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Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

I wish Elon didn't get sucked into culture wars, because slimming down Twitter's workforce wasn't a bad idea

I fantasized about someone buying Google and slimming it down too, because it used to be a great place to work (I worked there for over a decade). There were lots of great builders but they got drowned out by careerists

In fact I worked in the SF office around "fail whale" times at Twitter (2009), and there was a steady trickle of coworkers over to Twitter. Though from what I hear the leadership there was the real problem, and allowed the other problem to fester

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Slimming down Twitter's workforce is indeed a valid choice. But perhaps Elon should have spent six weeks meeting every team and asking what they did before acting, like Steve Jobs did at Apple.

As it stands, it didn't seem like it helped focus the company in any way shape or form.

At least we know what social media would say about Jobs.

> I wish Elon didn't get sucked into culture wars, because slimming down Twitter's workforce wasn't a bad idea

I don't know how you're relating those two things, but it's funny you should say that. At the time he was firing people, throngs of self-proclaimed "experts" started pontificating about how Twitter was going to implode and crash and burn. There was about two weeks of non-stop posts from various acquaintances on social media about it. They've all been very quiet lately.

A lot of experts also said it would be a slow fall over with things not working over time.

They were right.

Yes, I remember these self-proclaimed experts' timeline for failure being continually pushed out. First it was currently imploding, then a few days, then weeks, then some vague unfalsifiable time in the future, and then they just gave up talking about it.

Makes you wonder if maybe they're the dead weight in their organizations, and therefore are unable to see how much of it is around.

You're right, a few people being wrong about the timeline means things are going well.

No you've misunderstood. What I actually said was essentially that a lot of experts, aren't. Even ones who really believe they are.

Whether Twitter is doing better or worse really has nothing to do with these predictions that were made. The issue is that you obviously don't need literally hundreds or thousands of engineers to keep Twitter generally running and providing a similar kind of service. It might see a down tick in quality or outages, new features might take longer to be implemented. But that's not the service exploding and grinding to a halt.

I was just musing -- maybe some of the people making these kind of predictions are people who think meetings and work groups and committees and powerpoint slides constitutes useful work as opposed to a (sometimes unavoidable) drag that is to be minimized at all costs.

I understood what you meant, it's not a complex point, and it's not novel or interesting. That you can find people who are wrong about the future is not exciting.

> The issue is that you obviously don't need literally hundreds or thousands of engineers to keep Twitter generally running and providing a similar kind of service. [...] It might see a down tick in quality or outages, new features might take longer to be implemented. But that's not the service exploding and grinding to a halt.

1. That is not a "similar kind of service", it's worse service. 2. Those aren't the only things that are happening. Normal people are finding out that "the service" is more than 240 character text values (even if HN engineers disagree).

No, you quite clearly didn't understand what I meant.

And it is a similar level and of service. What's happening? Certainly nothing that "the experts" claimed would.

What's not working?

Spaces, for one.

Spaces "coincidentally" shut off while Elon was in one and getting grilled with questions about banning journalists. Also, about 7 hours ago he tweeted "Spaces is back"

To me that's convincing circumstantial evidence that Spaces didn't break, he turned it off.

I’m not sure we’ve ever seen a giant company successfully “slimming down” ?

Sure, some go though catastrophic downfall and miraculously rebound from there, but that feels more like throwing someone down a mountain with a only a bottle of water and see if they can make it back to civiliation.

The more natural cycle would be frustrated workers moving out to make their own company and build something better from there. In the current climate that doesn’t work because of mono/duopolies and corruption, but that should be the thing to strive for IMHO.

> I’m not sure we’ve ever seen a giant company successfully “slimming down” ?

There was this case in 1996 and 1997 but this seems more the exception than the norm:

https://money.cnn.com/1997/03/14/technology/apple/

Apple is I think a different case as it comes after a (reverse) merger, in particular as the main product (the OS) was rebased from Next’s stack and not Apple’s legacy one.

Laying off redundant people after a merger is basically part of the plan, and it’s more akin to cutting off the bits that don’t fit in the new org (they’re bringing in 500 Next people at the same time), than “slimming down” in the sense of making the same org leaner and more efficient.

Or if we take that definition, car manufacturers merging and getting rid of thousands of workers as a cost saving measure would also count as successful slimming downs, and we’d have many more example of it. That would work as well.

> as it comes after a (reverse) merger

The answer to almost every modern financial wizardry is M&A. Sure, a DCF yields the theoretical value of a stock’s stream of cash flow. But in reality, M&A secures that lower bound. Yes, an efficient firm may reduce headcount willingly. But in reality, M&A provides the culture shock.

Yeah I was thinking about this thread about Apple in 1996 or so:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33289954

A few people including myself remarked how it sounded like Google now

And I noted that I don't think Google will "ever" slim down, because they're making money and Apple wasn't

i.e. there's not enough justification for a leadership shake-up. Twitter had more justification -- there were many CEO changes and the board wasn't happy with the leadership

I would see a world where the ad business gets seriously impaired and Google struggles enough to keep up with the enterprise market that they lose out to MS.

In that fantasy world something like Salesforce could get bought by Google and they’d reshape the whole Google’s product tree to solely focus on enterprise money, and a landslide of redundant engineers would probably be let go.

> I’m not sure we’ve ever seen a giant company successfully “slimming down” ?

We have. That company is called Apple after SJ’s return.

> Though from what I hear the leadership there was the real problem

It almost always is.

> fail whale

do you mean "whale fall"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall

No, op didnt

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/1987/fail-whale

> The fail whale is a graphic that appears when the social networking website Twitter.com is experiencing technical difficulties. The image is of a whale being lifted by 8 orange birds and was created by Yiying Lu.

Back in the day, Twitter's error page showed a cartoon picture of a whale, which became nicknamed "the fail whale". The fail whale was a common sight on Twitter circa 2009 because the site couldn't scale fast enough to match the demand and errors were frequent - that's the era GP is referring to by the fail whale times.

The SuperNews documentary on Twitter elaborates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5Ff2X_3P_4&t=168s

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/1987/fail-whale

The commenter likely meant “fail whale”[0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#Outages

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