Notoriously overstaffed based on what? The fact that you've heard this repeated in different ways over a long period of time?
But generally, yeah. I've heard a lot of people question Twitter's opex and headcount over the years, from HN to daily standup meetings. Twitter is a big company that ships a small handful of products, of which only Twitter for iOS and Twitter for Web really seems to matter. As long as they don't fire their sysops and iOS developers, most Twitter users would probably never notice a difference.
…except you know the entire company? The one that lost most of its only revenue source overnight [1], became immediately flooded with hate speech [2], lost a meaningful chunk of its most valuable users [3] and started attracting a huge amount of regulatory oversight knocking at the door [4].
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2022/11/28/twitter-loses...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/technology/twitter-hate-s...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweet...
[4] https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/11/30/tech/twitter-eu-complianc...
However, not many companies can survive with a permanent code-freeze, which is why companies don't just fire the "excess" folk who take PTO between December 25 and January 1, even though "things were fine" in that timeframe
Many of them probably could be fired without much repercussions on company, the problem really is that there is no way in hell to judge that quickly and immediately start firing.
It's the load balancing, the advertising, the billing system, the >200 legal jurisdiction's worth of regulation [0], lobbying both for and against various regulations, auditing everything for legal disputes, the dynamic battle with scammers and spammers who want to figure out and get around the spam filters, and the security updates (some of which they need to write themselves and not just install on all their machines).
Probably some other stuff as well, but this is already like a Monty Python sketch.
[0] not just each nation, but e.g. all the different US states
They might be able to sell it to someone for a fraction of the price they have paid for it but every day that he stays in charge the less they will be able to sell it for.
Trust me, I want Twitter to suffer the worst death of all. It's just not likely that Elon Musk will be the reason why the site falls, at least not from a technical standpoint.
It’s already over… I don’t know how long the death rattle is going to last but it’s past the point of no return in any meaningful sense.
None of those things are going to have any impact on the eventual outcome here.
I was pretty clear about the very specific problems they are facing and how any one of them individually is potentially fatal for them. Without solutions to those problems the end result is going to be the same it’s just the timeline that’s in question.
But for a one-time charge for a lawsuit settlement, it was profitable just before Musk took over, it was not operating above its means (it almost certainly is now, despite the cuts, because of the loss of advertising revenue on top of the enormous debt service costs Musk loaded it up with to finance the acquisition.)
> The actual employees seem to be doing a fine job at reduced-capacity though
Keeping the lights on in the core app? Maybe (subjectively, I’m seeing more problems with app behavior, and seeing more reports of them, but that could, at least in part, be more attention being on it.) With the kind of safety that is of concern to moderators, no, despite Musk’s claims of reduced hate speech and other objectionable content by Twitter’s count, outside analysis has that skyrocketing.
Basic business functions? Well, missing payroll in a couple of EU jurisdictions is kind of a big deal.
So, no, I would say the existing crew isn’t doing a great job of keeping Twitter running, though the most clear problems aren’t in app function, but other business-critical functions. But, it wasn’t just engineers that were cut, and keeping the lights on, without innovation, is probably the easiest function to maintain with deep cuts, since software doesn’t actually rot.
But a bunch of stuff did break. Famously 2FA stopped working, there has been an explosion of spam, and other widely reported issues- which are only the ones we know about - there could very well be some truely abhorrent stuff going under the hood to keep the wheels from falling off.
The idea that a week or two of something other than total violent collapse being a measure of how well you're handling staffing has got the smell of management track thinking all over it.
We'll really just have to wait and see what happens. I really want Twitter to destroy itself beyond repair, but the core platform seems intact.
This logic is just specious. Passing judgment on a large, distributed system based on its continued uptime is a bit like arguing that firing the flight crew of a jumbo jet was a good idea because the autopilot is working. It betrays a lack of understanding of what is really going on.
The only system that does not require ongoing maintenance is one that no one uses.
From article: "As soon as Musk actually took over, there were always three things that had to be done by yesterday." I wonder why...
And hell, hiring that many people at once is a lot of work to whoever left...
A large company is more than their website. Legal teams, regulatory compliance, infosec, etc. Apparently most of that is gone.
Apart from Twitter's ability to generate revenue.
> That was broken when he bought it.
You know what, you're kinda right, he did load up Twitter with an interest burden of $1bil/year when he completed the purchase. And then he scared off all the advertisers. So sure, he broke it when he bought it.
And him firing a bunch of people wasn't why companies stopped paying him (why would they care?), it was every other thing he did with the platform.
This is what drove me to stop using Twitter and over to nitter as a frontend. If they finally stopped doing that, I can happily start browsing their actual website again.
That's a pretty terrible take. Fire your entire IT staff and your stuff will all keep working for a while at most places. That doesn't make that IT staff pointless. They aren't hamsters that run on a wheel that powers everything, they are there to anticipate & correct problems as they come up.
You can't make this type of claim within a couple weeks of the layoffs. If Twitter continues to operate without a hiccup for the next year or two then sure try to make that claim. But to say it at this point is just ridiculous.
Also stuff already broke during the firings - like 2FA had issues already.
it hasn't been long enough to be able to say that yet. if you get rid of all firefighters, that doesn't mean the whole world will immediately catch fire.
Yet. That we know about. As the system trends towards entropy.
What musk is doing is, well, clown fiesta, but it's easy to look at twitter finances and see someone isn't making company's money
Walmart has 2.3 million employees but it's just a store. Why do they need that many when SpaceX has N employees and is launching rockets
Yes, Twitter doesn't build physical things or operate any store fronts... but that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of complexity that is within the company and the way that it maintains its funding.
This is a terrible example and you know it. Walmart has physical stores everywhere.
Besides, my comment was about Walmart, which has over 10,000 stores... So of course they have more employees than Twitter by a huge margin.
So let's imagine you run Twitter and you're operating in every western country on the planet. Now, all those countries have different laws and regulations. Are you, the CEO/coder/whatever going to be the one who sits down with regulators and discuss the nuance of their laws? How are you going to deal with law enforcement requests? FOIA requests from journalists? What kinds of information can you store about users in different locales? What kind of government compliance do you need to have in place for enterprise customers? How many hours per week are you allowed to require for workers in Germany? Can your translation contractors in Poland work through the holidays? Or maybe you consider lawyers just another one of those pesky salespeople/moderators who gets in the way of genius?
That's just one tiny segment of the company. Try to imagine how many other moving parts there are besides the four roles of "CEO," "coder," "salesperson," and "moderator."
The only reason you think they are over staffed is because you don't like the political views of the majority of employees and you disagree with their content moderation policy. That's it and it's so obvious.
No, it's because they haven't done anything innovative in a decade and their product is much simpler than a ton of tech companies with half the staff... Their stock price was super depressed and they were losing what, $4 million per day?
It's super obvious for anyone remotely financially literate that they were way overstaffed. Any buyer would have laid off at least half the staff...
Even Jack Dorsey admitted it: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/05/jack-dorsey-speaks-twitter...
Has hundreds of millions of users and had an awful lot of advertiser accounts. How many accounts does SpaceX have? Yes, a lot more now that they've got their Internet service, but managing users is labor intensive, even if you don't provide many means of contact. Advertisers, especially large brand accounts, is labor intensive too, and if you lose half your big accounts because you cut staff willy-nilly, there goes a lot of revenue.
"but Twitter is fat and everyone knows it"
Everyone knows it because it's what everyone on the right has been stating without evidence for weeks. You've heard it so much it's become like an obvious fact even though you can't point to any hard evidence. I say this because you make statements like that. As if you are saying "The capital of France is Paris".
You also said
"Twitter does not include 7500 employees, unless ~6000 of them are working on something other than Twitter."
How do you know how many employees it takes? How do you know 1500 is all they need? You just keep making statements without any backing them up nor do I think you can unless you're C level at Twitter
Also any company might be losing money with staff being the main reason but still need that level of staff.
Nope! Spacex has 9500 employees
> multiple manned missions a year to the ISS
Over 100k people worked on Crew Dragon Crew-2 mission from three different locations in making sure it's a success. But, here you are drinking cool-aid
But, that's not what happened or I implied. Read for yourself -> http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
A great example - Boeing had more money, more people and the same external support and they STILL haven't launched a vehicle yet. SpaceX has beat them by almost 4 years and counting. You'd think with '100k people' they could do it by now right?
Again, OP didn't do that. In the article, Elon Musk's quote didn't reference "all the programmers who wrote all the libraries, platforms, operating system's that [SpaceX] is built on."