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Most of what you say is true but I disagree with your conclusion. Elon is being cruel, his behaviour is actively hostile and unacceptable towards any employees regardless of their value or how pampered they are.

Elon cutting bloat and Elon treating people with cruelty are separate: Elon could cut bloat without being actively cruel. He’s choosing to be cruel for his own enjoyment.

I agree. Screw him.

And I think you are right. I don't stand for this guys shenanigans in anyway. He is a terrible leader.

I just meant that a lot of people are observing and waiting to see if he can run twitter in a lean but sustainable way. If he can... oh boy, we are up for a wild ride.

If Elon can succeed treating his employees as cruelly as he has then software engineers absolutely need to begin to mass mobilize. If anything we need to do so to protect h1b, parents, disabled, and our older devs. Maybe like an actors union or something that forces basic standard of living.

I live in Sweden so for sure I agree. I'm all for capitalism but there needs to be baseline social guarantees beneath it.

Well put! Being efficient can be achieved in many ways.

No matter how ruthless one chooses to be, there's no need to also be mean, unless one is sadistic and/or compensating for some major psychological problems.

What you’re missing is that Twitter and other Silicon Valley companies are high growth companies, which have always invested aggressively to become ever more dominant.

Over the last decade, Twitter has averaged a 25% revenue growth rate per year, and if it sustained that level of growth it would soon be worth what Elon paid for it.

The problem is that Elon clearly has no idea how to put all of those talented people to work on something worthwhile and only sees them as dead weight. Maybe the old management didn’t know how to make the best use of all of the people they hired, but Elon has zero idea of how to use the people he fired.

Compare it to what Steve Jobs said when returning to Apple: not that the company was bloated and the employees were lazy, but that it was full of talented people who just need a vision they can get behind.

> Twitter has averaged a 25% average growth rate per year, and if it sustained that level of growth it would soon be worth what Elon paid for it.

I'm sorry but I'm very skeptical of this. It's unclear to me if you mean revenue or MAU but I would doubt it's growing at 25%. That would be an insane curve of exponential growth which I'm fairly certain is not the case for Twitter.

I should have been more clear, 25% is their average annual revenue growth over the last decade. Obviously there have been good years and bad, but in 2021 they hit 37%, so the capacity for big growth is clearly not in the past.

Elon bought the company for $44 billion, so he too clearly agrees that the potential for growth is high.

I'm still not sure if those percentages you are mentioning are revenue (from ads) or MAUI. If they are from revenue from ads, well those were bound to go down a lot as soon as the economy flipped.

> Elon bought the company for $44 billion

It's more complicated than that. He agreed to pay $44 billion at a certain moment in time where interest rates were negative. The way these acquisitions work is by borrowing a huge amount of money (something like 80% of the deal) putting up a much lower percentage of your own money (say 20%) and then using the business itself as collateral agains the loan.

The math changes a lot when interest rates change. That's why he tried to bail out of seeing it through.

Yes, he made a terrible deal. He had terrible timing, showed no discipline by waiving due diligence, and overpaid for twitter.

> He agreed to pay $44 billion at a certain moment in time where interest rates were negative.

For $50 and $4.20

I would question how deeply he thought about the price and how much of that was his thumbing his nose at the SEC.

It is hard to apply such a forecast to all tech companies. They aren't created the same. Growth companies and startups have already corrected after realizing the mistakes made. Blue-chips have reduced workforces in non-profitable efforts while expanding workforce in profitable ones.

Real leaders aren't going to look at what gets constant press and apply it to their divisions. That's just asinine. Also to think you need to provide extreme value to your employer because of "the times looking tough" is the media scaring you because you saw a market correction of layoffs and a significant event of someone Icahn-lifting a company.

> to think you need to provide extreme value to your employer because of "the times looking tough" is the media scaring you

I would say first try to provide as much value for yourself by building something that you own.

But trying to provide extreme value by working intensely is not a bad way to face life I would say. I want to work 8h hours (or less!) but I want to run hot all the time while I'm doing it. What's wrong with that?

> I want to work 8h hours (or less!) but I want to run hot all the time while I'm doing it. What's wrong with that?

Nothing is wrong with that, but it's just not realistic to expect everyone to work like that.

I guess the way I would put it is, when someone is providing "extreme" value to you, you know that's not a sustainable relationship and you have to start making other plans.

If the terms aren't economic for both parties, they can't last. Long term I shouldn't be relying on getting value which other other people would be willing to pay more for.

I think you're really conflating two unrelated problems.

I agree that there is bloat. But that has nothing to do with engineers.

But it's not an engineer's job to create and provide value out of thin air. It is management's job to only hire engineers when they have real value to create that requires more engineers. I imagine 50-90% of hires are "empire building" or politics.

I also expect it's probably a good thing for the industry and the world when these imaginationless FANG companies stop wasting great years of talented engineers and stop being seen as some aspirational goal for everyone.

> But it's not an engineer's job to create and provide value out of thin air. It is management's job to only hire engineers when they have real value to create that requires more engineers. I imagine 50-90% of hires are "empire building" or politics.

100% agree. Head count is like oil or Dune's Spice at these companies. Middle managers just want to grow the headcount under them to grow their own influence and get more power in whatever petty politics they are currently engaged in.

You are 100% right

>Now it's the time to be resilient and provide extreme value to you employer

No, my employer will keep dealing with my relatively good value. If he only wants to keep top performers, he will soon run out of engineers to actually do the work, both because he can't hire and the current ones will burn out.

Providing extreme value to your employer just means selling yourself for cheap and making him a bunch of money. "Hahaha, no" is an appropriate answer to such a demand.

I'm not saying you should slave yourself for free. In fact I would encourage you not to do that. Instead build something that you own... either a blog, some bootstrapped internet business, your brand, anything.

I personally like working 8 hours a day in a very intense way. When I'm working I'm really working and I like high tempo, no bureaucracy, no BS, building solid stuff. In my opinion this is the way. Do 8h (no more, possibly less!) but give it all while you are at it.

Nothing is worth doing if it's not done well.

Are you saying that, basically, twitter and its workforce deserved this, and we all do, and people like Gergely should just fall in line and realize that?

Yeah, that's exactly what I said. /s

In all seriousness... Times change, this was bound to happen. Does it matter whose fault it is? Be adaptable and accept reality outside your control.

Whoever fault it is doesn't change the reality of the situation.

You are treating this as a natural disaster when in reality it’s entirely man made. We know exactly whose fault this is. You can’t hand wave it all away as “times are tough”.

Ok, whose fault was it? List 10 people who are responsible for the whole chaotic system we call "The Economy".

It's been decades we still don't know who was responsible for the 08 Financial Crisis nor the Great Depression.

Besides of course hand waving "greedy bankers", "unregulated speculative markets".

Is it man made? Yes. But it's also a chaotic system like the weather.

Are you blaming layoffs on interest rates again?

The fault of the layoffs is that somebody did a leveraged buyout. These have been terrible for workers and customers across all parts of our economy.

Twitter like many companies over hired during COVID and layoffs are healthy. I don’t think you can call the process at twitter anything but destructive.

Everybody hated LBOs when they were done by IBankers trying to make fees. Elon doing it is just as destructive.

> are you blaming layoffs on interest rates again?

Or the absolute idiocracy that is Venture Capital and growth at all costs. Or the middle managers at these companies that spent their time growing their influence to play politics and status / power games. Or you know, the average person who puts money aside on their 401K who in turn needs money managers who in turn end up partially funding venture capital...

It's chaotic. You can't point the finger at any single person or class and "blame them". It's a complex system made of many moving parts and somehow poorly understood incentives.

But you seem to have it all figured out. Good luck!

That's why we make laws, policies, and norms.

Event driven behavioral dictates if you want to avoid being confused by "Chaos."

Don't accept abuse or the abuser. Fight back.

This is not Nature sending a storm.

It's humans, causing pain for other humans. We have policies, laws, norms .. all categories have been violated repeatedly by Musk in this episode.

He's out of balance with humanity.

- If Elon Musk were to be held to same standard of performance, after his abysmal blue check fiasco, the "weekly review" would send him packing!

- Attitude issues, bloat, free-loaders are not only found among the developers!

- Responsible parties for frivolous and ill conceived "wild company bets" are not the developers!

- "We have been treated like greek gods and goddesses and we are spoiled".

Not we. https://nitter.net/elonmusk

- Times indeed have changed. The "gods and goddess" were playing fast and loose with easy money and now the money is tight and they are looking at "BLOAT". They made poor decisions in terms of business models, growth, and those "cut" left with golden parachutes.

"I'm a strong believer in worker rights" + "Times are / have changed."

Indeed!

I agree with the sentiment that Elon Musk is totally overrated and borderline a scammer. I'm 100% with you on that.

That being said... if he manages to run twitter with 20% of the people in a sustainable way that makes a lot of people look bad (including the devs).

These are two entirely different matters. There is no question that Twitter, or Google, or IBM, or Microsoft, or ..., have some dead weight.

The issue is that the silly money giant corps destroy the sensible norms for the rest of us innocents who never touched that crappy VC money. First they utterly fucked (can we say fuck on hn?) the interview process for all of us. Remember that? Now I guarantee you, every little man/woman "boss" out there is gonna follow 'the utterly spoiled greek god' and enforce the new 'one week job security window' for the rest of us who weren't being "spoiled" because we never deigned to work for these crappy companies!

"Are you in?" claims the loudly announced new 'greek god' hire of Elon the Terrible. Remember kids, you've heard all this before ..

p.s. every thing these megalomaniacs have touched has screwed something major in society. Surveillance capitalism; destroying the political discourse; etc.

Every single one of these disasters is 100% the responsibility of these supremely self-satisfied "gods" like Elon. Not us developers.

When are they going to face the "hard core" judgment?

I also believe that many tech companies are bloated - just as many websites and many codebases are bloated.

But you can't reduce the bloat by just waltzing in and tearing out pieces. Bloated processes, companies and software are often tightly coupled in annoying ways and you first have to spend time removing all this coupling before you can maybe decide to cut some of it out.

That is the general consensus yes. But what if this guy comes in and proves us all wrong? What will the consequence be? A lot of people are watching.

I've been saying this for almost 2 years now. A reckoning is coming in the tech industry not unlike 2000. Wayyyy to many bootcamp coders getting uppity when they aren't collecting a $200k paycheck. When a 'professional linkedin recruiter' reaches out to me, all I can think of are the $100k HTML developers who were let go in 2001. History doesn't repeat, but it sure does rhyme.

Can Twitter run on 200 devs? Probably. Maybe even 20. Can Twitter run on the 200 devs they have and thrive? Don't know, but it won't be easy. Can Twitter run without manual content management? Not long term. Can Twitter run on subscription alone? No. Will Elon Musk ruin his mystique? Already has. Are these questions related? Yes.

Why is providing good information and commentary nefarious?

Should he be forced to shut up and not give out free info/advice just because he sells advice? Why doesn't rhia complaint apply to every entrepreneur or brand that posts on Twitter? Heck, or even news outlet?

He's not forcing you to look. Many people find his info valuable and worth sharing.