Is it fair to say that the often repeated idea that our non-development co-workers seem to do nothing, might be kind of true?
FWIW - I'm no fan of Musk or his antics.
a) sorry to hear the "often repeated..."- a business even one in software is a complex entity in the real world with lots of surfaces and functions. Finance, Sales, Marketing, PR, BD, Enterprise, HR, etc etc all exist for good reasons. Would strongly suggest enhancing mental model to understand those reasons. Will make a person a better eng
b) re the above, if one understands the concept of technical debt, based on the concept of financial debt- Musk is incurring enormous debt in all operational areas right now. Financially beyond what he already put on the balance sheet. Regulators in many countries he operates in are readying fines. Lawsuits are being filed. Poor press relations will make it hard for good news at twitter to emerge and give bad news at any of his other businesses more attention. In terms of corporate relationships, many avenues for revenue, especially enterprise-side, are completely off the table now.
c) in many large businesses I have worked with, they are far more overstaffed with engineers doing the wrong things, and understaffed in areas that would be more meaningful for the business. Very little code is truly part of the asset infrastructure. The vast majority is liability, and engineers writing more of it are just burning good money
I don't think he is. I think he wants to run it as a political influence network.
There's ample precedent. Facebook covertly sold its services to Cambridge Analytica, and both the UK and the US have a number of hopelessly unprofitable media outlets that are heavily subsidised to promote far-right views.
Twitter was a popular and effective (if limited) tool for organisation and dissemination on the Left. I suspect severely damaging that to an election-influencing extent is potentially far more profitable to Musk than selling ads.
If that's the case, he doesn't need to care about building a stable self-sustaining business, only about keeping the lights on for the next couple of years.
The way to think about net worth once you get past the upper-middle-class wage-laborer level is "You have assets that the market currently values at $XB, and you want to trade for other assets valued at $XB, and the true value of the assets you currently hold is $YB < $XB [otherwise you'd hold onto them], and you hope that the true value of the assets you're buying is $ZB > $XB." Under this framework, though, it's possible to come out ahead even if $ZB < $XB, as long as $ZB > $YB. It could be he bought Twitter at an inflated price, but he bought it with Tesla shares and leverage that was even more inflated, and so it still works out.
Small nit pick: Musk didn't put up $44 billion. His commitment is about half that, with the rest coming from other investors (e.g., a16z, Sequoia, individuals) and debt issued by Twitter, Inc.
a) agree that control of the pipes means control of the populace, consent can be manufactured, etc. That's pretty intuitive however I have not studied the mechanics of influence enough to have a sense of what can be done with Twitter and how effective it can be on a capital basis to judge whether it is worth the capital, and while the Saudis, eg have infinite money and are definitely opening new large scale influence fronts now (golf, etc)- the actual debt holders in twitter are banks with public balance sheets and they need to be paid. It seems like the min yearly operating budget for twitter as an influence service is $2B- that's real money
b) agree completely that there are innumerable right wing outlets entirely unsustained by eg ads, but many operators like Murdoch, Sinclair, are extremely profitable. So I would think there is a hope/vision it can be both effective on the influence side and also profitable or at least economically balanced
Now they're gone and Twitter is still here but the goalposts have been moved to "well actually it's gonna break in t+X weeks" or "well it's not about the system working, it's about marginal profit per engineer".
Claiming "Twitter will go down tomorrow because people got fired" is utterly stupid. It's like claiming "My teeth will fall tomorrow because my dentist got fired".
why would you want people who built such a resilient software stack to go to another company? potentially or likely competitors?
The more pressing question is arguably how necessary some of the engineers were (since quite a few were fired too). So many people have been predicting that the breakdown of the site is imminent, or just a few weeks away, or at least that it will slowly start degrading (with some shifting goalposts, maybe). The question is whether we are really seeing any of that. The site still seems to be functional as far as I can tell - I rarely log in, and I noticed that the "Please login" modal seemed to have some difficulties loading some elements lately - but I couldn't even reproduce the modal now, so maybe they decided to remove it (which would show that they still have the ability to make UI changes). I recently read that third-party APIs were down, but that might also have been a deliberate decision. Sure, they are probably accumulating some technical debt right now, but arguably it's the business side that would currently be the much bigger concern for the survival of the company (if it had to operate under market conditions, rather than being a pet project of one of the richest people on the planet).
But let me ask you a different question. Can one engineer increase the companies revenues by 0.1%?
If they can, they just made the company $5m/yr
If the ROI equation of an incremental hire can increase the companies revenues by 0.1% or even 0.01% the right move is to hire as many people as you can while the return on investment holds.
Well, maybe $2.5m since musk took over and tanked the company's revenue.
I'm not sure if 1 employee can increase twitters' revenues by 0.1%, but one CEO has decreased it by about 70%.
Unpaid rent. Stinky offices. No follow-up on legally required notice and severance. Regulatory fines pile up. Lawsuits pile up. It's the lo-tech schlamperei that will bite first.
Like Chesterton's Fence, one cannot simply surmise that the culled parts were unnecessary. Many of the answers to such questions went out the door along with that fateful layoff wave.
What we can conclude is that Musk's impulsiveness may become his undoing this time around if his luck doesn't hold.
First three Google results:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence
Later on it became apparent that Twitter was censoring some of its users without explanation. It’s platform was a source of misinformation, propaganda, threatening messages etc.
It would have been wise to slow down and first ask why the old fences were there to begin with don’t you think so? If someone with decision making power at Twitter sincerely asked “Why all the middlemen, the editorial boards, the opaque advertising costs, the FCC regulation…”.
Yes, they were not necessary.
Please, before you call me ignorant and downvote, just let me elaborate. I have seen the issue first-hand, it is subtle and specific to large companies.
First, companies want their stock price to go up. This is more important to them than profit margins, because the people making decisions (as are most employees) are renumerated largely in stock. Simply keeping a business profitable and stable will not increase stock prices, you need to convince investors that you have great plans which will make the company stronger. Hiring more employees makes this look more convincing.
Secondly, the best way for managers on all levels to increase their standing and compensation is to manage more people. As a result, it doesn't matter if your team is running optimally with 20 people and there's no point in starting new big projects, you must come up with reasons to hire more people to progress your career. Therefore, every manager is adamant about having perpetually understaffed teams.
The result is that more projects will be started - regardless of whether they make sense - and more people will be hired to work on those projects. At all levels, perpetually.
It is debatable how bad this inflation is, but the case of twitter shows that even a horribly abrupt and mismanaged exodus of 75% of employees will have no discernible mid-term effects on the product.
At risk of sounding extreme, I'd say that if the layoffs happened in an organised fashion and none of Musks's ill-conceived ideas were implemented, such loss of workforce would not have affected income. I also believe that if most large, established tech companies were built with efficiency in mind rather than perpetual stock growth, they could be effectively ran with 10% of the workforce.
Your other points are valid but this part is completely incorrect - Wall Street investors are extremely sensitive to costs and love high-margin businesses. No investor believes that just because you're hiring and increasing costs, that you will magically grow revenue. The cause and effect are almost in the opposite direction - strong past revenue growth (and consequent high stock prices) cause executives to be over optimistic about other opportunities, which lead to overhiring, which then allows the other effects you mention (which are valid) to take hold. But the root cause isn't stock prices going up because of overhiring, but as a rational response to past success.
- Are there high-quality brand ads running? (Fewer.)
- is there more hate speech? (Yes.)
- Is it plausible that check-mark and "coin" revenue can replace ad income (No.)
There has definitely been a rise in hate speech on twitter since mush took over.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/shaunharper/2022/10/31/elon-mus...
But I think that Musk had an idea for transforming Twitter into a new distribution for distributing music and video. It might be easier to transform the company and build the new service after breaking down the original model.
Maybe simply creating a new startup without messing with Twitter would have been more prudent, but probably less exciting for Musk.
Those are 3 features from that time I'm familiar with as someone who doesn't use Twitter.
So I would say their current staffing levels are probably not sufficient.
The revenue is not as important to the owner compared to the reach and influence.
Many more let go since, and many resignations as well. Perhaps you’re nitpicking layoff vs fire, but the company has far less employees now than before Musk took over.
Then all this becomes expense for the business that can be written off.
And why is pay for a business’s employees not considered an expense?
How will that even work? Or is this another rehash of "they just write it off..."?