You can fire 80% of software engineers and the company will survive
medium.com
medium.com
Forget about new products, forget about improvements to existing products, forget infrastructure work/cost optimization, forget not having major data breaches regularly, forget mitigating large-scale security vulnerabilities(i.e. log4j), forget being able to capitalize on market trends on a useful timescale, and forget about the ability to deal with situations that require more engineering capacity that your company uses on an average day.
Entering "survival mode" and keeping only enough engineering capacity on board to keep the service running on a normal day is implicitly a bet that no emergent events are going to demand more capacity from you than is needed on that normal day. The product might be standing now, but you can't do anything useful with a paralyzed company that's going to topple over the first time it faces a stiff breeze.
Using Erlang.
Tiwtter uses Scala that should be much more scalabale, considering the staggering amount of money spent on the JVM compared to the BEAM.
Of course not the same, but the question is, how much harder?
10 times harder?
100 times harder?
Given 1/5 of the users and probably less than 1/200 of the traffic (*) it should be feasible with less than 7,500 employees.
I don't believe WhatsApp employed the best 50 engineers in the World, I bet many of them worked at Twitter too.
(*) 100 billion messages sent via WhatsApp every day VS 500 million tweets per day
Also, graph algorithm’s likely don’t scale linearly, 10 times more edges may have much much more resource usage.
So you're saying WhatsApp had no critical other teams, but Facebook bought them anyway for a record breaking sum of money at the time, because they looked nice on picture?
When Elon tweets, I'm guessing Twitter doesn't go do 118M write transactions to all his followers. But what it would have to do is flag all 118M accounts as "something as changed". Then the next time one of his followers is on Twitter, which could be a month from now, that flag means "uh oh, better go see what changed", and to do that, all of the follower's "following" accounts have to be accessed to find the change, if there is only 1 change flag per Twitter account.
If Twitter keeps a change flag per "Following" user, that makes finding changes easier, but also means lots more flags to keep updated.
Or, you could go "stateless" and not use flags, but then it seems like you'd be doing a lot of work for users who may not see it for days or months.
Way different problem than 1-on-1 messaging.
if my mom sends a message to the family group it goes to 50 people.
How many billion WhatsApp groups are there?
with the same constraints and problems Twitter has to face (offline users, notifications, keep users messages until they are online again, etc.)
Also, Twitter does real-time data analysis, which is another of their money sources, and takes a huge amount of computing.
It's probably because many Twitter former employees lurk here on HN and can't understand why nobody is rooting for their beloved platform, of course shame on EM for his abusive behaviour, people before money, always, but nobody will miss Twitter if it really dies.
Half of what Twitter does is superfluous and the rest is badly executed.
A normal company would not survive with only 20% of the staff, Twitter might thrive, because honestly, at its core, as many have already pointed out, Twitter is “writing on a bathroom wall”.
Also: never forget that this happened and then Kashoggi was killed by the Royal Prince Bin Salman
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/09/twitter-saud...
But while people are worried now that Prince Al-Walid invested 1.9 billion dollars in Musk's Twitter, they also forget that till 2020 he owned 4.6% of Twitter through the Saudi investment fund he controls, the shares were acquired in 2015, when the spy was already working for Twitter and the management had already confronted him about the issue!
"If the company is left only with 20% of engineers (even the best ones), it will be way deep in survival mode (just barely providing support for an existing product, not building some new exciting things or even improving existing ones)."
He also goes on to talk about how the company has deep pockets and that means they're not paralyzed, as you say, in the long term. Feel free to actually read the article for more details.
"Deep pockets" don't do anything on their own, especially not when no one believes in your company's ability to consistently fulfill its obligations to customers. You can hire engineers, sure, but how are you going to ramp them up when all of your engineering capacity is dedicated to keeping a small group of core services from falling over dead? How quickly can you bring people on board when you're notorious for a culture of overwork and abuse? You can borrow some money, sure, but who's going to lend to you when you're massively in debt from an LBO and you can't provide more than "long term" promises that in six months the company can actually function?
"How quickly can you bring people on board when you're notorious for a culture of overwork and abuse?". I agree that could be a challenge but then again, he's gotten people onboard at his other companies where I've heard the work/life balance is awful as well.
"who's going to lend to you when you're massively in debt from an LBO and you can't provide more than "long term" promises that in six months the company can actually function?". Valid point in today's economic climate, but there have been countless examples of investors making risky bets repeatedly. Uber is a perfect example.
Needless to say, employees will do one of two things. Even very mediocre employees will demand high-end consultancy fees, and "rock-stars" or whatever you want to call them will demand factors of that, or they'll just avoid you like the plague. But frankly, after a relatively short period of time even the high pay won't justify coming back anymore.
And then the time will come to hire and your competitor will be able to hire great people (with intimate knowledge of your company's inner workings), and you won't be able to hire anyone for double the pay. And that's IF you can avoid your company suffering regular sabotage when firing people. People do stupid things when they get fired. Seriously. It's scary.
I'm not one to defend Musk's management practices, but I think the main idea motivating this purge (which may or may not be a correct idea) is that Twitter, specifically, does not need "rockstar" engineers anymore at all.
Sure, he'll take them if they kiss the ring and work for peanuts, but he wants people who follow orders and don't talk back. He's not unique here: all management everywhere always wants this wants this but, in some endeavors you have to tolerate people who aren't this way, either because you don't know the right orders to give, or just because they're the only talent that can get done what you need to get done. Twitter's main corporate priority at this point is keeping the lights on as cheaply as possible, since they have a huge nut of debt they they can't afford to service, and on top of it all revenue is down. Again, I'm not saying this situation is desirable for Twitter employees, users, management, advertisers, or ownership (or even Musk himself), but this is the situation.
https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159527086740295680...
So clearly mr. Musk thinks twitter needs rockstar engineers. I also find it extremely unlikely he paid anything less than a full year's wage for these 12 weeks.
Startup vs mature service codebases can be quite different in conplexity... getting engineers up to speed and ready to contribute on the latter can take much more time.
Labour productivity is already a per worker measure. I've never heard it used to refer to anything else.
That seems to be what they're referring to when they say they can increase productivity by cutting workers and working the rest much harder.
I'm pretty sure that's bullshit and the sheer amount just daily maintenance and fire fighting will annihilate any possible productivity gains, so I agree with you.
There are plenty of industries where the economic envelope favors cheap human labor. But this in no way implies that you can cut 80% of your staff and get the remaining 20% to do both their own work and everyone else’s.
And say hello to being increasingly surrounded by Chesterton's fences[0] at every turn.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence
employees that would do this is unlikely to remain at the company to actually do this. Existing corporate culture or management friction will very quickly force out such an engineer, or make such an engineer ineffective at producing such innovations.
Another example is Tencent, from social network to a mail client, then WeChat, also expanded to games. QQ which is the original social network Tencent was built on, stayed almost the same with or worse with 100x head-counts.
It is always a rare event, but when it happens, it is a 1000x win for a company. It is something worth betting on.
survival doesn't have to be meaningful, the meaning is to survive.
Survival is about not dying, Twitter don't need 7,500 employees to survive.
> forget mitigating large-scale security vulnerabilities(i.e. log4j),
that was simply a matter of upgrading a dependency.
and honestly a remote exploit for that has never been spotted in the wild.
... Across a global infrastructure. ... And finding out if, where you have been compromised. ...And fixing all those systems that was found to have been compromised. ...And handling media questions, PR related to the issue and your organization.
Just saying it was "simply a matter of upgrading a dependency." is so amazingly far from what such an event requires. Even if you wasn't actually affected in a technical sense.
5 people total?
that have too look at the problem for a few days and then go back to their regular duties.
Which is their job, BTW, you don't need "special teams".
I work for a company that has more than 20 thousand employees.
How we fixed it?
Every team checked if their dependencies contained a vulnerable version of log4j, fixed it, ran the tests, submitted the new code, the CI/CD did the rest.
absolutely not.
> How much do they handle media questions, PR related to global IT security events?
You don't need thousand people for that and It's their job anyway!
Listen, I come from what the average American would call "a socialist" country, at least regarding the labour market and organization.
I understand the social part of employing more people than necessary, it's a kind of redistribution that many countries won't or can't do through proper taxation.
I also understand that sometimes it's about resilience, two of everything is better than single points of failure.
But, it's ironic that these observations come from the POV of an American company.
It's ironic that people are leaving Twitter because Musk is asking them to work hard, meaning they aren't actually doing it, according to his standards (he's a terrible boss, no doubt!), but also meaning that Twitter is probably doing so bad because they focused on the wrong thing, like Facebook with the meta fiasco.
The American dream is not about 28 days of paid vacation, maternity leave, life-work balance, it's about making as much money as you can in the fastest way possible.
In its original formulation In such a country the talents, energy and perseverance of a person ... have far greater opportunity to display than in monarchies
You want a better life balance, better working hours, less staying in the office and more paid time to raise your kids?
Come to Europe!
For much less money of course.
Because you can't have both.
So yeah, it might be easier to do something with 3 people than one, but most of the time too many people are enemy of the efficiency.
You know what took the most part of upgrading the log4j incident where I work?
Coordination between too many levels of hierarchy.
That is actually the worst part of working in large companies, that's what actually stifle innovation and paralyzes them.
Twitter was already doing bad, it's been doing bad for years.
I left Twitter (as a user) 5 years ago, because it was already terrible.
I'm no Musk fan at all, but at least he's making things clear: if that's the end result people are used to, we don't need that many people to achieve it, we simply need motivated people (by money).
As SDE employee in Germany you might earn 60k-120k. Where the end of the range is more often found in larger companies with about 10y+ of experience.
But you have health care that never puts you in a position where you have to decide between ruin or death of a family member, what can be done will be done even e.g. if you need brain cancer be burned out with a particle accelerator (no joke). You will never be in a position where you instantly are ruined when you loose your job (1y at 70% income and at least social care later). You are forced to have an extend of retirement solution/insurance, which costs, but at least you cannot mess it up or loose in when you are insolvent.
So this stuff I call the true freedom, not gun ownership or freedom of speech that goes to far. Being free of crushing fear about your family health and future risks, this is freedom in Germany and other European countries. - This freedom also reduces violence and crime you are confronted with a lot, because the motivation or psychic conditions for it are much less common.
So for me Germany is the perfect place for raising a family imo. But maybe yes there might be a reduced chance to become really rich here as a SDE
What? Citation needed.
This spread through Minecraft servers like wildfire. The damage was mostly kids crashing the game on other kids, but that's still a denial of service.
Log4Shell definitely had "in the wild" exploitation. A trivial amount of googling gives evidence.
In most organization management courses, you are taught " you cannot change the culture". The truth is you can and you do it by firing people, firing or pushing out a lot of people.
My point is that Twitter is a bad case study for engineers, its a very standard case for mba though. You cannot and should not view Twitter thru a primarily engineering point of view.
> And one last thing. The company that has deep enough pockets can survive tons of shit. If you wave a check big enough, you will find people willing to go through hell and back and who will drag the company forward. I believe this is a very important point. I felt that we (software engineers) sometimes have too big egos believing that if enough software engineers left, the company will fall apart. The reality is that (big money) can help navigate quite dire circumstances for companies.
Does Twitter have deep pockets? And if it offered you whatever it would take for you to spend some months in hell, do you trust that it would be able to pay? Twitter is in an awful situation, and in sharp distinction to Musk's previous near-death experiences, there's no government coming to bail him out.
With Twitter getting a much better balance sheet, what would stop them from hiring more great folks again in 3-6 months?
I think a lot of people and in this thread included really underestimate negative impact of poor product innovation culture. This hard reset is the only way imo.
Because hiring is hard, and there is little reason to think their balance sheet would be much better. And because some of their advertisers are leaving, reducing their income. And because a lot of these "great people" probably wouldn't take Musk at his word due to his unreliable leadership the past year.
Things like personnel and advertisers don't turn on a dime. It's not like cloud computing - Twitter will face long term consequences in the slower moving fields because of Musk's current decisions.
Let's not forget that twitter IPO'd at $45 a share in 2013. The market agrees with musk that the last decade has produced minimal value.
Growth often comes with dead weight. You can't 10x your staff overnight and expect the same output per engineer. And as you grow, your organizational structure impacts your architecture (Conway's law). The downsizing frequently is an unwinnable scenario, and people need to recognize that going into it.
Most workers if you fire 80%, there is an immediate drop in production.
I think the loss of engineers is felt on a more long-term basis.
It’s not surprising that our faithful machines keep generating heat and maybe money.
Then, how long can that last ? Probably a while. I’ve been in mostly sinking ships. People are way more replaceable that we think.
In a good way. But mistake are made. Quality drop. New features halt. Turnover rise….
the hospital, the building, would survive even with no doctors, but the patients wouldn't.
It's not the same thing for software.
Software is not really alive in the first place and doesn't need anything more than electricity to keep running.
Dependencies on other teams, management constantly changing their mind, having to put out fires, helping other teams, etc. There are very few teams where this kind of thing doesn't happen.
Also, something to keep in mind when saying things like "you can fire 80% of your SWEs and survive" is slack. You might survive, but have no slack which means any sort of tail event is going to destroy your company.
As a non-Staff IC, I probably can't unblock myself if my problem spans across multiple teams.
For a manager/Staff eng, unblocking across a different org is probably infeasible.
It feels like Director+ is when it becomes your responsibility to unblock things no matter what.
Ex: the "Being a Leader Means Never Saying “That’s Not My Problem”" section in this article
https://staysaasy.com/leadership/2022/08/15/how-to-break-int...
Because short term optimizations teams do to get things out almost always cause larger (global) risks, from everything from new attack surfaces to yet-another-copy-of-user-data that now can get leaked because it isn’t actually protected the way it is supposed to be.
Near as I can tell from stories, Twitter was already maxing out the auditing and compliance bypassing to get things done, so yikes on the long term fallout here.
Doubt.
Employees often have very imperfect information into what other employees are doing in their day to day jobs. The team that looks lazy because they don't immediately prioritize your bugs and requests may be understaffed compared to the operational load.
And unsexy jobs that keep the operation running may be done very well by people who aren't part of the most popular kids, but you'll wind up missing them once they're gone.
If “survive” means, won’t immediately collapse and can continue on for months to years while extracting value I’d agree. If “survive” instead means that they can’t both do required maintenance to keep the company operating _and_ simultaneously build out new features and aspects of the business, Kim not sure I’m as convinced
First it's just a file browser.. then it starts with a text editor.. then image viewer, pluus cloud support (dropbox, onedrive,...), then file sync, backup solution, package management, image editor, music player, video player, and in the end, with all the "streamlining" added, you've got a 300mb app that just lost the ability to sort files by size, but which can now order food delivery for you.
What new features does eg. twitter need?
Advertising features. It's overall advertising story lacks a lot of the capabilities of Facebook/Google which is why it's a distant 3rd in total ad-spend.
This is where those employee cuts are going to be most felt because this is directly tied to revenue. And whilst overall advertising is down there was still a huge opportunity for Twitter to grow.
Our food? Our culture? Our language? What part did we play in making those? We added the word tweeting and are now trying to figure out what it should mean?
ha-ha
Yep, a lot of older version were a lot better than the current ones
Just in my own experience I once inherited ~20 .net 3.5 projects that needed to be updated to support tls 1.2 which required going up to 4.5?4.7? Can’t recall beyond it needing a major version update. The company was then hit with the decision of either doing a multi month effort to update all the inconsistencies between those version for the minimum viable product of updates or spend a year ish to get onto .net core and be ahead of the update schedule.
That was one set of decisions and work for a team of 8, solely to maintain status quo, for a relatively tiny company. Tech companies as they have all currently organized themselves, cannot just run with minor maintenance
If you don't, then a competitor that implements Z might become more appealing to users.
But features are not always user-visible. New features are regularly added to web browsers and phones, and it's often in your interest as a web site or app developer to make use of them.
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Are those newfangled 360 reviews really that much more effective than other review processes?
And of course this fails to account for how nobody likes, say, those meddling busybodies on the security team, or those idiots at the support desk who always make you unplug and restart things before letting you explain what the real issue is; or how everyone likes that one person who always brings donuts and spends more time being friendly with other teams than actually working.
well they were an exercise in bullshit back at amazon in 2001...
Based on what.
Have any of these people worked at Twitter or have any metrics benchmarking it against its peers.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/274566/twitters-annual-r...
2021 would have been a profit of $300M had they not included a one-time lawsuit settlement.
What really stands out is how much they spend on stock-based compensation – it seems like that would have been a key area to save money but that was also less than a third of the $1.2B in new annual debt which Musk just added so I have no idea how they could make the numbers work anymore.
https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2021/ar...
It's circular reasoning at best. 80% of employees were fired because it was overstaffed, and since the site is still up afterwards, Twitter was overstaffed.
And my point still stands that there is no empirical evidence that Twitter was overstaffed.
We do know that their revenue/employee back in 2020 was better than many other startups e.g. Shopify, Zoom.
https://twitter.com/RyanReeves_/status/1423013707190206464?l...
the pilot is the pilot, but 80% of the crew is, if the plan is to got from A to B. Maybe a second pilot for backup is a good idea, but is cabin crew selling lottery tickets on flight?
Even the cheap airlines have cabin crew; they're not there for the hell of it.
It's microservice based site features will break one by one.
Sounds like an upgrade. That's not really helping your point.
>It's microservice based site features will break one by one.
Yes, I see this as highly probable.
WhatsApp is a real-time messaging service and famously had only 50 engineers when its userbase is close to one billion [1].
[1]Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users:
https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...
WhatsApp did not have recommendations, advertising, content moderation, GDPR, DCMA etc or the volume of bots. It is simply not a comparable system.
And it is the backend systems you don't see that make up most of the tech stack.
Honest question, I'm a game dev. In my industry, we outsource a lot of that stuff.
But twitter had 7500 employees in 2021, of which about half were engineering (reports I found vary between 3500 to 4500), so that's at least 65x the engineers!
Whatever all those devs were doing was not producing a profit and was not improving the user experience.
2) For what it's worth, the Twitter employees let go were not just programmers, but also fulfilled other roles. I'm not quite sure what percentage of programmers Twitter lost, but I bet they lost a much higher percentage of other roles such as HR and content moderators.
> BTW. Figuring it who is the core team is not that complicated. You just ask everybody to name five people who are doing well and who they want to work with again (in the next company).
For what it's worth, this might yield a misleading answer because it could become a popularity contest.
The charismatic guy who plays office politics and tries to make everybody their pal might score highly here, but the smart engineer who just sits down quietly and churns out good features might be forgotten.
Well it is a software engineering company/business is it not?
The socially connected engineer will know more people who can be leveraged to meet the goals of the organization, even if they themselves are not as capable in isolation.
If businesses were judged on metrics like “most autonomous engineers who can write perfect code” then the businessy types would be disadvantaged (and the company would fold)
Specially in corporate settings where the gears need greasing. People are not gonna magically do the right things. They want context and understand why you are talking to them.
In my mind I’m not getting paid to write nice code, I’m getting paid to help ensure the software side of things keeps expanding without breaking within constraints of time and money. I’m very happy when this involves writing code but I’m also happy if this involves brokering, nudging, reminding, motivating, flirting, cajoling or otherwise positively interacting with the highly talented people I work with.
Social skills don’t come naturally to me, but the time investment spent figuring out the rules/heuristics has given me more bang-for-buck than any other lang.
One person's bloat is another person's critical feature. The vast majority of people use a small percentage of Microsoft Excel features, but the feature use is such that you cannot replace Excel without supporting all this esoteric stuff some small percent of users are leveraging. Excel's "bloat" gives it a competitive edge over the competition and makes it difficult to replace because of all of these edge cases in use.
Apologies to whoever I ripped that off from, I'm not finding the quote anymore.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
1) Why would it take a team to do this job? Was it a large team? I joke, but seeing what's trending and giving a short human description could seemingly be done by a part-time intern while on a bathroom break. I could imagine some reasons for this, but I'm curious.
2) Perhaps a company that's been bleeding money doesn't need to spend money on these kind of roles? You hate to see anybody lose a good job, but it's better than the entire company going under because you can never turn a profit.
Twitter pre-acquisition wasn't bleeding money, and it's plausible that these positions had positive ROI if they increased engagement and thus ad views.
Software engineers who are hired to think, and not just type, can provide a lot of value to teammates, product managers, and designers, and also supplement these other roles. But typing lots of lines is the way to look good in a spreadsheet during layoffs. And, many engineers want projects where they get to type for 4-12 months before users use the features.
Note, the above is not a complaint: I recommend software engineers track and ship a consistent number of diffs every week. It forces you to ask yourself if someone's blocking your reviews, or if maybe it's a good time to squeeze in several quick, safe unrelated improvements, etc. Shipping code should not feel like a chore; the company "owes" you the ability to ship code to production since they value your performance based on that.
Not even a popularity contest, in all likelyhood just a visibility-of-your-position contest. Some roles at companies interact with many more people in the company than other do; if you're competent and not a jackass you'll be well-regarded in them.
Shit at one job for a while part of our onboarding process for everyone was to spend half a day sort of pair programming through the technical details of how the platform worked. I used to teach programming, am good at pairing, and am nice in real life, so I did almost every one of those. If you asked anyone outside of eng for a list of best engineers I'd be near the top, because I was one engineer everyone had had a positive technical interaction with.
I eventually got, correctly, fired from that job for underperforming! No one could believe it! Except every engineer I worked with, but that was only 1/4 of the company. The rest were baffled.
"It's called medium because most of the articles aren't very well done" ?
Enough with the twitter analysis already, just let him finish running it into the ground and after he fails to make the first or second billion dollar annual financing payment someone else will finally just take over or sell the domain.
Twitter takes in $5 Billion per year but spends most of that on costs to operate.
So he thinks he's clever and just has to cut operating costs by a billion per year and "tada" profitable enough to pay financing of a BILLION PER YEAR
Except you can't kick out three legs of a table and expect it to keep working like it used to, or at all.
Anyway he can do whatever he wants, my only curiosity is if this teaches people they can just quit twitter as there are plenty of better alternatives or will be soon.
Once people learn the "quitting skill" then maybe they can use it on Facebook etc.
One of the problems with cutting 80% of the workforce even if you know which 20% is useful and manage to only spare them is that competitors exist. You don’t just need people to make sure your product works, but you also need people to make sure your product runs slightly better than every competitor.
An existing social graph is a significant moat, but it’s not foolproof.
The problem is that if we assume that the 20% useful people can be identified perfectly, then someone else could build a company that has 25% more useful people than the company that just cut 80% of its staff and probably out deliver you for long enough that they’d be able to easily chip into the moat you’ve built fairly quickly.
As an aside, the Pareto principle is often misused and isn’t close to being any sort of law. It applies in vastly fewer situations that it doesn’t apply in…try applying the Pareto principle to the floor of any manufacturing facility, for example.
Also, some of the people who have been working at a company for a long time know the systems in detail. They may not be the people who'd win a popularity contest, but you don't want these people to suddenly leave.
With larger social companies, outside the tech part, there are inevitably marketing/outreach teams in popular/growth regions of the world building campaigns in conjunction with niches or brands.
New hires won't know the internals of Twitter but they can dive in and help. They can also be motivated by equity-heavy comp packages.
And given that it's a private company not sure whether you would expect compensation other than salary.
I think you underestimate how much some people would like to see Twitter 2.0 succeed. Lots of people didn't love how censorious Twitter had become and want to help build something better. I have several friends who are interested in working there. It does sound like it will be long hours. But for some people that will be a badge of honor. Most of my interested friends are not married so have fewer other priorities.
Maybe there is a cadre of conservative freedom loving experienced techies hiding in the shadows but I haven't seen them. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, I watched the whole Parler collapse saga caused by a lack of mastery and experience in their chosen technologies and it really instilled in me the idea of appreciating the drive of learning and open mindedness. The conservative movement seems to have a disdain for deep learning of a specific field. They are setting themselves up to be left behind in the tech revolution.
Your bias is showing. One does not have to be conservative to want Twitter 2.0 to succeed. Also, there are definitely experienced techies who are conservative and who are not "out" in silicon valley. It's hard to know how many there are because they have kept their heads down for many years.
What if it actually works out for Twitter?
If it does, this will set the baseline for how you can treat software developers.
The special treatment (in compensation, flexibility, etc) we seem to enjoy over other white collar professions will be gone.
So far that hasn't happened with tech and tech workers have had a unique position that others have not had in a long time. This Twitter saga might be a proof of concept of how many tech companies can be stripped bare (if it succeeds at Twitter)
I hate to think about it but from my point of view it seems as if I should be rooting for Twitter to catastrophically fail so that the tech elitists who are trying to make this a thing will have to go back to the drawing board for now.
Twitter is no longer positioned to add any new services or abilities. The Twitter we had is the best Twitter will ever be. Maybe that's enough. More likely is people have left who are key to maintaining operational excellence. Like the Titanic, their absence may not be noticed for some time.
My initial takeaway from this disaster isn't you can let 80% of your engineers go and you'll be just fine. Though I'm quite happy for my competitors to draw that conclusion!
Still think if a company needs to involve software engineer, removal of 80% of software engineer, the total software engineer count less 80% needs to total 1 or more.
Hopefully this wasn't the bean counter reasoning for minimum employees required for company health plan.
It also self drives if I let the steering wheel.
Until it doesn’t.
When the agency being exercised is departure you get two remainers - the zealots and the hanger-ons.
You can try to roll the clock back to a nimble pivot or preserve startup but you're looking at wildly different skillsets to make that work and those people have likely just left.
It's possible to pump out great things with this configuration, but only a fool would sign up for the task. Or maybe a Michael Milken who fancies himself as a Steve Jobs.
Hire to work on your core product and for specific purpose. Don't let managers hire willy nilly to grow their fiefdom.
I couldn't help but read "H1B slaves" in place of workaholics.
That might sound mildly hyperbolic, but if you can force someone out of the country, that gives you tyrannical power over them. The power imbalance is so large it must be seen as coercive.
I'd be very interested to see the H1B demographics of post Musk Twitter.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/politics/twitter-layoffs-visa...
> “Firing folks who are on a H-1B in a major economic downturn is not just putting them out of the job, it’s tantamount to ruining their lives,” one former employee told CNN, adding that some people who had accepted Musk’s ultimatum had accepted it “out of self-preservation.”
> For that reason, some staff at Twitter who are on H-1B visas are staying on despite wanting to leave the company, a former employee told CNN, adding that they’re “concerned with being forced into a flooded job market where they may be unable to find a job and before being forced out of the country.”
20% of the customers pay 80% of the revenue.
You can't just willy-nilly cut any 80%.
You have to look at the actual sales per customer and only then cut the 80% that are time wasters.
If you have 1000 engineers, you MUST know which specific engineers are the 200 that are delivering 80% of the results.
If you have 200 salespeople, you have to know which exact and specific 40 salespeople you keep and the 160 that you fire.
.
But the problem in many companies that suck, or it was a good company and now it sucks, is that generally, the best employees, the 20%, have the most options. If they get too much problems, those 20% will be the first out the door. So the company starts getting into a death spiral. As more of the top 20% leave, that means the remaining top 20% will have to do the work of the ones that left. And soon they will say no way and they will quit, until all that is left is the 80% that does 20% of the work.
I have nothing against the 80/20 heuristic, but like most things, you better know exactly what you're talking about.
Also, in any company, every company, top management should know exactly who the best employees are, and treat them way better than anyone else. You bend over backwards for them. You do not treat all employees equally. It is an utter disaster to lose a golden goose employee, in any capacity, a top 20% receptionist, a top 20% janitor - doesn't matter. All top 20%-ers are top 20%-ers. Bend over backwards to keep your top 20% janitor if you have 100 janitors because you have a really really big building, treat the 20% top priority - get the CEO to talk the top 20% janitor if needed. If nothing else, it is good corporate self-discipline. Because the more top 20's you have in every area, they all feed off of each other's energy.
This is completely ignoring the number of engineers you start with. Let's say you have Twitter with 10000 engineers and Twitter with 40000 engineers, in one case I end up with 2000 engineers, in other with 8000 engineers, you are telling me the result will be same?
First you need to find out how big overemployment and how productive employees you have to come up with some percentages, some companies are efficient, some companies ar stagnating hardly introducing any new features over years (cough Twitter cough), so clearly there is big overhead of engineers.
However pulling that off successfully while maintaining the existing platform on a skeleton crew and also replicating everything their users and customers expect (when said customers are already pausing spending in concern) doesn't lead me to expect success
https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/
The key question is how to you find & keep the 100 or so key people from a 7,500 company when reducing numbers.
another point is twitter isn’t a pure tech company…it’s an ad business on a tech platform. if all the sales and content people quit or are fired I question the long term (2+ years) survivability especially with 10+ billion in debt and annual 1+ billion loan payments
This will get you a list of solid team players. It's a list of who can keep a company going, but not the company.
These are some of the reports to consider:
* Twitter had around 7500 staff when Elon Musk purchased it. Twitter by many accounts now has less than 1000 staff. Some accounts place that number less than 500.
* I think the losses aren't done. Elon Musk reportedly started reviewing every coder's performance, accomplishments over the last six months, and code snippets. He might be going to give the best of them a bonus (inciting jealousy and possible resignations in some of the others). More likely in my opinion, he's going to fire more people.
* Advertisers are seeming to shun Twitter now. See GroupM's labeling of Twitter a 'high risk' [1]. Hiring, or re-hiring, needed staff will be hard with the volatility perceived and with a lack of money as inducement.
I love Twitter, and use it for many things. It's too early to say Twitter's ultimate fate for certain, but I suspect this Thanksgiving will be Twitter's last. Banks could always buy a failing Twitter and bring it back. Who knows?
[1] https://digiday.com/marketing/never-been-critical-twitters-a...
As an extension of this, I propose we remove 4/5ths of each airliner. The 20% that remains, so long as we pick the right 20%, will surely fly correctly.
Seriously: who writes this dreck? You don't have to believe that every single employee at a company is productive or necessary to understand that you can't saddle your remaining employees, even if you picked the "right" ones, with the remaining workload.
On top of that, it feels like classic "magical" thinking by a manager who doesn't understand technical scope or split responsibilities. Why bother to understand why you've hired so many people before blithely opining that 4/5ths of them are fireable? Who the hell wants to work for someone who says things like that? Certainly not the "high-quality" engineers who are supposedly being separated from the chaff.
"It's just money" says Elon and if his goal were to be the world's most massive troll (which I suspect is a large part of it), then it's achievement accomplished, full stop.
In a month they're going to say "look! we didn't have a single outage during the World Cup" and act like it vindicates their approach.
This is exactly the problem with this thinking. A lot of people don't contribute as much as the top contributors, but if you remove them, suddenly the most productive people have to do their normal jobs plus all these other peoples' too. Then they're going to feel overworked and look for a better job elsewhere.
You end up with the less productive employees remaining.
Ultimately, each company should employ exactly one engineer.
> Prediction 36: In the future, all work will be outsourced, until all the work on the planet is being done by one guy.
The Pareto Principle in no way implies that you can just fire 80% of your employees and retain 80% of their "effect"; that's just not how tasking and scoping work.
Much of that workload isn't going away, even if they are ignoring it.
I guess where I'm going is that the article states a roughly true thesis, but applies it in a situation where it's not terribly relevant.
Not sure if they will fly correctly. But most airlines I'm sure have wildly profitable routes, some moderately profitable routes, some mild. And some I'm sure are loss making routes.
You start plotting a graph and a bell curve emerges. The key is this- Do the profitable routes have more demand you can't meet now, but can meet if you divert resources from the loss making routes. If the answer is yes, you can always eliminate the loss making routes, and use those resources to supply to profit making ones. This makes perfect sense, because it not only saves money, this makes money.
There's a bakery near my place which used to sell its things in a shop. Soon enough they realise finding talent to bake is a big problem and most people were buying bulk quantities to sell it to others for a small profit. Eventually he realised he could sell to people who could run shops but had no talent to bake. That way we was able to divert his time and resources to make things at scale, so obviously his profits and by definition market capture increased too.
The real question in case of companies like Twitter is- What is Twitter's core competence? Should Twitter run a in house payroll team? Should they be running a PR team? What sort and size of Legal teams should they be running? Should they be running a in house content moderation team? If their business benefits more making newer products and features. It does make total sense to cut down resources from places are a cost center -ve to hiring more programmers. And it does make total sense for Musk to say things like they will be fairly intense on the engineering and programming side of things.
(And there's a reason airlines fly routes at a loss: an unprofitable route brings travelers to hubs where profitable flights can be allocated cheaply. It's never, ever as simple as "just trim the fat," because the things you think are "fat" almost never are.)
>>It's never, ever as simple as "just trim the fat," because the things you think are "fat" almost never are.
Fair enough. But do trim the real fat.