Elon appears to be ham-handedly binary searching for that answer. The problem is that if you go too low, things catch fire and there is nary a soul to put them out.

A more reasonable, emotionally mature individual would've taken time to develop the appropriate metrics to determine which employees were necessary, and which weren't, vs starting with the galacticly stupid approach of keeping the programmers which have written the most code in the past N days, and then following that up by giving generally well-off, easily re-employable, capable engineers an ultimatum, with a three month severance chaser. Who do you suppose is most likely to click that "yes" button? People who are not as easily re-employable.

I wouldn't be surprised if twitter has less than 10% of their best engineers left, with the remaining engineers being the lowest performers. And now those 10%'s lives are all the more difficult, meaning the majority will likely be showing themselves the door in the near future.

Pure, unmitigated, incompetence on Elon's part.

Nothing of that user share is just a simple web app.

Lots of moving parts to make that work. And it often takes a special person who’s been there long enough to know a peculiar infrastructure needed in part to make that happen.

You always hear about how these jobs pay a lot, well it’s not always the kinda sexy academic stuff you hear about on HN… A lot of spinning up and deploying services.

> It's just a simple web app. How many people can it really take to run the thing?

Except it isn't? Content filtering and ranking based on properties such as individual preferences and localized content is way harder than dumping a SELECT * FROM tweets, not to mention compliance requirements.