Hacker News Reader

Comment by lostdog | Hacker News Reader

There are always comments about "why do they need X,000 people" every time a company's staffing gets talked about. I guess we are finally getting an answer. We will get to see whether the layoffs effect the technology and the development pace, although a lot of the real information will leak out through rumors.

Personally, I am sad about these layoffs. Even if there are many many lazy Twitter engineers hanging out on the roof, it's still sad to see people treated so poorly. Elon just treats people with such disgust. I have seen the inside of companies like Twitter, and usually people check out because leadership fails to set any direction. An engineer joins, tries to get some things done, and then finds that they cannot within the company's structure. That engineer will give up and be "unproductive" for the rest of the time their. Elon could have handled the takeover in a serious and humane way. He could have set some product direction, given the employees some time to realign and get some of his features built, and then fired those who could not or chose not to keep up. Instead, he immediately forces everyone to work through the weekend on a random feature, and cuts people ASAP in the most malicious way he could.

I am really disgusted by this brand of "leadership," and it's hard to reconcile this with someone I'd like to respect for bringing electric cars to the masses, and the U.S. back into the space race. I feel deeply sorry for the Twitter engineers who are being squeezed for no purpose but selfishness and meanness, and I hope it doesn't spread through the industry.

View on HN

We can be compassionate about the folks getting laid off while still realizing that the company was grossly inefficient and needed to restructure -- these are not contradictory feelings. For me personally, I have no idea what "technology and development pace" these layoffs even could effect, as I have seen no real change in the service in the past ~5 years I've used it.

Actually, I have noticed that in the last year or two they refuse to show me more than a tweet or two until trying to force me to log in.

> Actually, I have noticed that in the last year or two they refuse to show me more than a tweet or two until trying to force me to log in.

Things like that are usually UX driven, developers often don't have any recourse beyond implementing what's demanded in such a setting.

Ironically, I think Twitter started actually building product for the first time in a long time recently.

One frame through which you could view Twitter is it was the place where famous / popular / important (athletes, movie stars, government officials) talk to the public. Spaces, enabling audio conversations for those people, makes tons of sense.

So also Twitter Blue letting you read certain news w/o a paywall. If you're a serious consumer of news on Twitter, wsj/nyt/wapo/latimes/ft probably cost $1500/year. If the economics worked for the news orgs, there was huge value there.

Of course, they really sat on the product for 5+ years, so oof...

> as I have seen no real change in the service in the past ~5 years I've used it.

You underestimate the effort it takes to keep a service as large as Twitter running. Constant software upgrades to maintain high standard of security, inevitable technological break-age, deprecated dependencies, operations, root-causing failures, migrations (you can't avoid hardware migrations; hardware will die out), planning fallacy, etc, etc.

Yes it's incredible to see so many people on _hacker news_ who don't understand how much work it is to keep even moderately large (low millions of users) services running.

Yes, and repeatedly people point out that high dozens or low hundreds should be enough but they have thousands (allegedly).

I think the point you are missing that especially tech people might have been using twitter for 10 years like a public IRC client. Open App/Browser, read messages, write messages, complain about lack of linear timeline, close app.

Yes, it has grown, but they added a million features that probably none of the people here asked for. We don't necessarily follow Justin Bieber where the system needs to be able to handle 2m users connected, we follow a kernel developer with 2000 followers.

I guess it's a marvel of engineering that's mostly needed for whatever method they found to make money off, I'm still asking myself this after these years.

I thought Twitter was mostly on AWS?

I don't think most of the issues mentioned are mitigated by AWS, sadly.

According to whistleblower Peiter Zatko they had two datacentres.

He reports that they were worried that if a DC went offline they might not be able to bring it back up again!

Their servers in their DCs were running unpatched operating systems with no disk encryption!

I highly recommend reading his full report. The level of disfunction he reports is insane.

Here's story for you

A team of 30 works at zerodha for serving 6.2 million users. They are largest trading broker in India.

There story is worth a read https://zerodha.tech/blog/hello-world/

Edit: Apparently they have 1200 employees for operations and everything else. Thanks to child comment for pointing that out.

30 member tech team.

So what are the other 1170 people doing? 10 managers to each person in tech? Sounds like bloat /s

No they dont have managers or a separte QA team. 30 is their entire tech team which handles everything.

They are largest broker so others might be sales, legal, marketting, hr guys

> They are largest trading broker in India.

Trading brokers don't need to make spam-filtering tools, CSAM filters, ads tools, handling huge video/image data, or handling a global audience.

I suspect most brokers's tech is way simpler than Twitter's.

> Constant software upgrades to maintain high standard of security

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2022/t...

"Zatko’s complaint alleges he had warned colleagues that half the company’s servers were running out-of-date and vulnerable software and that executives withheld dire facts about the number of breaches and lack of protection for user data, instead presenting directors with rosy charts measuring unimportant changes."

Firing incompetent people might improve things, not make them worse.

One of the reasons I was looking forward to the trial was to hear what (if any) communication between Mudge and Elon('s team) had been dredged up in discovery.

That's why WhatsApp had 50 employees before the acquisition - it's very difficult to do these things if you have only 3-5 people.

People also underestimate what it takes to keep advertisers happy. It might take a whole team just to manage one big account, and that account will cover the cost of the staff. With Elon threatening to fire half the company, it's no wonder brands are pulling out/pausing with no way to know who will be handling their accounts. A General Mills or Audi wants to keep working with the people it's come to trust over the years, not wonder if this new CEO is going to hand them off to some intern who just graduated with a major in advertising.

> There are always comments about "why do they need X,000 people" every time a company's staffing gets talked about. I guess we are finally getting an answer.

Yes, this is what people really need to be worried about. Not about Elon's policies ruining Twitter or whatever; that's the good outcome. The bad outcome is: what happens if Elon lays off 50% of Twitter, and a year later it turns from a floundering social media company that's not doing anything with its dominant market share into a profitable adtech powerhouse that rivals Meta and Google? If that happens, then your company's CEO is going to be laying off 50% of staff, too.

You’re being downvoted at the moment, but if that timeline plays out I can definitely see copycat behavior in smaller companies, especially among the hustle culture bros.

Completely agree. Elon is so worshipped that just him doing this has already emboldened the financial analysts and wannabe founder types to more ruthlessly question total comp numbers and hiring. Everyone who works in technology should be worried. Whether it’s correct or not, what looks like waste and excess to the business class who are used to the “hard facts” of balance sheets could look to someone else like one of the few labor sectors on the planet where workers are paid something near what they are worth. Silicon Valley is the land of fat peasants. This is the beginning of the lords and ladies tightening the peasant’s belts.

"Elon is so worshipped"

Is that really still the case? Most of the time I read something about Elon the comment section is very negative, compared to some years ago and it seems rare to encounter a Musk fanboy anymore.

Nobody worshipped him anyway. Musk is openly against some major progressive liberal and left viewpoints. And he is an awkward impulsive super billionaire. So naturally there is a sour crowd here.

> it seems rare to encounter a Musk fanboy anymore

Can we swap internets? I see plenty of them just in the comments under this story, never mind elsewhere.

> Yes, this is what people really need to be worried about.

Ah yes, the what if I’m really not only ineffective, but a net negative on my company and they find out anxiety.

It's more: what if I'm superficially similar to very different people in a very different company who are a net negative on their company.

I'm not worried. I've lived out what happens when activist investor know-it-all types come in and gut a company thinking they and their sycophant yes-men are smarter than everyone that came before. That isn't to say that Elon can't improve twitter as a business, but most CEOs aren't Elon, and even Elon is more hot air than substance.

this is the story of most newspapers, same shit happened to the entire industry the past 20 years

Most CEOs aren't Jack Welsh, and yet most of them implemented stack ranking. This persists even when it seems to demonstrably harm the companies.

So dropping 50% even if it harms the company may become a major move.

> into a profitable adtech powerhouse

Isn't one of his stated goals for Twitter to become much less reliant on advertising income? Hence the whole Twitter Blue $8/month thing.

So someone correct me if I'm wrong but didn't many Twitter employees start talking about how horrible Elon was and how they didn't want to work for him when the discussions were ongoing?

Seems like if large chunks of the employee base are talking smack on the possible new CEO, not even as a corporation but as an individual, they shouldn't be unduly surprised if the CEO decides to show them the door when he gets in since he can't be sure they won't be actively hostile.

And I know this is happening in such a way that they aren't just letting go of people that talked smack on musk, but still I don't know what supposed adults were thinking when they were s*t talking their new potential CEO.

It's been clear for a while that Twitter only has the presence it has because it was the first out of the gate and not because they're actually good at what they do. Their talents seem to largely be the ability to amplify the most toxic aspects of both the left and the right at the same time.

That is true, at least if you trust leaked discussions, however, this isn't an isolated example of Elon's leadership in action. All the points about the ideological captivity of Twitter employees are secondary to repeated behavior.

So is, "Don't talk open shit about your future boss" a point? Yeah, but so is Elon treating this process like an inhumane animal. The latter trump's a bunch of plebians with loud opinions.

> So someone correct me if I'm wrong but didn't many Twitter employees start talking about how horrible Elon was and how they didn't want to work for him

I think it's worth introspecting on where you got this impression and what "many Twitter employees" means. It seems to me there are many powerful people who want you to have this impression but that doesn't mean it's true. Twitter had thousands of employees and I'd bet a strong majority of them are not ideologues in the way you imagine. Just people who work 9-5 and value job security.

I presume people got that impression from highlighted Tweets from employees… which says something about the effect that Twitter has on discourse.

If large chunks of the employee base are talking smack about the possible new CEO, perhaps there are reasons they are doing so? "Elon comes in and throws the company into chaos" seems to be fairly accurate, FWIW.

There were a handful of very vocal people who created that ruckus and the media amplified it.

> So someone correct me if I'm wrong but didn't many Twitter employees start talking about how horrible Elon

What a sensitive man-baby. For all his flaws, Mark Zuckerberg is no glass cannon. He is not prone to rage because his employees dared question him.

I guess an implicit questions is: Can you teach old dogs new tricks?

Can you turn around people who are used to coming in at 10, getting coffee/snacks for the next 30 minutes who then talk shop for 30 minutes, figure out who's on-call this week, set up some meetings, train new onboard, then discuss lunch plans and when they'll head down to the gym, then return at 2 for a meeting, at 3 do some work, then talk about whether it's uber or something else back home while getting their favorite drink prepared.

Can that be turned around, or are those apples spoiled?

are you joking? is that most day-in-a-lifes for high paid senior workers there? damn I'm working at the wrong place

All? No. Obviously he'll be keeping a bunch and obviously some key people are productive. But, look, what are new revenue streams and features added in the last 5 years? One hand's digits can enumerate them.

Here is a biz-dev at TWTTR: in her own words: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/skmAZHNuEP0

Same, with MST 3000-style commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk6T1pmHCAE

i am screaming, why am i grinding leetcode again? LOL

Reminds me of a similar video but from a LinkedIn employee https://youtu.be/X5TZVhKDwpk

I don't see how you can infer anything at all from that video. It's not like she's going to show her screen while she's typing away at an email (I hope it's obvious why...). There's also no timestamps, so the video says nothing about how much time is spent slacking off vs working. The video snippets probably only accounted for 2 hours of her day (at most). That doesn't seem super wasteful to me. If your impression is that "smoothie and wine on tap = slacking off", I think that's your misconception to correct.

That commentary video is also worse than useless; they're obviously not aware of how tech companies operate. They're commenting on things like the office being empty and the employee visiting the office for the first time. Are they not aware of WFH? The "gourmet" meals are also standard at many tech companies, and are an extremely small part of the cost. It's not like vegetables are more expensive when you prepare them in a way that looks good. On the net, offering the free food (and smoothie, foosball etc.) leads to much more value created than they cost to provide. This mentality is penny-wise, pound-foolish.

I've had that sort of schedule, except for me it was more like leave early to catch a movie (happily that coincided with the summer that Moviepass was big).

Reminder that this situation is made up based on videos you saw on TikTok

I wish that were true. I've seen it in person (of course, this is not representative of every team every day --but it also occurs).

This isn't a knock on you. This is a knock on people who are parasitic to a company. Look, people cargo culted the SGI&Sun ethos and said, aha, they know! Let's follow. But these places are no longer the cult of engineers, it's the cult of MBAs and biz-dev types who if they were not in tech would be doing similar useless things at investment banking firms.

These are the kinds of people who balloon spending: we had this and that at [FANG] Let's get this that and the other here without knowing why we had it there and whether or not it make sense here, but, hey, you hired me, so let me have what I know -no, I don't want this viable alternative, that's not what the cool kids at FANG used, eeewww!

normalize this

Many companies are moving to four day work weeks. Productivity peaks at under 50 hours per week. Silicon Valley humans are not immune to this just because they work in big tech.

Anyone who focuses purely on hours worked or misery while working is merely perpetuating this country's unhealthy Protestant style relationship with work. If an employee can be fully productive to the demands of their work and still have time to chat or go to the gym, what is the issue? You act like you've just described the worst thing you've ever seen ("spoiled apples") but I just see a happy workforce.

Of course, if they are truly not productive, that's something different. But unless they are your reports, you have no idea what their true level of productivity is.

It's beyond time we start recognizing that happy employees are more productive, and stop shaming people for daring to seem happy at work. Because right now, a lot of us seem like the proverbial crab not letting others crawl out of the bucket.

The owner wants to cut the fat. He's finding it. Yeah, he'll take out some muscle here and there, but were they overstaffed, could they do with less? Yes and yes. In a down market you don't survive by running things bloated especially when you have not been consistently profitable. He's not running a ClubMed charity.

Not a single part of what you criticised is inherently unreasonable. It entirely depends on the quality of the work done, and the overwhelming majority of people do not use anything close to an 8 hour workday to get stuff done. 4-5 at most.

I agree that 3-4 hours of productivity is all you're gonna get. Many people could be done without though. Some are a burden than help. He can run the co on 50% current staff easily, 25% is a bit bare bones, but doable.

Would be interesting to see how Elon's own schedule looks like. And no not his PR enabled one. Would love to understand how he finds time to meme post almost every hour and handles all the insane context switching from managing 4/5 companies at a time.

This brand of leadership is how you end up with companies like SpaceX being able to build a Raptor engine per day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33436918) and Tesla advancing the electric car industry by many years. Now we'll see Twitter pivot from a stagnant rest & vest to high productivity.

Here's Andrej Karpathy's (ex-Tesla head of AI) explanation of Elon's leadership style and effectiveness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbxladysbTE

That's an interesting clip and reminiscent of an extremely effective manager I had. He would remove people from trouble projects one at a time to (a) reduce cost and (b) reduce meetings. The worst case project would have the single best engineer left on it.

I also saw the complete opposite at two companies which were decades old, but were distracted by CSR and processes. Both ceased to exist a few years ago.

I'm going to call B.S. on this one. with SpaceX and Tesla, many employees are driven by a sense of purpose independent of the behavior of their shared/part-time CEO based on the fundamental mission of the company. In Twitter's case, I doubt the notion of whipping engineers to making more advertising revenue via blue check marks is going to rouse a sense of pride, purpose, or productivity. I guess we'll see!

I suspect that Musk has more in store than just keeping Twitter as we know it today.

Elon sees twitter as artificial brain made of humans (each user is a neuron). So i assume he has more ideas what to do with twitter than to just add paid blue marker.

That clip resonates strongly with me. I’ve seen exactly the good and bad scenarios he describes there in orgs for the reasons outlined.

I think that’s why Apple created so many iconic products under Jobs. You hear stories of Steve using the product and seeing a minor flaw and just flying off the handle that it’s not good enough, for the type of bug you know would have been a “priority 2 - won’t fix” in most large orgs on a product the CEO will never even use.

A “big hammer” who cares about the product can make a huge difference.

> Now we'll see Twitter pivot from a stagnant rest & vest to high productivityNow we'll see Twitter pivot from a stagnant rest & vest to high productivity.

SpaceX has higher headcount and less revenue than Twitter. Despite the long hours and hazardous working environment they are dramatically less productive than the lazy woke Twitter employees.

> He could have set some product direction, given the employees some time to realign and get some of his features built, and then fired those who could not or chose not to keep up.

True. He could have. In the meanwhile, he has signed Twitter up for massive amounts of loans whose annual interest exceeds the company's annual free cash flow. I am not up to speed with all of Twitter's finances, but this right here might be one of the fastest way to grow the free cash flow without affecting the core revenue stream of the ad business.

I don't think this would be an act of leadership if it comes to pass. This is just a consequence of the straitjacket that Elon has put Twitter in. Sometimes, constraints help. Let's see what these financial conditions do for Twitter.

> I guess we are finally getting an answer. We will get to see whether the layoffs effect the technology and the development pace, although a lot of the real information will leak out through rumors.

Except it won't take effect immediately. It's not like Twitter will only load 50% of the pages or it will be 2x slower the day the layoffs kick in.

I think the main hypothesis is that Twitter will have an S-curve decline.

Since so much work in a large org is communication, if they're able to do layoffs effectively and actually cut out the least productive people - 50% could take a while to have any visible external impacts.

That's my guess at least.

Sad for the people that lost good jobs, but I'm excited we get an opportunity to witness a massive cut like this and learn from it.

There's a sense in which leaders don't actually make decisions, just tell people what's already happening.

From one perspective Elon is doing what Zuck doesn't have the balls to pull off. The product is mature, has passed peak enthusiasm already, time to stop growing+exploring, and start battening down the hatches?

My suspicion (and I think main stream?) is that 50%+ of the company is necessary just to stay afloat, sustainably.

Sure, in the very short term you could probably fire 80% of people and make the other 20% work 7-16s. But that's not going to end well.

The major threat to Twitter right now is twofold: that (1) the mild user downturn it’s been experiencing since 2020 turns into a full-on death spiral, and (2) other social networks step in and pull a TikTok by gobbling up Twitter’s users. Both of these things could probably be averted by smart new leadership. Neither of these things is helped by loading the company up with debt and moving into layoff/cash extraction mode to service it.

> I'm excited we get an opportunity to witness a massive cut like this and learn from it.

We've seen a lot of these, what do you plan to learn from this specific one?

What moderately healthy large tech company cut half of its employees before?

Twitter does not look moderate healthy at the moment.

I think Elon treats _human labor_ with disgust, not just assembly line crew but also in high tech labor. Likely he believes a significant percentage of the employed talent pool is waste at a company like Twitter (and probably many others), by showering a smaller group of heavy hitters with more money he could be more nimble in ways he is with SpaceX, maybe even Tesla.

But Tesla and Spacex have notoriously low pay compared to their peers. Eg a Tesla swe makes 40% less than at Google

That's rank and file, but Tesla hires people like Andrej Karpathy and Jim Keller, are they paid low too? I bet not...

Firing 50% is not disgusting or malicious if the company is 50% overstaffed and losing money. It's acknowledging reality.

Letting people coast by in jobs they've given up on is not compassionate. Those people would be happier in a job where they can make a difference, and society would be better off too. I see a lot of people lamenting how the greatest minds of our generation have been stuck in big tech golden handcuffs putting eyeballs on ads. Well, this is what the fix looks like!

It's unfortunate that it's happening in a downturn but it's not Musk's fault that the economy started tanking during the acquisition.

> Those people would be happier in a job where they can make a difference, and society would be better off too

Serious question: how many jobs can really make a difference? How well do they pay and with what risk factors? Compare that to a steady paycheck where your way of making a difference it to try to make political and other internet discourse slightly nicer or at least less troll friendly.

How do you identify the right 50% in the short time Musk had?

He basically has to rely and trust people inside Twitter to make those decisions for him (can he, though?) or he has to fire people in an arbitrary way.

I don’t really understand how you can make that call unless you believe people are pretty much interchangeable and their emotions play no role.

It just seems inconceivable to me how you can meaningfully decide who to fire.

It‘s not as though this was an acquisition and suddenly the sales department is redundant and you can fire them all.

I would assume that you would need at least a couple months time to get to know the company and understand what and who might be redundant. I don’t think that question is easy to answer at all.

The answer is it's not really possible to do a much better job. With unlimited time the result would not be that much more fair or effective. Firing the bottom 50% is impossible even with unlimited time to think about it. Employee performance evaluation isn't very effective, and Musk has no reason to trust Twitter's previous performance evaluations, and forcing people to work 6 months under a new performance evaluation process with the threat of a 50% layoff over their heads is not compassionate either, nor would it have a much better result at the end anyway. There is no silver bullet. Better to rip off the band-aid in one go.

You might say that a perception of fairness is important so that employees trust leadership. Well, what's likely to happen is the fired people will think it's unfair, and the people chosen to remain will think "well, at least the right choice was made in my case". Of course, the opinion of the remaining people is what matters to the company going forward.

Generally agree with the perception part, except that if the employee sees their better performing team members get fired and the worst ones stay, they might be almost as unhappy as if they were fired themselves.

Do you think it would be possible to build electric cars and rockets _without_ this brand of leadership?

Both companies were very close to failure several times. There was never a room for slack.

There was significant room for slack, he simply pushed growth over stability.

Reusable rockets and Starlink for example are extremely expensive investments that paid off, but SpaceX didn’t need them to prosper. Tesla’s stability suffered from continuous expansion of manufacturing requiring continues investment as well as Self Driving and other R&D investments which weren’t actually needed.

Which isn’t to say these where poor investments, but pushing the envelope simply increases risk.

Musk undeniably made these things happen sooner than they otherwise would have done. I would argue though, at least in terms of his public persona, this sort of abrasiveness has intensified significantly since those accomplishments. So yes, I think it is possible.

> Do you think it would be possible to build electric cars and rockets _without_ this brand of leadership?

Absolutely yes. The sort of high performing people who join places like SpaceX and Tesla need very very little pressure to get them to work at full speed. Usually it just takes a nudge here and there, and they'll work themselves like crazy. The extra pressure on top is pure stress, and causes people to narrow their thinking and make mistakes.

The most important thing that good leadership brings is clear direction and high standards. Elon has these qualities for sure, and he could do away with the overstressing of his employees and would still be just as successful. Happy employees are productive. This was obvious in the early days of many startups, with Google as the prime example, but now the copycats will think that treating people as disposable is how to be successful like Elon.

As far as I can tell, the context here is that Elon is firing lots of people who are apparently not productive despite being in their position for years.

You are making it sound like Elon is the type of person who always pesters people and attempts to micromanage them to squeeze every ounce of "productivity" juice he can get out of the forcefully.

But obviously if that was his style, Tesla and SpaceX would never take off.

> The most important thing that good leadership brings is clear direction and high standards.

Isn't that exactly what he brings? And isn't that what's bringing him under fire in this HN thread? People acting all horrofied because he's actually enforcing the high standards that you say he should have.

> You are making it sound like Elon is the type of person who always pesters people and attempts to micromanage them to squeeze every ounce of "productivity" juice he can get out of the forcefully.

This is exactly what I hear 2nd hand. His workplaces are miserable to be in because of extreme micromanagement, and expectations of long hours despite the personal and health cost to his employees.

>> The most important thing that good leadership brings is clear direction and high standards.

> Isn't that exactly what he brings? And isn't that what's bringing him under fire in this HN thread? People acting all horrofied because he's actually enforcing the high standards that you say he should have.

Yes, but he mixes these good leadership qualities with pointlessly bad leadership qualities. He has high standards for the quality of the work (good), but he combines it with high standards for how unhappy you have to be while doing it (not good).

I'm not debating that Elon is successful and effective--it's obvious that he is. However, on top of being effective he just chooses to treat people like shit.

Start one and see? I’d love more alternatives for my next EV.

There are tons of alternatives now. Both startups and established auto makers switching production lines.

Toyota has built more hybrid cars than Tesla had which are more complex than EVs, so yes.

It is a large scale restructuring under new management. I'm sure the goal is to try to get this layoff phase done as quickly as possible to establish a new structure with the remaining employees.

I'm optimistic for Twitter's future. I thought it had stagnated long ago, but I'm intrigued now.

Not really.

Twitter is much leaner compared to Meta or Google, and they can't really be compared on many levels.

The experiment is nonetheless interesting.

I bet that the major influence if the layoff is the internal company spirit and morale, if the damage is too deep, the company could sink.

Fortunately for them, I don't think they really need a huge team to simply keep the lights on and the servers running.

> Elon could have handled the takeover in a serious and humane way.

Nothing I've ever read about him suggests that he operates in a humane manner.

He's like a lot of billionaires, views humans as cogs in the machine.

I don't know. It's not good that people are getting treated poorly - if anything, twitter should take more responsibility here. But if it's really "lazy developers" then maybe it's better if they work somewhere else and increase value for our society. Maybe some of them just went to twitter for the name and compensation but don't like to work for a corporate (like me for example). It's probably better for everyone if they go somewhere where they are happier and more productive.

I think it’s a good lesson for people picking companies. In the honeymoon phase of tech, the mythology created was that these elite startups have the type of culture where the boss is a revolutionary, you pick your own hours, beer and food, company outings, meaningful work, prestige, unlimited vacation, etc.

Well the truth is when you walk into a company that hires people for a quarter million dollars at scale, you are truly a number on a spreadsheet. The only way you can cut budget on 500 engineers at that price is not by firing Bob the underperformer, but instead 1/5 or 2/5 of that entire staff.

It should make you wonder what is that leetcode for? You are not that important or expensive in the backroom of some enterprise or medium sized business to be slashed like that. But when you are part of a 50 million dollar budget, bet your ass you have a 50/50 chance of being part of that 25 million the company suddenly wants to save.

The underperformer stuff has nothing to do with it.

I don't like Elon either, but he didn't make the decision to hire those people and it's not really fair to blame him now that they need to be fired. If twitter had 100k headcount, would you still say he should have delayed a layoff and given people a chance?

Unfortunately, regardless of what one wished to do, the economics of this deal and the amount of debt means that there is a very short leash. The layoffs are a way to extend that leash.

> forces everyone to work through the weekend on a random feature

Is this for real? In Belgium, most developers would have a good laugh, go home and enjoy the weekend.

How would you go about doing layoffs?

Elon is likely secretive Trump supporter. Over the years I noticed a lot of his thinking align with Trump. This take over is very expected when Twitter banned Trump. I was expecting something significant happening to twitter during Biden years. Lucky guess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com