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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
by 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 agoMusk’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 agoExactly 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 agoWhen the "hard reset" causes revenue to evaporate as advertisers leave, the balance sheet is not "much better".
- edmundsauto 4y ago> With Twitter getting a much better balance sheet, what would stop them from hiring more great folks again in 3-6 months? Because hiring is hard, and there is little reason to think their balance sheet would be much better. And because some of their advertisers are leaving, reducing their income. And because a lot of these "great people" probably wouldn't take Musk at his word due to his unreliable leadership the past year. Things like personnel and advertisers don't turn on a dime. It's not like cloud computing - Twitter will face long term consequences in the slower moving fields because of Musk's current decisions.
- sigwinch28 4y ago"Utterly ineffective" helped produce a 44 billion dollar valuation.
- HDThoreaun 4y agoI think musk believes the value was there in 2012. Or at least that it stems from Trump et. al. and not whatever new features they've released. Let's not forget that twitter IPO'd at $45 a share in 2013. The market agrees with musk that the last decade has produced minimal value.