4 ms·
Big orgs have plenty of people that need to justify their salaries, I mean it, I'm 100% convinced you could fire half the staff of a big organization, going hea
by epolanski 2y ago
Big orgs have plenty of people that need to justify their salaries, I mean it, I'm 100% convinced you could fire half the staff of a big organization, going heavy with the management roles and lighter on operational ones and the company would become more productive and efficient.
And the higher the people in the pyramid are the better they are at selling their ideas in their neverending quest for recognition, fat bonuses and promotions.
And once they get them, more often than not by doing pointless and even harmful work, they can then leverage it by jumping to another company.
Gervais' principle at its finest.
- somanyphotons 2y agoTwitter as an example, showed us that the staff really do matter
- herval 2y agoTo be fair, they became a lot more efficient if the goal was to streamline propaganda and bot adoption
- spamizbad 2y agoI feel like Twitter is a bit of a Rorschach test. If you want to “keep the lights on” you can get away with mass layoffs, but your revenues and product development sure do suffer. I think you’re going to see a lot of tech companies adopt a less acute version of this strategy unfortunately
- sleight42 2y agoIt's another form taken by enshittification to squeeze more money from the business. Employees are the largest cost center. If a business can get away with less innovation then they will get rid of and hire less staff to maintain their margin. Realistically, this is a delicate balancing act. As others have noted, the Sales and PR game then (and always) drives the new and existing monies that come in.
- misiek08 2y agoI thought Twitter fired 70% of manpower and still works?
- spamizbad 2y agoIt also lost 70% of its revenue.
- paxys 2y agoAnd 80% of its value. Musk bought it at $44B. Fidelity recently used an internal valuation of $9.4B for their own shares in the company.
- bdangubic 2y agohe bought presidency with it so it is not that bad of an investment. it is short-sighted to look at “twitter” value since he bought it, one should look his net worth since he bought it. even if closes it down tomorrow it will be money well spent
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- davidashe 2y agoNext-level elon defense here. “Elon made an obvious mistake? Oh no, newb. Look on this other indicator that reinforces my bias.”
- bdangubic 2y agonot bias but facts :) he took over twitter, made it into right-wing propaganda machine, changed algorithm during the election campaign ... it is short-sighted to not take into account that he basically bought dissemination of public information and single-handedly swayed the election. if you think he bought twitter to make money off it I have some crypto to sell to you :)
- yava2025 2y ago[flagged]
- griomnib 2y agoShows that having H1Bs you can hold hostage lets you get away with anything. If it weren’t for their captive workforce they would have had far bigger problems than an unreliable service, rapidly declining user base, and imploding revenue.
- sleight42 2y agoLet's not forget the cheaper out-/"near"-sourced employees. Geographic arbitrage to save on the cost of staff.
- steveoscaro 2y agoSeems like an odd takeaway to me - they fired 90% of their staff and now pump out new features way more quickly than old Twitter.
- Tanjreeve 2y agoWhat features? Only updates I ever hear is various security features getting disabled/going dead and various tech demos getting checked out/failing.
- icedchai 2y agoThe opposite, I think. It showed us how bloated the average tech corp actual is. Musk may have went too far with his cuts, but directionally I believe he’s right.
- skeeter2020 2y agoIf you can fire half of the people at a big company, you could also erase half the small startups with no impact as well.
- presspot 2y agoThose startups take care of that themselves.
- hatefulmoron 2y agoI would think most people would take that for granted. Small startups are often "pre-impact" (or "pre-failure", situation depending..)
- cbm-vic-20 2y agoThe hard part is figuring out which half. And figuring out who the right people to make those decisions.
- qwertycrackers 2y agoThe problem is that there's no outside way to tell which 50% is the useless half. It's just like marketing budget.
- sleight42 2y agoAs someone who was spent 5+ years in one of their many acquired companies, SFDC management has a reasonably accurate sense of their best performing staff. However, line and middle SFDC managers are partly evaluated based on the size of their orgs. This obviously leads to perverse incentives to bloat one's org; the loss of fiefdom then leads to loss of promotion opportunity and even employment.