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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

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

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> 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.

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.

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.

That was a hard red pill to swallow.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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

> 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.

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/

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