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I'll posit an unpopular one. Elon's mass-firing at Twitter showed CEOs that many tech companies really are overstaffed and can get away with far fewer employees

I'll posit an unpopular one. Elon's mass-firing at Twitter showed CEOs that many tech companies really are overstaffed and can get away with far fewer employees (Twitter's troubles now are due to dumb policy decisions, not their tech stack falling off a cliff).

mynameishere 3y ago
dumb policy decisions Musk took a baby step in the direction of free speech, and immediately the order went out for major corporations to stage an advertising boycott.
- phlipski 3y ago
  Order's from who? Certainly Musk re-platforming hate speech (and lies) in the form of Alex Jones and re-tweeting antisemitic posts had NOTHING to do with corporations wanting to flee right?
- piva00 3y ago
  Sure, the same free speech that Musk extended to people he didn't like, like the guy tracking his plane? Gimme a break...
- king_magic 3y ago
  This is pretty intellectually dishonest. Doubt the ad boycott wouldn't have been nearly as large - or maybe even happened at all - if it weren't for Musk letting Nazis have a field day on Twitter again.
  - gitfan86 3y ago
    That is a very naive understanding of power dynamics in the legacy media.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  There are literally nazis advertising on twitter right now, today, january 24 2024. https://twitter.com/DefundIsraelNow/status/1750172690785427740 https://twitter.com/DefundIsraelNow/status/17501726907854277... Whatever this is in the direction of it certainly isn't a baby step.
pyrale 3y ago
Counterpoint : projects/products usually take years to die from neglect. Every large company that handles IT as a cost-center has a host of zombie projects they believe are still well, but actually are understaffed/funded, and will eventually fail unexpectedly. When the failure is perceived, the usual decision is to start a rewrite, and have both an old, unmaintainable product and a recent product that isn't fully-featured yet.
- ilyash 3y ago
  Personal anecdote - I see spam is way up already. I assume some of the fired people were fighting spam.
zzyzxd 3y ago
> many tech companies really are overstaffed > and can get away with far fewer employees I can't tell whether Twitter was really overstaffed or not, but I don't agree with people who use "see, twitter.com is still stable now" as a proof that the company was overstaffed before layoff. For instance, the stability could have been earlier investment in reliability engineering paying off. Cutting features and reducing changes also improves stability, but that may not be a good thing in the long run. Can the company get away with it? Possible.

mynameishere 3y ago

dumb policy decisions Musk took a baby step in the direction of free speech, and immediately the order went out for major corporations to stage an advertising boycott.

phlipski 3y ago
Order's from who? Certainly Musk re-platforming hate speech (and lies) in the form of Alex Jones and re-tweeting antisemitic posts had NOTHING to do with corporations wanting to flee right?
piva00 3y ago
Sure, the same free speech that Musk extended to people he didn't like, like the guy tracking his plane? Gimme a break...
king_magic 3y ago
This is pretty intellectually dishonest. Doubt the ad boycott wouldn't have been nearly as large - or maybe even happened at all - if it weren't for Musk letting Nazis have a field day on Twitter again.
- gitfan86 3y ago
  That is a very naive understanding of power dynamics in the legacy media.
giraffe_lady 3y ago
There are literally nazis advertising on twitter right now, today, january 24 2024. https://twitter.com/DefundIsraelNow/status/1750172690785427740 https://twitter.com/DefundIsraelNow/status/17501726907854277... Whatever this is in the direction of it certainly isn't a baby step.

pyrale 3y ago

Counterpoint : projects/products usually take years to die from neglect. Every large company that handles IT as a cost-center has a host of zombie projects they believe are still well, but actually are understaffed/funded, and will eventually fail unexpectedly. When the failure is perceived, the usual decision is to start a rewrite, and have both an old, unmaintainable product and a recent product that isn't fully-featured yet.

ilyash 3y ago
Personal anecdote - I see spam is way up already. I assume some of the fired people were fighting spam.

zzyzxd 3y ago

> many tech companies really are overstaffed > and can get away with far fewer employees I can't tell whether Twitter was really overstaffed or not, but I don't agree with people who use "see, twitter.com is still stable now" as a proof that the company was overstaffed before layoff. For instance, the stability could have been earlier investment in reliability engineering paying off. Cutting features and reducing changes also improves stability, but that may not be a good thing in the long run. Can the company get away with it? Possible.