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Great news for tech workers imo. Part of the tech labor market downturn has been driven by skepticism over the costs: if Twitter can slash its workforce and ke

Great news for tech workers imo. Part of the tech labor market downturn has been driven by skepticism over the costs: if Twitter can slash its workforce and keep running just fine, why can’t other companies? Well, Threads swooping in to rapidly drain Twitter’s market share might change that reasoning.

adam_arthur 3y ago
Are there really more than a few hundred people working on Threads? I believe Twitter had ~7,500 at its peak. Even if Threads succeeds, its not going to be because they have meaningfully more employees. Cloning twitter is a fairly easy technical problem nowadays... in contrast to early 2010s era of no-cloud, poor infra management and so on
- martin8412 3y ago
  A few hundreds working on a project within Meta. They won't have to take care of a lot of important things they'd have to if they were standalone.
- whateverman23 3y ago
  It's not really possible to say how many people are "working on" Threads, I bet. Threads is using Meta infrastructure. Should all those employees count towards Threads employees? How about HR? Legal? Internal tools? Building staff? Security? etc etc.
  - adam_arthur 3y ago
    I'm not particularly interested in Twitter itself, I just disagree that many of the products we use today require a large number of developers. Its easy to find many examples of apps that were challenging to build even just 10 years ago, that are somewhat trivial now. That trend will only continue. OpenAI only had ~100 employees at one point. You don't need 100s of operations people if you move from on-prem to serverless, for example. Today, social media requires the most people in content moderation/support, rather than development. Tomorrow those people are likely to be supplanted by LLMs or similar more tailored AI moderation models. Many products that required 1000s of people 10 years ago, may only require 100s today. To me this is just a fact
    - whateverman23 3y ago
      I see it as four categories, from least employees to most: 1. Desperately trying to make short term cash, and are trying to do their best with fewer employees than needed to maintain the current product. (Twitter is here). 2. Enough staff to maintain the current product, but not significantly innovate. 3. Significantly more than needed to maintain the current product, leaving room for people to work on non-core products that may end up being the next billion dollar project, even if the vast majority flop (Most big tech companies are here). 4. Way too bloated, with not enough projects to work on or not enough revenue to justify the R&D. The problem is that outsiders have a really really hard time understanding the product complexity of half a billion+ user services. Comparing OpenAI to the social media sites that this HN post is talking about is a great example. It's a completely different product with completely different challenges than FB, twitter, threads, youtube, whatever. Another great example is people citing "day in the life" videos that are actually recruiting videos showing the brighter sides of the job. Or people citing employees who claim that the company hired them to do nothing, when in reality it's a recruiter that was hired shortly before hiring slowed.
      - adam_arthur 3y ago
        Do you agree or disagree that techproducts today are easier to build than 15 years ago? Everything else is irrelevant. Technology drives abstractions which drive deflation by allowing fewer people to produce more goods. This has been proven and observed for thousands of years Companies can thrive while overemploying people, but eventually they get undercut by one that doesn't
        whateverman23 3y ago
        You're conflating two different topics: 1. "Its easy to find many examples of apps that were challenging to build even just 10 years ago, that are somewhat trivial now." Correct. It's easier now to build apps that we used 10-15 years ago. 2. "Do you agree or disagree that techproducts today are easier to build than 15 years ago?" Incorrect. Tech product complexity has increased in many ways in the last 15 years (and the increase in complexity is larger than the decrease in complexity we talked about above). -- Regulation. COPPA regulations strengthened significantly around 10 years ago. Europe's GDPR went into effect in like 2016. Those are just a couple popular ones. Remember when Amazon just didn't collect sales tax? Sure makes things easier! And remember, those laws are constantly changing. If NJ raises their sales tax, you better have someone paying attention. If Europe comes up with a new privacy law, you better have enough people to drop everything and implement everything that's needed. -- Scale + globalization. Myspace topped out at like 100 million active users around 15 years ago. Facebook is 30 times that size now! That scale comes with complexities most don't think about. How do you report user video ad income to the IRS-equivalent in Andorra? I don't know, but you now need to know at Facebook's scale!
- stubybubs 3y ago
  Most of those 7500 were not engineers. They were moderators, sales, support, HR, etc The moderation, whatever people personally think of it now, has certainly suffered from an advertiser perspective, which is why they left. It was a mistake to fire many of them. The sales people with relationships to advertisers left, and so again did many advertisers. It's apparently impossible to get your account reinstated if you were banned, because there is no more support. People had pay issues due to lack of HR and also lost benefits, so they left. On top of that, almost all the features they shipped were in the works before the company was bought, so they didn't really ship anything. Stability was worse and users left. They are flocking to Threads because it's stable. Remaining devs continued to trickle away as the work environment became intolerable. Basically every aspect of his experiment was a failure. I'm sure Twitter could have cut 10-15% and been okay but what Musk did absolutely did not work. All those things managers talk about, those reasons to treat your people well: cratering morale after layoffs, increasing attrition, dead sea effect, loss of institutional knowledge, it's all true, and just what everyone expected. The only thing to learn from Twitter's fall is that they were right. Great experiment I guess? Really validated some things we had all seen small scale or intuited.
  - adam_arthur 3y ago
    Twitter layoffs will have only "failed" due to creating a cultural divide and driving people to other services. Not due to the mechanical aspect of them Twitter laid off 80-90% of their people and the app functions the same. No material downtime in the year or so since the acquisition and feature velocity has only increased. Even if the features were in the pipeline already, none of them appeared over the 5-6 years preceding the acquisition. Highly coincidental, to the point of being suspect. Advertisers left due to taking sides on will of the moment cultural reasons, not because of moderation. The individuals behind advertising at many large corporations simply didn't want to help Elon. Would you want to give money to somebody you hated, and who loudly vocalized things that went strongly against your principles? This part is obvious to any objective observer. It's clear at this point that net added value per Twitter employee was low or even negative for many. If a company can layoff 90% of the developers and have no material change in availability or development velocity, then it's really inarguable otherwise
- quitit 3y ago
  In addition to the other points made by others about sharing staff... At their respective peaks Meta had around 12x the staff of peak Twitter despite not having 10x the user base (that said Meta towers heavily over Twitter in users and monthly accesses.) Even today Meta still has more than 10x the staff of peak Twitter. If anything you're highlighting that at ~7,500 staff Twitter was probably too thinly run.
sanderjd 3y ago
Yeah, unfortunately Musk has done so much incompetent stuff that it's not as easy to make the case that the Twitter implosion is due to the staff reduction rather than one of the twenty other boneheaded things that have happened. The narrative could totally settle on: "The massive staff cuts would have worked out just fine if he hadn't also taken on too much debt in the financing and scared off advertisers with his own personal tweeting and gotten rid of verification and started promoting the replies of paying customers and turned off non-logged-in access and search engine visibility." Personally I think it is all of the above.
- ericb 3y ago
  > Personally I think it is all of the above. I don't know--based on the behavior observed from the client-side in chrome devtools, twitter seemed to be DDos-ing itself with no exponential backoff and no jitter. That seems like exactly the kind of problem I'd expect if I fired all the senior people.
quitit 3y ago
Reddit's CEO stated that what Elon did to Twitter was a model he'd like Reddit to follow. Although Reddit's changes are fresh, it has declined both in quality and esteem from copying this business style. I expect further decline if they follow this road. As for the companies that aren't following Elon's lead: they are flourishing. We have enough data points now to say it authoritatively. Slash and burn is not effective, smart or conducive to the desired results.
- rhaway84773 3y ago
  In Musk’s defense, I think there is something to the idea that most tech companies were a little too bloated. Especially with the hiring during the pandemic based on unrealistic valuations and future expectations. But this is another area where Zuck beat Musk because Meta addressed this issue in a much more sensible way which involved considered changes in workforce as opposed to Musk’s impetuous unthought through slash and burn style.
  - ericb 3y ago
    I think they were bloated a bit, but that was mostly staffing for red herring projects and extra management layers. The bloat was a mismanagement problem "solved" by cutting everything but management. That plus a bit of over-hiring from covid and cheap money. But that's also a management issue.
rhaway84773 3y ago
Very clearly Twitter has not been able to run fine since firing so much of their workforce. The confusion here is because of 2 things: 1. Many people who were commenting on how this would adversely affect Twitter were doing it solely because they didn’t like Musk, as opposed to an understanding of how software development works. So these people were basically predicting that Twitter would stop working entirely in 2 weeks. But that’s not how software is developed. If it was, engineers would never be able to take a vacation and major web apps would all start failing on Jan 1. Those who understood how software development worked recognized that what we would see instead is a slow decay in software quality where things would consistently become slightly worse. Also, we’d see a complete inability to change major functionality without causing problems. Finally, there might be a few big bang failures (eg the domain name expires, but no one with access to the domain is still hired by Twitter anymore) but those would be few and far in between and would take time to uncover (although it does appear Twitter has faced at least one such situation). Twitter is indeed facing these situations. 2. The real threat to Twitter was always competition. In a competitive environment staying still is a death trap since your competitors will outpace you. There are a few reasons why Twitter has largely escaped this so far. (a) Twitter’s business is a fundamentally bad business model with a lot of hassles most businesses simply don’t want to deal with. (b) a misconception by many competitors that there was something fundamentally wrong with Twitter that needed to be addressed. (b) is why Bluesky and Threads have been the most successful Twitter alternatives. They’ve basically been Twitter clones and are not trying to fundamentally change the model. Of course, Bluesky is now basically getting crushed by Meta’s resources and existing user base, but they were fundamentally ok the right track and could have been competitive if they were able to reach technical parity earlier.

adam_arthur 3y ago

Are there really more than a few hundred people working on Threads? I believe Twitter had ~7,500 at its peak. Even if Threads succeeds, its not going to be because they have meaningfully more employees. Cloning twitter is a fairly easy technical problem nowadays... in contrast to early 2010s era of no-cloud, poor infra management and so on

martin8412 3y ago
A few hundreds working on a project within Meta. They won't have to take care of a lot of important things they'd have to if they were standalone.
whateverman23 3y ago
It's not really possible to say how many people are "working on" Threads, I bet. Threads is using Meta infrastructure. Should all those employees count towards Threads employees? How about HR? Legal? Internal tools? Building staff? Security? etc etc.
- adam_arthur 3y ago
  I'm not particularly interested in Twitter itself, I just disagree that many of the products we use today require a large number of developers. Its easy to find many examples of apps that were challenging to build even just 10 years ago, that are somewhat trivial now. That trend will only continue. OpenAI only had ~100 employees at one point. You don't need 100s of operations people if you move from on-prem to serverless, for example. Today, social media requires the most people in content moderation/support, rather than development. Tomorrow those people are likely to be supplanted by LLMs or similar more tailored AI moderation models. Many products that required 1000s of people 10 years ago, may only require 100s today. To me this is just a fact
  - whateverman23 3y ago
    I see it as four categories, from least employees to most: 1. Desperately trying to make short term cash, and are trying to do their best with fewer employees than needed to maintain the current product. (Twitter is here). 2. Enough staff to maintain the current product, but not significantly innovate. 3. Significantly more than needed to maintain the current product, leaving room for people to work on non-core products that may end up being the next billion dollar project, even if the vast majority flop (Most big tech companies are here). 4. Way too bloated, with not enough projects to work on or not enough revenue to justify the R&D. The problem is that outsiders have a really really hard time understanding the product complexity of half a billion+ user services. Comparing OpenAI to the social media sites that this HN post is talking about is a great example. It's a completely different product with completely different challenges than FB, twitter, threads, youtube, whatever. Another great example is people citing "day in the life" videos that are actually recruiting videos showing the brighter sides of the job. Or people citing employees who claim that the company hired them to do nothing, when in reality it's a recruiter that was hired shortly before hiring slowed.
    - adam_arthur 3y ago
      Do you agree or disagree that techproducts today are easier to build than 15 years ago? Everything else is irrelevant. Technology drives abstractions which drive deflation by allowing fewer people to produce more goods. This has been proven and observed for thousands of years Companies can thrive while overemploying people, but eventually they get undercut by one that doesn't
      - whateverman23 3y ago
        You're conflating two different topics: 1. "Its easy to find many examples of apps that were challenging to build even just 10 years ago, that are somewhat trivial now." Correct. It's easier now to build apps that we used 10-15 years ago. 2. "Do you agree or disagree that techproducts today are easier to build than 15 years ago?" Incorrect. Tech product complexity has increased in many ways in the last 15 years (and the increase in complexity is larger than the decrease in complexity we talked about above). -- Regulation. COPPA regulations strengthened significantly around 10 years ago. Europe's GDPR went into effect in like 2016. Those are just a couple popular ones. Remember when Amazon just didn't collect sales tax? Sure makes things easier! And remember, those laws are constantly changing. If NJ raises their sales tax, you better have someone paying attention. If Europe comes up with a new privacy law, you better have enough people to drop everything and implement everything that's needed. -- Scale + globalization. Myspace topped out at like 100 million active users around 15 years ago. Facebook is 30 times that size now! That scale comes with complexities most don't think about. How do you report user video ad income to the IRS-equivalent in Andorra? I don't know, but you now need to know at Facebook's scale!
stubybubs 3y ago
Most of those 7500 were not engineers. They were moderators, sales, support, HR, etc The moderation, whatever people personally think of it now, has certainly suffered from an advertiser perspective, which is why they left. It was a mistake to fire many of them. The sales people with relationships to advertisers left, and so again did many advertisers. It's apparently impossible to get your account reinstated if you were banned, because there is no more support. People had pay issues due to lack of HR and also lost benefits, so they left. On top of that, almost all the features they shipped were in the works before the company was bought, so they didn't really ship anything. Stability was worse and users left. They are flocking to Threads because it's stable. Remaining devs continued to trickle away as the work environment became intolerable. Basically every aspect of his experiment was a failure. I'm sure Twitter could have cut 10-15% and been okay but what Musk did absolutely did not work. All those things managers talk about, those reasons to treat your people well: cratering morale after layoffs, increasing attrition, dead sea effect, loss of institutional knowledge, it's all true, and just what everyone expected. The only thing to learn from Twitter's fall is that they were right. Great experiment I guess? Really validated some things we had all seen small scale or intuited.
- adam_arthur 3y ago
  Twitter layoffs will have only "failed" due to creating a cultural divide and driving people to other services. Not due to the mechanical aspect of them Twitter laid off 80-90% of their people and the app functions the same. No material downtime in the year or so since the acquisition and feature velocity has only increased. Even if the features were in the pipeline already, none of them appeared over the 5-6 years preceding the acquisition. Highly coincidental, to the point of being suspect. Advertisers left due to taking sides on will of the moment cultural reasons, not because of moderation. The individuals behind advertising at many large corporations simply didn't want to help Elon. Would you want to give money to somebody you hated, and who loudly vocalized things that went strongly against your principles? This part is obvious to any objective observer. It's clear at this point that net added value per Twitter employee was low or even negative for many. If a company can layoff 90% of the developers and have no material change in availability or development velocity, then it's really inarguable otherwise
quitit 3y ago
In addition to the other points made by others about sharing staff... At their respective peaks Meta had around 12x the staff of peak Twitter despite not having 10x the user base (that said Meta towers heavily over Twitter in users and monthly accesses.) Even today Meta still has more than 10x the staff of peak Twitter. If anything you're highlighting that at ~7,500 staff Twitter was probably too thinly run.

sanderjd 3y ago

Yeah, unfortunately Musk has done so much incompetent stuff that it's not as easy to make the case that the Twitter implosion is due to the staff reduction rather than one of the twenty other boneheaded things that have happened. The narrative could totally settle on: "The massive staff cuts would have worked out just fine if he hadn't also taken on too much debt in the financing and scared off advertisers with his own personal tweeting and gotten rid of verification and started promoting the replies of paying customers and turned off non-logged-in access and search engine visibility." Personally I think it is all of the above.

ericb 3y ago
> Personally I think it is all of the above. I don't know--based on the behavior observed from the client-side in chrome devtools, twitter seemed to be DDos-ing itself with no exponential backoff and no jitter. That seems like exactly the kind of problem I'd expect if I fired all the senior people.

quitit 3y ago

Reddit's CEO stated that what Elon did to Twitter was a model he'd like Reddit to follow. Although Reddit's changes are fresh, it has declined both in quality and esteem from copying this business style. I expect further decline if they follow this road. As for the companies that aren't following Elon's lead: they are flourishing. We have enough data points now to say it authoritatively. Slash and burn is not effective, smart or conducive to the desired results.

rhaway84773 3y ago
In Musk’s defense, I think there is something to the idea that most tech companies were a little too bloated. Especially with the hiring during the pandemic based on unrealistic valuations and future expectations. But this is another area where Zuck beat Musk because Meta addressed this issue in a much more sensible way which involved considered changes in workforce as opposed to Musk’s impetuous unthought through slash and burn style.
- ericb 3y ago
  I think they were bloated a bit, but that was mostly staffing for red herring projects and extra management layers. The bloat was a mismanagement problem "solved" by cutting everything but management. That plus a bit of over-hiring from covid and cheap money. But that's also a management issue.

rhaway84773 3y ago

Very clearly Twitter has not been able to run fine since firing so much of their workforce. The confusion here is because of 2 things: 1. Many people who were commenting on how this would adversely affect Twitter were doing it solely because they didn’t like Musk, as opposed to an understanding of how software development works. So these people were basically predicting that Twitter would stop working entirely in 2 weeks. But that’s not how software is developed. If it was, engineers would never be able to take a vacation and major web apps would all start failing on Jan 1. Those who understood how software development worked recognized that what we would see instead is a slow decay in software quality where things would consistently become slightly worse. Also, we’d see a complete inability to change major functionality without causing problems. Finally, there might be a few big bang failures (eg the domain name expires, but no one with access to the domain is still hired by Twitter anymore) but those would be few and far in between and would take time to uncover (although it does appear Twitter has faced at least one such situation). Twitter is indeed facing these situations. 2. The real threat to Twitter was always competition. In a competitive environment staying still is a death trap since your competitors will outpace you. There are a few reasons why Twitter has largely escaped this so far. (a) Twitter’s business is a fundamentally bad business model with a lot of hassles most businesses simply don’t want to deal with. (b) a misconception by many competitors that there was something fundamentally wrong with Twitter that needed to be addressed. (b) is why Bluesky and Threads have been the most successful Twitter alternatives. They’ve basically been Twitter clones and are not trying to fundamentally change the model. Of course, Bluesky is now basically getting crushed by Meta’s resources and existing user base, but they were fundamentally ok the right track and could have been competitive if they were able to reach technical parity earlier.