Wild prediction: Twitter will continue to work as it did even after that ~80% workforce haircut. Make of that what you will.
Fire your entire payroll department. No one will notice... until the biweekly paychecks don't go out, and now your employees aren't getting paid.
Fire badge security. No one will notice... until you need someone to make a new badge for a new employee.
Fire your IT staff. No one will notice... until the server crashes and no one can reboot it.
Fire your system reliability engineers. No one will notice... until the World Cup is on and you have 10x regular traffic and now the site is crashing under the load.
Fire your lawyers. No one will notice... until you're now being sued for violating all the laws in all the countries for posting child porn (because you previously fired all the content moderators who were preventing that from being posted).
Ignoring Elon for sake of discussion, it would be a big a big boon for my career to work at Twitter.. but when 80% of the staff left? I'd be worried onboarding would be a mess. That i'd be handed several projects that no one knows how they work or what the ramifications are.
Ignoring all the red flags and focusing solely on onboarding sounds like misery.. not sure i'd want to take that job.
I imagine many will.. but .. oof.
And I'm not even sure it would be a big career boost to join twitter at this point. The way things are going there you'd probably be burned out pretty quickly which would mean a shortish tenure.
Musk's approach is drastic and will probably include a lot of turbulence as you say, but it's probably also the fastest way to find the minimum number of employees required to run Twitter.
You couldn't use this strategy with any kind of critical service, but ultimately nobody is really hurt that much if things break at Twitter, so there is more latitude to take risks.
I'm not saying I like or agree with Musk's approach, but I see the logic.
Of course there's plusses too including working a large impact product with little bureaucracy and being on a even playing field versus your peers with little institution knowledge.
I guess what I'm trying to say is it's dissimilar to a fast-growing start up in important ways that attract people wanting to work for you.
Reminds me of a cleaners strike were after 2 weeks everyone suddenly realised that those invisible men and women do important work. A corporation is a machine in which even the tiniest cog matters.
However, what Musk is doing is absolutely hillarious, and is a much bigger trash fire that has nothing to do with optimizing the head count, or figuring out how to correctly reduce staffing etc.
Steve Jobs returning to a flailing Apple he is not.
And no, I don't gamble on events or crypto.
It says that 80% of the results come from 20% of the sources. That's not 8/10 people are doing nothing, but rather 8/10 people are doing things that only contribute to 20% of what makes Twitter Twitter.
On any given team of ten, it's likely that the entire team is in either the 80 or the 20 bucket, by virtue of what they're working on, not by virtue of how hard they're working or how talented they are.
> Derek de Solla Price, a British physicist, historian of science, and information scientist, discovered something about his peers in academia. He noticed that there were always a handful of people who dominated the publications within a subject. Price recognized a pattern which was later named after him.
> What is Price’s Law?
> 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.
https://expressingthegeniuswithin.com/prices-law-and-how-it-...
The people who stay will be those with the least options.
Musk has made employment at Twitter hugely risky, with no possibility of reward. Really boneheaded business, completely incompetent cutting off the workforce, honestly. Hard to imagine a worse way of pruning the workforce.
People keep repeating this trope as if Twitter is some paragon of technical excellence and innovation. It is no such thing. It is a popular website with a textbox for user input.
You don't need "talent", you simply need to people who get the job done.
And defenses like this go a looooong ways towards destructing the myth that Musk had technical acumen, because the only people defending him are those that can't do the work.
John Carmack, "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."
And discounting the scale of Twitter is also quite cartoonish projection.
There no way in hell that this 80% of workforce was actual bloat.
If your advertisers go away, then a whole lot of the iceberg of complexity underneath the bird app goes away.
But Twitter is not a software and servers company -- it's a media company. It has more in common with Hulu than Microsoft. The ability to post 240 chars of content is not a business. The users aren't the customers. As you say, the Twitter platform is not ground breaking tech -- that was never where the value was.
> Teams dedicated to curating content like twitter headlines and moderating content don't need to be there
This is where I think you and Elon are wrong. The "content" is the product and the advertisers are the customers. The assumption is that that these teams are not helping bring in advertisers but you and I don't know that. Elon didn't even care to find out because he fundamentally misunderstands the business he's in.
https://polymarket.com/market/will-twitter-report-any-outage...
I firmly believe, lets say 80%, of Twitter is bloat. But sacking them like this wont prove anything due to practicalities. You just can't unwind a mess like Musk is doing. If some employees sole productive task in a week is to reset a server that still has to be done and it will take a lot of work to figure out which button to press when the site falls over.
I have no doubt Twitter and most companies could be run in maintenance mode with 20% of the current staff. However figuring out which 20% is the tricky part.
Typically I only need 20% of the lights in my house to do what I need, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea for Elon Musk to come into my house and just randomly remove 80% of my lightbulbs.
To successfully pull off such a major change in staffing in such a short window would require knowing the ins and outs of the company extremely well.
It's hard to argue that Twitter wasn't incredibly overstaffed. Maybe even 80% overstaffed. But ripping 80% of the humans out of the equation basically overnight is not a recipe for a successful transition.
I'd further guess that 10-20% of their workforce was staying on top of regulations. If twitter works, but does not comply with the FTC consent order and gets fined out of business, that is not a technical failure but still is failure.
Large enterprises, especially those under consent orders, spend a TON of effort in compliance. Given that environment is constantly changing, there is net new work needed in almost a Red Queen effect.
I think people may be underestimating Elon's ability to bring in folks from the "secret guild of silicon valley" [2] to help him in this task. Of course, some of the Twitter employees who left are probably already part of it, but George coming on, even temporarily, might help bring in replacements.
[1]:https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159339146698169139...
[2]:https://medriscoll.com/2011/08/19/the-guild-of-silicon-valle...
Often done in the game dev world.
Now chance of such teams having fully out is anyone's guess.
Not only that.
If Elon succeeds that opens a new era in Sillicon Valley. An era where programmers are like steelworkers and coalminers in 1980s. You can raid large tech company (think Google or Apple), make workers redundant, cut costs mercilesly and return value to shareholders.
Twitter certainly had bloat, but separating the fat from the critical healthy connective tissue requires care, which has clearly not been spent here.
Even if we agree that company is 80% bloated, you probably want the best 20% to stay.
---
In referring to a bunch of employees laid off, he said "I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses. Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere"[1]. About another specific employee he said "A tragic case of adult onset Tourette’s"[2].
Why would talent ever want to work for a CEO who will fire you on the spot for whatever reason, turn around and say this about them publicly (or privately!). If I was still working at twitter, this would make me quit.
[1]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592569305941807104
[2]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592582828499570688
With only 20% of your workers, there is no way these problems will be addressed with equal ease.
Let's look at the admin/security teams. These are the people that literally keep things running. If a significant percentage of people from those teams quit, the others have to immediately pick up the slack (much longer on calls...) the added workload then leads to an avalanche where more and mor epeople quit. And it is always in the most business critical teams where these dynamics play out.
In Twitter's case, however, how long is it until they're sued for child porn (lack of moderation) or get 50 million euro fines for running afoul of Germany's Network Enforcement Act?
I'm sure that you can stop supporting the open source section. However, how much of their platform team is core to the product? How much is still required?
For all of the high-minded free speech town square rhetoric from his camp, this looks much more like the game plan from worst PE actors from the 1980s. I guess it’s good there isn’t a pension fund to raid?
People that claim "brand safety" honestly kind of make me laugh, look at all the World Cup sponsors...don't you think Qatar using slaves (some of which have died) to build the stadiums would be...not safe for your brand to associate with? I would, but they still are advertising, because the audience is massive. I think people dying from something you're helping to fund through advertising is probably worse to be associated with than a tweet saying "own the libs" is 3 pegs down from your ad. Call me crazy.
The sad thing is that people are suckers who actually believe alot of this corporate PR.
[1]:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/business/media/facebook-b...
People are leaving or algorithms are failing to promote tweets.
But, if not, absolutely no harm will come of it. What would be the worst part of losing twitter entirely?
Regardless of what you think of Twitter's future prospects, none of these destructive antics make it stronger. Twitter could still be saved, but it could have been saved even easier without all of this pointless and public display of arrogance and incompetence.
Once he gets to stabilize the cash flow, Twitter can provide a comp model to attract talent. About that, let's just say Geohot would not have worked for Parag, as an example. https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159295542717976576...
I ultimately feel like Musk went too hardball too fast. Twitter can definitely recover of course, but I think the road to doing so is going to be much longer and harder than it had to be.