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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

Big orgs have plenty of people that need to justify their salaries, I mean it, I'm 100% convinced you could fire half the staff of a big organization, going heavy with the management roles and lighter on operational ones and the company would become more productive and efficient.

And the higher the people in the pyramid are the better they are at selling their ideas in their neverending quest for recognition, fat bonuses and promotions.

And once they get them, more often than not by doing pointless and even harmful work, they can then leverage it by jumping to another company.

Gervais' principle at its finest.

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The problem is that there's no outside way to tell which 50% is the useless half. It's just like marketing budget.

As someone who was spent 5+ years in one of their many acquired companies, SFDC management has a reasonably accurate sense of their best performing staff.

However, line and middle SFDC managers are partly evaluated based on the size of their orgs. This obviously leads to perverse incentives to bloat one's org; the loss of fiefdom then leads to loss of promotion opportunity and even employment.

If you can fire half of the people at a big company, you could also erase half the small startups with no impact as well.

Those startups take care of that themselves.

I would think most people would take that for granted. Small startups are often "pre-impact" (or "pre-failure", situation depending..)

Twitter as an example, showed us that the staff really do matter

To be fair, they became a lot more efficient if the goal was to streamline propaganda and bot adoption

I feel like Twitter is a bit of a Rorschach test. If you want to “keep the lights on” you can get away with mass layoffs, but your revenues and product development sure do suffer.

I think you’re going to see a lot of tech companies adopt a less acute version of this strategy unfortunately

It's another form taken by enshittification to squeeze more money from the business. Employees are the largest cost center. If a business can get away with less innovation then they will get rid of and hire less staff to maintain their margin.

Realistically, this is a delicate balancing act. As others have noted, the Sales and PR game then (and always) drives the new and existing monies that come in.

I thought Twitter fired 70% of manpower and still works?

It also lost 70% of its revenue.

And 80% of its value. Musk bought it at $44B. Fidelity recently used an internal valuation of $9.4B for their own shares in the company.

he bought presidency with it so it is not that bad of an investment. it is short-sighted to look at “twitter” value since he bought it, one should look his net worth since he bought it. even if closes it down tomorrow it will be money well spent

Next-level elon defense here.

“Elon made an obvious mistake? Oh no, newb. Look on this other indicator that reinforces my bias.”

not bias but facts :) he took over twitter, made it into right-wing propaganda machine, changed algorithm during the election campaign ... it is short-sighted to not take into account that he basically bought dissemination of public information and single-handedly swayed the election. if you think he bought twitter to make money off it I have some crypto to sell to you :)

That's gotta be the most inefficient way to start a microblog at effectively elonmusk.com

The deal still has me scratching my head. They tossed out the brand name and logo. Elon already had the X name and domain. For much less than $44B I feel like you could clone Twitter and come up with a strategy to acquire users. Hell, for $1 billion you could probably pay a good number of influencers to move to your platform. $44 billion is an absolute fuckton of money to kill Twitter and move those people to your pet project.

> $44 billion is an absolute fuckton of money to kill Twitter and move those people to your pet project.

What's the point of having Fuck You Money if you can't say "Fuck You?" Your value assessment isn't taking into account the value of destroying old Twitter, of removing a major bullhorn in the information environment away from people that Musk probably considers adversaries at best, and malevolent actors at worst. Simply standing up his own competing platform would not have accomplished this.

It's weird that everyone and their mum "could" clone twitter easily. And yet the only products of note that's more than dismissive hackernews comments/slideware with something in production at similar scale was meta with threads and that's still inferior in terms of search and discoverability and scaffolded with the guts of Instagram and bluesky which has the advantage of being founded by Jack Dorsey and has been around for years now. For all the big talk musk et al have I'm not sure they could actually have built a clone. You can pay influencers but if we look at how dominant tiktok is/was making buzz and content is more of an outcome of a bunch of incentivisations and the kind of non technical community management stuff people dismiss as marketing than throwing money at all the big names you can find.

That's less an issue of a lack of manpower and more the result of one person up top pushing everyone away. A less annoying owner could lay off 70% of the staff without gutting revenue.

Though Elon Musk's purchase of the company was entirely in his own self-interest, and unfortunately, it's serving him well so far. Buying a company for a fraction of his personal wealth and leveraging that into having the president as his personal servant is one of the greatest investments in American history.

That's unrelated to the staff trim.

Unless I'm missing something, there's also been no innovation in their product at all. A company can only coast for so long.

Was there innovation in the twitter product pre-elon?

Shows that having H1Bs you can hold hostage lets you get away with anything. If it weren’t for their captive workforce they would have had far bigger problems than an unreliable service, rapidly declining user base, and imploding revenue.

Let's not forget the cheaper out-/"near"-sourced employees. Geographic arbitrage to save on the cost of staff.

Seems like an odd takeaway to me - they fired 90% of their staff and now pump out new features way more quickly than old Twitter.

What features? Only updates I ever hear is various security features getting disabled/going dead and various tech demos getting checked out/failing.

The opposite, I think. It showed us how bloated the average tech corp actual is. Musk may have went too far with his cuts, but directionally I believe he’s right.

The hard part is figuring out which half. And figuring out who the right people to make those decisions.

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