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Comment by hunglee2 | Hacker News Reader

That is a big cut, unusual for a European company.

I wonder whether there is already a 'Musk effect' at play. His taking the axe to the payroll in unprecedented style at Twitter might have pushed the boundaries as to what is acceptable to do, so has increase the range of permissible action for CEO's. 25-30% cuts might now be the new normal, rather than 5-10%

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Meh, blaming Elon sounds like click bait narrative.

Tech valuations and headcount grew ridiculously in the last few years. Ex: FB head count: https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-faceboo...

If people are surprised at the size of layoffs, I'm guessing its their first recession?

If he's successful with Twitter it will add credibility to the idea that most high margin SaaS/social companies don't need as many people as they currently have, yes.

And they certainly don't from a theoretical perspective. Whether they can successfully transition from inefficient+large to efficient+small is another question

It’s much too soon to judge the impact of the way Elon just discarded 80-90% of Twitter’s technical workforce (layoffs + voluntary departures). The only product change he has successfully implemented is unbanning people who violated the rules in the past, which is a change requiring no engineers to implement.

> Elon just discarded 80-90% of Twitter’s technical workforce (layoffs + voluntary departures)

Is that the current estimate? I'm curious, but I kind of lost track after the Saturday-of-code-reviews thing.

It's anecdotal, but a friend of mine working on the frontend told me his org of 150 engineers lost 2/3 in the original layoff (leaving 50), and then about 80% of those remaining declined the hardcore ultimatum (leaving 10, a mere 6.7% of the starting strength). H1B's are the majority of those remaining.

It was first 50% of the 7500 initial and then another 50% of the remaining. Then add all this Code Review nonsense and you can make the argument that at least 80% of the original are gone. I wonder how many he has brought in though. There is too much muddying of the waters to get a realistic estimate of people joining Twitter because they want to be part of Musk's "vision". It could be anything from hundreds of people joining to just 1 (George Hotz lol).

I work for one of the European scale ups, we did 20 - 30 % cuts (even in Engineering) back during summer.

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