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> I never observed this behavior once before Musk took over unless there was a well-known incident occurring. Yeah, I have. On multiple occasions before Musk

by timr 3y ago

> I never observed this behavior once before Musk took over unless there was a well-known incident occurring. Yeah, I have. On multiple occasions before Musk took over, Twitter also had bugs. Even if you think firing like 6/7th of Twitter's staff (or whatever) was a mistake, there's really no arguing that they're making more visible product changes than they have in years. That means that bugs happen. And frankly...proving that a tech company doesn't need that level of bloat is a valuable lesson for the entire software industry. If they overshot and have X% more bugs for now, that's fine. They'll still be dramatically leaner than before.

CSSer 3y ago
Great. This is all completely besides the point anyway. My point is that there are more of them and I think anyone who doesn’t see that is nuts. I’m sorry I don’t have a Grafana dashboard to show you.
- timr 3y ago
  The point is, without a Grafana dashboard, you don't have anything but a motivated anecdote.
  - javajosh 3y ago
    ~90% of the comments here are "motivated anecdotes" and are quite valuable. Perhaps this is not the dis you think it is.
    - billy99k 3y ago
      "motivated anecdotes" aren't valuable because they aren't accurate. It's political fuel for to shit on something you don't like. With this line of thinking, I could say climate change isn't happening because of the temperature outside my house.
  - CSSer 3y ago
    I never pretended to have anything else, and “motivated” is a weird word to use here. I have no skin in this game, and from what I can tell neither do you. If Twitter survives, great. I guess some of what you noted could be an interesting lesson, but I don’t think it’s going so hot so far and I’m not willing to call it yet.
    - timr 3y ago
      You have a belief that the service is more buggy, and were arguing as such from anecdote. That's what I mean by "motivated". I don't care at all, and am just reacting to the phenomenon of folks going "it's definitely worse now, and I know, because I used the product before". OK, great...I used the product before too, and don't perceive that to be true.
whateveracct 3y ago
uhh visible product changes as proof that a company is more productive is a joke. A joke PMs love to tell at least lmao. Making visible product changes is the easiest thing to do in software.
apercu 3y ago
It's totally possible that there was a ton of bloat. It happens when organizations scale and they're looking for market share instead of profitability. But, as someone who has worked in (bio)tech companies that got purchased, first they cut 20-30% of the staff, but that doesn't mean all the work they were doing went away, and it means key people in every role have to do more, which works for a minute, then management thinks "we're right, it was all fat", until those key people burn out and stop producing. Then you end up hiring 10-15% of the staff back. Or, the org slowly dies.
- timr 3y ago
  > as someone who has worked in (bio)tech companies that got purchased, first they cut 20-30% of the staff, but that doesn't mean all the work they were doing went away, and it means key people in every role have to do more Yeah, this wasn't a simple staff reduction. Twitter fired something like 80% (?) of their employees. By conventional wisdom, they should have gone down hard and never recovered. There are lots of people in this comment thread who are (dubiously) trying to make the case that they did. The Twitter example, for better or worse, revealed that tech companies are not just a little bit redundantly staffed...they're employing tons of people who effecitvely just make work for each other.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    > There are lots of people in this comment thread who are (dubiously) trying to make the case that they did. > The Twitter example, for better or worse, revealed that tech companies are not just a little bit redundantly staffed...they're employing tons of people who effecitvely just make work for each other. I've been arguing since the purge that Twitter was in the "Wile E Coyote ran off the cliff and is still treading air" phase, but that argument is getting harder and harder to justify as Twitter somehow stays alive. How could firing all those people really do nothing to the operational success of the company? What were they all doing? Companies don't hire people where they have nothing for them to do. I look at my (BigTech) company and everyone is running around like crazy with 3-5X more tasks in their backlog than they can possibly do. We always need more people. How do you get rid of 80% and just carry on??? Are they all just writing TPS reports for each other to read?

by timr 3y ago

CSSer 3y ago

Great. This is all completely besides the point anyway. My point is that there are more of them and I think anyone who doesn’t see that is nuts. I’m sorry I don’t have a Grafana dashboard to show you.

timr 3y ago
The point is, without a Grafana dashboard, you don't have anything but a motivated anecdote.
- javajosh 3y ago
  ~90% of the comments here are "motivated anecdotes" and are quite valuable. Perhaps this is not the dis you think it is.
  - billy99k 3y ago
    "motivated anecdotes" aren't valuable because they aren't accurate. It's political fuel for to shit on something you don't like. With this line of thinking, I could say climate change isn't happening because of the temperature outside my house.
- CSSer 3y ago
  I never pretended to have anything else, and “motivated” is a weird word to use here. I have no skin in this game, and from what I can tell neither do you. If Twitter survives, great. I guess some of what you noted could be an interesting lesson, but I don’t think it’s going so hot so far and I’m not willing to call it yet.
  - timr 3y ago
    You have a belief that the service is more buggy, and were arguing as such from anecdote. That's what I mean by "motivated". I don't care at all, and am just reacting to the phenomenon of folks going "it's definitely worse now, and I know, because I used the product before". OK, great...I used the product before too, and don't perceive that to be true.

whateveracct 3y ago

uhh visible product changes as proof that a company is more productive is a joke. A joke PMs love to tell at least lmao. Making visible product changes is the easiest thing to do in software.

apercu 3y ago

It's totally possible that there was a ton of bloat. It happens when organizations scale and they're looking for market share instead of profitability. But, as someone who has worked in (bio)tech companies that got purchased, first they cut 20-30% of the staff, but that doesn't mean all the work they were doing went away, and it means key people in every role have to do more, which works for a minute, then management thinks "we're right, it was all fat", until those key people burn out and stop producing. Then you end up hiring 10-15% of the staff back. Or, the org slowly dies.

timr 3y ago
> as someone who has worked in (bio)tech companies that got purchased, first they cut 20-30% of the staff, but that doesn't mean all the work they were doing went away, and it means key people in every role have to do more Yeah, this wasn't a simple staff reduction. Twitter fired something like 80% (?) of their employees. By conventional wisdom, they should have gone down hard and never recovered. There are lots of people in this comment thread who are (dubiously) trying to make the case that they did. The Twitter example, for better or worse, revealed that tech companies are not just a little bit redundantly staffed...they're employing tons of people who effecitvely just make work for each other.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  > There are lots of people in this comment thread who are (dubiously) trying to make the case that they did. > The Twitter example, for better or worse, revealed that tech companies are not just a little bit redundantly staffed...they're employing tons of people who effecitvely just make work for each other. I've been arguing since the purge that Twitter was in the "Wile E Coyote ran off the cliff and is still treading air" phase, but that argument is getting harder and harder to justify as Twitter somehow stays alive. How could firing all those people really do nothing to the operational success of the company? What were they all doing? Companies don't hire people where they have nothing for them to do. I look at my (BigTech) company and everyone is running around like crazy with 3-5X more tasks in their backlog than they can possibly do. We always need more people. How do you get rid of 80% and just carry on??? Are they all just writing TPS reports for each other to read?