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Comment by polote | Hacker News Reader

All these people are making 200k a year and will have no problem finding another job.

Many will be fine, there also may be many who will not. Not everyone makes that much at twitter, not everyone is in a role that is competitive right now. The ones who make the least are the ones who will suffer the most. Stop being callous.

The ones who make the least will also be in the most commonly available roles so they too should have no trouble finding a job elsewhere.

That’s not the point. Dignity and respect. Going in a different direction? Fine. Make cuts. But, no one deserves to be treated as disposable playthings. Zero communication and unreasonable demands create anxiety. Contrast this to stripe. I fail to see how one’s income determines the respect they should receive.

In a recent Tweet reply, Elon says that there are 10 people managing for 1 person coding.

Based on my experience in a 2nd tier SV company I believe this to be true

As I saw pointed out elsewhere, with a headcount of only engineers and these alleged 10 managers per engineers, this would leave twitter with like 630 engineers and 6300 managers which is a clearly a drastic underestimation of the number of engineers and that's before you count roles like sales, support, etc.

Don't take everything Elon tweets at face value

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586686935518498816

> There seem to be 10 people "managing" for every one person coding

Take this literally, not as as a ration. - each SWE in a product team has an EM, Dir Eng, VP Eng, PM, Director Product, VP Product, ...

Sure, but that team may have N engineers and those VPs may have N teams, so that doesn't seem so ludicrous for a 7000 person company. Or even 3500 person company by EOD. Certainly in my company there's about a 200:1 engineer:VP engineering ratio, so pointing out every engineer reports to a VP is kind of a meaningless statement

And there are also finance people, HR people, sales, etc. people. The company is far from entirely engineers, their managers, and the managers of their managers.

So there's overlap between every developer

630 coders is quite a lot for what Twitter does.

They do not own datacenters, AFAIK.

So it sounds like exactly zero people who have committed code recently will be fired, right?

Right but the people who bring in the money (advertising sales) probably got axed because they don’t write code.

Rightfully so, because 8€/month for blue stamp needs neither.

Depends on how Caligula feels next week.

It is still never nice to lose your job, especially if you have a mortgage matching based on your 200K salary.

Smart people live below their means.

Yeah right. Because smart people can always control the circumstances of their life like an illness, elder care, affordable housing, change in market conditions, etc.

No amount of living under your means mitigates the h1b clock to get a new position or leave the country.

I try to live by that principle but it's really difficult to actually do it, mostly because of costs related to real estate/housing, and seeing how housing is a big share of almost anyone's salaries (either through mortgages or rents) in the end it gets out of your control.

What I'm saying is that is difficult to live "bellow my means" when it comes to, well, living, which means having a roof on top of my head. I don't want anything fancy, just a safe enough area, decent amount of space and decent amount of transportation options. I'm of course willing to pay for all that, the problem is that there are people who are willing to pay even more, which leaves me with two options: either compete against those other people, which, like I said, makes the "live bellow my means" moot, or, the second option, to compromise on my housing/living arrangements (choosing to live in a less safe area, giving up on access to public transportation, choosing a studio apartment instead of a one-bedroom thing), which is less than ideal (because housing is a basic thing in one's life).

Doesn’t really matter when you have any mortgage or rent to house your family. It’s fine when you’re 22, less fine when you’re 42.

The majority of people who earn more spend more.

> Smart people live below their means.

> The majority of people who earn more spend more.

You don't need a Prolog engine to compute the conclusion...

I do, but when I earn more, I definitely spend more :)

:-)

Like Elon Musk.

Even leaving aside that a lot of these people are not engineers but customer support, finance, sales, etc. even developer hires in the current market are very measured and selective at most companies. First of all, probably nothing will move forward until after the holidays. It's not unreasonably pessimistic to think that it may take 6 months or more for someone to get a new position even as a developer.

6 months ago I would have agreed but it seems like the landscape has changed radically since then.

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