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Comment by bjornsing | Hacker News Reader

Yea, I think I’m still leaning in that direction, although I wouldn’t use those words or go all in on this.

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?

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> this thing runs fine on 20% of the staff

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%?

They're the ones that quit when you tell them they have to go hardcore or take a severance package.

right, because by definition the most talented and productive employees have the best prospects at other employers

Also true. But there they will face “the hegemony of the 80%” yet again…

I’m not so sure about that. I think the chance of running a company without the 80% unproductive naysayers has a very strong appeal to the 10%. Also, in bloated “political” organizations they typically run on 10% of mental capacity anyway, so a “hardcore death match” may not have the same meaning to them.

You will find out how much un-sexy but highly important work was done by those underperforming non-hardcore people. Which is usually quite a lot, including keeping the literal lights on.

Yea, I don’t want to exclude the possibility of that outcome. If Elon does run this $44 billion social experiment I will watch very carefully though. It will be very interesting indeed.

(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.)

Supposing that the "correct" 80% is getting cut in this exercise - Musk is still essentially promising sweatshop work conditions for those who remain. It's evident that what he wants is for engineers to work early mornings, late nights, weekends, holidays, maximally in the office, under a trigger-happy boss who shit-talks you, your company and your work on social media, and is motivated by pure financial desperation.

Imagine the relief of not filling out dozens of useless forms for five layers of management that do not really understand what you do anyway. One could really GSD at that point.

https://medium.com/geekculture/the-dead-sea-effect-d71df1372...

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

> Every place I've worked that had more than 50 staff, 90% of the productive work was done by 10% of the staff.

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.

That’s very likely. In a past life I’ve done a bunch of auditing for m and a, apart the obvious nepotistic paid internships more often than not people thought to be unproductive were really important to the organisation. Think about payroll, legal and the likes. They’re not necessarily productive in terms of the main product, but they help reduce the legal risk for the company and insure that people in the ‘productive departments’ may stay productive. As software developers we tend to only see the number of features/fixes someone pushes to the product as the main metric of productivity, however there’s way more to running a largish company.

> * “look, this thing runs fine on 20% of the staff*

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.

>> * “look, this thing runs fine on 20% of the staff*

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.

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