Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes.
Then when you design more features, security and other various systems to serve the customers it will creep in complexity. You can not escape that no matter what you do.
He had a point there though: He said that there seem to be "3 managers 'managing' one engineer", and I believe this is a common problem in the industry. VC-funded startups are terribly overstaffed and over-inflated.
When you cut the company to 1/3 and keep foreigners because of their visa status, nobody is gonna say anything of course, but that says a lot about you!
I do not believe that half the company was just "overstaff". I have been in situations where 1 manager had 1 reporter/reported, but they were single cases - it can't be spread to the entire company and nobody does anything.
That... you care about people regardless if they are foreigners and that you try to help those that would have the most problems if they were let go, especially as these problems are a consequence of your hiring of them?
I'm not familiar with the story, but from the way you presented it it sounds like a proper thing to do.
EDIT: not taking Musk's side, just pointing out the issue with the parent's argument.
A lot of tech companies have bloat in the form of AI ethics people, DEI people and so on. They need to go. But Musk probably hurt twitter a lot in short term by firing a lot of engineers and making it a place that made people unhappy.
These do actually have a proper job. They do ethics laundering for the tech companies and are very valuable.
Introduced failing ideas that made him ridiculous world wide, ... to finally hire a CEO.
And now he is using the platform to influence elections and events - free for all. Sure.
Not to mention HR managers.
I have seen situations where there are 10% engineers to 50% "assorted management" in tech companies. (the remaining 40% being a mix of sales and support staff such as office management).
I generally agree with you on your comment. I am a casual user of X these days and the site seems to be humming along without any user facing engineering issues.
With his products such as Tesla, X and Starlink touching millions of people daily Elon is an easy to reach punching bag.
Even if he is somehow instrumental in solving the massive feat of putting humans safely on Mars there will always be people on the side lines having shots at him.
There is a case to be made that Twitter would have been profitable if it didn't torch money on unnecessary complexity, but the crashing ad revenue suggests Musk is not the business genius that you might expect.
That's not a bot if you are not a bot? I know it's 'normal', but I still it as a bug. AI classifying me as something I not is a bug.
That's the most directly obvious thing that has happened post takeover.
The point is you can.
Choosing not to do is probably more important than being able to do.
Organizations are reflected in the products they create. We shape our teams and thereafter they shape us.
This doesn't mean brain teasers or other arbitrary metrics with standard bell curve distribution so you can pick the statistical outliers and claim you've done this. That's totally wrong because that's not what you're fitting.
Those are filters that produce stochastic results with merely the statistical properties of these rules of thumb.
If you're looking for a programmer, here's a better test: think if some famous programmer walked in and sat down to do your process. Could they pass? If the answer is "dice roll", meaning you'd say, turn down Rob Pike or Larry Wall, then you're doing it wrong.
As far as X, Musk is insane and drunk with power, that is not this.
Is it though? Small, lean, teams have fewer processes, less distractions, better communication, and more flexibility in what they can do. I've been in such teams and built such scalable systems and there was nothing 80-100 hours about it. It turned worse once the company was acquired and management and "specilised" workers were brought in.
what happened?
And one massive security breach.
We hit maximum reply lengths but yes there has been. And a massive security breach.
Most common thing people use it for is posting and reading. If you fake feeds as if they are real-time then the viewer will never know there was a system outage.
I am almost positive there was a massive security breach too.
That's a very serious allegation, as it would be illegal to not report it. Can you add some details?
Ideologically or from a service perspective? I don't see any noticable drop in the latter. Some disruption is expected as huge parts of the team is fired/leaves, but I see it going on in business as usual otherwise.
True but different: even ignoring how many of them were customer support and moderation, once the tech stack gets complex, you can't just snap your fingers and act like it's a simpler stack.
Even if a fresh 3-good-graduates team can reach feature parity with your now-1000-person team, when they've had 6 months from `git init` and you've been at it since the new team were in Kindergarten, the only way for the big corp to do the same is to buy out the new team and then leave them alone.
Has it? I've had the exact same experience.
efficiency shrinks by more team also you get other people. if you are working on something you stay alive until it's done.
≠ a job