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Comment by dmak | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why comments are so against these layoffs. Twitter is known for having a "chill" work environment and I have heard many stories of people just slacking off and doing other things while getting paid. I would actually like to see Twitter's team and culture rebuilt regardless of who bought it.

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Too many people, too fast. There's no way these are going to be sensible, surgical layoffs. The service is definitely going to suffer.

Fair point. Agreed on the surgical layoffs. I assumed that Twitter's culture was rotting very deeply already since they haven't made much progress for a long time.

There’s an underlying fact that the committee of people didn’t care about Twitter as a company right? That if you believe in your company and the welfare of your workers, and you believe Elon is a threat to them and your vision of whatever modern communication Twitter serves, then you wouldn’t sell it to him.

But they did right? As in the group lacks conviction.

There was not a single stipulation in that sale that said “please keep our people on for X amount of time”.

They took the cash and bounced.

That was a hard red pill to swallow.

The board represents the shareholders, of course they were going to take an over market offer. If they hadn't they'd be mired in shareholder lawsuits til the end of time.

Oh sure. The board and upper management were inept and ineffectual, I don't think anyone will argue otherwise. But so what?

The management and the shareholders are not the same thing. The board represents the shareholders, not the management. If they don't take the offer they get sued for breaching fiduciary responsibility.

It's twitter. The service suffering is actually a desirable feature.

Is it? In general at every place I've worked the vast majority of the work has come from launching & supporting new products. Existing infra does not really break that often, so if we just want Twitter as it is, that should be doable by 1/10th of the people. I'm not picking just on Twitter -- I feel this is the case broadly. Maintenance of a system that doesn't change is fairly straightforward as compared to innovation.

> if we just want Twitter as it is

Musk explicitly doesn't want that though, because he needs Twitter to earn a lot more money than it currently does.

False. He can pump profits keeping earnings flat by slashing costs. See probably removing 1/3 the cost with this single move.

The maths don't even begin to work out there.

He just made Twitter take on $13bn of debt to finance his purchase, the company will owe around $1bn a year in interest payments that it didn't used to. The layoffs announced today probably won't even cover that extra interest.

That's probably a billion in recurring expense of the worst kind. Debt can be satisfied with an equity issuance in the future post restructure.

That doesn't account for the lost ad revenue due to the rise of controversial content.

You clearly don't have experience with infra serving millions of people in real time. Everything is hard and infra breaks all the time.

How many people are actually involved in fixing Twitter's infrastucture? Must be in the hundreds. Maybe a thousand with their own data centers.

If your experience with services not under active development is that they are "breaking all the time," I'm sorry to say that you've worked only at places where the quality bar is very low.

Services that aren't under active development break as the things above them change and they are put into environments they weren't in before. This is very normal and the reason you don't see problems happening because of this is either because you're moving slowly (which is a valid way to do things…but not typical) or your have an army of people keeping it all running smoothly.

Alternative take: I was at Google when they killed Reader. At the time they pulled the plug, Reader had already been destaffed for years and was kept going in one guy's 20% time. The infrastructure effectively ran itself - the underlying Google datacenter teams replaced machines when they died, everything else was automated.

My experience there was pretty consistent with that: if you leave things alone, they won't break. Virtually all breakage was caused by changing things. On a well automated system repairing the physical components, rolling OS updates from time to time and so on, is not a huge amount of work.

The idea that Twitter is ever "not under active development" is ludicrous.

Services with hundreds of millions of users, antagonistic spammers/hackers/countries, and advertisers spending millions are never in maintenance mode.

You sound like you're trying to apply your understanding of lifestyle software businesses to one of the largest real-time communication networks in human history.

I don't believe I claimed Twitter was not under active development. The point that I was making here is that if we were OK with Twitter as-is, it would be possible to maintain it with far fewer people than they employ now. Indeed, 'maintenance' will be defined differently for an indie hacker vs. a popular website with user-generated content. But all software has some split of "keeping the lights on" vs. innovating.

What is your estimate of Twitter's effort split between those two categories?

You're moving the goalposts to a hypothetical situation where anyone is OK with Twitter as-is.

No one is. Twitter cannot be "as-is" because it would be overrun by bots and bugs.

Exactly. Any one who has ever worked in SaaS industry realizes how many cogs in a wheel it takes to keep it running. Sure, there are always inefficiencies and redundancies. But, I highly doubt Elon figured out in a week that 50% of employees are not necessary. This looks like the vindictive and impulsive action of a man baby who has never been told that he doesn't always know what's best. Time will surely tell. All the best to those who were laid off, but most importantly, good luck to those who are staying back. They are in for a ride.

No one is contesting the merits of infra at scale. There are essential teams that would likely be untouched because their job is operationally critical. However, other teams for less vital jobs would be cut. I think you are making an assumption that the core team who manages the infra is being laid off which is not clear.

I remember the original Ruby on Rails Twitter going down a lot. And their error page said something like "Reason: Too many whales".

The verge article mentioned elsewhere in this discussion claims "His team of outside advisors has spent the last week determining which engineers to keep based on their contributions to Twitter’s codebase, according to employees involved in the discussion". Of course how well of a job they can do in a week is anyone's guess, but it sounds like there was a lot more internal and external knowledge involved than just Elon's gut feeling on who's important.

Sounds like it's actually s/a lot/very little/

It's also just cruel. Twitter employees must be feeling immense whiplash. First they were being bought out, then they weren't, then they were again, then a huge change in work culture literally overnight, now mass layoffs.

Elon Musk, it seems, does not think about the humans affected by his decisions. Regardless of anyone's opinions on whether the culture was good or bad, this sort of sudden mass loss of employment will cause pain. Pain that didn't need to happen.

It's almost like Elon Musk _wants_ to drastically shift the work culture.

Yes, of course. Stress and Fear are the cornerstones of responsible leadership. You can say that this is intentional, but it just means he is an asshole.

> Too many people, too fast.

There is no indication of how many people.

> There's no way these are going to be sensible, surgical layoffs.

We have no clue whose going to be laid off.

You clearly have your mind made up, regardless of reality.

> There is no indication of how many people.

“About half of Twitter’s workers appeared set to lose their jobs, according to previous internal messages and an investor”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/technology/twitter-layoff...

> We have no clue whose going to be laid off

No but we do know this plan was thrown together extremely quickly. We know a few days ago developers were told to print off (!) their code for review. Let’s state the obvious: it takes more than a week to plan an effective layoff of half your staff.

The "too many" people is in comparison with other companies and the revenue these companies bring in. Twitter is at the highest end of the list of more employees per money.

It might not be the wisest thing, but in comparison with others tech companies and only in this component it's accurate.

> Too many people, too fast. There's no way these are going to be sensible, surgical layoffs.

If I were working there, I'd want the layoffs to be as swift and brief as possible. Having the sword of Damocles hanging over my head day to day would be unbearable. I'd rather Twitter have one big layoff and then re-focus on the product if it were me.

> The service is definitely going to suffer.

I see this claim, but don't quite get it. What are engineers doing there? Are they like Homer Simpson pushing a red button every day to keep the site running? It seems like kind of a set-and-forget type of operation at this point, since so few new features are developed. They copied a couple of other social media startups (Clubhouse & Substack) in the past couple of years, and they changed the stylesheet, but otherwise, doesn't seem like much has happened. Have they done a ton of optimization work that we simply don't know about? (And if not, why do they need it?) I just don't get the claim.

FWIW, I'm expecting to see essentially no difference in Twitter for at least six months.

They're working on that 'edit' button.

Many big tech companies, especially in the social space, are extremely bloated. They could literally have 10x more employees and everyone would still find something meaningless to work on. On the other hand they could have had far fewer employees and the company would have delivered better results and built a better product. A lean, focused engineering culture will do wonders to a company like Twitter.

1000%

I do agree overall, but it is very hard to achieve such a lean organization. Broad layoffs such as this tend to demotivate employees and cause your best employees to look for work where they don't have to worry as much about job security. I am fairly certain anybody with talent and drive would not be looking forward to continue working at Twitter in the coming days, at least without a significant pay raise (which Musk would want to avoid).

I dunno, if 50% of the chaff gets cut, that would be good with me. It all depends on who they’re letting go.

How confident are you in Elon's ability to identify "chaff" within a week? What makes you think the remaining 50% will continue to work at full capacity after this?

One way is to look at a few most recent perf reviews. Another way - look at some internal productivity metric that many companies introduced during Covid/WFH.

Have you ever seen either of those be remotely well correlated with actual job performance?

Yes. Underperformance is a decent indicator. Number of PRs is not a great one, but it can be somewhat correlated with eng velocity/productivity. Twitter will probably end up using a combination of metrics like that.

They will hopefully also talk to EMs, but at this scale might choose not to. It's going to be an ugly process but I doubt it's going to be a random one. They clearly understand that it's in their interest to retain the most skilled and performant employees.

Also, don't want to sound too cynical, but I would guess that it's actually not that hard to evaluate eng performance with all the data companies are collecting during WFH. I am sure Twitter requires using a VPN, so digging into that data would yield quite a revealing and precise performance metric. The only reason this approach is not widespread is ethical, not technological.

I’m having a hard time believing that a large number of people are doing nothing but slacking off at these companies. When people say their tech company has a “chill” culture normally they mean they don’t have to work overtime or during the weekends. Or they don’t get super stressed about hard deadlines. Not that they work 30 minutes a day. I worked for 2 big tech companies that have the “chill” culture label and never met somebody that was literally doing nothing or didn’t have a project assigned. I’m sure there are exceptions but that’s it. It’s not like in the TV show where they go and hang in the roof all day.

A very large number of people do slack off at these companies. Some engineers code only a few hours a week. They do attend meetings and such, but the actual task delivery timeline is very relaxed.

But how do you know that’s actually true? They might be just posting that to sound cool in some social app. In these companies everyone has a manager and assigned to a project. I don’t think it’s like in the tv shows or in consulting companies where you can spend months waiting for a project and actually doing nothing.

My friends in different size tech companies.

I've worked in Fortune 50 and in the Gov. Both are equally unproductive. Swaths of people doing nothing all day. Stagnancy is remarkable.

Also, makes it incredibly easy to climb the ranks and get rewarded for it. Whenever there is malaise in workplace, I work twice as hard. Build tools for others, solve their problems, uplift folks and motivate them. What good is it to sit around sadly wasting away your life with a resentful attitude. It's not fun and these people make things worse for others that are around them. By far the worst is working in the Gov. Not only people slack off, but they don't even try to hide it. Openly and shamelessly. It's not my type of an environment at all.

I wanna build shit with cool people and live a fulfilling life.

It's not a good look to wish for people to lose their jobs.

Losing jobs will eventually happen regardless for any business that loses money like they were. When the company has over-hired, layoffs at least mean they're taking corrective action now.

Sucks for the people affected now, possibly impacts fewer people long-term though. I doubt many Twitter employees will struggle to find reemployment quickly.

You're mistaken. I am not wishing for it and my comment doesn't "wish for it". I am just not against the decision that I clearly have no say in. I'm just looking forward into a decision that was already made.

I see what you're saying, but I think this is a take that doesn't stand up to much analysis. The correct amount of employees is the goal, we wouldn't cheer their workforce growing by 10x as a universal good, it's not sustainable and likely to imperil the jobs of everyone. But it's the "good" that's the inverse of this "bad".

I didn't really understand yakaccount4's take on this. If they are concerned about optics, what can one do to not layoff? would they just let the company continue to perform mediocrely and continue to bloat its burn just for the sake of not laying off people?

> would they just let the company continue to perform mediocrely and continue to bloat its burn just for the sake of not laying off people?

Who's more important the workers or the company? I bet the answer to that question will align with people's views on the layoffs.

It's not that black and white. It's nuanced, it is situational, and it is conditional.

this makes the common mistake that there will always continue to be a company with resources for the workers, regardless of how it performs. The company as a concept exists as a going concern, _then_ it can support workers. If the company ceased to exist, the workers could continue to report to work and produce output, but they would be unhappy with the compensation.

> Who's more important the workers or the company?

The workers all lose when the company goes bust.

The company goes bust without the workers. There’s more to it than just the extremes.

True. It's also true that the best thing a company can do for its workers is make a decent profit.

Amazon went over a decade minting millionaire employees while not making a profit. Ditto Uber, and half of the other cheap-money unicorns.

> I see what you're saying, but I think this is a take that doesn't stand up to much analysis.

I don't think it needs to, nor was I trying to make any kind of argument of the sort. The (former) employees are going to suffer and pay the price for the past mistakes of the corporate leaders. It's a depressing situation even if it is the absolute correct action for Twitter to take.

For that reason, I don't think it is hard to understand why there are so many comments against the layoffs.

Firing people based off of "lines of code submitted" immediately after crunching them for 80+ hour weeks is a really shitty way of trying to accomplish that goal.

At the same time, "too many people would lose their jobs [in insurance]" was *one of the reasons why we didn't get the public option when Obamacare passed.

There are definitely cases where people losing their jobs is a necessary evil to get us to a place of greater good. We should certainly support those that get laid off, but it shouldn't stop us (collectively) from improving how our society functions.

I'm reminded of the Soviet Union joke about full employment. Of course we have full employment - like at the subway entrance: one person takes your ticket, another brings it to the machine, the third one makes the stamp and the fourth hands it back to you. See? Everyone has a job!

I am speculating as a non Twitter user looking at it from the outside that the Twitter staff and primary Twitter user base shared the same views and culture.

So Musk is probably going to alienate a majority of his users doing this and Twitter will probably go into disrepute and decline now.

I have seen this happen to forums and boards I posted on where some moderators get de-modded which angers a lot of the users who leave or start posting less. Then the culture goes into decline and never returns. Maybe something like that is about to happen, or maybe not.

Because you're not going to know who the 'slackers' are in the first week or so of owning a company and actions like these are a great way to ensure that your company doesn't get rebuilt.

Despite how many Musk reply guys seem to exist, most of them aren't engineers and even fewer of them are dumb enough to work for a Musk-owned Twitter where you get to be overworked and underpaid.

Why not? If the rumors are true, there are people who don’t commit code (or design docs etc) for months on end. Wouldn’t it be pretty easy to identify those people?

I work with a pretty good QA tester guy who doesn't write any of code, but can configure an entire realistic test network across Windows / Linux servers, Android devices, IOS devices in a day.

Are ya going to fire him after seeing his lack of GIT commits after one week as CEO?

Obviously I meant if their job duties involve writing code or something…

You might want to calibrate your view of what is obvious. Which is the point gp was making.

Well the current events says Engineers were asked to print code which applies to only relevant parties (ex, people who are expected to commit code). If you are QA testing and aren't expected to commit code then it should be obvious that you are not subjected to that rubric.

Because you and I both know those rumors aren't true. Upper management at any big company isn't going to let any of that slide no matter the culture. And implying that 50% of people are that level of unproductive is laughable by any metric. You could probably make some shit up by pointing at a technical manager that hasn't written code in a while but that's not indicative of their actual performance.

It's dishonest to say they won't rank before firing.

But worst case...

These firing decisions are not irreversible! If you accidentally fire a 10x programmer, you can re-hire.

A 10x programmer isn't going to come back to a company that fired him for nonsense reasons.

No true scotsman fallacy aside, firms make this mistake all the time and have to rehire the star/legacy maintainer at contractor rates to keep things running.

> These firing decisions are not irreversible! If you accidentally fire a 10x programmer, you can re-hire.

Ha! At a significant price premium, or that programmer is a moron.

All of Musk's companies have a reputation for being really sucky places to work. Interesting, but poorly paid, authoritarian and very long hours. It's suffering you accept to learn stuff and then leave, I've heard it described. Not a place to have kids.

Meaning Musk cannot rehire anyone who's left these companies.

>At a significant price premium, or that programmer is a moron.

You're stating the obvious as if it's not implied by my statement.

Alternatively, they might be A-OK returning to their codebase/team without fuss.

Edit: even if you pay an exorbitant premium, that could be cheaper than keeping N other 1x or -X programmers.

Wouldn’t call that obvious - a whole host of reasons exists as to why one wouldn’t rejoin a company that just fired them, many not related to money.

You're mixing and raising new issues beyond rehire price for an individual.

Who are you disagreeing with?

> I would actually like to see Twitter's team and culture rebuilt regardless of who bought it.

There you go. I don't think having giant operational costs at a company and having a head count in the thousands and sitting there losing more money without maximizing revenue it sustainable for any business.

Perhaps Twitter itself was overdue a massive correction, hence the first step is drastic layoffs and cuts.

I had lunch there a couple of times. The food was fantastic!

I'm curious how much damage all this negativity will have on Twitter culture going forward and what it will take to rebuild it. Is it just throwing money at the layoff "survivors" or is it really the mission of building the Internet's town square? I'm pretty interested to see how this plays out!

I've always heard these types of stories, and someone showed me a clip from a show once with some nerds on the roof. I can't help but wonder if that's real life for some people. I get nervous sometimes if I'm taking too long taking walks during my break, not that I'm going to get caught or scolded for going a few minutes over, but that mentally I'm harming my integrity by not honoring the commitment I made.

I can imagine the type of person that embodies this type of developer is someone who clicks 'I agree' without reading the terms of service, or shows up late to personal engagements.

Is it that simple? I doubt it. The man owns Starlink. Imagine that for a second. Imagine owning a social network that is a first class citizen to a global satellite network that no government can ever censor.

He could be pivoting the company into something astonishing.

Let's build a better one that people control.

That’s the whole point, no one is supposed to control it. Ugh, I sound silly, but here’s the Batman quote:

Not the hero we want, but the hero we deserve.

Yes, reverse the bans and connect this shit to Starlink and tell governments “I got no clue where those damn satellites are, can’t help ya, Trump’s tweeting from somewhere in Somalia with a VPN”.

Wow, yeah, what a utopian vision you paint.

Wait hold on a minute isn't there already some kind of amendment that makes this irrelevant?

Although since the Saudis own such a massive chunk of this newly private company I guess the US government is no longer the only one that Elon needs to concern himself with.

The man bought the company using Saudi cash. It is much, much more likely that he's going the other way on censorship.

Of course, astonishment might still be appropriate.

Didn't realize the Saudis were such big shareholders -- apparently now second only to Musk in total percentage of ownership https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/31/tech/murphy-saudi-musk-twitte...)

Aren't the Saudi royal family the worst investors of all time?

Why? I have no information either way, but I'm curious what their reputation is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teapot_Dome_scandal

Second only to Musk, with 4% ownership (based on their stake, and total deal size).

Not to mention installing a social networking app doesn’t somehow make your iPhone capable of satcom.

>Imagine owning a social network that is a first class citizen to a global satellite network

I guess the zeitgeist really did decide Net Neutrality is a bad thing. Like imagine a telecom owning a social network?

Ok I imagined it and I hate it.

> Like imagine a telecom owning a social network?

You mean like Verizon and Tumblr? ;)

In order for it to be a social network, doesn’t it need to have users?

The months leading up to Verizon's fateful decision in December 2018, they were in the range of over 500 million MAU. Within a couple months after, the number was half that.

Failing to learn the lessons of Betamax continue to haunt decisionmakers, essentially.

The takeaway should likely be: Twitter will be fine if people can still post their porn there.

Wasn't the downfall of Betamax that the tapes were limited to 1 hour (which Sony thought was fine since that was the unit of commercial videotapes) and most people wanted to record sporting events that took longer than an hour?

That didn't really work out.

Exactly my point and that of GP.

That would be insanely impressive

A censorship-resistant communication system and a Starlink sized dish are a good recipe for people going to jail in countries where Twitter is actually censored.

Governments that engage in active censorship also frequently are not the warm-and-fuzzy entities that westerners are used to when they think of governments.

Sounds great, but who pays for it? The purchase of Twitter was done via loans and now, interest rates are not zero. Musk will have to service considerable debt to keep Twitter alive.

If he can pull this off, he'll go down in history as one of the must successful business person of his generation. If he fails, he will still has Paypal, SpaceX and Tesla to brag about.

if it fails it cements him as a loose canon who is now past him prime

It will cast a narrative of Musk as someone who is successful only in a low interest rate economy. When interest rates tighten, companies have to show they can deliver more than Treasury notes. That was really easy when the interest rates were close to zero.

Presumably Twitter will be immediately profitable after these layoffs. Enough to cover the interest on the debt? Not sure

That maybe takes care of debt servicing, but what about growth? Business exist to grow shareholder value (public or private). Elon needs to solve that puzzle.

If 50m people pay the 8 dollar a month fee that’s another decent chunk of change.

Will be interesting to see how all these rapid fire changes play out over the next few years.

I’m not sure the path to growth for Twitter depends on a lot of net new development. More so better monetization of the existing platform, which can largely be done via small tweaks here and there

> he purchase of Twitter was done via loans and now, interest rates are not zero. Musk will have to service considerable debt to keep Twitter alive.

Those loan rates were negotiated before the recent hikes. They had some range built in based on what the market did, but he is definitely paying below current market rates.

Bigco software engineering has been quite chill / slack-off for some time. Rude awakening for a lot of devs if they have been resting on their laurels.

This.

Many of these people are going to be unemployable in standard "Churn out CRUD 24/7" jobs.

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