3 ms·

Elon Musk Urges More Companies to Shrink Like Twitter

4 points by impish9208 3y ago

impish9208 3y ago
https://archive.is/9gf9g https://archive.is/9gf9g
AYBABTME 3y ago
Unfortunately I'm pretty sure he's right. Large orgs doing projects with 30-40 engineers... don't get anything done. But people somehow have the belief that 30-40 engineers is what it takes, whereas 3-4 ones would get it done faster, although with a lot less of the details polished off. But in a quarter of the time.
- thx-2718 3y ago
  With that sort of mentality I'm not sure I would want to risk my life with one of their products.
  - BulgarianIdiot 3y ago
    Apple is implementing a similar philosophy where key projects are managed by teams of 4-5 people, and major divisions within the company are under one person who oversees every development personally. You can be hyperproductive with few people. You can even be more secure, more detailed, ship more features in shorter time, and so on. But the trick is entropy is always after you. Always. Case in point, Apple itself in recent years has dropped the ball. Some of their teams are lean and mean, classic Apple, while others have gone the corporate way of twiddling their thumbs all day (while still doing useful work, but not nearly as much). As Steve Jobs called them "C players". It's not easy to manage culture in a giant company. No matter what you do, when the machine is complex, culture gets heterogenous, things slip through the cracks, and entropy ensures you have lots of people who all look busy at all times, doing little. But what Twitter did has nothing to do with any of this. Because Elon Musk just went up and fired basically 90% of the company without even having understood WTF is it that most people he's firing are doing there. As evidenced by scrambling to re-hire some of them. Then firing them again, hiring them again. Now trying to hire again. Musk is erratic and over-confident. Firing half the people in a company overnight while you're two weeks in is like losing half your weight overnight. There's no such weight loss program. Someone chopped you in half. You don't die immediately though. You're conscious for many more minutes, before you bleed out and lose awareness. In corporate PoV this can take months and even a couple of years. But to me Twitter is dead. Elon is tryin resuscitation. Probably will fail. There's a way to make a company like Twitter leaner. But it would've taken a couple of years. He didn't want to put the time in, and learn. He wanted to save cash. Saving this way leads to bankruptcy.
- BulgarianIdiot 3y ago
  Never trust what Elon says: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36061555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36061555
BulgarianIdiot 3y ago
Twitter recently paid a 30-40 million USD to acquire (acqui-hire) basically a dozen people or so from a hiring company. A hiring company. Now... think this through for a second. When Elon has opinions to share, they're always in his favor. But they're not always directly what he says, rather it's the aftermath of what he says, as hundreds of millions are listening to him. If he's so desperate to hire good developers that he'd pay millions to get a tiny hiring company's employees working for him, while literally not paying Twitter's rent and bills... is he really trying to keep Twitter small at this point? Or is he trying to grow it? But how can he have more people to pick from on the market? He recently complained that hiring is very hard right now for Twitter. But what happens if he says "hey what I did was awesome, everyone should fire their developers... so I can hire some of them... I mean... I didn't say this. TWEET DELETED". Every company that follows his advice, even partially, will collectively flood the market with developers, and he improves the situation for himself being able to pick better devs, and also at lower salaries, because when you have lots of unemployed devs, salaries go down.
- moneywoes 3y ago
  From a hiring company meaning a recruiting company?
  - BulgarianIdiot 3y ago
    Recruiting company yes. Not a native speaker so my small language model decided "hiring company" sounds fine.
tortoise_in 3y ago
Is this guy serious about humanity? If companies not going to employee people, govt can not provide jobs to everyone! Private investment and subsidies companies get for providing jobs and livelihood. Everyone can't be Elon Musk. He should world through others perspective
mempko 3y ago
Yes, Just look how well the DeSantis announcement went. If the huge clusterfuck that was the Desantis announcement of Twitter spaces is any indication of the future for where this leads, then maybe the 'leaders' of our tech community should pause for thought.
rsynnott 3y ago
Meanwhile: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/24/tech/twitter-desantis-meltdown/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/24/tech/twitter-desantis-mel...
papito 3y ago
There is a solid case to be made that many tech companies are ridiculously bloated, trying to show "growth" to VCs by increasing the headcount and not the users (who are defined in rather shady and morally/legally questionable ways), but, uh, this is not it.

4 points by impish9208 3y ago

https://archive.is/9gf9g https://archive.is/9gf9g

Unfortunately I'm pretty sure he's right. Large orgs doing projects with 30-40 engineers... don't get anything done. But people somehow have the belief that 30-40 engineers is what it takes, whereas 3-4 ones would get it done faster, although with a lot less of the details polished off. But in a quarter of the time.

thx-2718 3y ago
With that sort of mentality I'm not sure I would want to risk my life with one of their products.
- BulgarianIdiot 3y ago
  Apple is implementing a similar philosophy where key projects are managed by teams of 4-5 people, and major divisions within the company are under one person who oversees every development personally. You can be hyperproductive with few people. You can even be more secure, more detailed, ship more features in shorter time, and so on. But the trick is entropy is always after you. Always. Case in point, Apple itself in recent years has dropped the ball. Some of their teams are lean and mean, classic Apple, while others have gone the corporate way of twiddling their thumbs all day (while still doing useful work, but not nearly as much). As Steve Jobs called them "C players". It's not easy to manage culture in a giant company. No matter what you do, when the machine is complex, culture gets heterogenous, things slip through the cracks, and entropy ensures you have lots of people who all look busy at all times, doing little. But what Twitter did has nothing to do with any of this. Because Elon Musk just went up and fired basically 90% of the company without even having understood WTF is it that most people he's firing are doing there. As evidenced by scrambling to re-hire some of them. Then firing them again, hiring them again. Now trying to hire again. Musk is erratic and over-confident. Firing half the people in a company overnight while you're two weeks in is like losing half your weight overnight. There's no such weight loss program. Someone chopped you in half. You don't die immediately though. You're conscious for many more minutes, before you bleed out and lose awareness. In corporate PoV this can take months and even a couple of years. But to me Twitter is dead. Elon is tryin resuscitation. Probably will fail. There's a way to make a company like Twitter leaner. But it would've taken a couple of years. He didn't want to put the time in, and learn. He wanted to save cash. Saving this way leads to bankruptcy.
BulgarianIdiot 3y ago
Never trust what Elon says: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36061555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36061555

BulgarianIdiot 3y ago

Twitter recently paid a 30-40 million USD to acquire (acqui-hire) basically a dozen people or so from a hiring company. A hiring company. Now... think this through for a second. When Elon has opinions to share, they're always in his favor. But they're not always directly what he says, rather it's the aftermath of what he says, as hundreds of millions are listening to him. If he's so desperate to hire good developers that he'd pay millions to get a tiny hiring company's employees working for him, while literally not paying Twitter's rent and bills... is he really trying to keep Twitter small at this point? Or is he trying to grow it? But how can he have more people to pick from on the market? He recently complained that hiring is very hard right now for Twitter. But what happens if he says "hey what I did was awesome, everyone should fire their developers... so I can hire some of them... I mean... I didn't say this. TWEET DELETED". Every company that follows his advice, even partially, will collectively flood the market with developers, and he improves the situation for himself being able to pick better devs, and also at lower salaries, because when you have lots of unemployed devs, salaries go down.

moneywoes 3y ago
From a hiring company meaning a recruiting company?
- BulgarianIdiot 3y ago
  Recruiting company yes. Not a native speaker so my small language model decided "hiring company" sounds fine.

tortoise_in 3y ago

Is this guy serious about humanity? If companies not going to employee people, govt can not provide jobs to everyone! Private investment and subsidies companies get for providing jobs and livelihood. Everyone can't be Elon Musk. He should world through others perspective

mempko 3y ago

Yes, Just look how well the DeSantis announcement went. If the huge clusterfuck that was the Desantis announcement of Twitter spaces is any indication of the future for where this leads, then maybe the 'leaders' of our tech community should pause for thought.

rsynnott 3y ago

Meanwhile: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/24/tech/twitter-desantis-meltdown/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/24/tech/twitter-desantis-mel...

papito 3y ago

There is a solid case to be made that many tech companies are ridiculously bloated, trying to show "growth" to VCs by increasing the headcount and not the users (who are defined in rather shady and morally/legally questionable ways), but, uh, this is not it.