Hacker News Reader

Comment by oxfordmale | Hacker News Reader

In one of my previous company, there was a "keeping the light on" plan. It specified the minimum number of people needed to run the company. However, CEO was clear this was just managed decline and not a viable mode of operating the business.

It allowed the company to meet regulatory obligations. However, overtime, customers would leave because of the poor service.

Meta can likely run effectively with even less Engineers. However, the lack of exciting projects will prevent them from attracting top talent. Overtime their product offering will become less interesting than their competitors.

Napster, Tumblr and Yahoo are still around, however, they are a shadow of what they once were.

View on HN

I suspect “lack of exciting projects” is not driving people away as effectively as “tumbling stock price” and “likelihood of getting fired”.

Lack of exciting projects often manifests as 'difficulties building a positive career trajectory' in the promo system used at Meta.

I’m just saying, even if you get a promo and your stock-based comp jumps 30%, it’s a moot point if the stock itself has dropped 50%. Or, you know, you get laid off.

I suspect Twitter is also "dead walking" at this point.

Did Twitter need to be more than keep the lights on?

I thought HN's refrain 2 years ago was how ridiculous it was that a simple product that didn't need to add features had a large headcount + how many businesses would be better off running stable instead of for growth.

Well, here we go.

> Did Twitter need to be more than keep the lights on?

In my view (early Twitter user, briefly worked at Twitter years ago), definitely yes. Twitter spent years bumping along and riding on their network effect. But that can't last forever. Twitter should have been energetically using their strengths to expand beyond their core product. For basically the same reasons that Google needed to be more than a search company. And toward the end of Jack's reign, they were finally showing signs of progress toward a decent level of product experimentation, so I had real hope for them.

Or maybe, there’s a spot somewhere between bloated and skeletal that makes more sense.

Well, there are thousand spots based on thousand opinions.

I think it would be a pretty disingenuous argument that Musk's leadership is closer to "stable" than what was happening before, which is probably why you're the only one even alluding to it.

They are finally not losing money. Things are better at twitter and stable. And they are not as funded by advertising which is a win for many

Twitter was basically break-even before: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/

> And they are not as funded by advertising which is a win for many

That is "pony in there somewhere" levels of optimism about Musk wrecking relationships with Twitter's major source of revenue: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/17/advertisers-see-elon-mus...

In terms of headcount.

No need to argue against a person, instead of the objective scenario I proposed.

Well, if twitter was bloated by a very big team it needs to be shrank first to become a smaller product.

All this bloated legacy code is still there and would have to be rewritten.

The teams that over-complicated the simple app wanted to show that they do something. When they are gone, their bloated code will not magically become small.

And no I dont think that Twitter layoffs were performed well. Just observing that those two things are not a contradiction.

On a side note: after upgrades of many apps or programs or websites that do them worse I often think that a lot of people complicate things or change things for the sake of showing that they are doing something.

Private equity will likely swoop in at some point to scavenge the carcass. However, I doubt that will happen before Elon watches most of his investment disappear in the bonfire.

You are under estimating the guys ability to get out of shit. Twitter is now private company as long as he no longer has to put more money into it he wont sell for less than what he paid as his ego won't allow it.

I think Elon does have to pay the debt interest rate if Twitter can’t add more debt to its books.

What does Napster even do now? Can you imagine meeting someone who still works there? I’d have so many questions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com