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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

by 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?
  - timr 3y ago
    Yeah, that's why I was careful about my wording. Without excluding the possibility that many people were truly doing nothing, I see this pattern all the time as companies get bigger: * project is done to 85% effectiveness by <= 1 FTE * company is flush with cash, and can hire someone to backfill that last 15% * new person is not fully occupied backfilling that 15%, and therefore *finds new things to do*...which creates more projects that are done to 85% effectiveness * goto step 1 Also, of course, as companies mature, they inevitably start moving down the cost-effectiveness graph, and taking on projects with lower and lower expected value. There are all sorts of reasons for this, ranging from valid ("this effort might pay off 10x"), to pathological ("if my team doesn't grow, I don't get a promotion"). Anyway, shovel enough money into the boiler during the "hypergrowth" phase, and you can easily end up with lots of people who are all very busy, but just not productive.
  - iainmerrick 3y ago
    I also thought there was a decent chance the entire product would just die irrecoverably, and that hasn't happened (although of course there might have been near misses we don't know about). I must admit I'm surprised how well it still seems to run, on the whole. I think it's still an open question whether the business is damaged irrecoverably. I guess now they don't have the same reporting requirements, as a private company, but everything I've read suggests they're losing as much money as ever. Although... you can certainly imagine a world where they both avoided infrastructure-death and managed to sustain the business (not pissing off advertisers, not pissing off power users, no pointless rebrands, etc).

by apercu 3y ago

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?
- timr 3y ago
  Yeah, that's why I was careful about my wording. Without excluding the possibility that many people were truly doing nothing, I see this pattern all the time as companies get bigger: * project is done to 85% effectiveness by <= 1 FTE * company is flush with cash, and can hire someone to backfill that last 15% * new person is not fully occupied backfilling that 15%, and therefore *finds new things to do*...which creates more projects that are done to 85% effectiveness * goto step 1 Also, of course, as companies mature, they inevitably start moving down the cost-effectiveness graph, and taking on projects with lower and lower expected value. There are all sorts of reasons for this, ranging from valid ("this effort might pay off 10x"), to pathological ("if my team doesn't grow, I don't get a promotion"). Anyway, shovel enough money into the boiler during the "hypergrowth" phase, and you can easily end up with lots of people who are all very busy, but just not productive.
- iainmerrick 3y ago
  I also thought there was a decent chance the entire product would just die irrecoverably, and that hasn't happened (although of course there might have been near misses we don't know about). I must admit I'm surprised how well it still seems to run, on the whole. I think it's still an open question whether the business is damaged irrecoverably. I guess now they don't have the same reporting requirements, as a private company, but everything I've read suggests they're losing as much money as ever. Although... you can certainly imagine a world where they both avoided infrastructure-death and managed to sustain the business (not pissing off advertisers, not pissing off power users, no pointless rebrands, etc).