Elon Musk Urges More Companies to Shrink Like Twitter
wsj.com
wsj.com
A hiring company.
Now... think this through for a second. When Elon has opinions to share, they're always in his favor. But they're not always directly what he says, rather it's the aftermath of what he says, as hundreds of millions are listening to him.
If he's so desperate to hire good developers that he'd pay millions to get a tiny hiring company's employees working for him, while literally not paying Twitter's rent and bills... is he really trying to keep Twitter small at this point?
Or is he trying to grow it? But how can he have more people to pick from on the market? He recently complained that hiring is very hard right now for Twitter.
But what happens if he says "hey what I did was awesome, everyone should fire their developers... so I can hire some of them... I mean... I didn't say this. TWEET DELETED".
Every company that follows his advice, even partially, will collectively flood the market with developers, and he improves the situation for himself being able to pick better devs, and also at lower salaries, because when you have lots of unemployed devs, salaries go down.
You can be hyperproductive with few people. You can even be more secure, more detailed, ship more features in shorter time, and so on.
But the trick is entropy is always after you. Always. Case in point, Apple itself in recent years has dropped the ball. Some of their teams are lean and mean, classic Apple, while others have gone the corporate way of twiddling their thumbs all day (while still doing useful work, but not nearly as much). As Steve Jobs called them "C players".
It's not easy to manage culture in a giant company. No matter what you do, when the machine is complex, culture gets heterogenous, things slip through the cracks, and entropy ensures you have lots of people who all look busy at all times, doing little.
But what Twitter did has nothing to do with any of this. Because Elon Musk just went up and fired basically 90% of the company without even having understood WTF is it that most people he's firing are doing there. As evidenced by scrambling to re-hire some of them. Then firing them again, hiring them again. Now trying to hire again.
Musk is erratic and over-confident. Firing half the people in a company overnight while you're two weeks in is like losing half your weight overnight. There's no such weight loss program. Someone chopped you in half.
You don't die immediately though. You're conscious for many more minutes, before you bleed out and lose awareness. In corporate PoV this can take months and even a couple of years. But to me Twitter is dead. Elon is tryin resuscitation. Probably will fail.
There's a way to make a company like Twitter leaner. But it would've taken a couple of years. He didn't want to put the time in, and learn. He wanted to save cash. Saving this way leads to bankruptcy.