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Since 2018-19 this topic of employee bloat kept coming up within my circle of friends (late 30s, early/mid 40s). Despite working in big/small orgs I always reac

Since 2018-19 this topic of employee bloat kept coming up within my circle of friends (late 30s, early/mid 40s). Despite working in big/small orgs I always reacted with massive surprise whenever a team/company said they have X employees, X being an order of magnitude higher than what I expected. And it's not as if I'm not aware of products' complexities, I have had experience in working in and leading small teams that delivered high impact projects. My cohort entered the workforce in mid 2000s when efficiency was paramount. Now looking back the impact of ZIRP is quite clear. The justification for last yaer's layoffs was rate hikes and macro conditions. This year it's AI. It's as if companies are still quite bloated and they are jumping at the first opportunity to lay them off. AI is just a reason I feel. Elon demonstrated with Twitter that tech companies can work despite cutting down a good chunk of workforce; CFOs at other companies can now point finger at Twitter and say, look they are still up and running despite cutting down like 80%, what's stopping us from reducing headcount by 15%-20%? Anyway, I feel middle managers will be the ones hardest hit by these layoffs. I've already begun hearing that line/middle managers are now expected to code; which is a good thing IMO. Will be interesting to see how this plays out this decade.

melon_taeppe 3y ago
twitters advertising revenue is down 54% since musk took over https://www.sportspromedia.com/news/twitter-x-elon-musk-usage-tech/?zephr_sso_ott=PpEqrk https://www.sportspromedia.com/news/twitter-x-elon-musk-usag...
- whatyesaid 3y ago
  That's nothing to do with number of engineers you have.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    A significant fractions of this layoffs weren't engineers but instead worked on moderation. When moderation was gone, antisemitic tweets (among others) became ubiquitous, which drove advertisers away.
    - elzbardico 3y ago
      I rarely see proper anti-semitic posts in Twitter. The problem is that people keep on insisting that posts condemning Israeli government illegal and immoral actions are anti-semitic. If anything, I welcome that people now can ask how Israel gets a pass of refusing to implement UN resolutions that back from as early as 1948 without any consequences.
      - littlestymaar 3y ago
        I'm not talking about Israel here, I'm talking about what happened last years, where you even had Twitter accounts called Gas_the_Jews and the like spawning up and attempts to report them being automatically closed (for this one in particular, the Auschwitz memorial had to step up to get it banned).
      - SequoiaHope 3y ago
        Echoing the other comment that this is genuine antisemitism at issue here, not the very legitimate questioning of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. Much of the analysis of the increase in antisemitism on Twitter after Musk happened before Oct 7th.
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    It might be. He fired a whole lot of moderators who would oversee the removal of content which, among other things, would be distasteful to advertisers. It’s possible that before Musk joined Media Matters would not have been able to find anti-semitic posts next to Apple advertisements due to their removal by moderators.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      Twitter was a bloodthirsty cesspool before Musk too. Maybe it got worse, I don't know, but the big difference is that buyers started to pretend to care since they did not like him.
      - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
        No it definitely has gotten worse. Notably, almost every comment and post I make gets interactions from bots right away. That never used to happen before. These bots are not following me. Also from analysis I have seen, hate speech has gone up significantly. This makes sense since there are no moderators. Twitter has recently decided to hire a substantial new group of people to rebuild a moderation team, because they truly did cut too many people there.
- manuelmoreale 3y ago
  I don’t think that’s because of the layoffs though so the original comment is still valid.
- __loam 3y ago
  Don't forget about the additional 1 billion dollar debt payment he added to the company's expenses.
rightbyte 3y ago
> Despite working in big/small orgs I always reacted with massive surprise whenever a team/company said they have X employees, X being an order of magnitude higher than what I expected. Ye it is silly since I too never seem to stop being surprised. The programmer bloat is insane. And ye I know everyone need 50 programmers for Antarctica fishing law compliance. I work at a machine industry company now, and programmer RnD is probably just twice as many as "needed". You probably want about that to have any chance of keeping continuance. The prior automotive company I worked for suddenly increased my department of programmers like 5 fold, forced Agile processes etc, for no reason at all with less output due to programming being the future etc. The programmer market have to be a bubble? Programmers in the 90s seemed to have been about 5 to 10 times more efficient (as measured by headcount), than nowadays.
- __loam 3y ago
  Programs were a lot simpler, and probably a lot less secure, in the 90s. A lot fewer distributed systems.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    Yes. Architectural bloat is probably an underlying cause. I remember this joke chain mail about C++ being a job creation scheme by Strausrup (his name is impossible to spell correctly ...). Modern distributed apps certainly are, in most cases. Security is only a problem if you expose your app to the webs, in the first place.
littlestymaar 3y ago
While overinflated headcount is a thing, Twitter isn't an example that anyone would want to follow unless they wanted to destroy their reputation, tank their revenues and allow competitors to appear in what was previously an untouchable monopoly.
mathverse 3y ago
Elon did not demonstrate anything. Any faceless entity especially at the top of the industry can function and print money out of thin air with a much smaller workforce. The reason why companies are so big is that companies want to cover all these unprofitable business flows and use cases for vertical integration. So many people work on products and services that bring 0 revenue to the company and yet these are important. It's just internally the valuation of these things had changed.
greg_V 3y ago
The real pivot was from operating by growth at all cost to maximizing revenue per employee. The game is still the same - keeping the valuations as high as possible - but now it's measured differently from the POV of investors. AI is just the buzzword of this hype cycle. Everyone is looking for solutions that have AI in them because FOMO, and it also alleviates fears of productivity loss in relation to layoffs: we can do more with less because something something AI! The third reason is probably that headcount was bloated in the first place to keep talent locked away from competitors. Now that the market shifted companies don't have to do that as workers have to compete for a shrinking number of positions.

melon_taeppe 3y ago

twitters advertising revenue is down 54% since musk took over https://www.sportspromedia.com/news/twitter-x-elon-musk-usage-tech/?zephr_sso_ott=PpEqrk https://www.sportspromedia.com/news/twitter-x-elon-musk-usag...

whatyesaid 3y ago
That's nothing to do with number of engineers you have.
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  A significant fractions of this layoffs weren't engineers but instead worked on moderation. When moderation was gone, antisemitic tweets (among others) became ubiquitous, which drove advertisers away.
  - elzbardico 3y ago
    I rarely see proper anti-semitic posts in Twitter. The problem is that people keep on insisting that posts condemning Israeli government illegal and immoral actions are anti-semitic. If anything, I welcome that people now can ask how Israel gets a pass of refusing to implement UN resolutions that back from as early as 1948 without any consequences.
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      I'm not talking about Israel here, I'm talking about what happened last years, where you even had Twitter accounts called Gas_the_Jews and the like spawning up and attempts to report them being automatically closed (for this one in particular, the Auschwitz memorial had to step up to get it banned).
    - SequoiaHope 3y ago
      Echoing the other comment that this is genuine antisemitism at issue here, not the very legitimate questioning of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. Much of the analysis of the increase in antisemitism on Twitter after Musk happened before Oct 7th.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  It might be. He fired a whole lot of moderators who would oversee the removal of content which, among other things, would be distasteful to advertisers. It’s possible that before Musk joined Media Matters would not have been able to find anti-semitic posts next to Apple advertisements due to their removal by moderators.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    Twitter was a bloodthirsty cesspool before Musk too. Maybe it got worse, I don't know, but the big difference is that buyers started to pretend to care since they did not like him.
    - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
      No it definitely has gotten worse. Notably, almost every comment and post I make gets interactions from bots right away. That never used to happen before. These bots are not following me. Also from analysis I have seen, hate speech has gone up significantly. This makes sense since there are no moderators. Twitter has recently decided to hire a substantial new group of people to rebuild a moderation team, because they truly did cut too many people there.
manuelmoreale 3y ago
I don’t think that’s because of the layoffs though so the original comment is still valid.
__loam 3y ago
Don't forget about the additional 1 billion dollar debt payment he added to the company's expenses.

rightbyte 3y ago

> Despite working in big/small orgs I always reacted with massive surprise whenever a team/company said they have X employees, X being an order of magnitude higher than what I expected. Ye it is silly since I too never seem to stop being surprised. The programmer bloat is insane. And ye I know everyone need 50 programmers for Antarctica fishing law compliance. I work at a machine industry company now, and programmer RnD is probably just twice as many as "needed". You probably want about that to have any chance of keeping continuance. The prior automotive company I worked for suddenly increased my department of programmers like 5 fold, forced Agile processes etc, for no reason at all with less output due to programming being the future etc. The programmer market have to be a bubble? Programmers in the 90s seemed to have been about 5 to 10 times more efficient (as measured by headcount), than nowadays.

__loam 3y ago
Programs were a lot simpler, and probably a lot less secure, in the 90s. A lot fewer distributed systems.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  Yes. Architectural bloat is probably an underlying cause. I remember this joke chain mail about C++ being a job creation scheme by Strausrup (his name is impossible to spell correctly ...). Modern distributed apps certainly are, in most cases. Security is only a problem if you expose your app to the webs, in the first place.

littlestymaar 3y ago

While overinflated headcount is a thing, Twitter isn't an example that anyone would want to follow unless they wanted to destroy their reputation, tank their revenues and allow competitors to appear in what was previously an untouchable monopoly.

mathverse 3y ago

Elon did not demonstrate anything. Any faceless entity especially at the top of the industry can function and print money out of thin air with a much smaller workforce. The reason why companies are so big is that companies want to cover all these unprofitable business flows and use cases for vertical integration. So many people work on products and services that bring 0 revenue to the company and yet these are important. It's just internally the valuation of these things had changed.

greg_V 3y ago

The real pivot was from operating by growth at all cost to maximizing revenue per employee. The game is still the same - keeping the valuations as high as possible - but now it's measured differently from the POV of investors. AI is just the buzzword of this hype cycle. Everyone is looking for solutions that have AI in them because FOMO, and it also alleviates fears of productivity loss in relation to layoffs: we can do more with less because something something AI! The third reason is probably that headcount was bloated in the first place to keep talent locked away from competitors. Now that the market shifted companies don't have to do that as workers have to compete for a shrinking number of positions.