Twitter eliminated ~4,400 of its ~5,500 contract employees yesterday | Hacker News Reader

Twitter eliminated ~4,400 of its ~5,500 contract employees yesterday

twitter.com

I would have thought they would be the first to go even before the full time employees.

Regular employees probably cost more.

I read on another thread that a lot of these contractors don't know if they are going to be paid, because the Twitter employees authorizing their time cards are no longer employed. What a shitshow!

That’s a huge cut. Has anyone done the math - the loss of advertisers vs the reduced workforce costs? Stands to reason that Twitter could be a hugely profitable company for a short time (until tech debt and other things overtake the short term gains)?

It's unclear to me (no sarcasm) why tech debt is an issue. I would be grateful if someone could explain why they would need to cut down on tech debt in order to keep the product in a functional holding pattern. Obviously there are going to be things that break and new exploits that need to be taken into consideration, but when I think about tech debt I imagine kludge-ridden, inelegant/inefficient code that is poorly documented.

As with Meta and Alphabet, Twitter's major problem right now is ad revenue.

The final earnings report prior to the acquisition stated that uncertainty around Musk's then-incomplete acquisition of Twitter contributed to a dip in ad revenue. Perhaps it was counterproductive for Twitter to put that sentiment in writing as part of their note to shareholders, insofar as it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. They communicated to the public -- including advertisers -- that advertisers would hesitate to continue advertising on Twitter due to the pending deal (and, inductively, that they have good reason to do so).

As with Meta, Twitter's revenue derives almost entirely from its ad business. Other ad-funded tech firms have faced similar headwinds in 2022, so if Twitter is facing a one-two punch of deal uncertainty and secular headwinds, it seems wise to batten down the hatches by reducing operating expenses. The product is mature, user growth is not driven by sales staff, and advertisers are tightening their respective belts.

I'm not sure what the percent breakdown of terminated employees is by business area (looked for it and couldn't find it), but if you have staff dedicated to keeping Twitter clean and inoffensive in order to keep advertisers happy, but those same advertisers are already shying away and forecasts suggest they will continue to do so, then cutting staff in those areas is not entirely bonkers.

> I would be grateful if someone could explain why they would need to cut down on tech debt in order to keep the product in a functional holding pattern. Obviously there are going to be things that break and new exploits that need to be taken into consideration, but when I think about tech debt I imagine kludge-ridden, inelegant/inefficient code that is poorly documented.

The code is one part of tech debt, and the other is infrastructure around that. Just as a random example, maybe the flow to add a blue checkmark needs to pass through a service that wasn't designed to support that load. They want to make it scale horizontally, but it was written as a stateful service and the code is a mess, so something that should have taken a week or a month now takes a year. It also may depend on a service that nothing else uses, like a weird bastardization of an old MySQL.

The problem with that tech debt is the inability to move quickly (even in response to outages), and the almost inevitable downtime related to trying to fix a poorly designed, poorly written, and/or poorly documented service.

It also kind of prevents you from cutting the staffing levels too far, because some portion of those people are tasked with "preventing the tech debt from taking the service offline".

I have no insight on how the tech debt affects Twitter in particular, but tech debt can be a very real thing.

Interesting comparison to how Zuckerber laid off staff and how Musk laid off staff.

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