Sure, you can cut 80% of anything and things will run just fine for a while. You could even stop paying your bills, and nothing bad would happen for a month or two, as invoices pile up. In fact I'd guess that you could cut 100% of UX and Product and no one would much notice for a year or so. So, why not do that? Because for all that we talk about short-termism, companies are long-term entities. Shares in a company are valuable now _because they will probably be valuable in 20 years time too_. So such self-mutilation is rare.

> 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.