> But seriously, how can someone burn down something he just bought for 44 billion so fast and consequently?
The fan boys would say: It’s Elon, he is playing 3D chess and no one is smart enough to understand his end goal.
The fan boys would say: It’s Elon, he is playing 3D chess and no one is smart enough to understand his end goal.
One thing that’s interesting about this shakeup is that it’s a very clear statement about where Elon sees value, right? Lazy “rest and vest” engineers? Just go home. Communications department? Get out.
Perhaps what Elon wants to say is “look, this thing runs fine on 20% of the staff, and now that the 80% naysayers are gone we’re going to really get shit done”. When I’ve worked for companies approximately the size of Twitter I’ve sure felt the urge to say that. :)
Now, the question is, now aligned with “reality” is this reasoning from first principles? No doubt a lot of haters are gonna hate, like crazy. Is it enough to take the whole company down?
Every place I've worked that had more than 50 staff, 90% of the productive work was done by 10% of the staff. I mean, I can't document that; it's anecdata. But I think it's a pretty reliable rule-of-thumb guideline.
But how do you identify that 10%?
(And my feeling is that a lot of the Elon-hate comes from people who fear that the outcome will be more in line with my expectations than yours.)
Most people don’t bank on all the “dead weight” being able to jump ship and find a new job. Musk also hasn’t outlined what his actual vision is so you’d be signing up for “hardcore” work without knowing if you agree with the goal
That’s my feeling too. But I’m not 100% sure that feeling aligns perfectly with “reality”. We humans have blind spots, and it may be that some of the 80% actually do very important stuff that I happen to be blind to.
Tech companies are growth-oriented companies. It doesn't matter if their current set of features "runs"; it's not the end of the story, it's only the beginning.
If the current featureset runs perfectly, but there is no R&D progress towards the next set of features to keep up with the competition, keep the current userbase onboard, and solicit the next generations of users: the company is dead.
The full quote read “look, this thing runs fine on 20% of the staff, and now that the 80% naysayers are gone we’re going to really get shit done”. “Get shit done” is essentially what you call R&D progress.