Musk plans to eliminate half of Twitter jobs to cut costs | Hacker News Reader

Musk plans to eliminate half of Twitter jobs to cut costs

bloomberg.com

76 pointsdonohoe111 comments

Are we witnessing a sinking ship ?

He loaded the company with a 1 billion dollar interest per year, and the best twitter has done is 600 million in profit.

Its sad because as a Twitter user their is really no alternative.

And no, Mastodon with its garbage discoverability is not an alternative, more details on why here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33428254

This is incentive to build a better fediverse or decentralized social network or whatever you want to call it. There are lots of projects working on it, obviously, and lots of people already doing it to some extent, but this is one of those events that illustrate why it's a thing worth continuing to push on and move forward.

Do you mean 600 million in profit?

Twitter has done over a billion in revenue in each of the past several quarters

Edited

> are we witnessing a sinking ship

Im not saying I’m all the way there in thinking this but I’m really starting to wonder if everyone got caught with their pants down. The banks heard Elon Musk and probably didn’t do their due diligence in the loan, with the speed of this thing it’s not hard to imagine he is not as in command of the situation as he’d like people to believe. Either way it’s going to make a great business school case study.

The opposite. You're witnessing a ship that was sinking that's about to become buoyant.

Elon is is full of hot air, yes, but not _that_ much hot air.

Reddit will implement Twitter-like feeds and hashtags and eat their lunch. Twitter content creators hate Elon.

I have a very hard time believing Reddit can/will do it better.

Yeah. Not just that, but for the past 2-3 years, I felt like I've been watching reddit disintegrate in real time, at an accelerating rate.

Their IPO has been "just around the corner" for the past 3 years or so. And with more time passing, the more improbable it seems to ever happen. At first, it seemed like the IPO timeline couldve been affected by COVID. But at this point, I don't think reddit will ever IPO. And if it does, it will just be a last ditch attempt to kickstart a countdown do its death.

They missed the boat. Time of IPOs at least big ones is over for a while...

Speak for yourself

It was sinking already, to be sure, but I don't really see any reasons to be so optimistic that this group can make it "buoyant".

Tesla and SpaceX are a couple reasons.

Extremely different industries, the only web tech job Elon has experience with was X.com where he was a fucking walking nightmare to work with. Seems like he's going the same direction of being a fucking walking nightmare to Twitter. Let's see in some quarters.

I have no hopes at all.

He wasn't exactly known for cars or rockets either.

I'm impressed by those companies too, but I don't think the experience of running them is very transferable to running a social network. Indeed, having two other big complicated companies to run at the same time is another reason I'm skeptical. He's going to get bored with running such a crappy and pedestrian company and go back to focusing on the better and more interesting ones.

Between laying off 50% of jobs and pushing employees to work 12 hours a day, how is there enough morale at Twitter to even develop the myriad of new features Elon wants?

I suspect there just won't be. But for those of us not working there, it will be an interesting data point, to see how it goes.

Elon and the 50 super engineers from Tesla are going to sleep at the office until it’s fixed

Wait a second, everything I see about Elon online says that he alone is the super genius who invented electric cars and space travel. The engineers who work at those companies are just assistants; people to massage his shoulders as he tackles the next impossible technical problem himself.

Exactly, the 50 super engineers will stand behind Elon as he executes and engineers and allll the e's.

I've heard rumors that Tesla engineers are Python while Twitter engineers are Scala.

Is this true? If so, what could 50 Tesla engineers do?

Nothing, because they don’t understand RecSys which is half of ML at social media companies. Probably could help with prediction for ads but the domains are very different.

Ad targeting at Twitter has always been shit. Also effectively deprecated. Best starting from scratch.

well, not design a self-driving car, for starters

Hey, trolley problems are open-ended!

harsh, but fair.

They obviously rewrite Twitter back to Python! Afterall, this shouldn’t take them more than a Sunday afternoon - or at least that’s what Elon gave them as the deadline.

Python is significantly slower than Scala.

But I guess with all of the users leaving it should balance out.

3.11 is pretty fast. Probably roll with rust over scala.

Wouldn't be surprised if a mass rewrite happens just for the control it brings.

That's exactly what I think is going to happen: A giant rewrite with half the staff, overworking to burnout, cratering morale, and a struggle to hire. In short, a disaster.

But if that doesn't happen, well, it will be interesting to see how it goes...

Twitter definitely uses Scala in many of their core services.

https://github.com/twitter

Finagle and Scalding are particularly well done libraries.

From the job posting, it seems Tesla is using some Scala too.

Parts of Tesla almost exclusively use Scala.

It was a joke bro.

But ~50 Tesla engineers being pilfered using public funds to try and help Twitter is obviously happening right now.

I agree this is a joke, but maybe not the kind you were looking for. Is Twitter even paying for this? And if so, who would think that Twitter could possibly benefit from a bunch of programmers who don't even know the codebase?

> using public funds

Wait, what? How are Tesla engineers being publicly funded?

> Wait, what? How are Tesla engineers being publicly funded?

Tesla is a public company. Every year, they go back to their shareholders for another secondary offering, asking for more money. In exchange for this money, Tesla (the company) gives these tokens (aka: Stocks) out.

These stocks represent the public's interest in TSLA. Every TSLA shareholder is the true and legitimate owner of the company. TSLA shareholders likely shouldn't be happy with Elon Musk using their money to fund his private Twitter shenanigans.

Its definitely embezzlement as it is. The question is if TSLA shareholders care enough to sue. They probably don't care. So I don't expect anything to happen.

As long as there are stocks out there (IE: As long as there are public stocks in existence), the CEO + Board has a fiduciary duty to do what is best for the company. We're witnessing a clear and evidence destruction of that relationship, as TSLA engineers seemingly work for Twitter.

---------

Legally, and more importantly _morally_ speaking, if Elon Musk really wants to do this, he should take TSLA private so that his public shareholders don't get defrauded / embezzled throughout the venture.

Not that I think the typical political environment has enough people caring. But if TSLA starts to have money issues, people will ask questions a few months from now (IE: No one cares about embezzlement as long as times are good. People only really care about such theft when the money seemingly disappears. Its just human nature unfortunately)

How do you know that the Tesla engineers aren't being billed to Twitter?

I'd be very surprised if they weren't, frankly.

Contracting your employees out to a different company is not "embezzlement".

I do believe my quote is:

> Is Twitter even paying for this? And if so, who would think that Twitter could possibly benefit from a bunch of programmers who don't even know the codebase?

Then you went from there to "Its definitely embezzlement as it is."

Ah, I see. I read that as "public" in the sense of "government".

I’ve heard rumors that Tesla Engineers wear purple shirts and Twitter engineer tuck their green shirts in

Surely there are plenty of engineers rejuvenated by the prospect of fixing Twitter.

Well, Twitter's no longer public so they won't benefit from any long term stock price appreciation. I wonder if there's any other bonus structure in place, or if Elon plans to cut everything to the bone.

If the $8/mo is a good pivot, then sure. And there's lots of reasons to think it's not. E.g. I pay $15/mo to access the entire Netflix library. I'd pay roughly half that to do what exactly? To get a blue checkmark?

It would be different if Twitter pivoted and went towards the Cameo model where people pay for a celebrity's well wishes or say getting an expert viewpoint on demand.

Acquihire.

> Engineers and director-level staff from Tesla reviewed the lists, the person said. Layoff lists were drawn up and ranked based on individuals’ contributions to Twitter’s code during their time at the company, the people said. The assessment was made by both Tesla personnel and Twitter managers.

This process sounds shambolic

Using outside people who never contributed to the company to judge who in the company actually contributed. This is Elon going the "hire business consultants to tell you bullshit you want to hear" way but instead of business consultants he is cheaping out and hiring people from his other companies to act as them.

If this actually ends up being a success (massive if!), it will be a harbinger of other tech companies realizing their headcounts are bloated and downsizing accordingly. Does Zoom really need 6700 employees? Does Slack really need 2500? Zendesk 5800?

Counter point is that hundreds of millions of people use these products across the entire world, with thousands of corporations relying on them to work 24/7, yet the total number of global employees would barely fill half of the Chase Center.

Maybe? I'm pretty skeptical of this whole vibe that companies are overstaffed by 100% or more. It seems to me to be driven by executives and investors who have lost touch with what it takes to execute on their companies' current operations and future ambitions.

While I think the answer is "no", I also think that we need to remember that users want features, lots of features, and so in some sense bloated software requires bloated organizations.

This article might be useful: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/12/09/simplicity/

Users want support first of all

Probably. This is a view that is already starting to get a lot of transaction in SV/VC circles from what I've seen. In VC they obviously have a vested interest in that they want the "overpaid" big tech engineers to get fired and come work for cheap at their startup, but still.

The thing about Twitter is that it is so obviously overstaffed (on a Revenue/Employee basis when comparing to other META/AAPL/MSFT/etc) that there isn't an easier company to get the ball rolling with.

What are the breakdowns of job function? Sales, various tiers of support, infosec, solution engs, etc add up beyond the C-suite, devs and admins.

I’d imagine that these companies really do need this headcount. Think about how many relationships they need to manage.

My friends at Big Tech assure me that Twitter slimming down and revving up won't change the way their companies do business, but I'm not at all sure about that. If Twitter is successful (a big if) then the pressure to follow will be tremendous, especially at public companies.

You may be right, but the difference is that these are enterprise software companies. They will scale depending on the number of customers they have. My guess is about 80 percent of these roles are in sales, support and customer success.

Yeah like what they can manage millions of customers with 100 guys? Support is already shit but it will go to totally extinct.

> return to office

That seems a bigger deal. TBH they should just enforce this and most people will quit anyway.

Musk and Calacanis literally discussed doing this in the texts that were made public in the lawsuit. Called it a “gentleman’s layoff”

[1] https://fortune.com/2022/10/06/elon-musk-jason-calacanis-ret...

How dumb do you have to be to put stuff like that in writing? It’s just ammunition for a lawsuit.

Especially if he moves HQ to Texas.

Question: For those that stay, all their (vested) shares have been bought at $54.20, right? What do they replace the RSUs with as part of the compensation package moving forward?

It vests as cash

There was an LBO craze in the 80s, culminating (so the story goes) with the bidding war for RJR Nabisco - documented in Barbarians at the gate

They were unpopular with many, the idea was that a PE firm would buy the company with debt and then sell off parts and make other parts more efficient to service the debt. But underneath that was the idea that companies at the time were not using their assets efficiently, and it was possible to essentially use that efficiency to buy the company.

Tldr, I wonder if we're reaching that phase with big tech, where companies are sl inefficiency that they are ripe for the plucking by buying them off and cutting staff (the new versions of an asset) and streamlining operations.

Twitter is maybe an edge case, but it's plausible. I wouldn't be surprised to find that 90% of Google's recurring revenue comes from < 10% of their operations, and that an efficiency focused operator could capture most of their profit at a significantly lower headcount. Maybe this is the start of something

This happens a lot with mature enterprise software companies. They are bought and R&D is cut to the bone and existing customers that have too high of switching costs are milked for revenue. I’m not sure that model would work for ad revenue companies but you never know.

You mean Oracle's entire business model?

Oracle is a law firm that happens to have a development team attached to it.

A lot of the companies that get bought in LBOs aren't R&D heavy. For instance, you'll rarely see a pharma company LBO'd.

Even in tech, the type of companies you see bought out are ones like Rackspace. Not exactly cutting edge scientific research firms. LBO firms typically want a lot of physical assets and stable cash flow, i.e old economy firms like utilities and manufacturers and retailers.

Chrome does not directly generate revenue, doesn't mean Google will simply axe their entire team. Similarly there will be other products just to mitigate competition to protect the primary profit generators.

And sometimes simply the 10% of operations requires the support of 90% of the operations to generate 90% of the revenues. Its a large team effort.

If you've worked in the industry for longer than 5 minutes, ... this is incredibly obvious.

Facebo... I mean Meta looks like a good target :)

It still boggles the mind Twitter has 7000 employees when Whatsapp had fewer than 50. There must be a huge amount of deadweight.

Whatsapp literally has nothing to moderate or do. The infrastructure is basically just a mail man to deliver messages, and that's it. Almost everything is encrypted, there is nothing to moderate really.

I also have to imagine the graph and recommendation engine exponentially increases the infrastructure requirements and code complexity.

Is moderation a material part of Twitter's headcount? Like is that what 1000 people are doing?

Yes, or hundreds at least. Every platform has to deal with this problem, if they want to keep users and advertisers.

https://sports.yahoo.com/twitter-locks-hundreds-content-mode...

There is also development on social features like topics, the algorithm, spam filters, Ad management and much more.

So its not really a fair comparison.

I could be wrong but I somehow imagined most of this people doing nothing other than banning regular users for twits taken out of context or some other bs activism on Twitter to create "engagement"

just running infrastructure at a certain scale is a really hard problem. You will deal with hosts going bad for arbitrary reasons (some hardware, some software), weird infrastructure problems (networking broken, spurious connectivity in routers, etc), deployments not being rolled out to all hosts in the same version, etc.

You can work around a few of those by having really good tooling, and by trying to offload to cloud providers which do a bunch of the work for you, but it still won't be easy. At the scale at which whatsapp and Twitter operate 50 engineers is nothing - in many products this will be less than the size of teams who just do some basic server rollout and operations.

Apples and oranges. WhatsApp has tons more than 50 today and operates off Meta’s business. Twitter was 350 a year before the IPO.

Does WhatsApp have a global ad sales team? Sales is generally a large portion of the workforce in a large-ish media company.

Whatsapp doesn't provide any paid product... Nobody to take care of the problem of your customers and no sale organization, no moderation, etc. etc.

You are comparing a large scale information distribution system to essentially as post office.

completely different cardinality on the face of it

Debilitatingly so. How many processes were not automated to justify keeping friends by the thousands.

Hope he listens to the employment lawyers or he’ll spend his remaining days fighting lawsuits…

Well he already wasn’t listening to the employment lawyers since he fired the exec team for cause and took away their golden parachutes. He’ll be fighting those lawsuits for a while.

Dollars to donuts he's just using this to reduce their payouts, but unless he has pretty strong proof of wrongdoing, they'll all just settle. The execs will take home, say, $70 million instead of the ~$120 they were entitled (yeah, I'm crying a river on all sides) and everyone's happy.

Like the Twitter buyout itself, I think the execs have a strong legal right to the money. Why would they settle? Presumably they are already quite wealthy, and can wait out the courts.

Maybe, though if there is anything Elon has underestimated so far it’s the extent to which rich people will fight him for money.

Well, there’s laws for the procedure of larger layoffs to protect the little people and prevent discrimination. Ignoring them will spawn lawsuits as well.

He might. Shortly after firing them, he tweeted:

> Wachtell & Twitter board deliberately hid this evidence from the court. Stay tuned, more to come …

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586885887341645824

Yeah right. With Musks level of credibility, I wouldn’t hold your breath on him releasing this “evidence”.

Personally, I find the person who delivered on electric cars and reusable rockets more credible than a random anonymous account.

You are also omitting all the instances where the person who delivered on electric cars and reusable rockets has been a total piece of shit.

The person who is saying that FSD is just around the corner, upcoming next year™, since 2016 should also take a hit on credibility, no?

>… Musk also intends to reverse the company’s existing work-from-anywhere policy, asking remaining employees to report to offices …

v. back in March: https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1499422876134371329

Anyone at Twitter care to chime in anonymously? If the HN community can help, let us know.

Twitter employees will get severance and their RSUs paid out at far better rates than any other tech company excluding Apple. They’re doing just fine.

If the Twitter layoff is ran like the Tesla one, they’ll get 1 week severance and an Uber ride home.

Source for getting severance?

Too many fake news about Musk + Twitter on Hacker News. Can't tell what is true or not anymore.

We forgot about printing code on paper, huh?

Printing code on paper definitely happened. Confirmed by multiple folks. The layoff 75% numbers and layoffs before Nov 1 were false though.

https://twitter.com/leahculver/status/1586145696163373056?s=...

??? The tweeter you linked printed out her code as a joke, her tweet right below this is quoting Elon, "Comedy is now legal", you taking a joke as confirmation that something happened is a great example of why twitter is a net negative on humanity.

Holy moly you should relax buster, I was joking!

It still shocks me that Twitter has more than 3 employees. It's not exactly complicated software.

3 is excessively low, but yes, they shouldn't need more than 500 employees total to build and run their platform.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com