Hacker News Reader

Comment by novok | Hacker News Reader

I've been in companies where 1/5th of engineer was laid off. The state of company infra and the product dropped significantly and it took a long time to approach recovery, where they hired the same amount of staff back.

I can't imagine how dysfunctional twitter would be with %75 of staff gone, I don't even know if it will continue running as a business after that.

View on HN

Most of Twitter's staff aren't engineers. In fact, by their own descriptions of their workdays, most of Twitter's staff don't do anything at all.

Twitter will function better with 75% of the staff gone.

Will Musk actually cut 75%? Musk tends to do a lot of “thinking out loud” - so even if he really spoke that number, he won’t hold himself to it.

Whatever the actual figure is, it is unlikely to be the same figure across all departments - likely some departments will be cut much more than others. Probably engineering will experience significantly less cuts than marketing, PR, HR, government relations, business development, etc. Even in engineering, some cuts may be due to things like adjusting the manager:IC ratio.

Threatening to fire 75% of the staff might have been a last ditch attempt to turn public, shareholder, board and/or Parag’s opinion against the deal.

It didn’t work, and I doubt he’ll follow through on it. Otherwise, it’s sure to freeze almost all future initiatives and turn the team into caretakers instead of innovators and I’m not sure what the point of that would be.

Innovations? Initiatives? Like edit button and lengthening strings over 160 characters?

Just look at their Web UI, horribly slow and lagy.

Twitter is horribly bloated and unprofitable company. Several thousands people could be justified if there are sales and profits. 75% is not enough, current people must go, regardless of politics.

It cannot have been a threat to staff because it was never uttered by Elon to the staff. It cannot have been a way to influence public/shareholder sentiment because it was never said in public.

If he ever did say it, it was allegedly said to other investors in a private setting. More than likely it's a fabrication by someone who hates Elon (as unlikely as that sounds) laundered into the media as from an anonymous source.

Another slant, considering the (is this true btw) the rumor he asked engineers to print the last 30 days of code they submitted: he’s signaling “hey if you’re lazy, I’m going to fire you, so go ahead and leave on your own”. Which might just work.

There are tonnes of rumours being spread at the moment so I wouldn't take any of them seriously until they're confirmed.

Except for this one :)

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586108809772089345?s=46...

Edit: apparently this was “trauma / shock actors” (whatever that means) but it was still picked up by CNBC.

There is a lot of cruft without touching the engineering department. And there are always those two guys in every team that when they call sick - productivity of the team increases.

The question is, who will decide who to fire? And how many of the wrong people to fire will get fired in the process?

Even if that were true the problem with the approach he has taken is that by leaking that you are going to perform swinging cuts, everyone who can get another job immediately starts looking so by the time you actually get around to doing the layoff the team has self-selected and you only have “those two guys” left.

I doubt it because the whole vibe of Musk so far is that the axe will fall on the culture warriors and activists. I think the productive and less political engineers know they are safe.

And the zeitgeist seems to have changed lately - so jobs may not be so easier to come by, especially for employees that may be too political for the employer.

This! Can't believe how most of the discussion misses this point.

As a counterpoint, if you lay off 75% of your workers, you can now pay the remaining 25% three times more salary.

...and be on-call 3x as much.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com