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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.

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.
    - Wherecombinator 4y ago
      Not the same. A single tweet may need to be distributed to 50 million followers. I’m not a distributed database guy, but that to to me looks like a very different problem than what WhatsApp faces.
      - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
        > Not the same. A single tweet may need to be distributed to 50 million followers Of course not the same, but the question is, how much harder? 10 times harder? 100 times harder? Given 1/5 of the users and probably less than 1/200 of the traffic (*) it should be feasible with less than 7,500 employees. I don't believe WhatsApp employed the best 50 engineers in the World, I bet many of them worked at Twitter too. (*) 100 billion messages sent via WhatsApp every day VS 500 million tweets per day
        kaba0 4y ago
        Let’s not compare all employees to devs. Twitter has (had) absolutely business critical other teams, they are a very human-facing company. Does whatsapp have to make decisions whether to ban/unban a former US president? Also, I think Twitter gets a much more uneven usage - their daily usage is lower, but peaks can be similar (~1 billion user). Also, graph algorithm’s likely don’t scale linearly, 10 times more edges may have much much more resource usage.
        peoplefromibiza 4y ago
        > absolutely business critical other teams So you're saying WhatsApp had no critical other teams, but Facebook bought them anyway for a record breaking sum of money at the time, because they looked nice on picture?
        kaba0 4y ago
        I don’t know, but I’m fairly sure that the user base is the most valuable part of a social network/messenger platform, not the tech stack, or the staff.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  yeah, people won't ever admit that Twitter was already dead. It's probably because many Twitter former employees lurk here on HN and can't understand why nobody is rooting for their beloved platform, of course shame on EM for his abusive behaviour, people before money, always, but nobody will miss Twitter if it really dies. Half of what Twitter does is superfluous and the rest is badly executed. A normal company would not survive with only 20% of the staff, Twitter might thrive, because honestly, at its core, as many have already pointed out, Twitter is “writing on a bathroom wall”. Also: never forget that this happened and then Kashoggi was killed by the Royal Prince Bin Salman https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/09/twitter-saudi-arabia-dissident-spying https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/09/twitter-saud... But while people are worried now that Prince Al-Walid invested 1.9 billion dollars in Musk's Twitter, they also forget that till 2020 he owned 4.6% of Twitter through the Saudi investment fund he controls, the shares were acquired in 2015, when the spy was already working for Twitter and the management had already confronted him about the issue!
prng2021 4y ago
That's literally what the author described. "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)." He also goes on to talk about how the company has deep pockets and that means they're not paralyzed, as you say, in the long term. Feel free to actually read the article for more details.
- somesortofthing 4y ago
  I read the article, and my main takeaway was that the author massively downplays what "survival mode" practically means for the company/product. It doesn't just mean that engineers have to work harder or that you can't develop new products/improve existing ones. It means yearly "whoops hackers have all your emails phones and plaintext passwords now lol" data breaches. It means multi-day downtimes. It means being unable to take advantage of any market trend regardless of how big your comparative advantage is. "Deep pockets" don't do anything on their own, especially not when no one believes in your company's ability to consistently fulfill its obligations to customers. You can hire engineers, sure, but how are you going to ramp them up when all of your engineering capacity is dedicated to keeping a small group of core services from falling over dead? How quickly can you bring people on board when you're notorious for a culture of overwork and abuse? You can borrow some money, sure, but who's going to lend to you when you're massively in debt from an LBO and you can't provide more than "long term" promises that in six months the company can actually function?
  - prng2021 4y ago
    "how are you going to ramp them up when all of your engineering capacity is dedicated to keeping a small group of core services from falling over dead". That's a tough problem, but one that's solved thousands of times a year by fast growing startups when they get a new round of funding. "How quickly can you bring people on board when you're notorious for a culture of overwork and abuse?". I agree that could be a challenge but then again, he's gotten people onboard at his other companies where I've heard the work/life balance is awful as well. "who's going to lend to you when you're massively in debt from an LBO and you can't provide more than "long term" promises that in six months the company can actually function?". Valid point in today's economic climate, but there have been countless examples of investors making risky bets repeatedly. Uber is a perfect example.
homeland221 4y ago
You forgot twch recession is picking up momentum everywhere. Majority of programming job can be done remotely. Even EM cut to only 10%, he can up the remaining salary double, and programmer can increase output productivity easily x2 with those hardcore 10% left. 3 decades of HR experience back this fact easily especially money is no problem. For EM, money is no problem. I am willing to bet $10K with you on this issue that EM will make it through woth all those fired and let go.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  No, you can't increase your overall productivity after cutting 80% of your workforce. You might increase individual engineer productivity slightly by paying them boatloads of money, but you're still saddling them with the gargantuan passive tasks required to maintain the site. That alone eats any productivity gains, while also burning your "hardcore" people out.
  - kaashif 4y ago
    > No, you can't increase your overall productivity after cutting 80% of your workforce. You might increase individual engineer productivity slightly Labour productivity is already a per worker measure. I've never heard it used to refer to anything else. That seems to be what they're referring to when they say they can increase productivity by cutting workers and working the rest much harder. I'm pretty sure that's bullshit and the sheer amount just daily maintenance and fire fighting will annihilate any possible productivity gains, so I agree with you.
    - homeland221 4y ago
      Yes you talked about economic definition. You are 100% right....as right as Paul Volcker with his economic theory. But at corporate c level we discuse productivity with another unit attached....money.
  - homeland221 4y ago
    You can. It is called outsourcing. Seen it. Done it. Everytime, productivity increased! It os only when employees retaliate and government intervention then there is some cost involved to mitigate that. But still productivity is high (as in using the same amount of money to get more widgets and revenue in the same amount of time). You might be young say under 30s. Look back since the Nafta treaty signed in the 90s. There is enough evidence to back me on this productivity/revenue increase for the companies. For American, of course painful layoff.
merrywhether 4y ago
> 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. And say hello to being increasingly surrounded by Chesterton's fences[0] at every turn. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence
powerapple 4y ago
I'd say it is true for most companies. But companies hire people not just for keep the current business going. A matter of fact, having fewer people may be beneficial if you want to stay in current business as it is. Companies, especially growth companies, hire people to speculate the next big thing. One of the employee is going to do something great, and expand the business.
- chii 4y ago
  > One of the employee is going to do something great, and expand the business. employees that would do this is unlikely to remain at the company to actually do this. Existing corporate culture or management friction will very quickly force out such an engineer, or make such an engineer ineffective at producing such innovations.
  - powerapple 4y ago
    Take google for example, from search to gmail, from gmail to Adwords, Adsense. Another example is Tencent, from social network to a mail client, then WeChat, also expanded to games. QQ which is the original social network Tencent was built on, stayed almost the same with or worse with 100x head-counts. It is always a rare event, but when it happens, it is a 1000x win for a company. It is something worth betting on.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> but given that this is clearly about Twitter, you absolutely can't "survive" in any meaningful way survival doesn't have to be meaningful, the meaning is to survive. Survival is about not dying, Twitter don't need 7,500 employees to survive. > forget mitigating large-scale security vulnerabilities(i.e. log4j), that was simply a matter of upgrading a dependency. and honestly a remote exploit for that has never been spotted in the wild.
- JoachimS 4y ago
  "that was simply a matter of upgrading a dependency." ... Across a global infrastructure. ... And finding out if, where you have been compromised. ...And fixing all those systems that was found to have been compromised. ...And handling media questions, PR related to the issue and your organization. Just saying it was "simply a matter of upgrading a dependency." is so amazingly far from what such an event requires. Even if you wasn't actually affected in a technical sense.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > Just saying it was "simply a matter of upgrading a dependency." is so amazingly far from what such an event requires 5 people total? that have too look at the problem for a few days and then go back to their regular duties. Which is their job, BTW, you don't need "special teams". I work for a company that has more than 20 thousand employees. How we fixed it? Every team checked if their dependencies contained a vulnerable version of log4j, fixed it, ran the tests, submitted the new code, the CI/CD did the rest.
    - JoachimS 4y ago
      You are talking about the IT-people, right? How much do they handle media questions, PR related to global IT security events?
      - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
        > You are talking about the IT-people, right? absolutely not. > How much do they handle media questions, PR related to global IT security events? You don't need thousand people for that and It's their job anyway! Listen, I come from what the average American would call "a socialist" country, at least regarding the labour market and organization. I understand the social part of employing more people than necessary, it's a kind of redistribution that many countries won't or can't do through proper taxation. I also understand that sometimes it's about resilience, two of everything is better than single points of failure. But, it's ironic that these observations come from the POV of an American company. It's ironic that people are leaving Twitter because Musk is asking them to work hard, meaning they aren't actually doing it, according to his standards (he's a terrible boss, no doubt!), but also meaning that Twitter is probably doing so bad because they focused on the wrong thing, like Facebook with the meta fiasco. The American dream is not about 28 days of paid vacation, maternity leave, life-work balance, it's about making as much money as you can in the fastest way possible. In its original formulation In such a country the talents, energy and perseverance of a person ... have far greater opportunity to display than in monarchies You want a better life balance, better working hours, less staying in the office and more paid time to raise your kids? Come to Europe! For much less money of course. Because you can't have both. So yeah, it might be easier to do something with 3 people than one, but most of the time too many people are enemy of the efficiency. You know what took the most part of upgrading the log4j incident where I work? Coordination between too many levels of hierarchy. That is actually the worst part of working in large companies, that's what actually stifle innovation and paralyzes them. Twitter was already doing bad, it's been doing bad for years. I left Twitter (as a user) 5 years ago, because it was already terrible. I'm no Musk fan at all, but at least he's making things clear: if that's the end result people are used to, we don't need that many people to achieve it, we simply need motivated people (by money).
norwalkbear 4y ago
True. Twitter is unusual because it was a hostile takeover. Elon disliked the way things were and wanted a change. In most organization management courses, you are taught " you cannot change the culture". The truth is you can and you do it by firing people, firing or pushing out a lot of people. My point is that Twitter is a bad case study for engineers, its a very standard case for mba though. You cannot and should not view Twitter thru a primarily engineering point of view.

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.
  - Wherecombinator 4y ago
    Not the same. A single tweet may need to be distributed to 50 million followers. I’m not a distributed database guy, but that to to me looks like a very different problem than what WhatsApp faces.
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      > Not the same. A single tweet may need to be distributed to 50 million followers Of course not the same, but the question is, how much harder? 10 times harder? 100 times harder? Given 1/5 of the users and probably less than 1/200 of the traffic (*) it should be feasible with less than 7,500 employees. I don't believe WhatsApp employed the best 50 engineers in the World, I bet many of them worked at Twitter too. (*) 100 billion messages sent via WhatsApp every day VS 500 million tweets per day
      - kaba0 4y ago
        Let’s not compare all employees to devs. Twitter has (had) absolutely business critical other teams, they are a very human-facing company. Does whatsapp have to make decisions whether to ban/unban a former US president? Also, I think Twitter gets a much more uneven usage - their daily usage is lower, but peaks can be similar (~1 billion user). Also, graph algorithm’s likely don’t scale linearly, 10 times more edges may have much much more resource usage.
        peoplefromibiza 4y ago
        > absolutely business critical other teams So you're saying WhatsApp had no critical other teams, but Facebook bought them anyway for a record breaking sum of money at the time, because they looked nice on picture?
        kaba0 4y ago
        I don’t know, but I’m fairly sure that the user base is the most valuable part of a social network/messenger platform, not the tech stack, or the staff.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
yeah, people won't ever admit that Twitter was already dead. It's probably because many Twitter former employees lurk here on HN and can't understand why nobody is rooting for their beloved platform, of course shame on EM for his abusive behaviour, people before money, always, but nobody will miss Twitter if it really dies. Half of what Twitter does is superfluous and the rest is badly executed. A normal company would not survive with only 20% of the staff, Twitter might thrive, because honestly, at its core, as many have already pointed out, Twitter is “writing on a bathroom wall”. Also: never forget that this happened and then Kashoggi was killed by the Royal Prince Bin Salman https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/09/twitter-saudi-arabia-dissident-spying https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/09/twitter-saud... But while people are worried now that Prince Al-Walid invested 1.9 billion dollars in Musk's Twitter, they also forget that till 2020 he owned 4.6% of Twitter through the Saudi investment fund he controls, the shares were acquired in 2015, when the spy was already working for Twitter and the management had already confronted him about the issue!

prng2021 4y ago

That's literally what the author described. "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)." He also goes on to talk about how the company has deep pockets and that means they're not paralyzed, as you say, in the long term. Feel free to actually read the article for more details.

somesortofthing 4y ago
I read the article, and my main takeaway was that the author massively downplays what "survival mode" practically means for the company/product. It doesn't just mean that engineers have to work harder or that you can't develop new products/improve existing ones. It means yearly "whoops hackers have all your emails phones and plaintext passwords now lol" data breaches. It means multi-day downtimes. It means being unable to take advantage of any market trend regardless of how big your comparative advantage is. "Deep pockets" don't do anything on their own, especially not when no one believes in your company's ability to consistently fulfill its obligations to customers. You can hire engineers, sure, but how are you going to ramp them up when all of your engineering capacity is dedicated to keeping a small group of core services from falling over dead? How quickly can you bring people on board when you're notorious for a culture of overwork and abuse? You can borrow some money, sure, but who's going to lend to you when you're massively in debt from an LBO and you can't provide more than "long term" promises that in six months the company can actually function?
- prng2021 4y ago
  "how are you going to ramp them up when all of your engineering capacity is dedicated to keeping a small group of core services from falling over dead". That's a tough problem, but one that's solved thousands of times a year by fast growing startups when they get a new round of funding. "How quickly can you bring people on board when you're notorious for a culture of overwork and abuse?". I agree that could be a challenge but then again, he's gotten people onboard at his other companies where I've heard the work/life balance is awful as well. "who's going to lend to you when you're massively in debt from an LBO and you can't provide more than "long term" promises that in six months the company can actually function?". Valid point in today's economic climate, but there have been countless examples of investors making risky bets repeatedly. Uber is a perfect example.

homeland221 4y ago

You forgot twch recession is picking up momentum everywhere. Majority of programming job can be done remotely. Even EM cut to only 10%, he can up the remaining salary double, and programmer can increase output productivity easily x2 with those hardcore 10% left. 3 decades of HR experience back this fact easily especially money is no problem. For EM, money is no problem. I am willing to bet $10K with you on this issue that EM will make it through woth all those fired and let go.

woodruffw 4y ago
No, you can't increase your overall productivity after cutting 80% of your workforce. You might increase individual engineer productivity slightly by paying them boatloads of money, but you're still saddling them with the gargantuan passive tasks required to maintain the site. That alone eats any productivity gains, while also burning your "hardcore" people out.
- kaashif 4y ago
  > No, you can't increase your overall productivity after cutting 80% of your workforce. You might increase individual engineer productivity slightly Labour productivity is already a per worker measure. I've never heard it used to refer to anything else. That seems to be what they're referring to when they say they can increase productivity by cutting workers and working the rest much harder. I'm pretty sure that's bullshit and the sheer amount just daily maintenance and fire fighting will annihilate any possible productivity gains, so I agree with you.
  - homeland221 4y ago
    Yes you talked about economic definition. You are 100% right....as right as Paul Volcker with his economic theory. But at corporate c level we discuse productivity with another unit attached....money.
- homeland221 4y ago
  You can. It is called outsourcing. Seen it. Done it. Everytime, productivity increased! It os only when employees retaliate and government intervention then there is some cost involved to mitigate that. But still productivity is high (as in using the same amount of money to get more widgets and revenue in the same amount of time). You might be young say under 30s. Look back since the Nafta treaty signed in the 90s. There is enough evidence to back me on this productivity/revenue increase for the companies. For American, of course painful layoff.

merrywhether 4y ago

> 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. And say hello to being increasingly surrounded by Chesterton's fences[0] at every turn. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence

powerapple 4y ago

I'd say it is true for most companies. But companies hire people not just for keep the current business going. A matter of fact, having fewer people may be beneficial if you want to stay in current business as it is. Companies, especially growth companies, hire people to speculate the next big thing. One of the employee is going to do something great, and expand the business.

chii 4y ago
> One of the employee is going to do something great, and expand the business. employees that would do this is unlikely to remain at the company to actually do this. Existing corporate culture or management friction will very quickly force out such an engineer, or make such an engineer ineffective at producing such innovations.
- powerapple 4y ago
  Take google for example, from search to gmail, from gmail to Adwords, Adsense. Another example is Tencent, from social network to a mail client, then WeChat, also expanded to games. QQ which is the original social network Tencent was built on, stayed almost the same with or worse with 100x head-counts. It is always a rare event, but when it happens, it is a 1000x win for a company. It is something worth betting on.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

> but given that this is clearly about Twitter, you absolutely can't "survive" in any meaningful way survival doesn't have to be meaningful, the meaning is to survive. Survival is about not dying, Twitter don't need 7,500 employees to survive. > forget mitigating large-scale security vulnerabilities(i.e. log4j), that was simply a matter of upgrading a dependency. and honestly a remote exploit for that has never been spotted in the wild.

JoachimS 4y ago
"that was simply a matter of upgrading a dependency." ... Across a global infrastructure. ... And finding out if, where you have been compromised. ...And fixing all those systems that was found to have been compromised. ...And handling media questions, PR related to the issue and your organization. Just saying it was "simply a matter of upgrading a dependency." is so amazingly far from what such an event requires. Even if you wasn't actually affected in a technical sense.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > Just saying it was "simply a matter of upgrading a dependency." is so amazingly far from what such an event requires 5 people total? that have too look at the problem for a few days and then go back to their regular duties. Which is their job, BTW, you don't need "special teams". I work for a company that has more than 20 thousand employees. How we fixed it? Every team checked if their dependencies contained a vulnerable version of log4j, fixed it, ran the tests, submitted the new code, the CI/CD did the rest.
  - JoachimS 4y ago
    You are talking about the IT-people, right? How much do they handle media questions, PR related to global IT security events?
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      > You are talking about the IT-people, right? absolutely not. > How much do they handle media questions, PR related to global IT security events? You don't need thousand people for that and It's their job anyway! Listen, I come from what the average American would call "a socialist" country, at least regarding the labour market and organization. I understand the social part of employing more people than necessary, it's a kind of redistribution that many countries won't or can't do through proper taxation. I also understand that sometimes it's about resilience, two of everything is better than single points of failure. But, it's ironic that these observations come from the POV of an American company. It's ironic that people are leaving Twitter because Musk is asking them to work hard, meaning they aren't actually doing it, according to his standards (he's a terrible boss, no doubt!), but also meaning that Twitter is probably doing so bad because they focused on the wrong thing, like Facebook with the meta fiasco. The American dream is not about 28 days of paid vacation, maternity leave, life-work balance, it's about making as much money as you can in the fastest way possible. In its original formulation In such a country the talents, energy and perseverance of a person ... have far greater opportunity to display than in monarchies You want a better life balance, better working hours, less staying in the office and more paid time to raise your kids? Come to Europe! For much less money of course. Because you can't have both. So yeah, it might be easier to do something with 3 people than one, but most of the time too many people are enemy of the efficiency. You know what took the most part of upgrading the log4j incident where I work? Coordination between too many levels of hierarchy. That is actually the worst part of working in large companies, that's what actually stifle innovation and paralyzes them. Twitter was already doing bad, it's been doing bad for years. I left Twitter (as a user) 5 years ago, because it was already terrible. I'm no Musk fan at all, but at least he's making things clear: if that's the end result people are used to, we don't need that many people to achieve it, we simply need motivated people (by money).

norwalkbear 4y ago

True. Twitter is unusual because it was a hostile takeover. Elon disliked the way things were and wanted a change. In most organization management courses, you are taught " you cannot change the culture". The truth is you can and you do it by firing people, firing or pushing out a lot of people. My point is that Twitter is a bad case study for engineers, its a very standard case for mba though. You cannot and should not view Twitter thru a primarily engineering point of view.