Hacker News Reader

Comment by fallingknife | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk bought Twitter and fired 80% of it's staff. Twitter is still perfectly functional (other than scaring off advertisers, but that has nothing to do with head count). Let's not pretend that bullshit jobs are very much real.

View on HN

And FAANG was able to hire and layoff massive numbers between 2020 and today while increasing revenue. Google is famously a bullshit factory that churns out products only to kill them.

It's a hell of a thing to realize that your only real function in an organization is as a part of some VP or other's empire.

One way to look at that particular event is companies needed to ramp up on product (Zoom, Teams, <remote tools>). It takes a lot to build a product, less so to maintain/operate said product.

When the monkeys are finished writing the story on the typewriter, it doesn't take as many monkeys to hit print on the copier.

And yes, there are bullshit jobs. Lots of them.

One unfortunate thing is that it pays well. If it didn't pay so well, perhaps there would be more intrinsically motivated folks who would attempt to accomplish something worthwhile regardless of the organization's myriad dysfunctions. As it stands, when I worked at Google, I mostly met people who treated earning the most money as the ultimate objective of their lives, and behaved accordingly (gaming promotion metrics, empire building, angling for peer/spot bonuses, etc.) — there wasn't much of a conception of eudaimonia, or if there was, it was a 'someday I will...', with no plausibility behind those aspirations.

"perfectly" functional? Half the pages require a refresh to display more than a spinner and tweets are shown out of chronological order of you're not logged in.

The first claim is false. The second is intentional to prevent scraping.

>works on my machine

I'm not going to die over it but Twitter constantly shows me tweets it already showed me 10 seconds ago. They're doing it wrong.

From anecdotal evidence(just reading news reports) and testimonies (verbal anecdotes from people who still work at Twitter IRL), I think Twitter's current headcount is pretty close to what it was when Musk originally bought Twitter.

The difference is they now use a lot of contractors. Many FTE's that survived the acquisition have stayed because the money is good and they don't want to bother with something affecting their work visa status.

I think scaring off advertisers did affect the num of employees needed. Twitter was slightly profitable at the time because they had built out an effective sales org. Musk eliminated most of them, and many of those who kept their jobs soon quit in frustration.

It’s typical for KTLO (keep the lights on) effort to be under 10% of an engineering team’s total load.

Normally this is so the other 90% of effort can go toward additional functionality; but there’s always the option of simply firing a ton of people and reducing the amount of feature development.

The discussion around the twitter purge was dumb because basically nobody involved had experience as an organizational leader.

Twitter/X is not functional at all. You're only looking at it from a technical standpoint and not a money-making standpoint. It has completely collapsed in the money-making department and has lost 71% of its value as a result:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/02/x-twitter...

He's lost about $31 billion so far. The website may still function (sometimes, LOL) from a technical perspective but from from a business perspective it is far from functional. Everything I've read (just now, in 5 minutes of searching) suggests that revenue continues to drop and nothing suggests it is on anything but a downward trajectory.

Aside: Before Musk purchased Twitter it was on an upwards trajectory gaining in revenue just about every year though continuously operating at a loss.

I feel like it is not perfectly functional as a business but is rather hanging on by a thread?

Is that because it doesn't have enough employees or because it has one who won't keep his mouth shut when he should?

It definitely involves doing a bad job at scale. But also perhaps some of those employees were keeping it stable. Many of them were things presumable, like, account managers and stuff for advertisers.

That said, yeah, I agree that it sounded like most of Twitter was bullshit. Actually I'm confused why the OP said "let's not pretend like bullshit jobs are real". Twitter seems to be pretty clear evidence that they are.

(I happen to think they're everywhere and that this article is just terrible. but even worse than bullshit jobs are the bullshit grift economy. After all lots of tech does make money, by doing stupid misanthropic shit. It's bullshit, but not because it's unproductive: just because it's productive at making the world worse for everyone else. Different problem.)

Yea, I keep saying that Twitter is in the "Wile E Coyote already ran off the edge of the cliff" phase and they are still moving forward on momentum alone. But, that gets harder and harder to argue the longer Twitter survives. What if some portion of that 80% really were not necessary? It sounds shocking, but the longer Twitter lives, the truer it becomes.

For about two years, I was an engineering company's only technical employee and I had little else to do besides answering customer support questions. The business was clearly on its last legs and had been so for years. This was just its last gasp.

As another poster mentioned, it requires very little technical staff to just keep the lights on if you're not doing anything to move the business forward.

I am in the same camp of thinking that Musk overestimated how many people he could lay off while keeping Twitter going. But it seems plausible to me that Twitter was somewhat overstaffed.

How many employees are “not necessary” depends on your priorities. If you mostly want to keep a site up and running, the requirements are relatively slim. Musk also laid off a large part of the Trust and Safety team, who don’t have much to do with keeping the site running technically but were responsible for moderation. Whether their jobs were “not necessary” depends on your assessment of how much moderation Twitter needs.

Wait, are you saying that none of the fired people had anything to do with keeping advertisers happy? That seems wrong on its face.

80% of a company's workforce shouldn't be dedicated to marketing

I understand that that's how things are right now, but let me tell you, I fucking hate it. Whatever or whoever will burn it all to the ground, or allow it to, I will support. Disingenuous or not. I don't like the guy and I think he's stupid and has a big ego. But I'm more interested in total marketing death.

Twitter/X is an advertising company. They exist to sell content created by others to advertisers. Of course 80% of the company should be dedicated to doing the thing that brings in revenue. The technical side isn't terribly interesting or important by comparison.

Elon, before he bought Twitter, thought of himself as the customer. He talked about all the things he would do to make his own experience better. But he was never the customer, he was the product. He fired everyone involved in making Twitter work for its real customers and revenue has suffered for it.

Much of what made advertisers unhappy was due to a combination of policy and outside activism, not smaller headcount.

I have no idea what proportion of Twitter's jobs were bullshit or not, but it is DEFINITELY less functional than before.

From images routinely failing to load, to the current mess of logins that is the dualistic nature of x.com vs twitter.com (where which accts appear logged in fluctuates constantly), to my current favorite bug of the last month, where it's always stuck in dark mode in mobile browsers...

Honestly, they might as well bring back the Fail Whale.

Not every job has to be "keeps the company from completely falling apart in the next X months / years" to not be bullshit.

Almost every company "could" run with fewer people. But I think that's more a choice than a demonstration of "bullshit job".

The idea that you have to race to a cliff of able to function to figure out what is bullshit seems absurd at face value.

I have no idea if Twitter was overstaffed or full of bullshit jobs, but this doesn't exactly prove anything. You could eliminate the majority or maybe even the entirety of things like maintenance staff and researchers from plenty of organizations and not see any short-term decline. That doesn't mean they weren't needed. There's also jobs that you know will be needed at some point but not when. This includes obvious things like first responders. Get rid of the fire department and you'll be fine until there's a fire. It includes less obvious things like the mid-career officer bloat in the military, which is there because the military intentionally overstaffs and trains people to do other jobs in case of mass casualty events in which it becomes necessary to immediately move a bunch of people into different jobs.

But twitter isn't perfectly functional now.

“working” but very obviously severely degraded.

One of the reasons to believe AI adoption can’t be escaped

"Even though we get fewer customers through the doors, the doors still open"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com