4 ms·

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 wit

by 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...
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      > Doesn't mean the pilot is superfluous the pilot is the pilot, but 80% of the crew is, if the plan is to got from A to B. Maybe a second pilot for backup is a good idea, but is cabin crew selling lottery tickets on flight?
      - everforward 4y ago
        The cabin crew is there to keep control of the passengers. Keep people from smoking, make there aren't fights over masks, make sure nobody downs a whole bottle of whisky they bought in the duty free store and proceeds to do God knows what. Even the cheap airlines have cabin crew; they're not there for the hell of it.
        nindalf 4y ago
        But it’s a great analogy because a layman looks at an airline operation and thinks “yeah I can do this without the crew”. They’re wrong, just like all the people who think they can run Twitter with 20 good men.
    - Animatronio 4y ago
      Yeah, but the people that got fired were more like passengers than crew.
    - danielscrubs 4y ago
      Net Income per employee was -22,813 USD and the P/E ratio as of November 2022 (TTM): -413.
  - ReflectedImage 4y ago
    "still up afterwards" No, it's crumbling as we speak. You can get pirated movies from Twitter now, for example. It's microservice based site features will break one by one.
    - ashwagary 4y ago
      >You can get pirated movies from Twitter now, for example. Sounds like an upgrade. That's not really helping your point. >It's microservice based site features will break one by one. Yes, I see this as highly probable.
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  Years of non-profitability would suggest it, but I am not well versed in what goes on internally on twitter.
  - acdha 4y ago
    It’s a little trickier than that: their income has been growing substantially for years. https://www.statista.com/statistics/274566/twitters-annual-revenue-by-channel/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/274566/twitters-annual-r... 2021 would have been a profit of $300M had they not included a one-time lawsuit settlement. What really stands out is how much they spend on stock-based compensation – it seems like that would have been a key area to save money but that was also less than a third of the $1.2B in new annual debt which Musk just added so I have no idea how they could make the numbers work anymore. https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2021/ar/FiscalYR2021_Twitter_Annual_-Report.pdf https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2021/ar...
- disgruntledphd2 4y ago
  So back in 2015/16 when I worked at Facebook somebody asked Mark Z if Twitter was overstaffed. First someone told him how many employees they had, he was shocked and replied that they were definitely over staffed. Obviously anecdotal but given their sales/userbase I think that they have been historically over staffed.
  - teleforce 4y ago
    Completely agree. WhatsApp is a real-time messaging service and famously had only 50 engineers when its userbase is close to one billion [1]. [1]Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/amp https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...
    - threeseed 4y ago
      I wish people would stop with this pointless comparison. WhatsApp did not have recommendations, advertising, content moderation, GDPR, DCMA etc or the volume of bots. It is simply not a comparable system. And it is the backend systems you don't see that make up most of the tech stack.
      - postalrat 4y ago
        Or might do if people stop saying twitter's scale is why it needed so many engineers.
      - norwalkbear 4y ago
        Do those system justify have 10-20x the engineers? Honest question, I'm a game dev. In my industry, we outsource a lot of that stuff.
        tredre3 4y ago
        I personally could see a need for 10-20x the engineers, they're solving a very different problem. But twitter had 7500 employees in 2021, of which about half were engineering (reports I found vary between 3500 to 4500), so that's at least 65x the engineers!
- larksimian 4y ago
  As a user, nothing has improved about the product in years. As a shareholder, they're losing money. Whatever all those devs were doing was not producing a profit and was not improving the user experience.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  If you read the leaked Musk tweets you'll see that he believes it, at least partially, based off their revenue/employe ratio. It was like a third of the other major tech companies.

by syrrim 4y ago

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...
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > Doesn't mean the pilot is superfluous the pilot is the pilot, but 80% of the crew is, if the plan is to got from A to B. Maybe a second pilot for backup is a good idea, but is cabin crew selling lottery tickets on flight?
    - everforward 4y ago
      The cabin crew is there to keep control of the passengers. Keep people from smoking, make there aren't fights over masks, make sure nobody downs a whole bottle of whisky they bought in the duty free store and proceeds to do God knows what. Even the cheap airlines have cabin crew; they're not there for the hell of it.
      - nindalf 4y ago
        But it’s a great analogy because a layman looks at an airline operation and thinks “yeah I can do this without the crew”. They’re wrong, just like all the people who think they can run Twitter with 20 good men.
  - Animatronio 4y ago
    Yeah, but the people that got fired were more like passengers than crew.
  - danielscrubs 4y ago
    Net Income per employee was -22,813 USD and the P/E ratio as of November 2022 (TTM): -413.
- ReflectedImage 4y ago
  "still up afterwards" No, it's crumbling as we speak. You can get pirated movies from Twitter now, for example. It's microservice based site features will break one by one.
  - ashwagary 4y ago
    >You can get pirated movies from Twitter now, for example. Sounds like an upgrade. That's not really helping your point. >It's microservice based site features will break one by one. Yes, I see this as highly probable.
LAC-Tech 4y ago
Years of non-profitability would suggest it, but I am not well versed in what goes on internally on twitter.
- acdha 4y ago
  It’s a little trickier than that: their income has been growing substantially for years. https://www.statista.com/statistics/274566/twitters-annual-revenue-by-channel/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/274566/twitters-annual-r... 2021 would have been a profit of $300M had they not included a one-time lawsuit settlement. What really stands out is how much they spend on stock-based compensation – it seems like that would have been a key area to save money but that was also less than a third of the $1.2B in new annual debt which Musk just added so I have no idea how they could make the numbers work anymore. https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2021/ar/FiscalYR2021_Twitter_Annual_-Report.pdf https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2021/ar...
disgruntledphd2 4y ago
So back in 2015/16 when I worked at Facebook somebody asked Mark Z if Twitter was overstaffed. First someone told him how many employees they had, he was shocked and replied that they were definitely over staffed. Obviously anecdotal but given their sales/userbase I think that they have been historically over staffed.
- teleforce 4y ago
  Completely agree. WhatsApp is a real-time messaging service and famously had only 50 engineers when its userbase is close to one billion [1]. [1]Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/amp https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...
  - threeseed 4y ago
    I wish people would stop with this pointless comparison. WhatsApp did not have recommendations, advertising, content moderation, GDPR, DCMA etc or the volume of bots. It is simply not a comparable system. And it is the backend systems you don't see that make up most of the tech stack.
    - postalrat 4y ago
      Or might do if people stop saying twitter's scale is why it needed so many engineers.
    - norwalkbear 4y ago
      Do those system justify have 10-20x the engineers? Honest question, I'm a game dev. In my industry, we outsource a lot of that stuff.
      - tredre3 4y ago
        I personally could see a need for 10-20x the engineers, they're solving a very different problem. But twitter had 7500 employees in 2021, of which about half were engineering (reports I found vary between 3500 to 4500), so that's at least 65x the engineers!
larksimian 4y ago
As a user, nothing has improved about the product in years. As a shareholder, they're losing money. Whatever all those devs were doing was not producing a profit and was not improving the user experience.
HDThoreaun 4y ago
If you read the leaked Musk tweets you'll see that he believes it, at least partially, based off their revenue/employe ratio. It was like a third of the other major tech companies.