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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

If the 3x headcount increase really did add no value, there are still about 1/3rd profitable employees there now. In fact giant layoffs tend to cut the best people first because they are the ones who feel comfortable walking. The people that are the last to go are the ones who are very entrenched in the organization and who don't estimate their chances outside of it highly, and that's the exact description of who Elon thinks he's laying off.

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I've found the opposite. I almost never see low performing employees fired outside of a mass layoff. In every layoffs I've seen 10x as many people were fired as quit. So you lose a bunch of low performers involuntarily, and a few top performers both voluntarily and involuntarily and that leads to the average quality improve.

My first job out of college had layoffs 8 months in. I was called into a conference room, connected to a speakerphone with the rest of my team, immediately told that we were all laid off and that I had some paperwork to sign in my managers office.

I was given a 33% raise, moved to a salaried position, and got a $5000 cash bonus 10 minutes later.

I had mastered the new system we were implementing and converted and supported the remainder of the customers from the legacy system. Shitty support of the product my team of now one actually drove revenue as the customers would pay higher support prices because of the shitty support I offered.

The service I offered was shitty because my job was to meet minimal contractual obligations for multi-decade contracts to persuade the customers to renegotiate the contracts for a product that hadn't been EOL'd. All the while offering onsite conversion services from the legacy product for most of my day job.

What I'm saying is that company is still alive today, they had a pivot point and literally cut 55% of their employees on a single day.

Google wants to beat facebook still, there is one of a billionity pivot points that twitter could take.

You're assuming they didn't just fire 50% of people at random. It's not like they had a lot of time to think about whom to let go.

It also seems like a lot of the layoffs were achieved by offering everyone the severence of they left.

Assuming only people on visad stayed, I wonder if that skews more or less competent.

Do you think they did the work necessary to tell a high performer from a low one?

The short amount of time they took and methods they reportedly used don't instill much confidence.

> In fact giant layoffs tend to cut the best people first because they are the ones who feel comfortable walking.

This is more true when the layoffs happen because the company’s situation deteriorates. If the company cuts jobs because revenues fall and products fail, better employees are indeed more likely to move to greener pastures before mediocre ones do. If, however, the company prospects improve, rather than worsen, this is no longer the case.

Twitter has lost a lot of revenue recently and is now in a lot of debt, although that might not have had time to sink in. In real terms it is in a much worse place, and remember that betting on a success is something you'd do as an investor, not as a rank and file employee.

I'm not sure. I think I'm a good employee, but I like job stability. If I'm working somewhere with layoffs, I'll likely go somewhere without.

There also isn't a measure of employee quality, and layoffs are often not about the individual (e.g. Amazon cutting robotics). I've had no clue how likely I was to be laid off during most points in my career.

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