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> and knowing you can shrink it if you are wrong You can’t just shrink it. That’s the problem. They still think of it as a factory where everyone is just a rob

by re-thc 3y ago

> and knowing you can shrink it if you are wrong You can’t just shrink it. That’s the problem. They still think of it as a factory where everyone is just a robot. Most places lack enough documentation and processes that shrinking the teams reduce knowledge. There is never an even distribution of skill sets etc. You kill off team dynamics. It’s not the same. You can’t just slot people in and out without impact in software.

moneywoes 3y ago
To play devils advocate does Twitter not seem fine now?
- re-thc 3y ago
  > To play devils advocate does Twitter not seem fine now? Fine in what sense? There's less features, less capacity and more outages. They couldn't even hold someone's presidential announcement fine without it breaking. Is that fine? As a business they've gained debt and lost a lot of income. Is that fine? With less income, less ads and less of everything it's a different scale. Something that's fine with 1 million users is not the same as 10 million. I would say it's different - different ownership, different direction etc. Time will tell what the outcome is. Projects have been axed and new 1s will appear. The changing of staff has definitely hurt Twitter. Whether they can recover is a different question.
  - froggit 3y ago
    So... fine as long as you don't compare it to its past self?
- HWR_14 3y ago
  It does not. They have more frequent and longer outages now. Heck, when Musk tried to do a town hall for DeSantis to announce his run, the livestream was buggy specifically because no one had returned one of their vendors phone calls. That's a stupid reason for a major fuckup.
  - thulle 3y ago
    Do you have any source for the part about the vendor? Searching for a bit just gave me a ton of articles about the failed announcement in general.
    - brokenmachine 3y ago
      I read somewhere that it was because they didn't pay a bill to Redis. Maybe throw that in as a search term.
marcosdumay 3y ago
Just to add, you can't increase it that fast either. If you double the number of employees of some place in a year, you have a really large risk of completely redefining its entire culture. And a software business has basically 2 things, a culture and locked-in people.
- re-thc 3y ago
  > Just to add, you can't increase it that fast either. Lots of places reported people having nothing to do, don't know what to do and lacked direction. The hiring standards also went down.
- smileysteve 3y ago
  When you double in a year, especially in the great resignation, 75% of your company will be new hires at the end of the year. If you didn't follow conventions, your onboarding wasn't great or reinforced, then very few things in your system will be consistent.
- Slava_Propanei 3y ago
  [dead]
HWR_14 3y ago
You can shrink it if you plan correctly from the hiring phase. If you hire new people for a new division, and then shutter that division, you minimize the consequences. If you hire a bunch of new low level people for a bunch of teams and then prune those same people out, it's tough but doable. Heck, if you hire people because you might need them, give them nothing to do (as many people claimed happened to them) and then fire them it is the easiest of all. If, on the other hand, you hire 100% more people, then fire 50% of the people and try to use that culling to get rid of a lot of older (and more expensive) employees, you can doom your company.
- re-thc 3y ago
  > You can shrink it if you plan correctly from the hiring phase. If you hire new people for a new division, and then shutter that division, you minimize the consequences. You've just rephrased the exact issue I had differently. It doesn't matter if it's a new division or not unless your organization doesn't interact. People have to go via onboarding and other steps. It involves HR "people and culture", the internal IT teams, the reception, you might get assigned a mentor, etc. These interactions spread when people socialize. It's also as people and possibly shareholders how you view the company. Watch any sports and a player in form in the right team can perform 10x better. These so-called minimal disruptions actually have an impact. Meta was paying a higher salary because less people wanted to work there. I don't see all the negatives as "minimal consequences".

by re-thc 3y ago

moneywoes 3y ago

To play devils advocate does Twitter not seem fine now?

re-thc 3y ago
> To play devils advocate does Twitter not seem fine now? Fine in what sense? There's less features, less capacity and more outages. They couldn't even hold someone's presidential announcement fine without it breaking. Is that fine? As a business they've gained debt and lost a lot of income. Is that fine? With less income, less ads and less of everything it's a different scale. Something that's fine with 1 million users is not the same as 10 million. I would say it's different - different ownership, different direction etc. Time will tell what the outcome is. Projects have been axed and new 1s will appear. The changing of staff has definitely hurt Twitter. Whether they can recover is a different question.
- froggit 3y ago
  So... fine as long as you don't compare it to its past self?
HWR_14 3y ago
It does not. They have more frequent and longer outages now. Heck, when Musk tried to do a town hall for DeSantis to announce his run, the livestream was buggy specifically because no one had returned one of their vendors phone calls. That's a stupid reason for a major fuckup.
- thulle 3y ago
  Do you have any source for the part about the vendor? Searching for a bit just gave me a ton of articles about the failed announcement in general.
  - brokenmachine 3y ago
    I read somewhere that it was because they didn't pay a bill to Redis. Maybe throw that in as a search term.

marcosdumay 3y ago

Just to add, you can't increase it that fast either. If you double the number of employees of some place in a year, you have a really large risk of completely redefining its entire culture. And a software business has basically 2 things, a culture and locked-in people.

re-thc 3y ago
> Just to add, you can't increase it that fast either. Lots of places reported people having nothing to do, don't know what to do and lacked direction. The hiring standards also went down.
smileysteve 3y ago
When you double in a year, especially in the great resignation, 75% of your company will be new hires at the end of the year. If you didn't follow conventions, your onboarding wasn't great or reinforced, then very few things in your system will be consistent.
Slava_Propanei 3y ago
[dead]

HWR_14 3y ago

You can shrink it if you plan correctly from the hiring phase. If you hire new people for a new division, and then shutter that division, you minimize the consequences. If you hire a bunch of new low level people for a bunch of teams and then prune those same people out, it's tough but doable. Heck, if you hire people because you might need them, give them nothing to do (as many people claimed happened to them) and then fire them it is the easiest of all. If, on the other hand, you hire 100% more people, then fire 50% of the people and try to use that culling to get rid of a lot of older (and more expensive) employees, you can doom your company.

re-thc 3y ago
> You can shrink it if you plan correctly from the hiring phase. If you hire new people for a new division, and then shutter that division, you minimize the consequences. You've just rephrased the exact issue I had differently. It doesn't matter if it's a new division or not unless your organization doesn't interact. People have to go via onboarding and other steps. It involves HR "people and culture", the internal IT teams, the reception, you might get assigned a mentor, etc. These interactions spread when people socialize. It's also as people and possibly shareholders how you view the company. Watch any sports and a player in form in the right team can perform 10x better. These so-called minimal disruptions actually have an impact. Meta was paying a higher salary because less people wanted to work there. I don't see all the negatives as "minimal consequences".