5 ms·

The reality is most huge companies are majority bloat. The hiring numbers are also in part crap that goes into Series X Raise pitch decks. Oftentimes a lot of t

The reality is most huge companies are majority bloat. The hiring numbers are also in part crap that goes into Series X Raise pitch decks. Oftentimes a lot of the new bloat pisses off competent people, because their work doesn't actually get less, it becomes more. Not only do they have to now nanny people that are often not actually competent in their job, they just happened to go through the coding interview with wholly unqualified interviewers, but they now also have to handle nightmare features that were built by people completely disconnected from the other side. I'm not a friend of Elon's, but outside of the flashiness of the whole thing, I don't think his firing spree was wholly unwarranted. The other day I saw a video of a bunch of people at twitter leaving that have been there for a decade or so. I mean wholly crap, this reminds me of old German industry where people retire in the place they started.

yunohn 4y ago
> I mean wholly crap, this reminds me of old German industry where people retire in the place they started. This is honestly uncalled for. Job hopping every 2-3yrs should not be an expected task.
- 867-5309 4y ago
  is that down to the employer or employee?
  - yunohn 4y ago
    All companies I’ve worked at, startup to FAANG, have tried their best to reduce attrition and retain employees by providing growth opportunities. Changing jobs is a skill/knowledge net-negative for the employer, and can be negative (outside of salary) for the employee as they have to relearn everything (relationships, tech debt, processes) etc.
    - saagarjha 4y ago
      I have yet to see an employer match the market rate for talent.
  - jq-r 4y ago
    Could be both.
moonchrome 4y ago
Except in these firing sprees it's not competent employees that remain - those people are usually the first to jump ship because they have options and see where it's headed. It's not like they get raises for staying to get a part of the savings from the cuts - usually they get pay freezes. Restructuring is done on whatever idea the new owner(s) have in plan - which could be equally disconnected from "real product". I'm not that optimistic about Twitter long term - never was TBH but this Musk thing is turning to a shitshow and also exposes what it's like working for him in his other companies.
- loceng 4y ago
  [dead]
- PunchTornado 4y ago
  You realise how annoying it is when you see people around you in the company making as much money as you and doing nothing useful to actually generate revenue. Data scientists that write a blog post about the most used hashtag or emoticon. Or PMs that we don't need... I'm staying and I'm glad the teams are trimmed.
  - Kye 4y ago
    Are you absolutely 100% sure the surface stuff you had visibility into was all they did?
    - raspberry1337 4y ago
      Hey, the could actually do something very significant in secret that for some reason, you didn't know anything about! The excuses for bloat here is just mind-boggling, unless reflects that many people on HN are bloaters themselves
      - Kye 4y ago
        I have not been impressed with the average tech person's ability to understand parts of a business outside their immediate responsibilities. There were people on here seriously questioning the need for a general counsel for a company that's constantly under legal assault by every country on the planet. Never mind the long recurring "why does an ad-dependent company need people to manage relationships with the big spenders who expect that?" discussions.
bartvk 4y ago
> this reminds me of old German industry where people retire in the place they started What is wrong with that?
- kortilla 4y ago
  Depends on if you want innovation or stability. For innovation, people building fiefdoms over decades of political maneuvering is terribly destructive to change. Very few industries require constant learning for the business to compete so a highly tenured employee likely hasn’t learned anything new beyond minute process changes for 10+ years. Once people are ossified into a role like that, they will do anything and everything to shut down anything that has a whiff of threatening their current role.
  - bartvk 4y ago
    That is actually not my experience. I worked at a scientific institute on space cameras, and since projects easily last 10 years from design to launch, we have a lot of older people. Some were resisting change. Some were embracing it. All in all, I had a great time and gained a lot of respect. I love working in teams with all ages. Your sentence "once people are ossified..." feels like a generalization to me.
    - kortilla 4y ago
      I think you’re confusing age with tenure of a position.
dfghbbjiiugb 4y ago
Yes and no. I think we'd all agree that large tech companies have tons of really obvious staffing inefficiencies. There are many teams working on what are essentially vanity projects and many other teams have more staffing than they realistically need. On the other hand the slash and burn Elon approach seems objectively terrible. Indiscriminately firing most of the company kills morale and is likely to send the company into a hiring death spiral where your good employees leave and you can't attract good talent. This won't automatically kill the product or the company but it's not going to lend itself to big positive successes in the future.
mschuster91 4y ago
> I mean wholly crap, this reminds me of old German industry where people retire in the place they started. German here. I think this actually is a huge part of the success of the famous Mittelstand - all that institutional knowledge these people have is extremely valuable. It's not just basic stuff like "know time tracking, billing and other admin systems and internal processes", but also the stuff that really can speed up your work: whom to ask on the "kurzer Dienstweg" aka short-circuitting bureaucracy when needed, personal relationships with people in other departments on whose knowledge you rely (it's one thing if you get a random email asking for some shit from someone you don't know, but I'll always find some minutes to help out someone who has helped me out in the past), all the domain-specific knowledge about the precise needs and desires of your customers... Attrition is bad for a company as a whole, the problem is US-centric capitalism cannot quantify that impact (and it doesn't want to, given that attrition-related problems are long-term issues with years of time to impact), and so there is no KPI for leadership other than attrition rate itself. The only problem is that over the last years, employers' mindset has shifted from regular wage raises to paying the bare minimum which makes changing jobs every few years a virtual requirement for employees to get raises, and so we are already seeing the first glimpses of US employment culture and its issues cropping up.
- kortilla 4y ago
  > the problem is US-centric capitalism cannot quantify that impact (and it doesn't want to, given that attrition-related problems are long-term issues with years of time to impact) This is false. People invest on many year horizons all of the time when they believe in the company. If there was good evidence that having an average tenure of 5+ years was a great boost to the company, people would clamor to invest in companies like that. This was basically Google’s entire pitch when they were an early public company. Happy employees == great things. I remember when 60 minutes or dateline did some special about google before 2010 and people were floored by how good the employees got it. However, hiring standards relaxed and now google is slowly rotting from the inside to realize it’s the new IBM. Long tenure alone is absolutely not an advantage. It’s very easy to have a bunch of dead weight that just looks like they know what’s going on. So back to your point about experience mattering. That should show up in customer satisfaction, project turnaround speed, success rates, etc. Otherwise it’s pretty meaningless. And guess who already measures those KPIs…
entropi 4y ago
> The reality is most huge companies are majority bloat. This is true, and in my opinion, true for a reason. And that reason is not "most huge companies are dumb", as opposed to what Musk's cult seem to believe. The reality is, measuring what exactly is "bloat" and precisely cutting that bloat is extremely difficult and firing more than half of your workforce is probably like using a warhammer to do brain surgery.
- trashtester 4y ago
  Well, your alias actually refers to that process. Large organizations gain entropy over time. And entropy is precisly the inability to describe some structure at a micro/nano-level. But while fighting the entropy can be hard, not doing so is almost certain to be lethal. If an organism is infected by gangrene or cancer (the more extreme forms of entropy for a body), it may be more realistic to cut away whole body parts than to treat it in place, even if there is risk of sudden death. It seems to em that this is what Musk is trying. Either Twitter will be gone within a year, or they may very well be sustainably profitable within 2-3 years.
kranke155 4y ago
Software engineers at Twitter got used to working on an money losing company for 10 years and being told they’re great at their job. Then they were fired en masse because someone’s called them out on it. If your company is losing money all this time you are likely to be fired eventually in the real world. Job security in sw world had become so high that no one seemed to expect it. Everyone assumed “sure we’re losing money and the company has no direction” but all is fine. They all stayed there in their tables working for 10 years in a rudderless company as if it was a government job.
- entropy_ 4y ago
  This is factually untrue though. Twitter was making money in 2018 and 2019 (to the tune of ~1.2B/year in net profit out of ~3B revenue, which is a fairly high profit margin) they lost quite a bit of money in 2020 and less in the years thereafter. However, even in the years where they had negative net income EBITDA remained positive suggesting the losses were upfront investments that would be expected to be amortized over the coming years. The only reason Twitter is in deep financial shit right now is because Elon acquired it in a leveraged buyout and the cost of servicing the debt is estimated around 1B/year.
  - matwood 4y ago
    Yeah, most of the complaints of Twitter was that it should be doing more in the space it commanded, not that it was losing tons of money every year. Though, 1-1.5B in yearly interest payments is going to make that tough going forward.
  - kranke155 4y ago
    I stand corrected. My impression was they always lost money.
poulsbohemian 4y ago
>The reality is most huge companies are majority bloat. Something I learned early in my career is that some companies consider this a feature not a bug. As in, they are hoarding talent so that they don't go to work for their competitor.

yunohn 4y ago

> I mean wholly crap, this reminds me of old German industry where people retire in the place they started. This is honestly uncalled for. Job hopping every 2-3yrs should not be an expected task.

867-5309 4y ago
is that down to the employer or employee?
- yunohn 4y ago
  All companies I’ve worked at, startup to FAANG, have tried their best to reduce attrition and retain employees by providing growth opportunities. Changing jobs is a skill/knowledge net-negative for the employer, and can be negative (outside of salary) for the employee as they have to relearn everything (relationships, tech debt, processes) etc.
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    I have yet to see an employer match the market rate for talent.
- jq-r 4y ago
  Could be both.

moonchrome 4y ago

Except in these firing sprees it's not competent employees that remain - those people are usually the first to jump ship because they have options and see where it's headed. It's not like they get raises for staying to get a part of the savings from the cuts - usually they get pay freezes. Restructuring is done on whatever idea the new owner(s) have in plan - which could be equally disconnected from "real product". I'm not that optimistic about Twitter long term - never was TBH but this Musk thing is turning to a shitshow and also exposes what it's like working for him in his other companies.

loceng 4y ago
[dead]
PunchTornado 4y ago
You realise how annoying it is when you see people around you in the company making as much money as you and doing nothing useful to actually generate revenue. Data scientists that write a blog post about the most used hashtag or emoticon. Or PMs that we don't need... I'm staying and I'm glad the teams are trimmed.
- Kye 4y ago
  Are you absolutely 100% sure the surface stuff you had visibility into was all they did?
  - raspberry1337 4y ago
    Hey, the could actually do something very significant in secret that for some reason, you didn't know anything about! The excuses for bloat here is just mind-boggling, unless reflects that many people on HN are bloaters themselves
    - Kye 4y ago
      I have not been impressed with the average tech person's ability to understand parts of a business outside their immediate responsibilities. There were people on here seriously questioning the need for a general counsel for a company that's constantly under legal assault by every country on the planet. Never mind the long recurring "why does an ad-dependent company need people to manage relationships with the big spenders who expect that?" discussions.

bartvk 4y ago

> this reminds me of old German industry where people retire in the place they started What is wrong with that?

kortilla 4y ago
Depends on if you want innovation or stability. For innovation, people building fiefdoms over decades of political maneuvering is terribly destructive to change. Very few industries require constant learning for the business to compete so a highly tenured employee likely hasn’t learned anything new beyond minute process changes for 10+ years. Once people are ossified into a role like that, they will do anything and everything to shut down anything that has a whiff of threatening their current role.
- bartvk 4y ago
  That is actually not my experience. I worked at a scientific institute on space cameras, and since projects easily last 10 years from design to launch, we have a lot of older people. Some were resisting change. Some were embracing it. All in all, I had a great time and gained a lot of respect. I love working in teams with all ages. Your sentence "once people are ossified..." feels like a generalization to me.
  - kortilla 4y ago
    I think you’re confusing age with tenure of a position.

dfghbbjiiugb 4y ago

Yes and no. I think we'd all agree that large tech companies have tons of really obvious staffing inefficiencies. There are many teams working on what are essentially vanity projects and many other teams have more staffing than they realistically need. On the other hand the slash and burn Elon approach seems objectively terrible. Indiscriminately firing most of the company kills morale and is likely to send the company into a hiring death spiral where your good employees leave and you can't attract good talent. This won't automatically kill the product or the company but it's not going to lend itself to big positive successes in the future.

mschuster91 4y ago

> I mean wholly crap, this reminds me of old German industry where people retire in the place they started. German here. I think this actually is a huge part of the success of the famous Mittelstand - all that institutional knowledge these people have is extremely valuable. It's not just basic stuff like "know time tracking, billing and other admin systems and internal processes", but also the stuff that really can speed up your work: whom to ask on the "kurzer Dienstweg" aka short-circuitting bureaucracy when needed, personal relationships with people in other departments on whose knowledge you rely (it's one thing if you get a random email asking for some shit from someone you don't know, but I'll always find some minutes to help out someone who has helped me out in the past), all the domain-specific knowledge about the precise needs and desires of your customers... Attrition is bad for a company as a whole, the problem is US-centric capitalism cannot quantify that impact (and it doesn't want to, given that attrition-related problems are long-term issues with years of time to impact), and so there is no KPI for leadership other than attrition rate itself. The only problem is that over the last years, employers' mindset has shifted from regular wage raises to paying the bare minimum which makes changing jobs every few years a virtual requirement for employees to get raises, and so we are already seeing the first glimpses of US employment culture and its issues cropping up.

kortilla 4y ago
> the problem is US-centric capitalism cannot quantify that impact (and it doesn't want to, given that attrition-related problems are long-term issues with years of time to impact) This is false. People invest on many year horizons all of the time when they believe in the company. If there was good evidence that having an average tenure of 5+ years was a great boost to the company, people would clamor to invest in companies like that. This was basically Google’s entire pitch when they were an early public company. Happy employees == great things. I remember when 60 minutes or dateline did some special about google before 2010 and people were floored by how good the employees got it. However, hiring standards relaxed and now google is slowly rotting from the inside to realize it’s the new IBM. Long tenure alone is absolutely not an advantage. It’s very easy to have a bunch of dead weight that just looks like they know what’s going on. So back to your point about experience mattering. That should show up in customer satisfaction, project turnaround speed, success rates, etc. Otherwise it’s pretty meaningless. And guess who already measures those KPIs…

entropi 4y ago

> The reality is most huge companies are majority bloat. This is true, and in my opinion, true for a reason. And that reason is not "most huge companies are dumb", as opposed to what Musk's cult seem to believe. The reality is, measuring what exactly is "bloat" and precisely cutting that bloat is extremely difficult and firing more than half of your workforce is probably like using a warhammer to do brain surgery.

trashtester 4y ago
Well, your alias actually refers to that process. Large organizations gain entropy over time. And entropy is precisly the inability to describe some structure at a micro/nano-level. But while fighting the entropy can be hard, not doing so is almost certain to be lethal. If an organism is infected by gangrene or cancer (the more extreme forms of entropy for a body), it may be more realistic to cut away whole body parts than to treat it in place, even if there is risk of sudden death. It seems to em that this is what Musk is trying. Either Twitter will be gone within a year, or they may very well be sustainably profitable within 2-3 years.

kranke155 4y ago

Software engineers at Twitter got used to working on an money losing company for 10 years and being told they’re great at their job. Then they were fired en masse because someone’s called them out on it. If your company is losing money all this time you are likely to be fired eventually in the real world. Job security in sw world had become so high that no one seemed to expect it. Everyone assumed “sure we’re losing money and the company has no direction” but all is fine. They all stayed there in their tables working for 10 years in a rudderless company as if it was a government job.

entropy_ 4y ago
This is factually untrue though. Twitter was making money in 2018 and 2019 (to the tune of ~1.2B/year in net profit out of ~3B revenue, which is a fairly high profit margin) they lost quite a bit of money in 2020 and less in the years thereafter. However, even in the years where they had negative net income EBITDA remained positive suggesting the losses were upfront investments that would be expected to be amortized over the coming years. The only reason Twitter is in deep financial shit right now is because Elon acquired it in a leveraged buyout and the cost of servicing the debt is estimated around 1B/year.
- matwood 4y ago
  Yeah, most of the complaints of Twitter was that it should be doing more in the space it commanded, not that it was losing tons of money every year. Though, 1-1.5B in yearly interest payments is going to make that tough going forward.
- kranke155 4y ago
  I stand corrected. My impression was they always lost money.

poulsbohemian 4y ago

>The reality is most huge companies are majority bloat. Something I learned early in my career is that some companies consider this a feature not a bug. As in, they are hoarding talent so that they don't go to work for their competitor.