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What a meme article. "Random professor says layoffs don't improve profitably" Real reason: Twitter cut half its staff and still works fine. Everyone said it w
by maximumcomfy 4y ago
What a meme article. "Random professor says layoffs don't improve profitably"
Real reason:
Twitter cut half its staff and still works fine. Everyone said it would explode and the servers would shit the bed, but you don't need 7000 employees to maintain 5 features. As soon as it was clear half the employees were redundant, other companies realized they could lay off some of their useless people too. Companies had huge bloat and realized the core operations would be fine if you can some people, so they did.
- thinking4real 4y ago[flagged]
- Andys 4y agoIts also become politically correct to hate him, so his actions and success are practically irrelevant in that regard.
- loa_in_ 4y agoI think, systemically, he comes in contact with people who have some following of their own more often than average, so any extreme sentiment towards him gets easily and exponentially amplified. At least that's what I think about why Twitter staff was ever so "important", because they are social media people by trade. Some people are heard more than others in the "uncritically repeating someone's sentiment" mode.
- fsociety 4y agoWhat has Musk done so far that indicates he will make Twitter be more successful?
- flarg 4y agoThe tech is fine, but Twitter is a total cesspool now. Maybe there's more to tech firms than just tech?
- Salgat 4y agoTheres no indication that it's doing fine. In fact, Twitter has lost half of its top 100 advertisers recently (which is where most of its revenue is). Unfortunately Twitter is not a public company so we have no idea how much of it is being propped up right now. https://www.npr.org/2022/11/25/1139180002/twitter-loses-50-top-advertisers-elon-musk https://www.npr.org/2022/11/25/1139180002/twitter-loses-50-t...
- factsarelolz 4y ago[flagged]
- Salgat 4y ago2 month* old article, and I'm not the one who made the original claim that they're doing fine. If you have more recent evidence to the contrary, please fill us in.
- devwastaken 4y agoTwitter was doing amazing, until sold. You're thinking in traditional business, not silicon valley type. Twitters original investors got all their money back out of it. That was the goal. Not a service that was efficient or could live off of having less. By having all those workers and features in the works, it prolonged their position and increased evaluation. Which as we can see worked amazingly. Usually they would have sold to a tech giant like Microsoft or Facebook. An entity that can eat the cost because they don't know what to do with themselves and don't care about profits. Musk won't make back what they bought Twitter for, not even close, and neither would have the original investors if nobody bought it.
- fsociety 4y agoFeatures have been breaking in production, journalists have commented on “weird behaviors” in the app AKA consistency issues. I think long-term these small breakages will burn the engineering team out, in addition to the unnecessary drama they have been brought into. More interestingly, I have a theory that the app has not had a large-scale breakage precisely because of the reason they had bloat. Having a large org run on microservices makes it likely that you are running more infra than you require. But then failures tend to be self-contained in systems. This then means that on average, a failure will only affect one small part of the system rather than the whole. It will be interesting to hear post-mortems from engineers once the spotlight dies down and people are ready to talk about what is happening internally.