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> Can you fire 80% of doctors and a hospital will survive? Probably the hospital, the building, would survive even with no doctors, but the patients wouldn't. It's not the same thing for software. Software is not really alive in the first place and doesn't need anything more than electricity to keep running.

ck2 4y ago

How does the joke go? "It's called medium because most of the articles aren't very well done" ? Enough with the twitter analysis already, just let him finish running it into the ground and after he fails to make the first or second billion dollar annual financing payment someone else will finally just take over or sell the domain.

LAC-Tech 4y ago
isn't it much too early to know where Elons decisions are positive or negative for twitter? I understand they're negative for the emotional well being of a lot of twitter users, but for the company itself, we surely need to wait for data to come through.
- ck2 4y ago
  It's not rocket science and doesn't need a "million man hours" to figure out what he is trying to do. Twitter takes in $5 Billion per year but spends most of that on costs to operate. So he thinks he's clever and just has to cut operating costs by a billion per year and "tada" profitable enough to pay financing of a BILLION PER YEAR Except you can't kick out three legs of a table and expect it to keep working like it used to, or at all. Anyway he can do whatever he wants, my only curiosity is if this teaches people they can just quit twitter as there are plenty of better alternatives or will be soon. Once people learn the "quitting skill" then maybe they can use it on Facebook etc.
- ReflectedImage 4y ago
  It's not too early, there are already cracks appearing in Twitter.

jmuguy 4y ago

If you fired 80% of just the developers at Twitter yeah you’re right, it would probably survive at least in the short term. That isn’t what happened. Entire departments serving all sorts of functions were wiped out. Hell you have advertisers, you know… Twitters customers, backing out just bc they can’t get anyone on the phone there. It’s stupid, period.

dehrmann 4y ago

ZephyrBlu 4y ago

Something I've come to believe is that in large tech companies the Pareto principle is not true because only 20% of SWEs are good and the rest suck. More likely, the majority of engineers are blocked in some way from delivering. Dependencies on other teams, management constantly changing their mind, having to put out fires, helping other teams, etc. There are very few teams where this kind of thing doesn't happen. Also, something to keep in mind when saying things like "you can fire 80% of your SWEs and survive" is slack. You might survive, but have no slack which means any sort of tail event is going to destroy your company.

88913527 4y ago
There's smart, but then there's creative. Smart engineers might be wizards of mastering the technology, but creative engineers will re-define the problem domain such that their team can deliver without being blocked by other teams, which is a frequent problem in large organizations. Solving business problems effectively is a different skillset from pure mastery of technology (though, you really do need both).
- ZephyrBlu 4y ago
  I understand this. I've been told a few times I can unblock myself very quickly, but at some point it becomes unreasonable. As a non-Staff IC, I probably can't unblock myself if my problem spans across multiple teams. For a manager/Staff eng, unblocking across a different org is probably infeasible. It feels like Director+ is when it becomes your responsibility to unblock things no matter what. Ex: the "Being a Leader Means Never Saying “That’s Not My Problem”" section in this article https://staysaasy.com/leadership/2022/08/15/how-to-break-into-senior-management.html https://staysaasy.com/leadership/2022/08/15/how-to-break-int...
- lazide 4y ago
  Large companies build up armies of folks to stop SWEs from doing this. It’s literally what auditing, compliance, etc. do. Because short term optimizations teams do to get things out almost always cause larger (global) risks, from everything from new attack surfaces to yet-another-copy-of-user-data that now can get leaked because it isn’t actually protected the way it is supposed to be. Near as I can tell from stories, Twitter was already maxing out the auditing and compliance bypassing to get things done, so yikes on the long term fallout here.

syrrim 4y ago

I think many people would have argued beforehand that twitter in particular was overstaffed, and that you could safely cut large portions of their employees without much loss. In properly run companies, employees are already justified in terms of revenue or other value they bring to the company. If you fire them, you know concretely what the company will lose. Twitter was notoriously unprofitable, and the employees were instead justified in terms of the greenfield work they were doing to bring the company into profitability in the future. Except that clearly wasn't happening, and probably would never happen if they continued down the same trajectory. I don't think there are many lessons regarding that that generalize to other companies. We might carve out a category of company called a "post-startup", being a company that has gone through the startup phase of rapid growth in userbase, but that never moved onto the stage of "established company", owing to a difficulty finding their proper business model. Such a company might reasonably benefit from a large staff reduction. For other companies this is less clear.

threeseed 4y ago
> many people would have argued beforehand that twitter in particular was overstaffed Based on what. Have any of these people worked at Twitter or have any metrics benchmarking it against its peers.
- nindalf 4y ago
  Based on "many people are saying". It's circular reasoning at best. 80% of employees were fired because it was overstaffed, and since the site is still up afterwards, Twitter was overstaffed.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    Plane without a pilot will still fly for quite some time. Doesn't mean the pilot is superfluous. And my point still stands that there is no empirical evidence that Twitter was overstaffed. We do know that their revenue/employee back in 2020 was better than many other startups e.g. Shopify, Zoom. https://twitter.com/RyanReeves_/status/1423013707190206464?lang=en https://twitter.com/RyanReeves_/status/1423013707190206464?l...

woodruffw 4y ago

> The Pareto principle is “80% of consequences come from 20% of causes”. And as an extension of this, 80% of results are delivered by 20% of engineers. As an extension of this, I propose we remove 4/5ths of each airliner. The 20% that remains, so long as we pick the right 20%, will surely fly correctly. Seriously: who writes this dreck? You don't have to believe that every single employee at a company is productive or necessary to understand that you can't saddle your remaining employees, even if you picked the "right" ones, with the remaining workload.

whateveracct 4y ago
The management class does not want this Twitter ordeal (likely a huge public failure) making engineers think their skills give them power over companies.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  I agree completely. On top of that, it feels like classic "magical" thinking by a manager who doesn't understand technical scope or split responsibilities. Why bother to understand why you've hired so many people before blithely opining that 4/5ths of them are fireable? Who the hell wants to work for someone who says things like that? Certainly not the "high-quality" engineers who are supposedly being separated from the chaff.
- mmmpop 4y ago
  How do you define "public failure"? My definition would be entirely contingent upon the intentions of the new owner since it's his to do with what he pleases. If said owner is well into middle age and bored, but has more money than literally any other person...? Who am I to judge what he decides to do with it? "It's just money" says Elon and if his goal were to be the world's most massive troll (which I suspect is a large part of it), then it's achievement accomplished, full stop.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    At least to my mind, "public failure" includes but isn't limited to embarrassing outages and service degradation on one of the world's most popular social media sites, one that was more or less running smoothly immediately prior.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gonzo41 4y ago

You can't grow though, and you'll continue to degrade. Your market position will be static. You will get disrupted. Fat staffing at tech companies is about securing the future as much as the present.

prawn 4y ago
I agree. I have a semi-social website that I neglect for months on end and it trundles along, but it certainly doesn't grow and mostly erodes. With larger social companies, outside the tech part, there are inevitably marketing/outreach teams in popular/growth regions of the world building campaigns in conjunction with niches or brands.

kristopolous 4y ago

This is all wrong. You can only build great products with people who have enough wherewithal to exercise their personal agency. When the agency being exercised is departure you get two remainers - the zealots and the hanger-ons. You can try to roll the clock back to a nimble pivot or preserve startup but you're looking at wildly different skillsets to make that work and those people have likely just left. It's possible to pump out great things with this configuration, but only a fool would sign up for the task. Or maybe a Michael Milken who fancies himself as a Steve Jobs.

egberts1 4y ago

Ah, it's a good idea to be giving ideas to CEOs and shareholders, oh wait.

throwyawayyyy 4y ago

Sure, you can cut 80% of anything and things will run just fine for a while. You could even stop paying your bills, and nothing bad would happen for a month or two, as invoices pile up. In fact I'd guess that you could cut 100% of UX and Product and no one would much notice for a year or so. So, why not do that? Because for all that we talk about short-termism, companies are long-term entities. Shares in a company are valuable now _because they will probably be valuable in 20 years time too_. So such self-mutilation is rare. > And one last thing. The company that has deep enough pockets can survive tons of shit. If you wave a check big enough, you will find people willing to go through hell and back and who will drag the company forward. I believe this is a very important point. I felt that we (software engineers) sometimes have too big egos believing that if enough software engineers left, the company will fall apart. The reality is that (big money) can help navigate quite dire circumstances for companies. Does Twitter have deep pockets? And if it offered you whatever it would take for you to spend some months in hell, do you trust that it would be able to pay? Twitter is in an awful situation, and in sharp distinction to Musk's previous near-death experiences, there's no government coming to bail him out.

HDThoreaun 4y ago
Musk’s thesis was that twitters product team was utterly ineffective though. If you think “this business hasn’t built anything that provides an ounce of value for a decade” why wouldn’t you go into “survival” mode while you attempt to rebuild the culture?
- vernon99 4y ago
  Exactly this. This survival mode is obviously temporary to do a hard reset of culture, processes and codebase. With Twitter getting a much better balance sheet, what would stop them from hiring more great folks again in 3-6 months? I think a lot of people and in this thread included really underestimate negative impact of poor product innovation culture. This hard reset is the only way imo.
  - YokoZar 4y ago

crackercrews 4y ago

Seems important that there have been lots of layoffs elsewhere. Some percent of those laid off would take a job at Twitter. This is a big change from the last many years, when SWE hiring was very competitive. New hires won't know the internals of Twitter but they can dive in and help. They can also be motivated by equity-heavy comp packages.

threeseed 4y ago
If you are good at your job I doubt you will put up with Twitter's treatment of employees e.g. lack of vision, late nights and long weeks, inflexible work arrangements, public belittlement of your contributions etc. And given that it's a private company not sure whether you would expect compensation other than salary.
- crackercrews 4y ago
  Good point about private company equity. Probably they'd use cash bonuses instead. I think you underestimate how much some people would like to see Twitter 2.0 succeed. Lots of people didn't love how censorious Twitter had become and want to help build something better. I have several friends who are interested in working there. It does sound like it will be long hours. But for some people that will be a badge of honor. Most of my interested friends are not married so have fewer other priorities.
  - nebula8804 4y ago
    This is just my thought but I think you are overestimating the intersection of people who truly care about culture war stuff and the "deeply experienced" engineering community that values gaining the skill and experience to be able to build something like Twitter. When that engineer explained the RPC calls to Musk the other day the replies were very telling in the sense that people who spend their time talking about how "freedom is back at Twitter" or how the employees are getting their comeuppance don't seem to really internalize how much effort is required to build and maintain these services. Maybe there is a cadre of conservative freedom loving experienced techies hiding in the shadows but I haven't seen them. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, I watched the whole Parler collapse saga caused by a lack of mastery and experience in their chosen technologies and it really instilled in me the idea of appreciating the drive of learning and open mindedness. The conservative movement seems to have a disdain for deep learning of a specific field. They are setting themselves up to be left behind in the tech revolution.

ohCh6zos 4y ago

For most of my career I've worked at or consulted with very small companies. I had a bit of a shock taking a short job at a very large company. The sheer number of people who didn't seem to do anything was massive.

sibeliuss 4y ago
Truth. I'm shocked by it every day. Folks can easily get by without pushing a single commit for a month.

somesortofthing 4y ago

This might be slightly true for a small subset of companies, but given that this is clearly about Twitter, you absolutely can't "survive" in any meaningful way. What is possible without 80% of the engineers is keeping the core services running at the current capacity, with no room for dealing with emergent issues. That's about it, and that's all Twitter has really demonstrated so far. Forget about new products, forget about improvements to existing products, forget infrastructure work/cost optimization, forget not having major data breaches regularly, forget mitigating large-scale security vulnerabilities(i.e. log4j), forget being able to capitalize on market trends on a useful timescale, and forget about the ability to deal with situations that require more engineering capacity that your company uses on an average day. Entering "survival mode" and keeping only enough engineering capacity on board to keep the service running on a normal day is implicitly a bet that no emergent events are going to demand more capacity from you than is needed on that normal day. The product might be standing now, but you can't do anything useful with a paralyzed company that's going to topple over the first time it faces a stiff breeze.

typingmonkey 4y ago
Isnt that what twitter has already done in the last years?
- kaba0 4y ago
  I don’t think so. The tech stack is (was) quite impressive, if we don’t forget that Twitter is basically a real-time read-write database which is famously hard to scale/distribute.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    WhatsApp did it for a billion daily active users (Twitter has/had more or less 200 million active users/day) with 50 engineers. Using Erlang. Tiwtter uses Scala that should be much more scalabale, considering the staggering amount of money spent on the JVM compared to the BEAM.

unwise-exe 4y ago

BTW. Figuring it who is the core team is not that complicated. You just ask everybody to name five people who are doing well and who they want to work with again (in the next company). Then, sort employees by votes, and viola, at the top, you will get your true core team (which may not match perfectly to seniority, number of lines of code written, etc.). --- Are those newfangled 360 reviews really that much more effective than other review processes? And of course this fails to account for how nobody likes, say, those meddling busybodies on the security team, or those idiots at the support desk who always make you unplug and restart things before letting you explain what the real issue is; or how everyone likes that one person who always brings donuts and spends more time being friendly with other teams than actually working.

lamontcg 4y ago
> newfangled 360 reviews well they were an exercise in bullshit back at amazon in 2001...
- baby 4y ago
  I would agree, same at Meta

lamontcg 4y ago

> BTW. Figuring it who is the core team is not that complicated. You just ask everybody to name five people who are doing well and who they want to work with again (in the next company). Then, sort employees by votes, and viola, at the top, you will get your true core team (which may not match perfectly to seniority, number of lines of code written, etc.). Doubt. Employees often have very imperfect information into what other employees are doing in their day to day jobs. The team that looks lazy because they don't immediately prioritize your bugs and requests may be understaffed compared to the operational load. And unsexy jobs that keep the operation running may be done very well by people who aren't part of the most popular kids, but you'll wind up missing them once they're gone.

layer8 4y ago

This has interesting consequences when applied recursively.

tbatchelli 4y ago
Right, same as the saying “you can control expenses but you cannot control revenue”, as the logic to cut expenses; if applied recursively you end up with $0 expenses…and and $0 revenue.

hayst4ck 4y ago

> On the other hand, Elon Musk (and Twitter) can dangle a big enough carrot to pursue a reasonable number of workaholics to stick around (and +hire some new ones) to move the company forward. I couldn't help but read "H1B slaves" in place of workaholics. That might sound mildly hyperbolic, but if you can force someone out of the country, that gives you tyrannical power over them. The power imbalance is so large it must be seen as coercive. I'd be very interested to see the H1B demographics of post Musk Twitter. https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/politics/twitter-layoffs-visas-h1b https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/politics/twitter-layoffs-visa... > “Firing folks who are on a H-1B in a major economic downturn is not just putting them out of the job, it’s tantamount to ruining their lives,” one former employee told CNN, adding that some people who had accepted Musk’s ultimatum had accepted it “out of self-preservation.” > For that reason, some staff at Twitter who are on H-1B visas are staying on despite wanting to leave the company, a former employee told CNN, adding that they’re “concerned with being forced into a flooded job market where they may be unable to find a job and before being forced out of the country.”

iwillbenice 4y ago

4b11b4 4y ago

Everyone is speculating for now. My speculation is they will entirely rewrite the core of the software.

random314 4y ago
And what purpose would that serve?
- Macha 4y ago
  I also suspect they will attempt this. A system to be maintained by 100 engineers needs to be simpler than one maintained by 2000 engineers but in a normally run business that kind of simplification would never get pursued over short-medium term incremental revenue. However pulling that off successfully while maintaining the existing platform on a skeleton crew and also replicating everything their users and customers expect (when said customers are already pausing spending in concern) doesn't lead me to expect success
  - random314 4y ago
    I don't think any engineer left would have the bandwidth to attempt anything like a rewrite. It would be DOA.
    - Macha 4y ago
      Oh, I don't think they'd have the bandwidth to pull it off either. But I think Elon has whittled the engineering team down to those who think as he does and those too scared to contradict him and he's publicly stated that he thinks their microservices based architecture is too complicated. So I don't see a successful rewrite happening but I do see an attempted one coming.
      - random314 4y ago
        True.

Gustomaximus 4y ago

See Prices Law https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/ https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/ The key question is how to you find & keep the 100 or so key people from a 7,500 company when reducing numbers.

atishay811 4y ago

You can also fire the CXOs and keep promoting from within at 1% the current CXO stock options with a 10 year vesting cliff and the company will survive - may actually do a lot better.

chrismcb 4y ago

You can probably fire 4/5ths of any company and they would survive. But that doesn't mean only 20% of the people are working You'll lose parts of the businesses. You will fall to grow. Things would take longer to get done. That doesn't mean you need all those employees either. But it isn't just about survival

rrwo 4y ago

A company like Twitter isn't made up of just "software engineers". Besides writing software, (likely different) people are deploying and running it, testing and integrating it with other systems, monitoring it, securing it. Also, some of the people who have been working at a company for a long time know the systems in detail. They may not be the people who'd win a popularity contest, but you don't want these people to suddenly leave.

sargstuff 4y ago

Ummm.... devil's advocate: allowing for just integer value software engineer count, 80% percent of startup with just 1 software engineer leaves 0 software engineers in startup company of 1. Allowing for accountant, still gives an off by 1 error. Including a legal professional & accountant will at least allow for resolution of company issues without rehiring a software engineer. Still think if a company needs to involve software engineer, removal of 80% of software engineer, the total software engineer count less 80% needs to total 1 or more. Hopefully this wasn't the bean counter reasoning for minimum employees required for company health plan.

andrewflnr 4y ago

Even if Twitter survives, I think we'll find "survive" is a far cry from "provides ROI for $44B". Anyway, there's every indication that Elon took no particular effort to keep the "right" 20%. Also the whole argument is much more tenuous when applied to ops and moderation staff, rather than "software engineers". It's the loss of ops staff that (to me at least) seems most likely to kill Twitter.

albertopv 4y ago

No serious company would survive if so many sw eng left, because also clients/customer will leave the moment they know it, fearing loss of functionality, security, support...

jemmyw 4y ago

That's a generalisation and I don't think it works. Many companies run a lean engineering team that makes sense for their product. Twitter didn't and I really truly don't believe they needed as many as they had to work on their product. I know, from talking to someone who left just before the buy out that they just had too many people working on too many things that never even saw the light of day. Hire to work on your core product and for specific purpose. Don't let managers hire willy nilly to grow their fiefdom.

whatever1 4y ago

My car also keeps on going when I release the throttle. It also self drives if I let the steering wheel. Until it doesn’t.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

physicsguy 4y ago

You can probably survive if you fire the right 80%, but if you fire people who are pretty integral to particular services at random, you might not keep the lights on for long enough…

PeterStuer 4y ago

Since this is about Twitter, let us not pretend all of those fired were software engineers.

LatteLazy 4y ago

You can tell this was written by a human. If an Algo wrote it, it would be better.

rhaway84773 4y ago

The author is right that money can correct a lot of wrongs, and that’s what we will probably see in Twitter for a while. One of the problems with cutting 80% of the workforce even if you know which 20% is useful and manage to only spare them is that competitors exist. You don’t just need people to make sure your product works, but you also need people to make sure your product runs slightly better than every competitor. An existing social graph is a significant moat, but it’s not foolproof. The problem is that if we assume that the 20% useful people can be identified perfectly, then someone else could build a company that has 25% more useful people than the company that just cut 80% of its staff and probably out deliver you for long enough that they’d be able to easily chip into the moat you’ve built fairly quickly. As an aside, the Pareto principle is often misused and isn’t close to being any sort of law. It applies in vastly fewer situations that it doesn’t apply in…try applying the Pareto principle to the floor of any manufacturing facility, for example.

Markoff 4y ago

"If the company is left only with 20% of engineers (even the best ones), it will be way deep in survival mode (just barely providing support for an existing product, not building some new exciting things or even improving existing ones)." This is completely ignoring the number of engineers you start with. Let's say you have Twitter with 10000 engineers and Twitter with 40000 engineers, in one case I end up with 2000 engineers, in other with 8000 engineers, you are telling me the result will be same? First you need to find out how big overemployment and how productive employees you have to come up with some percentages, some companies are efficient, some companies ar stagnating hardly introducing any new features over years (cough Twitter cough), so clearly there is big overhead of engineers.

Onanymous 4y ago

And maybe even do better. The trick is to know who exactly to put in those 80%.

rugina 4y ago

If the Pareto principle is always true, just keep on firing 80% of the remaining engineers until the company runs without developers.

windex 4y ago

Stupid broad brush articles and theories like this will screw everyone. The author thinks work is a game show.

fooker 4y ago

I think a lot of people are not considering something important here. What if it actually works out for Twitter? If it does, this will set the baseline for how you can treat software developers. The special treatment (in compensation, flexibility, etc) we seem to enjoy over other white collar professions will be gone.

nebula8804 4y ago
Some have talked about this being the ultimate goal for Musk and his tech buddies. A repeat of the 80s style of acquiring a company, stripping it down and turning it around for a quick profit which reduced any power left from the employees. So far that hasn't happened with tech and tech workers have had a unique position that others have not had in a long time. This Twitter saga might be a proof of concept of how many tech companies can be stripped bare (if it succeeds at Twitter) I hate to think about it but from my point of view it seems as if I should be rooting for Twitter to catastrophically fail so that the tech elitists who are trying to make this a thing will have to go back to the drawing board for now.

oh_my_goodness 4y ago

Yeah, viola. Sure.

Havoc 4y ago

I don’t think the vote 5 people approach would work. Popularity and pleasant to work with does not equal core team. Not even close

vinyl7 4y ago

Lots of engineers in this thread think they're more important than they really are

Communitivity 4y ago

Maybe, but consider this. First, you are unlikely to get a 1:1 overlap between the 20% staff you retain and the most impactful 20%. Next, business is not a sprint, it's a marathon relay race - the people you need will depend on the product, development phase, and market changes. Last, there is a difference between survive and thrive. Your business may limp along on life-support until it recovers (in part from re-hiring enough staff), or more likely, dies a slow agonizing death. If you cut 80% of your staff I think the loss of institutional knowledge alone could prevent thriving. These are some of the reports to consider: * Twitter had around 7500 staff when Elon Musk purchased it. Twitter by many accounts now has less than 1000 staff. Some accounts place that number less than 500. * I think the losses aren't done. Elon Musk reportedly started reviewing every coder's performance, accomplishments over the last six months, and code snippets. He might be going to give the best of them a bonus (inciting jealousy and possible resignations in some of the others). More likely in my opinion, he's going to fire more people. * Advertisers are seeming to shun Twitter now. See GroupM's labeling of Twitter a 'high risk' [1]. Hiring, or re-hiring, needed staff will be hard with the volatility perceived and with a lack of money as inducement. I love Twitter, and use it for many things. It's too early to say Twitter's ultimate fate for certain, but I suspect this Thanksgiving will be Twitter's last. Banks could always buy a failing Twitter and bring it back. Who knows? [1] https://digiday.com/marketing/never-been-critical-twitters-ad-boycott-is-starting-to-look-like-a-long-goodbye/ https://digiday.com/marketing/never-been-critical-twitters-a...

dTal 4y ago

In other news, on the same page of HN discussions, Twitter is beginning to fail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33692179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33692179

tyronehed 4y ago

thefz 4y ago

Programmers are one thing. But what about DevOps, internal infrastructure engineers and general IT, cloud architects... ?

taylodl 4y ago

Since we're talking about Twitter, let me point out the Titanic didn't immediately sink when she struck the iceberg. Things can appear fine for some time before they catastrophically fail. Software is no exception. Twitter is no longer positioned to add any new services or abilities. The Twitter we had is the best Twitter will ever be. Maybe that's enough. More likely is people have left who are key to maintaining operational excellence. Like the Titanic, their absence may not be noticed for some time. My initial takeaway from this disaster isn't you can let 80% of your engineers go and you'll be just fine. Though I'm quite happy for my competitors to draw that conclusion!

abirch 4y ago
Apple could absolutely fire 80% of their engineers. It'd be stupid, but they could do it and look great for 6-12 months until everything starts to fall apart.
- taylodl 4y ago
  Exactly. It's a short-term play. I'm hoping my competitors would believe they can make this a long-term play! :)

jti107 4y ago

this guy is completely misapplying the Pareto principle. if you lose the devs that are responsible for 50-80% of the work, your company is crippled. another point is twitter isn’t a pure tech company…it’s an ad business on a tech platform. if all the sales and content people quit or are fired I question the long term (2+ years) survivability especially with 10+ billion in debt and annual 1+ billion loan payments

FrontierPsych 4y ago

What that guy says, and most of the posts here say, are not correct, IMO. 20% of the customers pay 80% of the revenue. You can't just willy-nilly cut any 80%. You have to look at the actual sales per customer and only then cut the 80% that are time wasters. If you have 1000 engineers, you MUST know which specific engineers are the 200 that are delivering 80% of the results. If you have 200 salespeople, you have to know which exact and specific 40 salespeople you keep and the 160 that you fire. . But the problem in many companies that suck, or it was a good company and now it sucks, is that generally, the best employees, the 20%, have the most options. If they get too much problems, those 20% will be the first out the door. So the company starts getting into a death spiral. As more of the top 20% leave, that means the remaining top 20% will have to do the work of the ones that left. And soon they will say no way and they will quit, until all that is left is the 80% that does 20% of the work. I have nothing against the 80/20 heuristic, but like most things, you better know exactly what you're talking about. Also, in any company, every company, top management should know exactly who the best employees are, and treat them way better than anyone else. You bend over backwards for them. You do not treat all employees equally. It is an utter disaster to lose a golden goose employee, in any capacity, a top 20% receptionist, a top 20% janitor - doesn't matter. All top 20%-ers are top 20%-ers. Bend over backwards to keep your top 20% janitor if you have 100 janitors because you have a really really big building, treat the 20% top priority - get the CEO to talk the top 20% janitor if needed. If nothing else, it is good corporate self-discipline. Because the more top 20's you have in every area, they all feed off of each other's energy.