Comment by memish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by memish | Hacker News Reader

What happens when Twitter survives despite reducing headcount by 80-90%?

It's going to send a message that companies are more overstaffed than we thought. This may explain an underlying fear driving even some engineers to put their reputation on the line with confident declarations that Twitter is going to fail. Some were saying it wouldn't survive the night. It's now morning. Others saying it won't last the weekend or coming week. We'll soon find out. I would expect some bumps along the way. Twitter Blue was a bump.

Perhaps Twitter is just the first to go lean before the recession. Elon merely the first dancer who is willing to look dumb. Now who's going to be the first follower to transform the lone nut into a leader?

Watch this 2 minute to see how this works, you may have seen this before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ

Now here's a counterbalance to the fear with an optimistic take: This is a correction. A small number of tech companies have been hoarding talent. The talent gets a 3 month severance and made available to the larger ecosystem.

I don't think there's any doubt that many tech companies are hideously, bafflingly over-staffed (3000 people working on just the music functionality of Alexa? What could they possibly be doing?). But maybe take a bit of time to understand what everybody is (and isn't) doing before throwing half out and alienating the rest?

This is just a masterclass in how not to do it. He doesn't look dumb because he's reducing the headcount. He looks dumb because he's going about it like an absolute lunatic.

> What could they possibly be doing?

People constantly underestimate the size of the support staff needed to keep the engineering team productive. For every ten or so software engineers you hire to work on a new product or feature, you're going to need 5-10 QA engineers, another project manager, another product manager, maybe another build engineer, maybe more internal IT staff... You need these people. Software doesn't just leap from developers' fingertips directly onto store shelves. And now that that program's engineering manager has so many more direct reports, that manager needs another manager to split his duties up... And now that there are so many managers, their Director maybe needs a personal assistant to help keep her schedule better organized. All that extra staff eventually requires more HR support, more people working in facilities/building management, more janitors. On the business side, this product is going to need a few more marketers, maybe salespeople to sell it, business analysts to track its effectiveness, and so on. After a couple rounds of this, the company looks up and somehow has 3,000 people and HN sneers about what could they all be doing...

That would easily explain 300 employees. But 3000? For this?

> just the music functionality of Alexa

Seems absurd to say without a link to source

There's a difference between saying "I could bang that out in a weekend and replace the whole department" and recognizing that 3,000 people supporting a relatively small feature is a sign of bloat in an organization. Surely there's _some_ point where the headcount becomes a sign of a problem -- would it be okay to make OP's comment if 100,000 people were working that feature?

I agree with your general point that a "software team" in a big org requires a lot more people than just engineers developing new features, and that the headcount doesn't necessarily scale linearly. That doesn't change the fact that in a normal business, if 3,000 full-time staff (support staff and all) are working on something, it's probably something pretty big that generates enough revenue or has enough growth potential to justify that cost. Even if a team is working hard and "doing stuff", they can still be grossly overstaffed.

That could happen, but if you were running, say, a grocery store, and 90 of your 100 employees walked out the door in a single swoop, everything would look pretty good for a little while, maybe even a day or two. There's still merchandise on the shelves, customers are still able to check out because you've routed your staff there. But over time things will start to cascade. The freezer breaks. Someone breaks a bottle of wine in aisle 10. A customer can't find anything and walks out. Etc etc.

But yeah, for that little bit at the start, everything "looks" fine.

Point being: it's way too soon to say twitter is surviving.

What about now?

If it requires more than 20% - 30% of your staff to sustain operations then you've implemented it wrong. So sure, you should be able to keep operations going having sustained large staff reductions, but you aren't going to be doing anything to expand your business opportunities. Maybe Musk doesn't think that's required, but if they lose too many key operations personnel then they may be screwed.

It "survived", but apparently with some minor disruptions [1], which isn't a good signal at all. Any social media site should be able to survive a Thursday night with no major news events, celebrity deaths, natural disasters, or scandals.

What will be the true test is the world cup. If it can survive the final game (estimated 1.5 to 2 Billion viewership), that will be impressive. Historically, that's been a major engineering challenge for any "public" social network. With 90% less staff, it might not be possible to monitor, triage, test, fix, etc. on the fly.

[1] https://downdetector.com/status/twitter/

I suspect you right to some extent. But "survive" has two meanings: 1) keep the site up and running, and 2) make money. A site of this size earns gobs more money with just a small fractional increase in traffic. I have no doubt Twitter can stay running on a skeleton crew, but can it earn more revenue in the long run than it would have with a larger crew.

I think that Twitter won't fail anytime soon. These rash HR moves probably have a mid-term goal of completely replacing the company personnel. When 95% or so of donations made by Twitter staff went to Democratic party, it is safe to say that his political stance of allowing free speech for all parties will be heavily resented by the current workforce, and might lead to demotivation, low productivity and even sabotage. Replace potentially unloyal people who don't even want to go to the office with a new skeleton crew, get everything functioning, then bring in new personnel to work on new features.

Yes, and actually Tesla is similar in that their staff donates 94% to Democrats. That's not an issue because it's not affecting the output of electric cars in a negative way. Perhaps it's even positive since they are more motivated in the direction of electrification and its role with regard to climate change. But Twitter is the public square and needs to be neutral.

> It's going to send a message that companies are more overstaffed than we thought.

Consider the FTX news, where the new CEO appointed to clean up the mess called it a complete failure of corporate governance.

There is a huge amount of work that isn't directly related to keeping a website running that is required to sustain a large corporation and keep it legal. You can ignore all of this for a while, but not forever.

From various reports it seems Twitter has fired everyone in security, privacy, media relations, regulatory compliance and we probably haven't heard of everything.

I wish companies could go lean. I had tremendous growth when working for Netflix partly because engineers there got to build meaningful systems with huge ownership and very small teams. Case in point, my coworker and I owned four or five high-traffic systems and carried a pager 24x7. It didn't bother us at all as our we got alerts maybe once or twice a month.

That said, a lean company requires strong leadership, technical depth in management, and specific types of cultures. I don't believe that most companies are up to such challenge.

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