5 ms·

The fact that Twitter is running well with headcount down significantly matters

31 points by mcenedella 4y ago

brntsllvn 4y ago
Totally agree it's worth discovering how few employees it requires to keep the lights on. However harsh. Musk mentioned cash burn was $4mm/day ($1.5bn/yr) and headcount reduction probably cuts that in half. Perhaps a sustainable business will emerge after all. Not exactly equivalent, but I think Craigslist has like 40 employees. It's doesn't make billions in revenue like Twitter did (does?) but seems like a relevant case study.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >Musk mentioned cash burn was $4mm/day ($1.5bn/yr) So he could afford to run it for 30 years with his own money, for the equivalent hit of like buying a car would be for an ordinary person, just out of spite if he had to!
  - db48x 4y ago
    He doesn’t have NNN billion dollars, he as stock in companies he controls which is currently valued at NNN billion dollars (whatever his current net worth is). Those are very different things.
    - brntsllvn 4y ago
      Point taken. But he borrows against those assets. Call his margin 30%. That's still a decent chunk of time.
    - coldtea 4y ago
      Not very different. Let's put it this way, even if he went crazy with it, he'd still die a billionaire even if he gets at a hundrend years old... Heck, Trump is still a billionaire, and he did several bunkrupties, bad investments, BS moves, and stupidity to hurt his public image there is. And he never had 1/100 of what Musk has to begin with...
      - gjsman-1000 4y ago
        Not very different? It’s completely different. Imagine if I printed 1,000,000 shares of a fictional company I owned. Then my parents bought 1 share each for $1 each. I would have a market cap of one million dollars, even though the remaining 999,998 can’t be sold anywhere. Thus, Elon’s net worth only works if he could sell every share, for the share price it is right now. This is impossible - he would crash the stock and make a few billion dollars at most.
        mwint 4y ago
        Even if the stock crashed 50%, it’d still be way more than a “few” billion.
        coldtea 4y ago
        You are assuming he needs to cache everything and have 500 billion at hand at once. That's not how it works.
  - brntsllvn 4y ago
    Yeah totally. Instead, he paid a premium rather than arguing for a discount via unsustainable cash burn.
- derbOac 4y ago
  It's easier to keep the light switch on than to put in the wiring and sockets to begin with. I'm sure there's a term for this type of bias but it's not the only type that's relevant to these discussions.
Rzor 4y ago
I think it's too soon to say that, but don't forget Musk's philosophy of working like hell (his famous 100h a week) and how this could bite Twitter in the future. All in all, CEOs are paid for good decisions, not necessarily hard ones.
- oska 4y ago
  Does anyone ever go through life only making good decisions and not any hard ones?
- myvoiceismypass 4y ago
  How hard is a CEO _actually_ working if they literally spend more than half the day tweeting, posting memes, and responding to criticism?
  - mwint 4y ago
    CEOs responding to criticism is way more valuable than the stuff they usually do…
AnimalMuppet 4y ago
Define "well". In particular, define the time frame over which "well" is measured. Twitter has run well... for the past month. That's not long, even in the "what have you done for me this quarter" world of corporate earnings. And even that's too short for any sane evaluation - tons of CEOs have destroyed a business by making things look good for a year or two. He's doing this. So far, it's worked well enough to keep the lights on and the servers up. Beyond that, it's too early to tell.
- quitit 4y ago
  Twitter's ex-employees have detailed the extensive efforts they made to make twitter run well by automatically diagnosing and managing various sources of downtime. However anyone with any amount of systems experience knows that updates, bugs and new features are going to be the pain points moving forward. "Running well" is subjective - moderation is now garbage and advertisers have left in droves, it's easy to flood the website with spam to drown out messages (as various sleeper accounts just did during the chinese covid protests) and many features that have been broken still remain broken. Judging from share price depreciation across Musk's various businesses, I'm guessing the sentiment of "everyone in SV admires Elon" is at best naive, but most likely an attempt at manipulation to address Tesla's still-tumbling share price. Is there even anyone out there who thought the site would just stop working? The expectation isn't that the infrastructure will fail, it's that Musk will make a series of impulsive decisions that render the site either irrelevant or unable to compete with other social media platforms. So far this seems to be a pretty accurate forecast of his actions.
  - wfme 4y ago
    > Is there even anyone out there who thought the site would just stop working Yes, there were many authoritatively claiming this on here and Twitter. The goalposts for failure will continue to move, though, and we’ll just pretend no one ever claimed those things.
i13e 4y ago
Twitter now has billions in debt that it has to service and has lost half of their top 100 advertisers. Their plan to sell an 8$ subscription won't have the reach or ability to service that debt, and while layoffs were necessary to cut costs, doing it in such a classless and unorganized way opens them to serious site reliability issues going forward (they were even down a bit today, for example). I don't see this playing out well to be honest.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Frankly, that was going to happen either way. Twitter was losing money long before Elon took over, and advertising alone was never going to pay the bills for ~7500 employees.
  - i13e 4y ago
    Yes but the issue is that while laying off so many people could have reduced their burn to zero, losing half of your top 100 advertisers AND adding billions in debt, plus losing most of your staff is a recipe for disaster. Sorry if I didn't phrase that well in my comment. I do agree that they would have collapsed eventually and this is just an accelerated version of that
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      Guess we'll have to see, then. I'm no fan of the guy, but from where I'm standing the board seems stacked in Musk's favor...
      - HPMOR 4y ago
        How? Please explain. Literally everything is going against him right now.
        jhgfjhfgjhfgjh 4y ago
        Twitter reduced headcount significantly and the service is operating like normal. How is that going against him?
tonetheman 4y ago
It matters maybe to CEO's who want to squeeze their own companies in a similar manner. But saying they are running well with the head count down is just not known. Are the people who remain all killing themselves to keep everything running? If so that is not sustainable. Are systems running in spite of the down headcount, or really because of all the work done by those long fired? And hate/spam is known to be going up. So they are at least not covering that. He had money to run that company for years at a 4M burn rate but chose not to. He chose to fire people like a petulant child. And illegally in European countries. Hopefully everyone sees it for what it is, he is an embarrassment of a CEO.
cramjabsyn 4y ago
People act like musk is the genius who invented layoffs or being a cut throat executive. Yeah, firing people saves money. Yeah a ship can still run with a skeleton crew. However, personally I think the story of a platform supporting thousands of families is more interesting than a platform serving to enrich a small (and openly toxic) few
- asguy 4y ago
  > However, personally I think the story of a platform supporting thousands of families is more interesting than a platform serving to enrich a small (and openly toxic) few .. wasn’t Twitter operating at a net loss? So the VCs were the ones “supporting” those families… that’s a charity LARPing as a functional business
  - cramjabsyn 4y ago
    So the solution is to axe a large portion of the staff, burn established advertisers and alienate a large portion of the user base? Seems more like a playbook to torpedo the company.
    - asguy 4y ago
      The beauty is: we’re going to find out soon enough. So far it doesn’t seem like Twitter is going to have any problem surviving.
      - TheBigSalad 4y ago
        I'd be shocked if it survived this.
quags 4y ago
It has not been long enough to really see. Security? Backups? DB Admin? These are easy to cut now and suffer later. Maybe many of these employees were useless but if shit ever hits the fan and you get an all hands on deck situation will be the real test.
mindcrash 4y ago
Are there any people left who fully understand Manhattan* from top to bottom? If not, they already have a short- to longterm problem unless they find something in the OSS community with the same characteristics. *) https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2014/manhattan-our-real-time-multi-tenant-distributed-database-for-twitter-scale https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2014/manhattan-...
nateburke 4y ago
Twitter no longer has to post quarterly numbers publicly. Whether or not its business is "running well" is idle speculation at this point, since that data is private. The CEO in the linked emails should stop wasting his time thinking about someone else's company.
wittycardio 4y ago
It's not running well. Far more glitchy than it used to be. You couldn't reply on iPhones a few days ago. I constantly get page load failures on web. It has a decade+ of engineering work on it so I don't expect it to just collapse. But definitely seeing issues
tamaharbor 4y ago
Sounds like when the US Government occasionally shuts down, yet seems to run just fine. (Except for shutting down Federal vacation destinations).
ryanbrunner 4y ago
I'm relatively sure that we could fire everyone but one person from our company and keep our site running (we have a very small team and site with, so that's "only" firing like 85% of the company). The problem would be that we wouldn't have any sales, product management, design, proper support, etc. "The site literally functions" is a very low bar and not nearly enough to keep revenues where they need to be, let alone actually grow and advance the company. Come to think of it, I have a better example. I used to work for a company (Highrise) that no longer exists - it was shut down by our parent company, and no employees are working on the product. New signups have been turned off, but it's still running and people are still using it. I can't say for certain absolutely no effort is being put into it, but I'm fairly sure it's pretty minimal, and it just keeps going. It's going to wither on the vine, but we never really had that many server issues to begin with if no one was touching anything, and so it can just kinda keep going with 0 staff.

31 points by mcenedella 4y ago

Totally agree it's worth discovering how few employees it requires to keep the lights on. However harsh. Musk mentioned cash burn was $4mm/day ($1.5bn/yr) and headcount reduction probably cuts that in half. Perhaps a sustainable business will emerge after all. Not exactly equivalent, but I think Craigslist has like 40 employees. It's doesn't make billions in revenue like Twitter did (does?) but seems like a relevant case study.

coldtea 4y ago
>Musk mentioned cash burn was $4mm/day ($1.5bn/yr) So he could afford to run it for 30 years with his own money, for the equivalent hit of like buying a car would be for an ordinary person, just out of spite if he had to!
- db48x 4y ago
  He doesn’t have NNN billion dollars, he as stock in companies he controls which is currently valued at NNN billion dollars (whatever his current net worth is). Those are very different things.
  - brntsllvn 4y ago
    Point taken. But he borrows against those assets. Call his margin 30%. That's still a decent chunk of time.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    Not very different. Let's put it this way, even if he went crazy with it, he'd still die a billionaire even if he gets at a hundrend years old... Heck, Trump is still a billionaire, and he did several bunkrupties, bad investments, BS moves, and stupidity to hurt his public image there is. And he never had 1/100 of what Musk has to begin with...
    - gjsman-1000 4y ago
      Not very different? It’s completely different. Imagine if I printed 1,000,000 shares of a fictional company I owned. Then my parents bought 1 share each for $1 each. I would have a market cap of one million dollars, even though the remaining 999,998 can’t be sold anywhere. Thus, Elon’s net worth only works if he could sell every share, for the share price it is right now. This is impossible - he would crash the stock and make a few billion dollars at most.
      - mwint 4y ago
        Even if the stock crashed 50%, it’d still be way more than a “few” billion.
      - coldtea 4y ago
        You are assuming he needs to cache everything and have 500 billion at hand at once. That's not how it works.
- brntsllvn 4y ago
  Yeah totally. Instead, he paid a premium rather than arguing for a discount via unsustainable cash burn.
derbOac 4y ago
It's easier to keep the light switch on than to put in the wiring and sockets to begin with. I'm sure there's a term for this type of bias but it's not the only type that's relevant to these discussions.

Rzor 4y ago

I think it's too soon to say that, but don't forget Musk's philosophy of working like hell (his famous 100h a week) and how this could bite Twitter in the future. All in all, CEOs are paid for good decisions, not necessarily hard ones.

oska 4y ago
Does anyone ever go through life only making good decisions and not any hard ones?
myvoiceismypass 4y ago
How hard is a CEO _actually_ working if they literally spend more than half the day tweeting, posting memes, and responding to criticism?
- mwint 4y ago
  CEOs responding to criticism is way more valuable than the stuff they usually do…

AnimalMuppet 4y ago

Define "well". In particular, define the time frame over which "well" is measured. Twitter has run well... for the past month. That's not long, even in the "what have you done for me this quarter" world of corporate earnings. And even that's too short for any sane evaluation - tons of CEOs have destroyed a business by making things look good for a year or two. He's doing this. So far, it's worked well enough to keep the lights on and the servers up. Beyond that, it's too early to tell.

quitit 4y ago
Twitter's ex-employees have detailed the extensive efforts they made to make twitter run well by automatically diagnosing and managing various sources of downtime. However anyone with any amount of systems experience knows that updates, bugs and new features are going to be the pain points moving forward. "Running well" is subjective - moderation is now garbage and advertisers have left in droves, it's easy to flood the website with spam to drown out messages (as various sleeper accounts just did during the chinese covid protests) and many features that have been broken still remain broken. Judging from share price depreciation across Musk's various businesses, I'm guessing the sentiment of "everyone in SV admires Elon" is at best naive, but most likely an attempt at manipulation to address Tesla's still-tumbling share price. Is there even anyone out there who thought the site would just stop working? The expectation isn't that the infrastructure will fail, it's that Musk will make a series of impulsive decisions that render the site either irrelevant or unable to compete with other social media platforms. So far this seems to be a pretty accurate forecast of his actions.
- wfme 4y ago
  > Is there even anyone out there who thought the site would just stop working Yes, there were many authoritatively claiming this on here and Twitter. The goalposts for failure will continue to move, though, and we’ll just pretend no one ever claimed those things.

i13e 4y ago

Twitter now has billions in debt that it has to service and has lost half of their top 100 advertisers. Their plan to sell an 8$ subscription won't have the reach or ability to service that debt, and while layoffs were necessary to cut costs, doing it in such a classless and unorganized way opens them to serious site reliability issues going forward (they were even down a bit today, for example). I don't see this playing out well to be honest.

smoldesu 4y ago
Frankly, that was going to happen either way. Twitter was losing money long before Elon took over, and advertising alone was never going to pay the bills for ~7500 employees.
- i13e 4y ago
  Yes but the issue is that while laying off so many people could have reduced their burn to zero, losing half of your top 100 advertisers AND adding billions in debt, plus losing most of your staff is a recipe for disaster. Sorry if I didn't phrase that well in my comment. I do agree that they would have collapsed eventually and this is just an accelerated version of that
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    Guess we'll have to see, then. I'm no fan of the guy, but from where I'm standing the board seems stacked in Musk's favor...
    - HPMOR 4y ago
      How? Please explain. Literally everything is going against him right now.
      - jhgfjhfgjhfgjh 4y ago
        Twitter reduced headcount significantly and the service is operating like normal. How is that going against him?

tonetheman 4y ago

It matters maybe to CEO's who want to squeeze their own companies in a similar manner. But saying they are running well with the head count down is just not known. Are the people who remain all killing themselves to keep everything running? If so that is not sustainable. Are systems running in spite of the down headcount, or really because of all the work done by those long fired? And hate/spam is known to be going up. So they are at least not covering that. He had money to run that company for years at a 4M burn rate but chose not to. He chose to fire people like a petulant child. And illegally in European countries. Hopefully everyone sees it for what it is, he is an embarrassment of a CEO.

cramjabsyn 4y ago

People act like musk is the genius who invented layoffs or being a cut throat executive. Yeah, firing people saves money. Yeah a ship can still run with a skeleton crew. However, personally I think the story of a platform supporting thousands of families is more interesting than a platform serving to enrich a small (and openly toxic) few

asguy 4y ago
> However, personally I think the story of a platform supporting thousands of families is more interesting than a platform serving to enrich a small (and openly toxic) few .. wasn’t Twitter operating at a net loss? So the VCs were the ones “supporting” those families… that’s a charity LARPing as a functional business
- cramjabsyn 4y ago
  So the solution is to axe a large portion of the staff, burn established advertisers and alienate a large portion of the user base? Seems more like a playbook to torpedo the company.
  - asguy 4y ago
    The beauty is: we’re going to find out soon enough. So far it doesn’t seem like Twitter is going to have any problem surviving.
    - TheBigSalad 4y ago
      I'd be shocked if it survived this.

quags 4y ago

It has not been long enough to really see. Security? Backups? DB Admin? These are easy to cut now and suffer later. Maybe many of these employees were useless but if shit ever hits the fan and you get an all hands on deck situation will be the real test.

mindcrash 4y ago

Are there any people left who fully understand Manhattan* from top to bottom? If not, they already have a short- to longterm problem unless they find something in the OSS community with the same characteristics. *) https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2014/manhattan-our-real-time-multi-tenant-distributed-database-for-twitter-scale https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2014/manhattan-...

nateburke 4y ago

Twitter no longer has to post quarterly numbers publicly. Whether or not its business is "running well" is idle speculation at this point, since that data is private. The CEO in the linked emails should stop wasting his time thinking about someone else's company.

wittycardio 4y ago

It's not running well. Far more glitchy than it used to be. You couldn't reply on iPhones a few days ago. I constantly get page load failures on web. It has a decade+ of engineering work on it so I don't expect it to just collapse. But definitely seeing issues

tamaharbor 4y ago

Sounds like when the US Government occasionally shuts down, yet seems to run just fine. (Except for shutting down Federal vacation destinations).

ryanbrunner 4y ago

I'm relatively sure that we could fire everyone but one person from our company and keep our site running (we have a very small team and site with, so that's "only" firing like 85% of the company). The problem would be that we wouldn't have any sales, product management, design, proper support, etc. "The site literally functions" is a very low bar and not nearly enough to keep revenues where they need to be, let alone actually grow and advance the company. Come to think of it, I have a better example. I used to work for a company (Highrise) that no longer exists - it was shut down by our parent company, and no employees are working on the product. New signups have been turned off, but it's still running and people are still using it. I can't say for certain absolutely no effort is being put into it, but I'm fairly sure it's pretty minimal, and it just keeps going. It's going to wither on the vine, but we never really had that many server issues to begin with if no one was touching anything, and so it can just kinda keep going with 0 staff.