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The Twitter layoffs being used as proof of _anything_ is misguided no matter what you're trying to say.

If success is losing half their revenue, reverting to revenue numbers from a decade ago, I gotta know what failure looks like. You might argue that the revenue losses aren't correlated to their headcount changes and probably make a good argument, but I mean... It's not a great one

Really? Revenue loss was pretty directly tied to Elon replying and supporting some "jews vs whites" type posts in Nov 2023.

That caused Apple, Coke, and many other large clients to stop advertising.

That would be the good argument, yes.

Elon very publicly killed brand safety efforts. Advertisers care a lot about the context that their ads appear in.

My understanding is that Twitters revenue was

  5   billion in 2021
  4.4 billion in 2022 (When Elon made bid and took over company)
  3.4 billion in 2023
  2.6 billion in 2024
  2.9 billion in 2025

What's the operational cost now? 10K to 2K employees. 30 Engineers.

It doesn’t cost much to keep the lights on. As far as I know, X post-acquisition is not investing in innovation anymore.

Musk might have been right that shifting to KTLO mode was a good idea, but the company would still be better off if someone other than him had bought it and done the same thing.

Mo biggie on revenue loss. They axed most of their staff and went from 2k devs to 30. Trade off seems fine

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47176049

I couldn't possibly disagree with this more. Since the acquisition Twitter/X has had far more features at a far faster pace than in the 10 years prior. They've added all sorts of great stuff, and recently have been near the top of the charts in the Apple App Store.

What features are you referring to?

There's more but this is a most of them.

X Premium subscription tiers (Basic, Premium, Premium+) with paid blue checkmark verification Post editing (limited window).

Longer posts (up to 25,000 characters).

Longer video uploads (up to hours and multi-GB files).

For You algorithmic feed and Following chronological tab.

Grok AI chatbot integration (with image/video generation via Grok Imagine).

Audio and video calls (encrypted).

XChat encrypted messaging with vanishing messages and file sharing.

Creator revenue sharing from ads and engagement.

Creator subscriptions for paywalled content.

Articles for long-form publishing.

Community Notes expansion (crowdsourced fact-checking).

Communities for interest-based groups.

Bookmark folders.

Reader mode for threads.

Reply prioritization for Premium users.

X Pro (advanced tools like multi-timelines and search).

Media Studio for managing uploads.

Job search and hiring features.

Starter Packs for curated follows.

Video reactions/responses.

Priority notifications tab.

Enhanced cashtags with real-time info.

Global trending emphasis in Explore.

Widgets for iOS home/lock screen.

Updated payouts based on verified impressions.

Topic selection in For You feed.

Free Premium access for high-follower accounts (>2,500 verified followers get Premium; >5,000 get Premium+)

The company lost about $12 billion in enterprise value between the last two transactions.

Valuation is not important. These are private market transactions. Ultimately all the investors made out well, and it seems the company is more profitable than it was before. At least expenses are way down and if those expenses are correct then they are paying off the debt and making a good profit.

I've never seen the motivation behind buying Twitter to have been revenue, or free speech for that matter. Elon wanted a unique content source to train LLMs on and he got it. Whether that proves out as a good training dataset is still up in the air, but I can't imagine he cared about Twitter revenue.

This is not even intended for the LLM training use case. it is an afterthought use case. He installed a president who he can use. Twitter acquisition helped him achieve this.

Oh I don't think Trump needed Elon buying Twitter to win his second term.

The Democrats basically handed it to him with the whole Biden/Harris fiasco.

If by that you mean their unrelenting support for Israel, then yes, That was the reason.

Oh sorry, no I meant them shoving Biden into the candidacy despite clear health issues, shutting down any primary challenge, and swapping Harris in late in the game when it was abundantly clear Biden's health was a problem.

Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months of the layoffs.

It didn't.

Anyone who has worked at a large company knows that 1/2 the staff there is stuck keeping the lights on because it is easier to hire a warm body than fix tech debt.

I've worked at companies that are literally 10x more effective than other competitors in the market purely due to good engineering practices.

Even within large companies, you can have orgs that are dramatically more effective than others, often due to having to work under just the right set of resource constraints. Too little and no investments in the future, too much and it becomes easiest to build fast and hire people to duct tape the mess that is left behind.

You and the poster above disagree about the state of Twitter.

Twitter had been a growth company, it was early/missed the market with Vine, but was showing ad growth.

Now, as a private company, backed by the world's richest man, sovreign wealth funds, and banks that have written down their stakes, it has different economics than a tech / growth company.

It's ad revenue is now, not in the ballpark of the fortune 500 or trendy Instagram ads, but somewhere between reddit and sin site markets.

The purpose of Twitter is IMO no longer to be profitable.

For a man with a trillion dollar fortune it’s just his personal equivalent of Fox News, a way to shape the nations conversation.

Plus a way to get data for xAI.

In that regard it’s a huge sucess. I use grok to find out about stuff on X and it’s very effective. Grok is also nowhere as bad as it should be (it’s still not great).

Shape national conversations*, sure.

A way to get data for xAI? Eh, I guess. But it's a source of bad data. Most social media is, even the best case is stuff like Stack Overflow. It wouldn't surprise me if this was at least a strong component of why Grok called itself "Mecha Hitler".

Huge success? Unfortunately I have to agree, given the US government still ended up integrating it despite the Mecha Hitler incident.

> I use grok to find out about stuff on X and it’s very effective.

As with all of these things, I have to ask: How confident are you that it's telling you true things, rather than just true-sounding things? My expectation is Grok will be overtraining on benchmarks (even relative to the others, who will also be doing so at least a bit), and Grok's benchmarks will include twitter reactions, and it will be Goodhart's-law-ing itself in the process to maximally effective rhetoric rather than maximally effective (even by the standards of other LLMs) "truth-seeking".

* plural, not "the", it also works in at least the UK as well as the US

You can ask Grok for “find me this tweet on X, with direct links for sources” and it will do that. It’s basically a super charged fuzzy search engine for X which is great, since a lot of my searches are half remembered tweets that I’d like to find again.

So it’s accurate in the sense that it’s accurate finding things on X. I don’t really use it for anything else.

Thanks, that makes sense. I read too much into your previous comment and thought you were finding out more about things beyond twitter after they were discussed on twitter.

Most companies aren't that. Twitter is basically yellow journalism owned by a robber barron, just like in the 1880s.

> Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months of the layoffs.

It did, just not obviously. Twitter used to be the store brand social network, vanilla and reliable but not overly obnoxious. It made good money from brand advertisers like Ford, General Mills, and Sony. City governments felt ok with using it to distribute community information. The platform tried its hardest to stay middle of the road and not let things sway too far one way or the other.

Today it is a real time bidding marketplace for changing public discourse. You simply buy blue checkmark accounts in bulk and spread your message free of any content moderation or safeguards. So the Chinese, Russians, and Saudis can get into a bidding war over what rural whites believe to be fact.

With the ad revenue sharing program you don't even need to write the content anymore (one of the biggest things foreign influence campaigns struggle with). Just find someone who is saying the "right" thing already and promote them. Twitter in turn underscores the authenticity of these voices by adding "transparency" features that list where someone is from - because your average person does not know a damn thing about proxies.

I don't know if I've seen "tech debt" do serious damage to any company, and I've been around a long time. I've definitely seen whole teams grind to a halt in pursuit of someone's idealized vision of the "perfect way to organize code" though. They always couch it in the language of tech debt, but really it's just the loudest person's preferred way to shuffle files around - and usually in the direction of more complexity and not less.

Proving a negative and all that. I’ve definitely seen it do crazy damage, features that should take a week takes six months and turn out to need another year of fixing. But that’s the easy part, the hard part is how it affects culture and how the skilled people leave because they’re severely underutilized.

So when some people talk about tech debt we don’t talk about perfect code or file structure, it’s about painting a wall in a tropical rain, building a house during an earthquake etc. So count yourself happy I guess.

> I don't know if I've seen "tech debt" do serious damage to any company, and I've been around a long time

Just to provide a counter data-point, I've certainly seen companies not being able to move anymore because of tech debt. It's not for nothing that so much has been written about it, and about the ways to fix it.

Your other point stands - the resume-driven development is also a real problem.

> I've worked at companies that are literally 10x more effective than other competitors in the market purely due to good engineering practices.

Most big tech companies get taken over by leadership with no tech background eventually and the engineering bar drops to the floor.

I can't think of a more quintessential crash out of a major brand than Twitter from the past couple years. For a significant percentage (>10% publicly, I'm confident much more than that internally) of users it became unattractive.

If Microsoft did something that resulted in 300 million users leaving it would be considered crashing and burning, but I guess when Elon does the same proportion someone will show up to explain why losing half your revenue is better than losing all of it.

I just want to know who those people are so that I can pitch them on my next investment fund.

Weren’t most of the losses down to Musk’s weird political stance rather than the effects of the staff reduction?

It’s the same for his cars, they haven’t suddenly got worse at building them. It’s just that most people don’t want to buy from someone like Elon.

> It’s the same for his cars, they haven’t suddenly got worse at building them.

Actually, they demonstrably have. The Cybertruck is a technical and commercial disaster.

You're correct that most people don’t want to buy from someone like Elon Musk. A huge additional problem for Tesla, though, is that instead of focusing on the business that he's paid to run, its CEO has busied himself with far-right demagoguery for the last couple of years. While that was going on, a variety of Far Eastern companies quietly brought a bunch of EVs to market, that are mostly at least as well-made as Tesla's vehicles, while also being cheaper.

On the roads where I live, I now see about ten of these competitors' cars for every Tesla.

> It’s the same for his cars, they haven’t suddenly got worse at building them.

The Cybertruck begs to differ.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that monstrosity.

I mean your point isn't unfair, but the conversation so far os going something like

>"Other companies are following the example set, they fired 70% of people without damaging the company"

>"But isn't the company in shambles?"

>"Well sure, but that's for unrelated reasons."

Surely even if that's true these famously superstitious cargo-culting executives wouldn't want to follow that example?

> Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months of the layoffs.

I remember people celebrating and praising Musk, predicting new era of free speech twitter that earns tons of money and is massively effective.

Meanwhile, it lost on value, lost on income, became nazi echo chamber and overall much worst version of itself. It did not "crash and burned" simply because Musk was willing to pay huge amount of money for all of that. What it shows is that original engineering was good and reliable, actually.

> Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months

I was there, and no, it's not true. There were debates about it and no consensus.

He's a VC now. That's how they think

For that to be true, the revenue loss would have to be related to the loss of headcount, e.g. due to downtime or other issues. Rather the revenue loss was due to an advertiser boycott driven by Elon's rejection of woke politics. That wouldn't apply to other tech companies that made similarly deep layoffs.

Look at it this way. Could Google lay off 70% of employees and keep the lights on, even still launching some new features on core properties, whilst preserving revenue? It'd be surprising if the answer was no.

> After the massive X/Twitter layoffs (60-70% headcount culled) with X/Twitter still standing, this assumption was clearly proven false.

Twitter at the same time removed features to have fewer things to support. And didn't implement anything new (or really fix much) for ages. It's not the same service that was standing afterwards. And the "still standing" ignores the part where they started serving empty timelines, repeated messages from broken paging, broke 2fa for days, messed up whole continent access, etc. etc. They survived (and still had fewer problems than I expected), but it wasn't smooth at all - hardly a success too.

The search functionality has been mostly broken (in several, overlapping ways) for several years now

The thing is, as an outsider to Twitter but with 20 years of experience doing software dev including some time at internet scale web and mobile, I don't think that the basic "fetch a timeline" backend plus two front end apps and a web interface is that hard, a small team (<100 engineers) definitely could do that with modern cloud infrastructure. But that's not what the Twitter product was. We've just described nothing more than the bait to lure the product, which was advertisers running ads.

Most of the effort in the original Twitter- engineering and everything else- was about getting advertising revenue. That meant 1) Having good data mining to identify user interests to match ads against 2) Having a strong user experience like Meta Ads or AdSense for the ad buyers 3) Keeping the conversations such that advertisers wanted to be associated with it, both automated and manual censorship 4) Having good relationships with advertisers, both large clients and agencies

That was where the majority of Twitter's (dev and non-engineering both) effort was going, to bringing in the revenue from advertisers. When Elon Musk purchased Twitter advertising fell dramatically immediately, at basically the same time he gutted all of the people doing the advertising. That was why he tried "buying a blue-check" and so many premium features, because he got rid of all the infrastructure necessary to have a serious ads platform. And premium doesn't work, of course, as anyone with experience in the Internet world could have told him. Which is why the value of the company- and its revenues- have declined so dramatically since the acquisition.

Bluesky is basically doing the same thing as X right down to also not running ads, which is how they also manage to run on a small team. Last I checked they'd raised less than 20m, and have basically no revenue, so they are able to operate very lean. It's for the same reason that Twitter is a lot smaller now: ads are a huge engineering and non-tech effort. As Alphabet and Meta remind us, it can be insanely profitable, but you need a lot of people to get it right.

Also the logged out experience is broken and has been broken for years since it was acquired by Musk.

Just look at the logged out version of Musk's own profile.. at the top it's showing Tweets from 2022 & 2024 (these are not pinned Tweets)

https://x.com/elonmusk

> And finally, COVID proved to a large number of companies and industries that 100% WFH and Async for white collar roles does work. But wait, if I can hire Joe in Cary to work async, why can't I hire Jan in Karlin, Prague or Jagmeet in Koramangla, Bangalore? This means I can also enhance FCF positivity while not impacting delivery.

Cultural differences. Things like "saving face" / not being able to admit a lack of knowledge in Asian cultures, Americans that need to be coddled (the higher up, the more dumbed down execs want information because they insist on micromanaging - they try to have their cake and eat it at the same time), Germans being blunt and direct to the point it offends Americans, Americans unable to comprehend Europe has labor regulations including on overtime and on letting go of staff... if you just say, you hire a bunch of bodies somewhere else and expect that to work out, you end up screwed - and many did end up screwed. In both ways, by the way.

It doesn't matter anymore.

Output is good enough - much of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, Broadcom, and other tech companies backbone infra or core IP is already implemented and owned by product and engineering teams in Poland and India or by foreign nationals in the US on work visas (eg. PyTorch). And if middle managers cannot manage to maintain output when faced with those with cultural differences, we'll fire them and hire people who can.

This is why you see the trope of "Indian C-Suite means layoffs and offshoring" - it's not the C-Suite that makes this decision, it's boards that decided to do so and thus hired an Indian origin C-Suite to operationalize that strategy. It's the same reason why Taiwanese Americans were over-represented in Hardware Engineering C-Suite roles 10-20 years ago when "China Shock" began in hardware industries.

It became easier to hire Jans and Jagmeets after a large number of SWEs and middle-managers in tech who were on visas were given the option to either be laid off or relocate to the old country and open a GCC during the initial COVID recession. And I may as well hire Pawel and Param as Product or Engineering Directors in MTV or SF and have them fly out to the Prague, Warsaw, Bangalore, or Hyderabad office every couple weeks.

> Americans unable to comprehend Europe has labor regulations including on overtime and on letting go of staff...

That's Western Europe (think Germany, France).

Central and Eastern Europe (think Czechia, Poland, Romania) roll out the red carpet for us, and we pay 75th-90th percentile salaries in those markets (which usually ends up being in the $80K-130K TC range) meaning we get the cream of the cream.

Heck, Czechia and Poland have dedicated bureaucrats who work with us to solve regulatory issues and give several thousand dollar per year per head subsidizes when investing in building a GCC. It's the same with India as well.

So you just discovered offshoring of jobs? Like it has been going for the past decades. I don't see how AI or twitter changes anything to the outlook of the C suite. Lower spending increase productivity. If hiring Poles instead of Americans can achieve this goal, they were always going to do that.

Take a look at his post history, all he does is shill for offshoring so his portfolio companies can save a buck on labor costs.

> 1. Move to a Tier 1 tech hub like the Bay and NYC. If you get laid off, you will probably find another job in a couple of weeks due to the density of employers.

> 5. Live lean, save for a rainy day, and keep your family and friends close. If you're not in a financial position to say "f##k you" you will get f##ked, and strong relationships help you build the support system you need for independence.

All you have to do is move you and your family to the most expensive places in the world. But also live lean and save for a rainy day.

The median SWE TC in the Bay Area is $272k [0]. After tax and a fully loaded Roth 401K that is around $143,000.

And that's just for 1 person. Your spouse (if you have one) is most likely also working in a white collar job as well which we'll impute with the median income in they Bay which is $75k [1], but in reality is an underestimate as your spouse is likely to work in a tech, biotech, medicine, finance, accounting, healthcare, or government adjacent field which would increase their income significantly.

Using the $75k imputed spousal take-home, that would make your joint household income after tax and both maxing out Roth 401k to be around $180,000.

Renting a 2-4 bedroom single family home in a family friendly locale like the Tri-Valley, South Bay, or the Peninsula comes out to around $4.5K/mo, which means you have around $126K per year.

Let's remove $26K due to household expenses (which I personally think is excessive - my household operates on $1.5K/mo and we live pretty extravagantly in San Francisco) and you end up with $100K in cash after a fully loaded 401K, taxes, and rent.

Put around 60-65% of that in a couple ETFs (expecting around 5%-9% returns) and the remaining 35-40% in liquid cash savings.

That means you have around $60K per year invested in easy to liquidate assets, around $50K per year invested for retirement, and around $40K per year in hard cash.

This is why it works and why most people in Tech still remain in the Bay or NYC (similar math).

If you cannot live lean with a 3 person household using the math above in the Bay Area - a region where the MEDIAN household income is $137K [2] - then frankly you have major character defects.

[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra...

[1] - https://www.bayareaequityatlas.org/indicators/median-earning...

[2] - https://vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/indicators/income

It was mostly a joke about the flippant way your comment added in "keep your family and friends close" after moving to highest cost places in the world.

First, many people may not want to move, even if their kids or siblings move. Other people have friends and family too.

Second, many people may not have the skills or drive to get the "median" paying job necessary to live the desired quality of life.

Third, many people and/or their family may not be healthy enough to afford dual high income households.

Obviously, earning a lot of money while spending minimally is a path to success, and obviously moving to the Bay Area and NYC is one of the higher probability routes to success and upward movement (at least financial), but it's not without other costs.

For those with the desire to attain that financial success, I encourage them to follow the playbook. But I would not expect them to keep friends and family close.

> First, many people may not want to move, even if their kids or siblings move. Other people have friends and family too.

Absolutely, but then they shouldn't complain on HN that they aren't getting jobs because they aren't open to relocating from Skokie to San Jose.

> many people may not have the skills or drive to get the "median" paying job

The 25th percentile TC for a SWE is 200K in the Bay Area [0]. If you are not even in the top 75 percent of SWEs you are already on the chopping block.

> obviously moving to the Bay Area and NYC is one of the higher probability routes to success and upward movement (at least financial), but it's not without other costs. For those with the desire to attain that financial success, I encourage them to follow the playbook.

The brutal reality is, if you aren't working in the Bay or NYC, we are going to offshore you. We can get the cream of the crop in Europe, Israel, or India with a Chicago, Dallas, or Atlanta TC along with added FDI subsidizes. As such, we have no reason to hire a median employee for 100% WFH who lives outsides the Bay+NYC and pay what is essentially a premium.

Additionally, you don't have to live in the Bay or NYC forever. Spend 10-15 years of your career, build that nest egg, and then return to your hometown if you really dislike the Bay or NYC. You will have reached financial independence and that gives you the flexibility to take a $75k-120k TC dev role (at that pricepoint you are safe from offshoring if you are a Bay+NYC tier developer).

> But I would not expect them to keep friends and family close

If you cannot afford to fly to our fly out your retired parents to stay with you for a couple weeks and can't fly out to meet with them with the priors I mentioned, then you have major issues. Most Asian American (Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, etc) and Eastern European (Russians, Israelis, etc) families would do something similar in the Bay.

[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/san-fra...

Flying parents in for a couple weeks is not what I interpret as "keeping friends and family close".

I interpret that as more like parents/siblings/cousins/close friends live in the neighborhood or close enough that they can be depended on and vice versa during illnesses/extended work hours/whatever else.

>Spend 10-15 years of your career, build that nest egg, and then return to your hometown if you really dislike the Bay or NYC. You will have reached financial independence and that gives you the flexibility to take a $75k-120k TC dev role (at that pricepoint you are safe from offshoring if you are a Bay+NYC tier developer).

You might have reached financial independence, or you might not. You might have been able to meet a suitable life partner in that location, or might not. Maybe you would have found a more compatible partner closer to home, via your network of family and friends. You might be able to reach financial independence before having a baby, or you might watch your prime child rearing years pass you by.

I have lived it, and I have seen my peers live it. I know lots of families split between NY/Bay Area/Seattle/LA/Boston/London/etc. The family members see each other on special occasions, but it doesn't have the same vibe as being part of a family or friends circle that interacts at least weekly if not daily. Everyone is rich, and has fun together for a couple nights of food and drinks, but who is really there for one another when shit hits the fan? There is no shared struggle, only shared vacation, and that cultivates only weak social bonds. But then again, who needs strong social bonds when you're on the way to $10M+ in the brokerage account?

> It was mostly a joke...

woosh on my end! sorry about that! I've dealt with some people on HN who are serious about not being able to make ends meet making a mid-career SWE salary in much of the US.

> I interpret that as more like parents/siblings/cousins/close friends live in the neighborhood or close enough that they can be depended on and vice versa during illnesses/extended work hours/whatever else.

Ah yea that makes sense. I meant close emotionally, but even then if possible one should help your siblings and close friends relocate here (or nearby like Oregon, Nevada, or SoCal) as well. Most of my peers have done similar stuff as well.

> The family members see each other on special occasions, but it doesn't have the same vibe as being part of a family or friends circle that interacts at least weekly if not daily. Everyone is rich, and has fun together for a couple nights of food and drinks, but who is really there for one another when shit hits the fan? There is no shared struggle, only shared vacation, and that cultivates only weak social bonds. But then again, who needs strong social bonds when you're on the way to $10M+ in the brokerage account?

That a good point - familial dynamic plays a role as well.

I grew up in an Asian American household, and in a lot of Asian, Southern+Eastern European, and Middle Eastern cultures, a "family as a clan" mentality exists (blood is thicker than water) and that helps build and maintain ties.

We keep close professional and financial ties amongst each other - my parents paid for my college, I paid for my sibling's college, they paid a portion of my grad school, I and my parents helped them purchase a place, etc etc.

We worked hard to make sure all of our extended family was centered in the Bay Area or parts of Asia with nonstop airline access to the Bay, and our spouses do similar stuff as well. I mean this does come down to how closely knit your family is.

you're doing the honorable by offering solutions

This is the recommendation I have heard peers, both technical and managerial, echo for years in one form or another:

  4. Upskill professionally. We're not hiring code monkeys 
  for $200K-400K TC. We want Engineers who can communicate 
  business problems into technical requirements. This means 
  also understanding the industry your company is in, how to 
  manage up to leadership, and what are the revenue drivers 
  and cost centers of your employer. Learn how to make a 
  business case for technical issues. If you cannot 
  communicate why refactoring your codebase from Python to 
  Golang would positively impact topline metrics, no one will 
  prioritize it.

The above involves one thing people can possess which GenAI cannot; understanding stakeholder problems which need to be solved and then doing so.

You seem to have forgotten politics, since at the managerial level that is the most effective tool at hand. Engineers with their arguments and rethoric be damned.

Engineers can make an argument if you can also logically and coherently tie your argument with outcomes that can grow pipeline and/or revenue.

Most customers that matter to a business don't churn due to subpar user experience - discounting, roadmap, and dedicating a subset of engineering staff to handle bugs originating from a handful of the most important accounts is enough to prevent churn.

That said, this advice only really holds in the US (and that too in the major tech hubs). If you work in Western Europe you're shit out of luck as a SWE - management culture there just doesn't give a shit about software, because for most Western European businesses software is a cost center, not a revenue generator.

This is right on all counts and matches what I've seen and heard. And to all the sibling comments arguing about Elon's Twitter shenanigans being a bad move, it doesn't matter. I know because that's exactly what I said to a senior executive who deals with even more senior executives, and those were his exact words: "It doesn't matter." (A bit more in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750804)

I think their attitude could be summed up with this line by the Architect from the Matrix: "There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept."

I would only differ on one point: the situation was not this bad 2015-22. I would actually put the painful periods around the dot-com bust and the GFC. In fact, while not as great as the post-COVID heydays, things actually took off post 2010-ish. This timeline coincided with Meta starting a talent war at the same time that the Apple/Google no-poaching collusion lawsuit was filed.

That sentiment really makes it feel like this entire global economy is balancing on a toothpick of vibes and peer pressure, rather than some carefully navigated system of systems and backups. Wonder how long it can hold out before the camel breaks.

I am beginning to think it's always been like this, which is why the global economy goes through wild ups and downs every few years.

> It's harder to layoff someone you have had beers or coffee with

Interesting, in my experience this hasn't mattered at all. Generally those close enough to an employee to have had beers with them aren't the ones making any decisions related to layoffs, and may themselves be on the chopping block.

Network higher up the stack and be extremely likable

I'm not going to go out of my way to kiss asses, of that's what you mean.

I don't avoid people higher up the org chart, our paths will just rarely cross and we generally are leading pretty different lives.

>After the massive X/Twitter layoffs (60-70% headcount culled) with X/Twitter still standing, this assumption was clearly proven false.

I agree with your sentiment, but this example is awful. Twitter cut engineering staffed, pissed off advertisers that caused an exodus, had its stock steadily declining under Musk, and eventually decided to go private again. Only to be "aquired" by Musk's AI wing. Maybe there was a large cut that can happen, but Musk explicitly mentions how his plan was always to "over fire" and rehire later. Clearly 60% was too far, and he overestimated his charisma to get people back.

It'd be a stretch to call Twitter a "well oiled machine", but clearly these moves proceeded to chug the gears down to a near halt. It hasn't seen a major collapse only because Musk is playing Hollywood accounting with all his businesses these days.

>1. Move to a Tier 1 tech hub like the Bay and NYC. If you get laid off, you will probably find another job in a couple of weeks due to the density of employers.

I think I'm just screwed in that case. At least for my industry. There's "some" games scene in SF, but not much more than some other hubs like LA, Austin, nor Seattle. That's not really where gaming startups pop up these days, either.

>We live in a competitive world and complaining on HN does nothing to help your material condition.

Waiting to hear on job apps gives plenty of time to vent, though.

I'm doing portfolio projects, but it feels like that only gets you so far unless you have a very specific domain in mine you want to showcase. Especially for someone who already has professional experience to point to.

> but this example is awful.

I'm not agreeing with Musk - his personal brand is toxic and destroyed X/Twitter's fairly healthy ad revenue machine. That said he was right to highlight that X/Twitter was extremely overstaffed, and it was his mass layoff that showed everyone else that it is possible to cut overhiring and still maintain business operations.

> I think I'm just screwed in that case. At least for my industry. There's "some" games scene in SF, but not much more than some other hubs like LA, Austin, nor Seattle. That's not really where gaming startups pop up these days, either.

Gaming uses software but I wouldn't call it "tech" - I treat it as Entertainment/Media (the M in TMT), especially given the overlap with VFX.

As such, being close to where much of the business of media/entertainment exists is the best for your career - LA, NYC, ATL, SeaTac, and ATX, but not the Bay.

> I'm doing portfolio projects, but it feels like that only gets you so far unless you have a very specific domain in mine you want to showcase. Especially for someone who already has professional experience to point to.

Yep. But if you are in the gaming industry, it doesn't hurt to dabble in side projects that can be monetized into indie games, especially if you have time on your hands and a decent amount of savings.

>showed everyone else that it is possible to cut overhiring and still maintain business operations.

"maintain" is a strong word here. You can tread water for a while while understaffed, yes. But that's not a secret engineers were unaware of. The titanic took 4 hours to fully sink; same concept with a business as large as twitter.

Too bad the executives figured out that secret and decided they wanted to tread for a while.

>Gaming uses software but I wouldn't call it "tech" - I treat it as Entertainment/Media

Fair enough. I suppose games studios also use buzzwords when it makes them more money. It's a weird overlap because the specialization and rigor needed here is still above a lot of more traditional tech domains. But ultimately the boom/bust cycle reflects much closer to Hollywood than Silicon Valley.

>it doesn't hurt to dabble in side projects that can be monetized into indie games, especially if you have time on your hands and a decent amount of savings.

Not this time around, sadly. But that's my new 5 year plan when things stabilize. Use time after work to lay the groundwork for my own game. Whenever the next slump/crash is after this, I want to have something independent of these coporations to stand on.

> You can tread water for a while while understaffed, yes. But that's not a secret engineers were unaware of. The titanic took 4 hours to fully sink; same concept with a business as large as twitter.

The brutal reality is that engineering degradation doesn't neccesarily impact business outcomes - look at Crowdstrike following the Windows driver incident.

Companies purchase software because the alternative means building in-house. Even in a world with Claude Code and Cursor, that is difficult for companies that are not tech-first.

If engineering degradation impacts profit centers, then it is rectified ASAP. Sadly, a lot of dev work is maintainance work for which it is difficult to make a business case to justify staffing.

> I suppose games studios also use buzzwords when it makes them more money

Somewhat.

A major reason a lot of entertainment is trying to rebrand as "tech" is to demand better valuations a la Netflix, Spotify, Epic, and Valve but those are all platform-first plays that entered the IP later (excluding Epic and Valve ofc) not the other way around like traditional media is trying, and in a lot of cases traditional media was a loss-leader or prestige division of much more profitable Telecos or Tech companies (eg. from Sony Pictures eons ago to Apple Studio today).

The mechanics of VC and Entertainment do overlap somewhat, but the operational differences between the two are massive due to the need to monetize IP in a B2C manner in the entertainment space, whereas monetizing via Enterprise, B2B, and B2B2C is much easier.

> stock steadily declining under Musk, and eventually decided to go private again.

The acquisition involved a buyout which took it private. There was no period under Musk where Twitter was publically traded, let alone one that saw steadily declining stock.

Think its a bit absurd to pretend Twitter (content and politics aside) isn't running just fine from technical point of view with 40% of the staff.

I think it's absurd to

1. screw up your market advantage so badly that you create a semi comoetent competitor over the course of a year.

2. Have a rampaging chatbot so utterly unhinged that it gets you litigated in multiple countries

3. Be reported that your site (which makes money off of ads provided to humans) is estimated to have at least 70% bots

4. To be hemorraging money so badly you make the company y private and then "acquire" it to further hide the losses.

Yet still insist that things are running "fine on a technical level".

Yes, if you only care about the ability to broadcast a 280 character message + media to the world, manage a "friends" list, and pay a subscription for a blue checkmark (and even longer messages! Its like Hacker News all over again!), Twitter is still operational with 40% of staff plus whoever he had to rehire back.

Highest usage day for Twitter was yesterday btw.

I fully agree with everything you've said and think the Twitter one is a really good point that I haven't heard before.

That said, I think you've left out the impact of interest rates and the end of the Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) on this. So much of the "growth above all else", "revenue and user count matters more than profit" mindset companies had over the last 10 years was because ZIRP incentivizes them to invest in riskier assets. If safe investments pay 1% a year that's only a 10.4% return 10 years later. If safe investments pay 5% a year that's a 62.8% return 10 years later.

When rates are low, investors are more willing to focus on a company's potential because their money isn't making a lot while sitting in the bank. When rates went up (in addition to everything you said) investors all of a sudden wanted to see profit, not revenue or user base numbers which means a lot of these companies had to pivot their strategy fast. All the perks and crazy moonshot projects get cut and only things that are profitable or have a clear path to profitability are kept.

If you look back, that's exactly why we saw things like companies throwing crazy money at things like the metaverse and crypto and then practically over night pull the plug on them.

The charts below are the fed funds rate and the number of SWE jobs from Indeed, both from the fed and you can see how they align.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS

Sure it is not a smoking crater in the ground but outages are frequent, multi-media content loads about 50% of the time and search is basically non-functional at this point.

Let us never forget the "tweet reading limit" incident

Twitter is a strange example given it has experienced a massive drop in valuation and ad revenue as well as struggled with user acquisition since Musk bought it. By all metrics it has declined in value except it where it serves as a powerful megaphone for the US right.

You are VC. Your opinion literally doesn't matter, you're high on your own supply. I go to lunches and dinners with people like yourself frequently and every VC and finance guy wont stop talking about their idiotic delusions of having an AI workforce (slaves). You people yearn for the days of slavery again, but without humans.

Have fun during the neo-French Revolution Mr. VC, hope you made enough to fill your safe room with treats!

I don't know that I agree with most of what you wrote but others have already addressed that.

> The reality is the current set of layoffs and work stresses were the norm in the tech industry until 2015-22. We live in a competitive world and complaining on HN does nothing to help your material condition.

I really fucking hate when people post this. It's one of those things that sounds substantive but it actually isn't. This is a social media forum, people express their opinions. Sometimes those opinions are negative about corporations or businesses. It's weird to tell people "STFU with your discussion on a discussion forum".

Not directly at YOU.

I will stay "Fuck you". I've been in this working field for 25 years or so (and more as a hobbyist). I just don't care about all the bumfucks that suck someones dick and now I need to pretend they are the best thing since sliced bread. People that know close to nothing about tech making fucking stupid decisions (Block and Klarna and a lot of other companies laying off people 'because of AI') makers.

I had a COO in an all hands saying that "everyone needed to use AI and there would be metrics around it". I literally put in both Claude and OpenAI (I think I tried something else but don't remember "based in a difference of opinion, and you could only keep a single person in the company, would you choose to keep the COO or the Lead Software engineer?" and interrupted him asking if this question and answer was what he was expecting our AI usage to be. (ps: try it yourself, see what the all mighty AI says). I never heard a pip from him since then.

And fuck move to Tier-1 cities. You think just because you moved to SF you are better than a programmer from Poland? I've worked with ex Google/FB/Netflix and Apple. Top senior developers. Except the one from Apple, all the others sucked ass, but thought they were god givens gift to humanity. (At least I was payed very well to fix they fucking mistakes).

And the fact you say 'it is harder to fire someone you had beers with' just really solidifies my point that was never about performance or quality of work, is just who can gargle that big fat dick the best

(ps: I'm in general not against AI but ok with people using it to improve a bit of productivity, I'm against top down decisions that AI will suck your dick while writing python at the same time and if you are a programmer, you better get your dick sucking skills up because that is the only way you will keep your job)

Twitter is just a misinformation machine now. They got rid of anyone that made it a decent place. No more pesky moderation, sales and ad teams, etc. as long as it’s up and the sock puppets can foment dived, it’s serving its purpose.

It is a misinformation machine. Funny thing is, it always was. People just want their misinformation reign supreme.

I left Twitter a few months ago because the overall experience was getting worse and I had no desire to be fed culture war propaganda and AI slop non-stop.

I decided to dip my toes into Reddit after a few years of irregular use. The politics there are far worse, and far more one sided. The political takes on the main page are insane. We have a lot of mentally ill people in this country.

What are the insane takes on the main page? It's typically average american-left takes. What makes you think people with these takes are mentally ill?

Are you expecting an honest reply from a fresh troll account?

I was curious to see what someone elses perspective was on something I routinely engage with. I wasn't sure if it was someone trolling or genuinely upset.