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Comment by Panini_Jones | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what effects this uncertainty will have on an organizational system. With multiple rounds of layoffs, talks of 'flattening', projects being cancelled, internal transfers being frozen, hiring being frozen, when does an organization finally become 'healthy' again? When are the right people in the right places making the right decisions again?

Does an organization that has so much capital need to even care about organizational strength?

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I've noticed more uncertainty, less comradery, a general malaise, lack of motivation and a lot less trust in the organization. A very very different feeling to a year ago.

My old boss who's still a director there said that it's been horrible since the Apple ATT changes, but then she's in ads.

I always used to say that it's easy to be nice in a growth company, and that appears to have been proven out by recent events.

“It’s easy to be an angel in paradise”

Tell that to Adam.

Have we seen this happen in the past? Did Microsoft go through a general sense of despondency when it cut people in 2009? Did it recover?

This was how Microsoft was seen in 2013 as Ballmer stepped down:

"Slumping stock price and unimaginative vision has left Microsoft marooned between a fading past and an uncertain future"

An unimaginative vision is a common result of mass lay-offs. The ones that stay behind do not dare to take risks and prefer to stick to the status quo. Only after Satya Nadella took over, did Microsoft start to recover.

So FB / Meta needs a new CEO ?

No, Mark's going to crash it into the ground.

I wonder if he's going to ask security to escort him to bathrooms

The writing was on the wall since a long time ago.

I'm usually not one to say companies shouldn't take on risks to expand into new business areas, particularly not in times where the core product is bleeding lucrative users... but here it's the same shit as with Twitter prior to Parag Agrawal's term or with Elon Musk's dozens of ventures.

It's one thing and bad enough if board members have sometimes dozens of posts... but Zuckerberg, Musk, Dorsey all show it's not a good idea when an actually active C-level exec has too many things on their table. And it's especially not good if they use company resources for their personal pet projects.

And it's especially not good if they use company resources for their personal pet projects.

Good grief.

I guess if you are a CFO, or finance guy, sure.

But a "pet project" is conjoined with passion. And R&D, and testing the waters in other markets, is what causes true motivation.

People often complain that big corps can only innovate via acquisition. Yet, this comment is complaining that big corps are innovating by... startup methods!

For what does a startup do, other than live as the pet project of its founders?

We should encourage CEOs of large corps to go out on a limb, to R&D, to bring change to the market, to explore new growth streams.

> And R&D, and testing the waters in other markets, is what causes true motivation.

There's a difference between legitimate R&D and pulling Tesla engineers to put out fires at Twitter. The latter is a blatant abuse of Tesla's resources and to be honest it's a miracle how Musk has not gotten under serious fire from at the very least the Tesla board or a lawsuit by shareholders.

Did you ever think, maybe he hired Tesla talent, on contract, via Twitter? Are you privy to contracts between these two companies?

Did you ever think, this may be why there is no issue?

startups, while they can have funding, do not have near unlimited piles of cash allowing them to keep building something no one wants.

At some point, they have to start being profitable, and this constraint is what forces them to be adaptable and listen to users.

Billionaire pet projects do not have this constraint, and as such can become endless money sinks.

https://minimsft.blogspot.com/

Sounds like faangs are becoming more like banking environment where few % layoffs are often happening few times a year. It still sucks to be the one affected and over time it sucks out a lot of positive energy

In my country, big national banks IT jobs are one of the last bastions of "potential forever job".

they're becoming like the IBMs and HPs of the world. Old dinosaurs set in their ways and they're not handling it very well.

> hiring being frozen

I don't know when they made that decision but a recruiter contacted me from meta last week. I wonder how far do people go through the hiring pipeline before the "stop the engines" signal arrives. Hopefully not after the offer has been accepted.

It may continue for another few weeks after „Stop engines“ signal is received, because recruiters still have their jobs and team leads will tell them: „Let’s keep recruiting funnel warm, while I’m checking if that signal really applies to us“. Until every team with an ambitious team lead is told that they are not special and they really should stop, they may still continue at least talking to people. And some may even got their budget after few rounds of negotiations, so this strategy will make a lot of sense for them.

... and what else should recruiters do? Sit there do nothing and fear being cut? Better be able to show what a pipeline you have.

Yeah, some recruiters are going to keep recruiting until they're fired. There's always a chance that somebody needs a warm funnel and then they'll be the ones kept around when the others are laid off.

Just a personal anecdote, I found Facebook's recruiters to be the absolute worst. The facts and figures of the position kept changing, and I spoke to three of them, and came away with zero confidence in their abilities.

It depends on organization, but in-house recruiters do not always have to interview people for specific positions. Employer branding, acquiring leads through meetups and conferences can also be part of the job.

exactly, in my experience, HR departments (at least recruiters) are among the first to be fired when things turn down - who needs to pay recruiters if you aren't hiring? - much better if you are worried about your own job to keep busy, and advertise and interview people for non-existent jobs then to sit on your hands all day with nothing to do. Hopefully the 'keeping busy' will save your job, if your manager needs to pick from a few dozen recruiters which ones to toss and which to keep.

Companies are always in the lookout for and hire great talent.

When they say hiring freeze, it usually means they will stop hiring a generic cookie-cutter person or fresh graduates

IC7+ was never frozen. Everything else is (at least for eng).

> Hopefully not after the offer has been accepted.

It has happened. Also happened that people were laid off soon after starting to work.

Yes they do. The trick is not throwing out the baby with the bath water. Elon Musk got a lot of criticism for how he handled layoffs at Twitter. But he did provide clarity and then ripped off the band aid. Notice how things have gone quiet around Twitter lately. IMHO, it wasn't nice but what remains is probably a healthier organization and a fairly stable team. A lot of people left in the process and that was always going to need to happen. But what remains seems to keep things going and they can now think about a future and work on that. He could have done it in a more respectful way. But doing it quickly was actually not a bad thing.

Facebook is dragging it out and people are unhappy. Having seen this from the inside, when companies are going through a lengthy process of repeated layoffs, people get nervous and lose trust in management being on top of things (because they obviously aren't). At some point people just start leaving by themselves instead of awaiting the next round. Or worse, they mentally check out and patiently wait for the compensation that comes with their layoff. Either way, they stop being productive team members. This creates a toxic situation that is hard to recover from.

IMHO Facebook should be more decisive and rip off the band aid a bit faster. They have a staffing problem. Too many people that were added that aren't delivering whatever Facebook had in mind. They are spending billions on things that aren't working very well. And throwing more money at the problem has stopped working. It's just costing them more money to do the same things they were doing.

Huh? Twitter has had almost monthly rounds of layoffs, including one a few weeks ago that took out some fairly high profile employees. They also have arbitrary firings and people being let go without being told [1].

I'm certainly not going to argue that Meta is going about this in a good way at all, but it is hard to think of a worse example of doing it "well" than Twitter under Elon.

1. https://twitter.com/iamharaldur/status/1632843191773716481

Someone counted 3 or 4 -- I forget -- separate rounds of layoffs after Musk said Twitter was done with layoffs. That's many things, but "providing [sic] clarity" it ain't.

edit:

> Musk has done at least three rounds of layoffs since his promise to stop doing them in November. [1]

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/21/23609522/elon-musk-more-t...

I guess, in its own way, knowing that there will be constant layoffs is a form of clarity?

Twitter kinda looks like a billionaire decided to pay a ridiculous amount of money for a company, just so he could destroy the livelihoods of thousands of people less fortunate.

Or an attempt to illustrate what happens when $40 billion and a narcissistic personality disorder meets Chesterton's fence.

Very good take imho

He also helped the livelihoods of a lot of Twitter stockholders, including people’s retirement savings.

> Notice how things have gone quiet around Twitter lately.

This was today: https://twitter.com/iamharaldur/status/1632843191773716481

I hate the attitude, the language and the fact that these people are running this world.

"Approved, you go ahead"

Just drains my energy and hope for the future.

I wonder what he thinks people think about him when they read this real life satire? There is an employee who doesn't know if he got fired or not and the CEO of his company now publicly wants him to explain what kind of work he was doing. Nobody even knows why: Will Elon decide whether this guy will be fired for real or get back his work pc access depending on his answers? Why is there no company internal way for Elon to figure out what someone does? Why does Elon engage publicly?

This is stunningly bizarre and such a bad look, the definition of a "shitshow".

I think Musk is a breath of fresh air from the sterile, managed, corporate-speak drones. He already proved a lot of... "experts" wrong about the imminent implosion of twitter after he got rid of a bunch of people. I'm very interested to see how things go in the next few years. Here's his side of the story on that.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1633011448459964417

I have worked in companies with a lot of dead wood in relatively senior roles. They may have done good work in the past, but they seem to stop doing much actual productive work and instead just kind of insert themselves into important projects and meetings and set about trying to make themselves sound indispensable. Yet they produce very little tangible output and their work can't be explained without vagueness and buzzwords. Leading efforts and driving changes and steering modernization and managing the paradigms, bringing stakeholders together, architecting solutions.

They're hard to get rid of for whatever reason. They've built little fifedoms, they have a reputation, they're very good at hobnobbing with middle management, or other dead wood.

Some orgs absolutely could benefit from a fresh pair of eyes to come in and have people justify their positions, and have the confidence and risk appetite to make some calls.

Now I don't know if Musk is telling the truth here, or anything about that ex-employee, his work or background. He might be a great worker who was well worth his salary in value created for Twitter. He could also be one of the other kinds, that failing orgs desperately need to rid themselves of. His twitter pitch is not highly confidence inspiring.

Twitter allegedly shed about 80% of its staff since Musk took over. Which is frankly staggering that it is still able to operate with 4 in 5 people in the company gone. Maybe that is cutting too far down to the bone but there has been no immediate implosion or collapse. Things still have a long way to play out, but clearly he did not throw darts at a board and fire random people or all the most productive ones if it could get that far.

Are you somehow unaware of the regular reliability issues (6 incidents in 2023 alone), downtime, collapse in revenue, advertisers erosion of trust, etc?

Personally, I couldn't classify that as 'operational' - but maybe I just have high standards and expectations

Twitter used to not work for me. I would actively avoid clicking on links to tweets as they would reliably not load on the first try, refreshing wasn't reliable either, and was quite slow.

I am today an active user of Twitter, and never have these issues anymore.

I don't use twitter much but I've always found it quite incredibly unreliable (for what it is and how many engineers they had working on it). Something was always "going wrong" with it. I haven't actually noticed any difference post-Musk. I'd easily believe if you pulled up stats showing it did get worse, there's simply been nothing you'd call an implosion of the service. It used to kind of work most of the time, and it still does.

I haven't really looked at financials. It's never been what you'd call healthy though, sans SV-bubble. I have heard they lost a lot of revenue since Musk took over but I'd imagine there has been a collapse in opex too so it's difficult to judge that one way or the other.

As for trust, I think a lot has been gained as well due to more transparency about their involvement with government censorship programmes. Again hard to really chalk that up one way or the other.

I'm not saying Twitter has suddenly become the golden goose under Musk, or that no technical operational aspect of it suffered after laying off 80% of their staff though, so this doesn't really address my point. My point is Twitter must have had a vast amount of positions that were not providing value and its actually refreshing to see a CEO go in and ask people to explain what they do, take bold action, and take ownership of those decisions.

The meek, managed, MBA, CEO style is to release a canned statement saying how sorry they are and how horrible they feel, and delegate salary or head count reductions down the line which actually doesn't help much with the dead wood situation and can even entrench it because they're often in lower level executive positions themselves.

My company has recently been through a round of these job cuts and we fired good, productive, very long term experts and immediately had to move people in other places to fill their exact positions (badly, because they barely worked with that code before and have to learn it all). Why? Because they worked in different branches of the organization. They fall under different VPs, and the edict said that everybody had to trim X%. It had nothing to do with what work they did, targets had to be hit so they had to go.

I would have killed to be able to take it to the CEO and be asked to explain what those people did to justify why they should stay on. That's why I find Musk a breath of fresh air. Not because he posts infantile memes on twitter or is rude to employees -- I don't think that twitter convo was very tasteful, he could certainly stand to improve how he goes about things. I just think his approach to running companies has some merit.

It’s not operating very well. Multiple public outages each weeks, 40% drop in income, and people are literally sleeping in bathrooms.

Works more or less the same as before really. There may be some differences but let's not pretend that many alleged experts were completely wrong in their predictions of imminent implosion. And I wonder how much expenses have dropped.

Corpspeak sucks and Twitter probably had more people than it needed. That being said, the solution to that is definitely not to hire someone who decides the final word for an exec is to post offensive memes on your account and shame individual employees after you fire thousands of them. The cuts weren’t quite random, but they were pretty haphazard, and a large part of why Twitter is still standing today is the work that went into improving it in the last decade, rather than smart decisions from Elon.

I think the problem with this take is that even though he's "shaking up" corporate culture, it's not, like, in a good way. Just randomness. More fun for the public to watch but I don't think we have many signs that any results are good.

I disagree obviously. I think it has merits and it's not "just randomness", whatever that means.

Twitter sucks now. Even its boosters are using “the service didn’t permanently collapse within 80 days of settlement, see?” as their metric of its success.

If it sucks now it sucked before. And the self-proclaimed "experts" who were certain it would imminently implode don't get to avoid being wrong by indefinitely stretching what imminent means or watering down what implode means.

The cruelty is the point.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1633253950198624257

And he apologises for firing him after humiliating him in public!

Probably realized there’s a multimillion severance contract in place.

Seems expected that he was fired. Elon is firing anyone who doesn't write code. He doesn't seem to be writing code, just a manager.

When does Elon realize he doesn't write code himself and fire himself?

Watching a grown man beg Elon musk for his job on a social media platform is not something I expected to ever see. It's been two weeks- if his paycheck didn't come through, he has his answer. Obviously a s-show led by Elon, but on LinkedIn especially I am seeing a lot of posts where these ex-FAANG employees, who usually score severance measured in months rather than days or weeks, and who were already raking in a $250k+ salary anyway (if you count bonus/RSUs), are so desperate to find another job "ASAP" as to make a post on LinkedIn to... try to get other people to find a job for them? The entitlement is rampant and I see no real difference between this Twitter conversation (if you can call it that) and the posts I frequently see on LinkedIn.

I'm out of date but in the past if your company was acquired and you were retained, you had to stay X years at the new company in order for the acquisition to be considered complete and you to get your complete payout. Dude probably wanted to know am I actually fired, because, then you need to, you know, pay me for my company? Elon tried to ghost dude, but old boy's got receipts is my guess. Elon just spent $$$ to save ¢¢¢. But maybe acquisitions/retained founders is different today. Elon rules though fake 'Twitter transparency' that lacks all nuance and detail but does have 200% more memes so who knows.

I agree. The Twitter exchange was cringey from both sides nonetheless.

I’m not sure why you find it strange that people who have lost their jobs look to their network for support?

It's strange. I know the colloquial wisdom is that it's not only NOT strange, but a good idea... but it's strange. It's usually ex-FAANG who are likely millionaires from a net-worth perspective, who were given weeks or months of severance, who would realistically have little trouble finding another job given their resume, yet they will compose a giant LinkedIn post about how woe is them and they need help finding another job - before they've even lifted a finger to find a job themselves. It belies everything they purport to be (e.g. "good enough to get a job at FAANG"- churned leetcode to pass the interviews, etc.), if you ask me.

> Watching a grown man beg Elon musk for his job

But that is not what is happening here at all.

Sure it is. He was asking Elon whether he still had a job, after being locked out of his account and not being paid for 2+ weeks, then he tweeted a litany of contributions he was making to the company to sell himself to Elon, whether that was his intent or not.

I'm not defending Elon, the whole thing has been a dumpster fire.

By all accounts Twitter has lost something like half its revenue and yesterday had regressed technically to the point where they couldn’t serve a hyperlink.

So there’s that.

Twitter already had a much lower workforce than FB or Google, etc. After a the cuts it’s even smaller so I guess there is just way lessons people who can or are interested in talking about it.

In 2022 their core business made 27 billion with 5 billion revenue if advertising income falls by ~12% ((27-24)/27) they are no longer profitable.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/A421/production/...

Haven't touched their platforms for years. User base in the USA keeps declining.

They need to cut expenses.

In Q3 2022 they made about $4.4B net profit on revenues of $27B.

Across the whole of 2022, it was $23B net profit on $117B revenue.

Not sure what you mean by “core business”. About 97% ($113B) of their revenue comes from advertising on Facebook, and half of that is in the US.

> Across the whole of 2022, it was $23B net profit on $117B revenue.

I'm not sure why who you were responding to assumed that if revenue dropped by 12%, profit would go to 0...

Wouldn't it be:

$117b revenue = $23b profit = 19.6% profit margin

If revenue went down 12%, margins would probably stay the same?

I have no idea what financial statement you’re looking at but this is not remotely correct.

you mean made $5b on $27b in revenue?

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