I've been reading the left and the right sides on this whole thing... and I kinda agree with this one:
https://www.newsweek.com/tantrum-twitter-reveals-how-privile...
We're pretty damn spoiled.
https://www.newsweek.com/tantrum-twitter-reveals-how-privile...
We're pretty damn spoiled.
The benefits and salaries that Twitter employees get are just the free market at work. Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple don't pay big bucks and give huge perks because they're liberal, they do it because it's the only way to retain talented employees.
The take is hypocritical at it's core. Musk himself is an extremely privileged billionaire. Under the same principle that Musk deserves his wealth, Twitter employees deserve every penny of compensation and every hour of time off that they get.
Musk doesn't get that. He's going to utterly fail because the engineers at Twitter have other options. They don't have to work there. They worked there because they were getting competitive benefits and salary. Musk is cutting that just because he doesn't like the rate. Ok, fine, but don't be surprised when your company falls apart and you can't hire anyone as a result.
Heck there might be a team of 50 that has the sole responsibility to figure out the code/algorithms that puts something on the main page automatically. Instead that can temporarily be a small team of 3 people that rotate news articles or tweets.
We tend to think "each employee generates $44B / 14000" but that's far from the truth.
>there are probably 30-40 engineers that make the most value, like billions of dollars each. From there it starts dropping off like a long tail in search results. There's value, but a lot less than others. Cutting the long tail may still break huge areas of functionality - but the rest will patch and fix it over time.
If this is true, then have companies like Microsoft, Apple, all just missed the big insight Elon has caught onto first? If the best engineers are generating a few billion in value each and can completely patch up the long tail, then Microsoft ought to be able to cut its staff down to about 200 such engineers, 300 if they want a lot of extra margin. 1.8T / 3bn per high performer. There's over 100k SWEs currently employed there, needless to say that's a big reduction in salary overhead.
Here's the analogy - lots of startups with 50 employees have sold for billions right. Once the company sells the payout potential is OVER which at that point those 30 of those 50 leave (within a year) and are replaced with 1000 people to take over and slowly add new features. Now remember the codebase still exists that has revenue potential that can feed 1000 or more people, but they did it with 50.
So the code is paying for the product, it's just stable and maybe making a little profit per year. That's enough to justify it.
But startups prove all the value is in those 50 people. The other 1000? they're all replaceable but in a union. The union is that idea that ANY headcount reduction is bad press. Why'd you fire Zak, I'm leaving too!
rant over
I would say Elon is spoiled though, in thinking he can treat folks as fungible.
No, alot SW devs (the type that work at FAANG-like companies) are actually spoiled, relative to most other industries of the world. Perhaps, they have gotten so used to is that they don't recognize it. You can absolutely make an argument that the rest of the world's workforce is being abused, but that is speaking from place of privilege and its easy to be a "champion for the worker" from your ivory tower.
> Elon is spoiled though, in thinking he can treat folks as fungible.
That is because they are fungible, though. Twitter is not some paragon of technical excellence and innovation. Its a website.
>Hammering in railroad spikes
Today hammering in railroad spikes is typically done by big machines like this one made by Unimog.[0] So do you think the SWEs are generating less value than the people operating the Unimog machines? And/Or that SWE jobs rely on less skill and effort than operating the Unimog machine? Should SWEs unionize like railroad workers so that a leader like Elon couldn't unilaterally declare changes to their working condition requirements and tell them to hit the curb if they disagree?
Are the Unimog operators too lazy and cozy in the machines? Should they be paid less than they would be to hammer the spikes, because hammering the spikes is harder work?
>I can't believe we need someone to define spoiled
Well, we do. I've walked through my attempt to grok your point above, and I can't. So if you can overcome your disbelief and post that definition, it might clarify what you are trying to say.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_fastening_system#/media/F...