I think we need to define “survive” to discuss this without just talking past each other.
If “survive” means, won’t immediately collapse and can continue on for months to years while extracting value I’d agree. If “survive” instead means that they can’t both do required maintenance to keep the company operating _and_ simultaneously build out new features and aspects of the business, Kim not sure I’m as convinced
Do we really need new features in everything? I mean, I understand the business point, more features, higher price, higher chances someone will buy product for feature X.. but I've seen feature creep, where a good app that did one thing great, now becomes a bloated mess, because they added one feature, and another, and another,...
First it's just a file browser.. then it starts with a text editor.. then image viewer, pluus cloud support (dropbox, onedrive,...), then file sync, backup solution, package management, image editor, music player, video player, and in the end, with all the "streamlining" added, you've got a 300mb app that just lost the ability to sort files by size, but which can now order food delivery for you.
Advertising features. It's overall advertising story lacks a lot of the capabilities of Facebook/Google which is why it's a distant 3rd in total ad-spend.
This is where those employee cuts are going to be most felt because this is directly tied to revenue. And whilst overall advertising is down there was still a huge opportunity for Twitter to grow.
Just running thru some software in my head and there's a ton of stuff I'd still use the MVP version of. If Reddit was developmentally arrested in 2010 I'd still be wasting the same number of hours there everyday. Talk about a company that creates bloat!
I don't know what units to use but if we count the buckets of progress from the first computer to today the industry has become like government tinkering with a tiny number of laws while most buckets of law had already been developed.
Our food? Our culture? Our language? What part did we play in making those? We added the word tweeting and are now trying to figure out what it should mean?
The new features Twitter needs might be as simple as implementing new standards that keep the status quo. No tech company produces 100% of the software it relies on and eventually they hit changes that go beyond maintenance and hit “rearchitect the platform”.
Just in my own experience I once inherited ~20 .net 3.5 projects that needed to be updated to support tls 1.2 which required going up to 4.5?4.7? Can’t recall beyond it needing a major version update. The company was then hit with the decision of either doing a multi month effort to update all the inconsistencies between those version for the minimum viable product of updates or spend a year ish to get onto .net core and be ahead of the update schedule.
That was one set of decisions and work for a team of 8, solely to maintain status quo, for a relatively tiny company. Tech companies as they have all currently organized themselves, cannot just run with minor maintenance
Ongoing improvement in tools for dealing with abuse. This has three major components, none trivial: ensuring that users keep enjoying the service and aren’t turned off by spam or harassment, keeping things appealing to advertisers, and complying with government regulations. I describe this as ongoing because it has human adversaries and they’re often quite dedicated and/or paid to do things like spam or shape public option so the problem shifts but is never solved.
Twitter needs whatever features the customers want so they can increase their DAU’s to a rate that will drive their profits to pay off the debt. He can’t coast with the current feature set as it has shown that it can’t pay the bills.
You need people to monitor bwhat users are doing. They realize that users are doing X and Y manually to do Z. So you implement feature Z.
If you don't, then a competitor that implements Z might become more appealing to users.
But features are not always user-visible. New features are regularly added to web browsers and phones, and it's often in your interest as a web site or app developer to make use of them.
how many of twitter's new features marked an increase in revenue or market-share?
it seems like twitter's main innovation in recent years has been inventing increasingly byzantine procedures to cull users from their platform, including their most revenue generative power-user: donald trump.
Shouldn't you put a reasonable time limit on "survive", like oncologists do? A 5 year survival on 20% staff seems unreasonably long, but a couple of weeks is too short for such a verdict.
1) I think most software companies can probably survive with far fewer programmers if they were willing to cut dumb features. Are they though? Bloat is kind of a lot of businesses business.
2) For what it's worth, the Twitter employees let go were not just programmers, but also fulfilled other roles. I'm not quite sure what percentage of programmers Twitter lost, but I bet they lost a much higher percentage of other roles such as HR and content moderators.
> BTW. Figuring it who is the core team is not that complicated. You just ask everybody to name five people who are doing well and who they want to work with again (in the next company).
For what it's worth, this might yield a misleading answer because it could become a popularity contest.
The charismatic guy who plays office politics and tries to make everybody their pal might score highly here, but the smart engineer who just sits down quietly and churns out good features might be forgotten.
> The charismatic guy who plays office politics and tries to make everybody their pal might score highly here, but the smart engineer who just sits down quietly and churns out good features might be forgotten.
Well it is a software engineering company/business is it not?
The socially connected engineer will know more people who can be leveraged to meet the goals of the organization, even if they themselves are not as capable in isolation.
If businesses were judged on metrics like “most autonomous engineers who can write perfect code” then the businessy types would be disadvantaged (and the company would fold)
Yeah exactly. Having someone who know reliably who knows what and how to get that person time and attention is important.
Specially in corporate settings where the gears need greasing. People are not gonna magically do the right things. They want context and understand why you are talking to them.
I constantly get told off by my boss for trying to be too clean and extensible at the expense of timely delivery (ie yesterday) but I am also the socially connected engineer who knows who’s good at what, and how to butter them up.
In my mind I’m not getting paid to write nice code, I’m getting paid to help ensure the software side of things keeps expanding without breaking within constraints of time and money. I’m very happy when this involves writing code but I’m also happy if this involves brokering, nudging, reminding, motivating, flirting, cajoling or otherwise positively interacting with the highly talented people I work with.
Social skills don’t come naturally to me, but the time investment spent figuring out the rules/heuristics has given me more bang-for-buck than any other lang.
One person's bloat is another person's critical feature. The vast majority of people use a small percentage of Microsoft Excel features, but the feature use is such that you cannot replace Excel without supporting all this esoteric stuff some small percent of users are leveraging. Excel's "bloat" gives it a competitive edge over the competition and makes it difficult to replace because of all of these edge cases in use.
I found the curated trends to be highly biased. They would elevate weeks-old events, claiming they had just happened. This always involved news items that fit a certain ideological bent. Seeing that made the timeline algorithm suspect in my mind.
Putting aside the accusation of bias for a second, which is obviously hard to prove, 2 things come to mind.
1) Why would it take a team to do this job? Was it a large team? I joke, but seeing what's trending and giving a short human description could seemingly be done by a part-time intern while on a bathroom break. I could imagine some reasons for this, but I'm curious.
2) Perhaps a company that's been bleeding money doesn't need to spend money on these kind of roles? You hate to see anybody lose a good job, but it's better than the entire company going under because you can never turn a profit.
The trending topics were hyper-localized, often down to the city. It's a very small task that they scaled up to a massive degree.
Twitter pre-acquisition wasn't bleeding money, and it's plausible that these positions had positive ROI if they increased engagement and thus ad views.
I worked at a B2B company with a monolith without API's that rendered old-style CSS. Big projects included defining and writing API's to support a self-service web app for admins, as well as a new web app for end users which was responsive on their tablets and phones. Similarly, a B2C company on features for four sets of audience instead of two. I worked closely with PMs on front-end.
Software engineers who are hired to think, and not just type, can provide a lot of value to teammates, product managers, and designers, and also supplement these other roles. But typing lots of lines is the way to look good in a spreadsheet during layoffs. And, many engineers want projects where they get to type for 4-12 months before users use the features.
Note, the above is not a complaint: I recommend software engineers track and ship a consistent number of diffs every week. It forces you to ask yourself if someone's blocking your reviews, or if maybe it's a good time to squeeze in several quick, safe unrelated improvements, etc. Shipping code should not feel like a chore; the company "owes" you the ability to ship code to production since they value your performance based on that.
> For what it's worth, this might yield a misleading answer because it could become a popularity contest.
Not even a popularity contest, in all likelyhood just a visibility-of-your-position contest. Some roles at companies interact with many more people in the company than other do; if you're competent and not a jackass you'll be well-regarded in them.
Shit at one job for a while part of our onboarding process for everyone was to spend half a day sort of pair programming through the technical details of how the platform worked. I used to teach programming, am good at pairing, and am nice in real life, so I did almost every one of those. If you asked anyone outside of eng for a list of best engineers I'd be near the top, because I was one engineer everyone had had a positive technical interaction with.
I eventually got, correctly, fired from that job for underperforming! No one could believe it! Except every engineer I worked with, but that was only 1/4 of the company. The rest were baffled.
Since this claim about company survival after firing 80% of engineers has been presented without evidence, it can be dismissed without evidence. The author doesn't seem credible looking at their LinkedIn either.
Can you fire 80% of doctors and a hospital will survive? Probably, the janitorial staff will still come in, and the light switch will still light a bulb. As a sibling comment notes, the degree to which employees are expendable and measure of survivability is key. Business types will erroneously think they can fire 80% of the staff, keep the lights on, and keep up new feature development. The biggest risk with this sort of minimizing thinking is thinking you can achieve more with less: you often can't, especially when it comes to the large business environments this article specifically carves out (the concept does not apply to small and medium sized businesses).
Growth often comes with dead weight. You can't 10x your staff overnight and expect the same output per engineer. And as you grow, your organizational structure impacts your architecture (Conway's law). The downsizing frequently is an unwinnable scenario, and people need to recognize that going into it.
"It's called medium because most of the articles aren't very well done" ?
Enough with the twitter analysis already, just let him finish running it into the ground and after he fails to make the first or second billion dollar annual financing payment someone else will finally just take over or sell the domain.
isn't it much too early to know where Elons decisions are positive or negative for twitter? I understand they're negative for the emotional well being of a lot of twitter users, but for the company itself, we surely need to wait for data to come through.
It's not rocket science and doesn't need a "million man hours" to figure out what he is trying to do.
Twitter takes in $5 Billion per year but spends most of that on costs to operate.
So he thinks he's clever and just has to cut operating costs by a billion per year and "tada" profitable enough to pay financing of a BILLION PER YEAR
Except you can't kick out three legs of a table and expect it to keep working like it used to, or at all.
Anyway he can do whatever he wants, my only curiosity is if this teaches people they can just quit twitter as there are plenty of better alternatives or will be soon.
Once people learn the "quitting skill" then maybe they can use it on Facebook etc.
If you fired 80% of just the developers at Twitter yeah you’re right, it would probably survive at least in the short term. That isn’t what happened. Entire departments serving all sorts of functions were wiped out. Hell you have advertisers, you know… Twitters customers, backing out just bc they can’t get anyone on the phone there. It’s stupid, period.
> BTW. Figuring it who is the core team is not that complicated. You just ask everybody to name five people who are doing well and who they want to work with again (in the next company). Then, sort employees by votes, and viola, at the top, you will get your true core team (which may not match perfectly to seniority, number of lines of code written, etc.).
This will get you a list of solid team players. It's a list of who can keep a company going, but not the company.
Something I've come to believe is that in large tech companies the Pareto principle is not true because only 20% of SWEs are good and the rest suck. More likely, the majority of engineers are blocked in some way from delivering.
Dependencies on other teams, management constantly changing their mind, having to put out fires, helping other teams, etc. There are very few teams where this kind of thing doesn't happen.
Also, something to keep in mind when saying things like "you can fire 80% of your SWEs and survive" is slack. You might survive, but have no slack which means any sort of tail event is going to destroy your company.
There's smart, but then there's creative. Smart engineers might be wizards of mastering the technology, but creative engineers will re-define the problem domain such that their team can deliver without being blocked by other teams, which is a frequent problem in large organizations. Solving business problems effectively is a different skillset from pure mastery of technology (though, you really do need both).
Large companies build up armies of folks to stop SWEs from doing this. It’s literally what auditing, compliance, etc. do.
Because short term optimizations teams do to get things out almost always cause larger (global) risks, from everything from new attack surfaces to yet-another-copy-of-user-data that now can get leaked because it isn’t actually protected the way it is supposed to be.
Near as I can tell from stories, Twitter was already maxing out the auditing and compliance bypassing to get things done, so yikes on the long term fallout here.
Quite often, the 80% are supporting the 20%. I know I've spent many days trying to review PRs for someone in "20% mode", and likewise, when I'm in "20% mode", I can deluge my coworkers with PRs and RFCs and such. It is very true that reading code can often take more time than writing code. Additionally, the "20% mode" person can often miss little details because they are moving fast, and that detail capture work can take a lot of time for very little code change.
I'm curious to see how this pans out for Twitter. I suspect this is true in theory, but in practice, finding the right 20% is hard, you can't do it as bluntly as Musk, and the "extremely hardcore" ultimatum will scare away people in that 20% who will take a few months severance to be done with the drama.
I think many people would have argued beforehand that twitter in particular was overstaffed, and that you could safely cut large portions of their employees without much loss. In properly run companies, employees are already justified in terms of revenue or other value they bring to the company. If you fire them, you know concretely what the company will lose. Twitter was notoriously unprofitable, and the employees were instead justified in terms of the greenfield work they were doing to bring the company into profitability in the future. Except that clearly wasn't happening, and probably would never happen if they continued down the same trajectory. I don't think there are many lessons regarding that that generalize to other companies. We might carve out a category of company called a "post-startup", being a company that has gone through the startup phase of rapid growth in userbase, but that never moved onto the stage of "established company", owing to a difficulty finding their proper business model. Such a company might reasonably benefit from a large staff reduction. For other companies this is less clear.
2021 would have been a profit of $300M had they not included a one-time lawsuit settlement.
What really stands out is how much they spend on stock-based compensation – it seems like that would have been a key area to save money but that was also less than a third of the $1.2B in new annual debt which Musk just added so I have no idea how they could make the numbers work anymore.
It's circular reasoning at best. 80% of employees were fired because it was overstaffed, and since the site is still up afterwards, Twitter was overstaffed.
the pilot is the pilot, but 80% of the crew is, if the plan is to got from A to B. Maybe a second pilot for backup is a good idea, but is cabin crew selling lottery tickets on flight?
The cabin crew is there to keep control of the passengers. Keep people from smoking, make there aren't fights over masks, make sure nobody downs a whole bottle of whisky they bought in the duty free store and proceeds to do God knows what.
Even the cheap airlines have cabin crew; they're not there for the hell of it.
But it’s a great analogy because a layman looks at an airline operation and thinks “yeah I can do this without the crew”. They’re wrong, just like all the people who think they can run Twitter with 20 good men.
So back in 2015/16 when I worked at Facebook somebody asked Mark Z if Twitter was overstaffed. First someone told him how many employees they had, he was shocked and replied that they were definitely over staffed. Obviously anecdotal but given their sales/userbase I think that they have been historically over staffed.
I personally could see a need for 10-20x the engineers, they're solving a very different problem.
But twitter had 7500 employees in 2021, of which about half were engineering (reports I found vary between 3500 to 4500), so that's at least 65x the engineers!
If you read the leaked Musk tweets you'll see that he believes it, at least partially, based off their revenue/employe ratio. It was like a third of the other major tech companies.
> The Pareto principle is “80% of consequences come from 20% of causes”. And as an extension of this, 80% of results are delivered by 20% of engineers.
As an extension of this, I propose we remove 4/5ths of each airliner. The 20% that remains, so long as we pick the right 20%, will surely fly correctly.
Seriously: who writes this dreck? You don't have to believe that every single employee at a company is productive or necessary to understand that you can't saddle your remaining employees, even if you picked the "right" ones, with the remaining workload.
The management class does not want this Twitter ordeal (likely a huge public failure) making engineers think their skills give them power over companies.
On top of that, it feels like classic "magical" thinking by a manager who doesn't understand technical scope or split responsibilities. Why bother to understand why you've hired so many people before blithely opining that 4/5ths of them are fireable? Who the hell wants to work for someone who says things like that? Certainly not the "high-quality" engineers who are supposedly being separated from the chaff.
How do you define "public failure"? My definition would be entirely contingent upon the intentions of the new owner since it's his to do with what he pleases. If said owner is well into middle age and bored, but has more money than literally any other person...? Who am I to judge what he decides to do with it?
"It's just money" says Elon and if his goal were to be the world's most massive troll (which I suspect is a large part of it), then it's achievement accomplished, full stop.
At least to my mind, "public failure" includes but isn't limited to embarrassing outages and service degradation on one of the world's most popular social media sites, one that was more or less running smoothly immediately prior.
I notice every VC cheering this absurd management style on. If Twitter's new management can be somehow spun as a success, it will normalise treating tech employees in general and engineering in particular very poorly - longer hours, less compensation. For VCs and senior management, that's a fantastic outcome.
In a month they're going to say "look! we didn't have a single outage during the World Cup" and act like it vindicates their approach.
The irony here is that you could easily fire 80% of the C-suite and VPs and a company should survive for some time. This is kind of a tautology because leadership at bigger companies should be mostly operating at the months-to-years timeframe, so it should take a long time (or a unique emergency) for their absence to be felt. We could run both experiments (firing engineers vs firing execs) against each other across a sample of companies and I know which I'd bet on to still be mostly functional 3-4 weeks later.
Indeed. And let's say you made the cut, you're staying, phew. What about next year, when there's the next cut? And the year after that? You've every incentive to hire _bad_ people, to protect your good ones. It's in your interests that other teams fail so that yours can survive.
This right here is why I always half-assed when my company asked me to participate in interviewing devs. Given the comapanie's track record of laying off quality devs for cheaper options, they were all potential replacements for ME. The expectations around loyalty in this industry bewilder me.
>You don't have to believe that every single employee at a company is productive or necessary to understand that you can't saddle your remaining employees, even if you picked the "right" ones, with the remaining workload.
This is exactly the problem with this thinking. A lot of people don't contribute as much as the top contributors, but if you remove them, suddenly the most productive people have to do their normal jobs plus all these other peoples' too. Then they're going to feel overworked and look for a better job elsewhere.
Sometimes the most productive people are productive precisely because they can pick tasks that play their strengths and manage to ignore the rest. If they're suddenly forced to take on whatever shit work pops up, some of them aren't going to be as effective anymore.
This is a very good point. An overworked, under resourced team is running just to stand still. There's no time to take a step back, consider what might be done differently. It just has to be done right now. It's a recipe for stagnation.
Another problem is that the better employees can move to better jobs more easily. So when management becomes a problem, they'll move elsewhere, and that will inspire more employees to leave.
You end up with the less productive employees remaining.
The point is that it's bunk reasoning, the same kind that results in managers proudly proclaiming to have used two women to make a baby in only 4.5 months.
The Pareto Principle in no way implies that you can just fire 80% of your employees and retain 80% of their "effect"; that's just not how tasking and scoping work.
I think the assumption is that 80% of the workload can safely be dropped on the floor, that the resulting 80% of results is sufficient to survive. However goofy it is to apply that to Elon's haphazard cuts to SRE and administration etc, the premise is not crazy. There's certainly no suggestion of multiplying the workload of the remaining employees by 5.
I'm inclined to agree for the non-eng parts of "the workload". But swe workload in a company that already pretty much does its job is a very flexible concept, and I'm not sure it has a firm existence apart from the workforce, firm enough to say there's something there that "isn't going away". And remember the standard for "the workload" that must be done is "survival", which is not a high bar.
I guess where I'm going is that the article states a roughly true thesis, but applies it in a situation where it's not terribly relevant.
>>As an extension of this, I propose we remove 4/5ths of each airliner. The 20% that remains, so long as we pick the right 20%, will surely fly correctly.
Not sure if they will fly correctly. But most airlines I'm sure have wildly profitable routes, some moderately profitable routes, some mild. And some I'm sure are loss making routes.
You start plotting a graph and a bell curve emerges. The key is this- Do the profitable routes have more demand you can't meet now, but can meet if you divert resources from the loss making routes. If the answer is yes, you can always eliminate the loss making routes, and use those resources to supply to profit making ones. This makes perfect sense, because it not only saves money, this makes money.
There's a bakery near my place which used to sell its things in a shop. Soon enough they realise finding talent to bake is a big problem and most people were buying bulk quantities to sell it to others for a small profit. Eventually he realised he could sell to people who could run shops but had no talent to bake. That way we was able to divert his time and resources to make things at scale, so obviously his profits and by definition market capture increased too.
The real question in case of companies like Twitter is- What is Twitter's core competence? Should Twitter run a in house payroll team? Should they be running a PR team? What sort and size of Legal teams should they be running? Should they be running a in house content moderation team? If their business benefits more making newer products and features. It does make total sense to cut down resources from places are a cost center -ve to hiring more programmers. And it does make total sense for Musk to say things like they will be fairly intense on the engineering and programming side of things.
"Airliner" here means the airplane, not the airline.
(And there's a reason airlines fly routes at a loss: an unprofitable route brings travelers to hubs where profitable flights can be allocated cheaply. It's never, ever as simple as "just trim the fat," because the things you think are "fat" almost never are.)
Isn't that exactly what most people did with the economy class seating. They modified their plane to transit more people. So this logic still holds. The remainder is as simple us understanding what basic structure of a product holds good as a product to sell.
>>It's never, ever as simple as "just trim the fat," because the things you think are "fat" almost never are.
I can't tell if you're intentionally being obtuse or not. The point of the original comment was that "Pareto-style" reasoning here is ridiculous: the engines and wings do 80% of the "work" in an airplane, but you can't remove the rest and expect it to still fly. You can't really quantize work inside of complex systems (like airplanes, or corporations) in this way; adjacent sub-threads in this thread explain why.
You can't grow though, and you'll continue to degrade. Your market position will be static. You will get disrupted. Fat staffing at tech companies is about securing the future as much as the present.
I agree. I have a semi-social website that I neglect for months on end and it trundles along, but it certainly doesn't grow and mostly erodes.
With larger social companies, outside the tech part, there are inevitably marketing/outreach teams in popular/growth regions of the world building campaigns in conjunction with niches or brands.
This is all wrong. You can only build great products with people who have enough wherewithal to exercise their personal agency.
When the agency being exercised is departure you get two remainers - the zealots and the hanger-ons.
You can try to roll the clock back to a nimble pivot or preserve startup but you're looking at wildly different skillsets to make that work and those people have likely just left.
It's possible to pump out great things with this configuration, but only a fool would sign up for the task. Or maybe a Michael Milken who fancies himself as a Steve Jobs.
Sure, you can cut 80% of anything and things will run just fine for a while. You could even stop paying your bills, and nothing bad would happen for a month or two, as invoices pile up. In fact I'd guess that you could cut 100% of UX and Product and no one would much notice for a year or so. So, why not do that? Because for all that we talk about short-termism, companies are long-term entities. Shares in a company are valuable now _because they will probably be valuable in 20 years time too_. So such self-mutilation is rare.
> And one last thing. The company that has deep enough pockets can survive tons of shit. If you wave a check big enough, you will find people willing to go through hell and back and who will drag the company forward. I believe this is a very important point. I felt that we (software engineers) sometimes have too big egos believing that if enough software engineers left, the company will fall apart. The reality is that (big money) can help navigate quite dire circumstances for companies.
Does Twitter have deep pockets? And if it offered you whatever it would take for you to spend some months in hell, do you trust that it would be able to pay? Twitter is in an awful situation, and in sharp distinction to Musk's previous near-death experiences, there's no government coming to bail him out.
Musk’s thesis was that twitters product team was utterly ineffective though. If you think “this business hasn’t built anything that provides an ounce of value for a decade” why wouldn’t you go into “survival” mode while you attempt to rebuild the culture?
Exactly this. This survival mode is obviously temporary to do a hard reset of culture, processes and codebase.
With Twitter getting a much better balance sheet, what would stop them from hiring more great folks again in 3-6 months?
I think a lot of people and in this thread included really underestimate negative impact of poor product innovation culture. This hard reset is the only way imo.
> With Twitter getting a much better balance sheet, what would stop them from hiring more great folks again in 3-6 months?
Because hiring is hard, and there is little reason to think their balance sheet would be much better. And because some of their advertisers are leaving, reducing their income. And because a lot of these "great people" probably wouldn't take Musk at his word due to his unreliable leadership the past year.
Things like personnel and advertisers don't turn on a dime. It's not like cloud computing - Twitter will face long term consequences in the slower moving fields because of Musk's current decisions.
Seems important that there have been lots of layoffs elsewhere. Some percent of those laid off would take a job at Twitter. This is a big change from the last many years, when SWE hiring was very competitive.
New hires won't know the internals of Twitter but they can dive in and help. They can also be motivated by equity-heavy comp packages.
If you are good at your job I doubt you will put up with Twitter's treatment of employees e.g. lack of vision, late nights and long weeks, inflexible work arrangements, public belittlement of your contributions etc.
And given that it's a private company not sure whether you would expect compensation other than salary.
Good point about private company equity. Probably they'd use cash bonuses instead.
I think you underestimate how much some people would like to see Twitter 2.0 succeed. Lots of people didn't love how censorious Twitter had become and want to help build something better. I have several friends who are interested in working there. It does sound like it will be long hours. But for some people that will be a badge of honor. Most of my interested friends are not married so have fewer other priorities.
This is just my thought but I think you are overestimating the intersection of people who truly care about culture war stuff and the "deeply experienced" engineering community that values gaining the skill and experience to be able to build something like Twitter. When that engineer explained the RPC calls to Musk the other day the replies were very telling in the sense that people who spend their time talking about how "freedom is back at Twitter" or how the employees are getting their comeuppance don't seem to really internalize how much effort is required to build and maintain these services.
Maybe there is a cadre of conservative freedom loving experienced techies hiding in the shadows but I haven't seen them. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, I watched the whole Parler collapse saga caused by a lack of mastery and experience in their chosen technologies and it really instilled in me the idea of appreciating the drive of learning and open mindedness. The conservative movement seems to have a disdain for deep learning of a specific field. They are setting themselves up to be left behind in the tech revolution.
> Maybe there is a cadre of conservative freedom loving experienced techies hiding in the shadows
Your bias is showing. One does not have to be conservative to want Twitter 2.0 to succeed. Also, there are definitely experienced techies who are conservative and who are not "out" in silicon valley. It's hard to know how many there are because they have kept their heads down for many years.
I responded to the other commenter about that. But I wouldn't be surprised if he did eventually, possibly while keeping control of supervoting stock like Zuck.
For most of my career I've worked at or consulted with very small companies. I had a bit of a shock taking a short job at a very large company. The sheer number of people who didn't seem to do anything was massive.
This might be slightly true for a small subset of companies, but given that this is clearly about Twitter, you absolutely can't "survive" in any meaningful way. What is possible without 80% of the engineers is keeping the core services running at the current capacity, with no room for dealing with emergent issues. That's about it, and that's all Twitter has really demonstrated so far.
Forget about new products, forget about improvements to existing products, forget infrastructure work/cost optimization, forget not having major data breaches regularly, forget mitigating large-scale security vulnerabilities(i.e. log4j), forget being able to capitalize on market trends on a useful timescale, and forget about the ability to deal with situations that require more engineering capacity that your company uses on an average day.
Entering "survival mode" and keeping only enough engineering capacity on board to keep the service running on a normal day is implicitly a bet that no emergent events are going to demand more capacity from you than is needed on that normal day. The product might be standing now, but you can't do anything useful with a paralyzed company that's going to topple over the first time it faces a stiff breeze.
I don’t think so. The tech stack is (was) quite impressive, if we don’t forget that Twitter is basically a real-time read-write database which is famously hard to scale/distribute.
Not the same. A single tweet may need to be distributed to 50 million followers. I’m not a distributed database guy, but that to to me looks like a very different problem than what WhatsApp faces.
Let’s not compare all employees to devs. Twitter has (had) absolutely business critical other teams, they are a very human-facing company. Does whatsapp have to make decisions whether to ban/unban a former US president? Also, I think Twitter gets a much more uneven usage - their daily usage is lower, but peaks can be similar (~1 billion user).
Also, graph algorithm’s likely don’t scale linearly, 10 times more edges may have much much more resource usage.
So you're saying WhatsApp had no critical other teams, but Facebook bought them anyway for a record breaking sum of money at the time, because they looked nice on picture?
I don’t know, but I’m fairly sure that the user base is the most valuable part of a social network/messenger platform, not the tech stack, or the staff.
If Twitter's Grand Pubah sends one tweet, it goes to 118M people. I can't see how many times he tweets per day, but it's way over 10, and just that would generate 1.2B messages.
When Elon tweets, I'm guessing Twitter doesn't go do 118M write transactions to all his followers. But what it would have to do is flag all 118M accounts as "something as changed". Then the next time one of his followers is on Twitter, which could be a month from now, that flag means "uh oh, better go see what changed", and to do that, all of the follower's "following" accounts have to be accessed to find the change, if there is only 1 change flag per Twitter account.
If Twitter keeps a change flag per "Following" user, that makes finding changes easier, but also means lots more flags to keep updated.
Or, you could go "stateless" and not use flags, but then it seems like you'd be doing a lot of work for users who may not see it for days or months.
How many people do you talk with on WhatsApp? Also, how many of those live in very very different geographical areas? I feel twitter’s graph has much more edges, and the nodes (users) can’t be partitioned as well.
Also, Twitter does real-time data analysis, which is another of their money sources, and takes a huge amount of computing.
yeah, people won't ever admit that Twitter was already dead.
It's probably because many Twitter former employees lurk here on HN and can't understand why nobody is rooting for their beloved platform, of course shame on EM for his abusive behaviour, people before money, always, but nobody will miss Twitter if it really dies.
Half of what Twitter does is superfluous and the rest is badly executed.
A normal company would not survive with only 20% of the staff, Twitter might thrive, because honestly, at its core, as many have already pointed out, Twitter is “writing on a bathroom wall”.
Also: never forget that this happened and then Kashoggi was killed by the Royal Prince Bin Salman
But while people are worried now that Prince Al-Walid invested 1.9 billion dollars in Musk's Twitter, they also forget that till 2020 he owned 4.6% of Twitter through the Saudi investment fund he controls, the shares were acquired in 2015, when the spy was already working for Twitter and the management had already confronted him about the issue!
"If the company is left only with 20% of engineers (even the best ones), it will be way deep in survival mode (just barely providing support for an existing product, not building some new exciting things or even improving existing ones)."
He also goes on to talk about how the company has deep pockets and that means they're not paralyzed, as you say, in the long term. Feel free to actually read the article for more details.
I read the article, and my main takeaway was that the author massively downplays what "survival mode" practically means for the company/product. It doesn't just mean that engineers have to work harder or that you can't develop new products/improve existing ones. It means yearly "whoops hackers have all your emails phones and plaintext passwords now lol" data breaches. It means multi-day downtimes. It means being unable to take advantage of any market trend regardless of how big your comparative advantage is.
"Deep pockets" don't do anything on their own, especially not when no one believes in your company's ability to consistently fulfill its obligations to customers. You can hire engineers, sure, but how are you going to ramp them up when all of your engineering capacity is dedicated to keeping a small group of core services from falling over dead? How quickly can you bring people on board when you're notorious for a culture of overwork and abuse? You can borrow some money, sure, but who's going to lend to you when you're massively in debt from an LBO and you can't provide more than "long term" promises that in six months the company can actually function?
"how are you going to ramp them up when all of your engineering capacity is dedicated to keeping a small group of core services from falling over dead".
That's a tough problem, but one that's solved thousands of times a year by fast growing startups when they get a new round of funding.
"How quickly can you bring people on board when you're notorious for a culture of overwork and abuse?".
I agree that could be a challenge but then again, he's gotten people onboard at his other companies where I've heard the work/life balance is awful as well.
"who's going to lend to you when you're massively in debt from an LBO and you can't provide more than "long term" promises that in six months the company can actually function?".
Valid point in today's economic climate, but there have been countless examples of investors making risky bets repeatedly. Uber is a perfect example.
Ah, right. Just fire anyone who doesn't have anything to do for 5 minutes and then rehire them a week later when the new piece of work comes in.
Needless to say, employees will do one of two things. Even very mediocre employees will demand high-end consultancy fees, and "rock-stars" or whatever you want to call them will demand factors of that, or they'll just avoid you like the plague. But frankly, after a relatively short period of time even the high pay won't justify coming back anymore.
And then the time will come to hire and your competitor will be able to hire great people (with intimate knowledge of your company's inner workings), and you won't be able to hire anyone for double the pay. And that's IF you can avoid your company suffering regular sabotage when firing people. People do stupid things when they get fired. Seriously. It's scary.
This is all true, and the whole situation will probably end mostly poorly for most Twitter stakeholders.
I'm not one to defend Musk's management practices, but I think the main idea motivating this purge (which may or may not be a correct idea) is that Twitter, specifically, does not need "rockstar" engineers anymore at all.
Sure, he'll take them if they kiss the ring and work for peanuts, but he wants people who follow orders and don't talk back. He's not unique here: all management everywhere always wants this wants this but, in some endeavors you have to tolerate people who aren't this way, either because you don't know the right orders to give, or just because they're the only talent that can get done what you need to get done. Twitter's main corporate priority at this point is keeping the lights on as cheaply as possible, since they have a huge nut of debt they they can't afford to service, and on top of it all revenue is down. Again, I'm not saying this situation is desirable for Twitter employees, users, management, advertisers, or ownership (or even Musk himself), but this is the situation.
So clearly mr. Musk thinks twitter needs rockstar engineers. I also find it extremely unlikely he paid anything less than a full year's wage for these 12 weeks.
>That's a tough problem, but one that's solved thousands of times a year by fast growing startups when they get a new round of funding.
Startup vs mature service codebases can be quite different in conplexity... getting engineers up to speed and ready to contribute on the latter can take much more time.
You forgot twch recession is picking up momentum everywhere. Majority of programming job can be done remotely. Even EM cut to only 10%, he can up the remaining salary double, and programmer can increase output productivity easily x2 with those hardcore 10% left. 3 decades of HR experience back this fact easily especially money is no problem. For EM, money is no problem. I am willing to bet $10K with you on this issue that EM will make it through woth all those fired and let go.
No, you can't increase your overall productivity after cutting 80% of your workforce. You might increase individual engineer productivity slightly by paying them boatloads of money, but you're still saddling them with the gargantuan passive tasks required to maintain the site. That alone eats any productivity gains, while also burning your "hardcore" people out.
> No, you can't increase your overall productivity after cutting 80% of your workforce. You might increase individual engineer productivity slightly
Labour productivity is already a per worker measure. I've never heard it used to refer to anything else.
That seems to be what they're referring to when they say they can increase productivity by cutting workers and working the rest much harder.
I'm pretty sure that's bullshit and the sheer amount just daily maintenance and fire fighting will annihilate any possible productivity gains, so I agree with you.
Yes you talked about economic definition. You are 100% right....as right as Paul Volcker with his economic theory. But at corporate c level we discuse productivity with another unit attached....money.
You can. It is called outsourcing. Seen it. Done it. Everytime, productivity increased! It os only when employees retaliate and government intervention then there is some cost involved to mitigate that. But still productivity is high (as in using the same amount of money to get more widgets and revenue in the same amount of time). You might be young say under 30s. Look back since the Nafta treaty signed in the 90s. There is enough evidence to back me on this productivity/revenue increase for the companies. For American, of course painful layoff.
This is completely orthogonal: the reason companies outsource is to purchase more labor for the same price.
There are plenty of industries where the economic envelope favors cheap human labor. But this in no way implies that you can cut 80% of your staff and get the remaining 20% to do both their own work and everyone else’s.
There is no indication of Musk increasing compensation. His retention plan seems to be based on the assumption that the top engineers are attracted to his cult of personality, not to pay them better. (Or to even pay them competitively; anecdotally it seems that the senior engineers leaving Twitter have been getting significantly higher comp in their new roles.)
> Forget about new products, forget about improvements to existing products, forget infrastructure work/cost optimization, forget not having major data breaches regularly, forget mitigating large-scale security vulnerabilities(i.e. log4j), forget being able to capitalize on market trends on a useful timescale, and forget about the ability to deal with situations that require more engineering capacity that your company uses on an average day.
And say hello to being increasingly surrounded by Chesterton's fences[0] at every turn.
I'd say it is true for most companies. But companies hire people not just for keep the current business going. A matter of fact, having fewer people may be beneficial if you want to stay in current business as it is. Companies, especially growth companies, hire people to speculate the next big thing. One of the employee is going to do something great, and expand the business.
> One of the employee is going to do something great, and expand the business.
employees that would do this is unlikely to remain at the company to actually do this. Existing corporate culture or management friction will very quickly force out such an engineer, or make such an engineer ineffective at producing such innovations.
Take google for example, from search to gmail, from gmail to Adwords, Adsense.
Another example is Tencent, from social network to a mail client, then WeChat, also expanded to games. QQ which is the original social network Tencent was built on, stayed almost the same with or worse with 100x head-counts.
It is always a rare event, but when it happens, it is a 1000x win for a company. It is something worth betting on.
"that was simply a matter of upgrading a dependency."
... Across a global infrastructure. ... And finding out if, where you have been compromised. ...And fixing all those systems that was found to have been compromised. ...And handling media questions, PR related to the issue and your organization.
Just saying it was "simply a matter of upgrading a dependency." is so amazingly far from what such an event requires. Even if you wasn't actually affected in a technical sense.
> Just saying it was "simply a matter of upgrading a dependency." is so amazingly far from what such an event requires
5 people total?
that have too look at the problem for a few days and then go back to their regular duties.
Which is their job, BTW, you don't need "special teams".
I work for a company that has more than 20 thousand employees.
How we fixed it?
Every team checked if their dependencies contained a vulnerable version of log4j, fixed it, ran the tests, submitted the new code, the CI/CD did the rest.
> How much do they handle media questions, PR related to global IT security events?
You don't need thousand people for that and It's their job anyway!
Listen, I come from what the average American would call "a socialist" country, at least regarding the labour market and organization.
I understand the social part of employing more people than necessary, it's a kind of redistribution that many countries won't or can't do through proper taxation.
I also understand that sometimes it's about resilience, two of everything is better than single points of failure.
But, it's ironic that these observations come from the POV of an American company.
It's ironic that people are leaving Twitter because Musk is asking them to work hard, meaning they aren't actually doing it, according to his standards (he's a terrible boss, no doubt!), but also meaning that Twitter is probably doing so bad because they focused on the wrong thing, like Facebook with the meta fiasco.
The American dream is not about 28 days of paid vacation, maternity leave, life-work balance, it's about making as much money as you can in the fastest way possible.
In its original formulation In such a country the talents, energy and perseverance of a person ... have far greater opportunity to display than in monarchies
You want a better life balance, better working hours, less staying in the office and more paid time to raise your kids?
Come to Europe!
For much less money of course.
Because you can't have both.
So yeah, it might be easier to do something with 3 people than one, but most of the time too many people are enemy of the efficiency.
You know what took the most part of upgrading the log4j incident where I work?
Coordination between too many levels of hierarchy.
That is actually the worst part of working in large companies, that's what actually stifle innovation and paralyzes them.
Twitter was already doing bad, it's been doing bad for years.
I left Twitter (as a user) 5 years ago, because it was already terrible.
I'm no Musk fan at all, but at least he's making things clear: if that's the end result people are used to, we don't need that many people to achieve it, we simply need motivated people (by money).
Just about one aspect of your post: You must see the income in relation to living cost and benefits in high paying areas in the US.
As SDE employee in Germany you might earn 60k-120k. Where the end of the range is more often found in larger companies with about 10y+ of experience.
But you have health care that never puts you in a position where you have to decide between ruin or death of a family member, what can be done will be done even e.g. if you need brain cancer be burned out with a particle accelerator (no joke). You will never be in a position where you instantly are ruined when you loose your job (1y at 70% income and at least social care later). You are forced to have an extend of retirement solution/insurance, which costs, but at least you cannot mess it up or loose in when you are insolvent.
So this stuff I call the true freedom, not gun ownership or freedom of speech that goes to far. Being free of crushing fear about your family health and future risks, this is freedom in Germany and other European countries. - This freedom also reduces violence and crime you are confronted with a lot, because the motivation or psychic conditions for it are much less common.
So for me Germany is the perfect place for raising a family imo. But maybe yes there might be a reduced chance to become really rich here as a SDE
True.
Twitter is unusual because it was a hostile takeover. Elon disliked the way things were and wanted a change.
In most organization management courses, you are taught " you cannot change the culture". The truth is you can and you do it by firing people, firing or pushing out a lot of people.
My point is that Twitter is a bad case study for engineers, its a very standard case for mba though.
You cannot and should not view Twitter thru a primarily engineering point of view.
BTW. Figuring it who is the core team is not that complicated. You just ask everybody to name five people who are doing well and who they want to work with again (in the next company). Then, sort employees by votes, and viola, at the top, you will get your true core team (which may not match perfectly to seniority, number of lines of code written, etc.).
---
Are those newfangled 360 reviews really that much more effective than other review processes?
And of course this fails to account for how nobody likes, say, those meddling busybodies on the security team, or those idiots at the support desk who always make you unplug and restart things before letting you explain what the real issue is; or how everyone likes that one person who always brings donuts and spends more time being friendly with other teams than actually working.
> BTW. Figuring it who is the core team is not that complicated. You just ask everybody to name five people who are doing well and who they want to work with again (in the next company). Then, sort employees by votes, and viola, at the top, you will get your true core team (which may not match perfectly to seniority, number of lines of code written, etc.).
Doubt.
Employees often have very imperfect information into what other employees are doing in their day to day jobs. The team that looks lazy because they don't immediately prioritize your bugs and requests may be understaffed compared to the operational load.
And unsexy jobs that keep the operation running may be done very well by people who aren't part of the most popular kids, but you'll wind up missing them once they're gone.
Right, same as the saying “you can control expenses but you cannot control revenue”, as the logic to cut expenses; if applied recursively you end up with $0 expenses…and and $0 revenue.
> On the other hand, Elon Musk (and Twitter) can dangle a big enough carrot to pursue a reasonable number of workaholics to stick around (and +hire some new ones) to move the company forward.
I couldn't help but read "H1B slaves" in place of workaholics.
That might sound mildly hyperbolic, but if you can force someone out of the country, that gives you tyrannical power over them. The power imbalance is so large it must be seen as coercive.
I'd be very interested to see the H1B demographics of post Musk Twitter.
> “Firing folks who are on a H-1B in a major economic downturn is not just putting them out of the job, it’s tantamount to ruining their lives,” one former employee told CNN, adding that some people who had accepted Musk’s ultimatum had accepted it “out of self-preservation.”
> For that reason, some staff at Twitter who are on H-1B visas are staying on despite wanting to leave the company, a former employee told CNN, adding that they’re “concerned with being forced into a flooded job market where they may be unable to find a job and before being forced out of the country.”
204 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadIf “survive” means, won’t immediately collapse and can continue on for months to years while extracting value I’d agree. If “survive” instead means that they can’t both do required maintenance to keep the company operating _and_ simultaneously build out new features and aspects of the business, Kim not sure I’m as convinced
First it's just a file browser.. then it starts with a text editor.. then image viewer, pluus cloud support (dropbox, onedrive,...), then file sync, backup solution, package management, image editor, music player, video player, and in the end, with all the "streamlining" added, you've got a 300mb app that just lost the ability to sort files by size, but which can now order food delivery for you.
What new features does eg. twitter need?
Advertising features. It's overall advertising story lacks a lot of the capabilities of Facebook/Google which is why it's a distant 3rd in total ad-spend.
This is where those employee cuts are going to be most felt because this is directly tied to revenue. And whilst overall advertising is down there was still a huge opportunity for Twitter to grow.
Our food? Our culture? Our language? What part did we play in making those? We added the word tweeting and are now trying to figure out what it should mean?
ha-ha
Yep, a lot of older version were a lot better than the current ones
Just in my own experience I once inherited ~20 .net 3.5 projects that needed to be updated to support tls 1.2 which required going up to 4.5?4.7? Can’t recall beyond it needing a major version update. The company was then hit with the decision of either doing a multi month effort to update all the inconsistencies between those version for the minimum viable product of updates or spend a year ish to get onto .net core and be ahead of the update schedule.
That was one set of decisions and work for a team of 8, solely to maintain status quo, for a relatively tiny company. Tech companies as they have all currently organized themselves, cannot just run with minor maintenance
If you don't, then a competitor that implements Z might become more appealing to users.
But features are not always user-visible. New features are regularly added to web browsers and phones, and it's often in your interest as a web site or app developer to make use of them.
2) For what it's worth, the Twitter employees let go were not just programmers, but also fulfilled other roles. I'm not quite sure what percentage of programmers Twitter lost, but I bet they lost a much higher percentage of other roles such as HR and content moderators.
> BTW. Figuring it who is the core team is not that complicated. You just ask everybody to name five people who are doing well and who they want to work with again (in the next company).
For what it's worth, this might yield a misleading answer because it could become a popularity contest.
The charismatic guy who plays office politics and tries to make everybody their pal might score highly here, but the smart engineer who just sits down quietly and churns out good features might be forgotten.
Well it is a software engineering company/business is it not?
The socially connected engineer will know more people who can be leveraged to meet the goals of the organization, even if they themselves are not as capable in isolation.
If businesses were judged on metrics like “most autonomous engineers who can write perfect code” then the businessy types would be disadvantaged (and the company would fold)
Specially in corporate settings where the gears need greasing. People are not gonna magically do the right things. They want context and understand why you are talking to them.
In my mind I’m not getting paid to write nice code, I’m getting paid to help ensure the software side of things keeps expanding without breaking within constraints of time and money. I’m very happy when this involves writing code but I’m also happy if this involves brokering, nudging, reminding, motivating, flirting, cajoling or otherwise positively interacting with the highly talented people I work with.
Social skills don’t come naturally to me, but the time investment spent figuring out the rules/heuristics has given me more bang-for-buck than any other lang.
One person's bloat is another person's critical feature. The vast majority of people use a small percentage of Microsoft Excel features, but the feature use is such that you cannot replace Excel without supporting all this esoteric stuff some small percent of users are leveraging. Excel's "bloat" gives it a competitive edge over the competition and makes it difficult to replace because of all of these edge cases in use.
Apologies to whoever I ripped that off from, I'm not finding the quote anymore.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
1) Why would it take a team to do this job? Was it a large team? I joke, but seeing what's trending and giving a short human description could seemingly be done by a part-time intern while on a bathroom break. I could imagine some reasons for this, but I'm curious.
2) Perhaps a company that's been bleeding money doesn't need to spend money on these kind of roles? You hate to see anybody lose a good job, but it's better than the entire company going under because you can never turn a profit.
Twitter pre-acquisition wasn't bleeding money, and it's plausible that these positions had positive ROI if they increased engagement and thus ad views.
Software engineers who are hired to think, and not just type, can provide a lot of value to teammates, product managers, and designers, and also supplement these other roles. But typing lots of lines is the way to look good in a spreadsheet during layoffs. And, many engineers want projects where they get to type for 4-12 months before users use the features.
Note, the above is not a complaint: I recommend software engineers track and ship a consistent number of diffs every week. It forces you to ask yourself if someone's blocking your reviews, or if maybe it's a good time to squeeze in several quick, safe unrelated improvements, etc. Shipping code should not feel like a chore; the company "owes" you the ability to ship code to production since they value your performance based on that.
Not even a popularity contest, in all likelyhood just a visibility-of-your-position contest. Some roles at companies interact with many more people in the company than other do; if you're competent and not a jackass you'll be well-regarded in them.
Shit at one job for a while part of our onboarding process for everyone was to spend half a day sort of pair programming through the technical details of how the platform worked. I used to teach programming, am good at pairing, and am nice in real life, so I did almost every one of those. If you asked anyone outside of eng for a list of best engineers I'd be near the top, because I was one engineer everyone had had a positive technical interaction with.
I eventually got, correctly, fired from that job for underperforming! No one could believe it! Except every engineer I worked with, but that was only 1/4 of the company. The rest were baffled.
Growth often comes with dead weight. You can't 10x your staff overnight and expect the same output per engineer. And as you grow, your organizational structure impacts your architecture (Conway's law). The downsizing frequently is an unwinnable scenario, and people need to recognize that going into it.
Most workers if you fire 80%, there is an immediate drop in production.
I think the loss of engineers is felt on a more long-term basis.
It’s not surprising that our faithful machines keep generating heat and maybe money.
Then, how long can that last ? Probably a while. I’ve been in mostly sinking ships. People are way more replaceable that we think.
In a good way. But mistake are made. Quality drop. New features halt. Turnover rise….
the hospital, the building, would survive even with no doctors, but the patients wouldn't.
It's not the same thing for software.
Software is not really alive in the first place and doesn't need anything more than electricity to keep running.
"It's called medium because most of the articles aren't very well done" ?
Enough with the twitter analysis already, just let him finish running it into the ground and after he fails to make the first or second billion dollar annual financing payment someone else will finally just take over or sell the domain.
Twitter takes in $5 Billion per year but spends most of that on costs to operate.
So he thinks he's clever and just has to cut operating costs by a billion per year and "tada" profitable enough to pay financing of a BILLION PER YEAR
Except you can't kick out three legs of a table and expect it to keep working like it used to, or at all.
Anyway he can do whatever he wants, my only curiosity is if this teaches people they can just quit twitter as there are plenty of better alternatives or will be soon.
Once people learn the "quitting skill" then maybe they can use it on Facebook etc.
This will get you a list of solid team players. It's a list of who can keep a company going, but not the company.
Dependencies on other teams, management constantly changing their mind, having to put out fires, helping other teams, etc. There are very few teams where this kind of thing doesn't happen.
Also, something to keep in mind when saying things like "you can fire 80% of your SWEs and survive" is slack. You might survive, but have no slack which means any sort of tail event is going to destroy your company.
As a non-Staff IC, I probably can't unblock myself if my problem spans across multiple teams.
For a manager/Staff eng, unblocking across a different org is probably infeasible.
It feels like Director+ is when it becomes your responsibility to unblock things no matter what.
Ex: the "Being a Leader Means Never Saying “That’s Not My Problem”" section in this article
https://staysaasy.com/leadership/2022/08/15/how-to-break-int...
Because short term optimizations teams do to get things out almost always cause larger (global) risks, from everything from new attack surfaces to yet-another-copy-of-user-data that now can get leaked because it isn’t actually protected the way it is supposed to be.
Near as I can tell from stories, Twitter was already maxing out the auditing and compliance bypassing to get things done, so yikes on the long term fallout here.
Based on what.
Have any of these people worked at Twitter or have any metrics benchmarking it against its peers.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/274566/twitters-annual-r...
2021 would have been a profit of $300M had they not included a one-time lawsuit settlement.
What really stands out is how much they spend on stock-based compensation – it seems like that would have been a key area to save money but that was also less than a third of the $1.2B in new annual debt which Musk just added so I have no idea how they could make the numbers work anymore.
https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2021/ar...
It's circular reasoning at best. 80% of employees were fired because it was overstaffed, and since the site is still up afterwards, Twitter was overstaffed.
And my point still stands that there is no empirical evidence that Twitter was overstaffed.
We do know that their revenue/employee back in 2020 was better than many other startups e.g. Shopify, Zoom.
https://twitter.com/RyanReeves_/status/1423013707190206464?l...
the pilot is the pilot, but 80% of the crew is, if the plan is to got from A to B. Maybe a second pilot for backup is a good idea, but is cabin crew selling lottery tickets on flight?
Even the cheap airlines have cabin crew; they're not there for the hell of it.
It's microservice based site features will break one by one.
Sounds like an upgrade. That's not really helping your point.
>It's microservice based site features will break one by one.
Yes, I see this as highly probable.
WhatsApp is a real-time messaging service and famously had only 50 engineers when its userbase is close to one billion [1].
[1]Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users:
https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...
WhatsApp did not have recommendations, advertising, content moderation, GDPR, DCMA etc or the volume of bots. It is simply not a comparable system.
And it is the backend systems you don't see that make up most of the tech stack.
Honest question, I'm a game dev. In my industry, we outsource a lot of that stuff.
But twitter had 7500 employees in 2021, of which about half were engineering (reports I found vary between 3500 to 4500), so that's at least 65x the engineers!
Whatever all those devs were doing was not producing a profit and was not improving the user experience.
As an extension of this, I propose we remove 4/5ths of each airliner. The 20% that remains, so long as we pick the right 20%, will surely fly correctly.
Seriously: who writes this dreck? You don't have to believe that every single employee at a company is productive or necessary to understand that you can't saddle your remaining employees, even if you picked the "right" ones, with the remaining workload.
On top of that, it feels like classic "magical" thinking by a manager who doesn't understand technical scope or split responsibilities. Why bother to understand why you've hired so many people before blithely opining that 4/5ths of them are fireable? Who the hell wants to work for someone who says things like that? Certainly not the "high-quality" engineers who are supposedly being separated from the chaff.
"It's just money" says Elon and if his goal were to be the world's most massive troll (which I suspect is a large part of it), then it's achievement accomplished, full stop.
In a month they're going to say "look! we didn't have a single outage during the World Cup" and act like it vindicates their approach.
This is exactly the problem with this thinking. A lot of people don't contribute as much as the top contributors, but if you remove them, suddenly the most productive people have to do their normal jobs plus all these other peoples' too. Then they're going to feel overworked and look for a better job elsewhere.
You end up with the less productive employees remaining.
Ultimately, each company should employ exactly one engineer.
> Prediction 36: In the future, all work will be outsourced, until all the work on the planet is being done by one guy.
The Pareto Principle in no way implies that you can just fire 80% of your employees and retain 80% of their "effect"; that's just not how tasking and scoping work.
Much of that workload isn't going away, even if they are ignoring it.
I guess where I'm going is that the article states a roughly true thesis, but applies it in a situation where it's not terribly relevant.
Not sure if they will fly correctly. But most airlines I'm sure have wildly profitable routes, some moderately profitable routes, some mild. And some I'm sure are loss making routes.
You start plotting a graph and a bell curve emerges. The key is this- Do the profitable routes have more demand you can't meet now, but can meet if you divert resources from the loss making routes. If the answer is yes, you can always eliminate the loss making routes, and use those resources to supply to profit making ones. This makes perfect sense, because it not only saves money, this makes money.
There's a bakery near my place which used to sell its things in a shop. Soon enough they realise finding talent to bake is a big problem and most people were buying bulk quantities to sell it to others for a small profit. Eventually he realised he could sell to people who could run shops but had no talent to bake. That way we was able to divert his time and resources to make things at scale, so obviously his profits and by definition market capture increased too.
The real question in case of companies like Twitter is- What is Twitter's core competence? Should Twitter run a in house payroll team? Should they be running a PR team? What sort and size of Legal teams should they be running? Should they be running a in house content moderation team? If their business benefits more making newer products and features. It does make total sense to cut down resources from places are a cost center -ve to hiring more programmers. And it does make total sense for Musk to say things like they will be fairly intense on the engineering and programming side of things.
(And there's a reason airlines fly routes at a loss: an unprofitable route brings travelers to hubs where profitable flights can be allocated cheaply. It's never, ever as simple as "just trim the fat," because the things you think are "fat" almost never are.)
>>It's never, ever as simple as "just trim the fat," because the things you think are "fat" almost never are.
Fair enough. But do trim the real fat.
With larger social companies, outside the tech part, there are inevitably marketing/outreach teams in popular/growth regions of the world building campaigns in conjunction with niches or brands.
When the agency being exercised is departure you get two remainers - the zealots and the hanger-ons.
You can try to roll the clock back to a nimble pivot or preserve startup but you're looking at wildly different skillsets to make that work and those people have likely just left.
It's possible to pump out great things with this configuration, but only a fool would sign up for the task. Or maybe a Michael Milken who fancies himself as a Steve Jobs.
> And one last thing. The company that has deep enough pockets can survive tons of shit. If you wave a check big enough, you will find people willing to go through hell and back and who will drag the company forward. I believe this is a very important point. I felt that we (software engineers) sometimes have too big egos believing that if enough software engineers left, the company will fall apart. The reality is that (big money) can help navigate quite dire circumstances for companies.
Does Twitter have deep pockets? And if it offered you whatever it would take for you to spend some months in hell, do you trust that it would be able to pay? Twitter is in an awful situation, and in sharp distinction to Musk's previous near-death experiences, there's no government coming to bail him out.
With Twitter getting a much better balance sheet, what would stop them from hiring more great folks again in 3-6 months?
I think a lot of people and in this thread included really underestimate negative impact of poor product innovation culture. This hard reset is the only way imo.
Because hiring is hard, and there is little reason to think their balance sheet would be much better. And because some of their advertisers are leaving, reducing their income. And because a lot of these "great people" probably wouldn't take Musk at his word due to his unreliable leadership the past year.
Things like personnel and advertisers don't turn on a dime. It's not like cloud computing - Twitter will face long term consequences in the slower moving fields because of Musk's current decisions.
Let's not forget that twitter IPO'd at $45 a share in 2013. The market agrees with musk that the last decade has produced minimal value.
New hires won't know the internals of Twitter but they can dive in and help. They can also be motivated by equity-heavy comp packages.
And given that it's a private company not sure whether you would expect compensation other than salary.
I think you underestimate how much some people would like to see Twitter 2.0 succeed. Lots of people didn't love how censorious Twitter had become and want to help build something better. I have several friends who are interested in working there. It does sound like it will be long hours. But for some people that will be a badge of honor. Most of my interested friends are not married so have fewer other priorities.
Maybe there is a cadre of conservative freedom loving experienced techies hiding in the shadows but I haven't seen them. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, I watched the whole Parler collapse saga caused by a lack of mastery and experience in their chosen technologies and it really instilled in me the idea of appreciating the drive of learning and open mindedness. The conservative movement seems to have a disdain for deep learning of a specific field. They are setting themselves up to be left behind in the tech revolution.
Your bias is showing. One does not have to be conservative to want Twitter 2.0 to succeed. Also, there are definitely experienced techies who are conservative and who are not "out" in silicon valley. It's hard to know how many there are because they have kept their heads down for many years.
Forget about new products, forget about improvements to existing products, forget infrastructure work/cost optimization, forget not having major data breaches regularly, forget mitigating large-scale security vulnerabilities(i.e. log4j), forget being able to capitalize on market trends on a useful timescale, and forget about the ability to deal with situations that require more engineering capacity that your company uses on an average day.
Entering "survival mode" and keeping only enough engineering capacity on board to keep the service running on a normal day is implicitly a bet that no emergent events are going to demand more capacity from you than is needed on that normal day. The product might be standing now, but you can't do anything useful with a paralyzed company that's going to topple over the first time it faces a stiff breeze.
Using Erlang.
Tiwtter uses Scala that should be much more scalabale, considering the staggering amount of money spent on the JVM compared to the BEAM.
Of course not the same, but the question is, how much harder?
10 times harder?
100 times harder?
Given 1/5 of the users and probably less than 1/200 of the traffic (*) it should be feasible with less than 7,500 employees.
I don't believe WhatsApp employed the best 50 engineers in the World, I bet many of them worked at Twitter too.
(*) 100 billion messages sent via WhatsApp every day VS 500 million tweets per day
Also, graph algorithm’s likely don’t scale linearly, 10 times more edges may have much much more resource usage.
So you're saying WhatsApp had no critical other teams, but Facebook bought them anyway for a record breaking sum of money at the time, because they looked nice on picture?
When Elon tweets, I'm guessing Twitter doesn't go do 118M write transactions to all his followers. But what it would have to do is flag all 118M accounts as "something as changed". Then the next time one of his followers is on Twitter, which could be a month from now, that flag means "uh oh, better go see what changed", and to do that, all of the follower's "following" accounts have to be accessed to find the change, if there is only 1 change flag per Twitter account.
If Twitter keeps a change flag per "Following" user, that makes finding changes easier, but also means lots more flags to keep updated.
Or, you could go "stateless" and not use flags, but then it seems like you'd be doing a lot of work for users who may not see it for days or months.
Way different problem than 1-on-1 messaging.
if my mom sends a message to the family group it goes to 50 people.
How many billion WhatsApp groups are there?
with the same constraints and problems Twitter has to face (offline users, notifications, keep users messages until they are online again, etc.)
Also, Twitter does real-time data analysis, which is another of their money sources, and takes a huge amount of computing.
It's probably because many Twitter former employees lurk here on HN and can't understand why nobody is rooting for their beloved platform, of course shame on EM for his abusive behaviour, people before money, always, but nobody will miss Twitter if it really dies.
Half of what Twitter does is superfluous and the rest is badly executed.
A normal company would not survive with only 20% of the staff, Twitter might thrive, because honestly, at its core, as many have already pointed out, Twitter is “writing on a bathroom wall”.
Also: never forget that this happened and then Kashoggi was killed by the Royal Prince Bin Salman
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/09/twitter-saud...
But while people are worried now that Prince Al-Walid invested 1.9 billion dollars in Musk's Twitter, they also forget that till 2020 he owned 4.6% of Twitter through the Saudi investment fund he controls, the shares were acquired in 2015, when the spy was already working for Twitter and the management had already confronted him about the issue!
"If the company is left only with 20% of engineers (even the best ones), it will be way deep in survival mode (just barely providing support for an existing product, not building some new exciting things or even improving existing ones)."
He also goes on to talk about how the company has deep pockets and that means they're not paralyzed, as you say, in the long term. Feel free to actually read the article for more details.
"Deep pockets" don't do anything on their own, especially not when no one believes in your company's ability to consistently fulfill its obligations to customers. You can hire engineers, sure, but how are you going to ramp them up when all of your engineering capacity is dedicated to keeping a small group of core services from falling over dead? How quickly can you bring people on board when you're notorious for a culture of overwork and abuse? You can borrow some money, sure, but who's going to lend to you when you're massively in debt from an LBO and you can't provide more than "long term" promises that in six months the company can actually function?
"How quickly can you bring people on board when you're notorious for a culture of overwork and abuse?". I agree that could be a challenge but then again, he's gotten people onboard at his other companies where I've heard the work/life balance is awful as well.
"who's going to lend to you when you're massively in debt from an LBO and you can't provide more than "long term" promises that in six months the company can actually function?". Valid point in today's economic climate, but there have been countless examples of investors making risky bets repeatedly. Uber is a perfect example.
Needless to say, employees will do one of two things. Even very mediocre employees will demand high-end consultancy fees, and "rock-stars" or whatever you want to call them will demand factors of that, or they'll just avoid you like the plague. But frankly, after a relatively short period of time even the high pay won't justify coming back anymore.
And then the time will come to hire and your competitor will be able to hire great people (with intimate knowledge of your company's inner workings), and you won't be able to hire anyone for double the pay. And that's IF you can avoid your company suffering regular sabotage when firing people. People do stupid things when they get fired. Seriously. It's scary.
I'm not one to defend Musk's management practices, but I think the main idea motivating this purge (which may or may not be a correct idea) is that Twitter, specifically, does not need "rockstar" engineers anymore at all.
Sure, he'll take them if they kiss the ring and work for peanuts, but he wants people who follow orders and don't talk back. He's not unique here: all management everywhere always wants this wants this but, in some endeavors you have to tolerate people who aren't this way, either because you don't know the right orders to give, or just because they're the only talent that can get done what you need to get done. Twitter's main corporate priority at this point is keeping the lights on as cheaply as possible, since they have a huge nut of debt they they can't afford to service, and on top of it all revenue is down. Again, I'm not saying this situation is desirable for Twitter employees, users, management, advertisers, or ownership (or even Musk himself), but this is the situation.
https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159527086740295680...
So clearly mr. Musk thinks twitter needs rockstar engineers. I also find it extremely unlikely he paid anything less than a full year's wage for these 12 weeks.
Startup vs mature service codebases can be quite different in conplexity... getting engineers up to speed and ready to contribute on the latter can take much more time.
Labour productivity is already a per worker measure. I've never heard it used to refer to anything else.
That seems to be what they're referring to when they say they can increase productivity by cutting workers and working the rest much harder.
I'm pretty sure that's bullshit and the sheer amount just daily maintenance and fire fighting will annihilate any possible productivity gains, so I agree with you.
There are plenty of industries where the economic envelope favors cheap human labor. But this in no way implies that you can cut 80% of your staff and get the remaining 20% to do both their own work and everyone else’s.
And say hello to being increasingly surrounded by Chesterton's fences[0] at every turn.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence
employees that would do this is unlikely to remain at the company to actually do this. Existing corporate culture or management friction will very quickly force out such an engineer, or make such an engineer ineffective at producing such innovations.
Another example is Tencent, from social network to a mail client, then WeChat, also expanded to games. QQ which is the original social network Tencent was built on, stayed almost the same with or worse with 100x head-counts.
It is always a rare event, but when it happens, it is a 1000x win for a company. It is something worth betting on.
survival doesn't have to be meaningful, the meaning is to survive.
Survival is about not dying, Twitter don't need 7,500 employees to survive.
> forget mitigating large-scale security vulnerabilities(i.e. log4j),
that was simply a matter of upgrading a dependency.
and honestly a remote exploit for that has never been spotted in the wild.
... Across a global infrastructure. ... And finding out if, where you have been compromised. ...And fixing all those systems that was found to have been compromised. ...And handling media questions, PR related to the issue and your organization.
Just saying it was "simply a matter of upgrading a dependency." is so amazingly far from what such an event requires. Even if you wasn't actually affected in a technical sense.
5 people total?
that have too look at the problem for a few days and then go back to their regular duties.
Which is their job, BTW, you don't need "special teams".
I work for a company that has more than 20 thousand employees.
How we fixed it?
Every team checked if their dependencies contained a vulnerable version of log4j, fixed it, ran the tests, submitted the new code, the CI/CD did the rest.
absolutely not.
> How much do they handle media questions, PR related to global IT security events?
You don't need thousand people for that and It's their job anyway!
Listen, I come from what the average American would call "a socialist" country, at least regarding the labour market and organization.
I understand the social part of employing more people than necessary, it's a kind of redistribution that many countries won't or can't do through proper taxation.
I also understand that sometimes it's about resilience, two of everything is better than single points of failure.
But, it's ironic that these observations come from the POV of an American company.
It's ironic that people are leaving Twitter because Musk is asking them to work hard, meaning they aren't actually doing it, according to his standards (he's a terrible boss, no doubt!), but also meaning that Twitter is probably doing so bad because they focused on the wrong thing, like Facebook with the meta fiasco.
The American dream is not about 28 days of paid vacation, maternity leave, life-work balance, it's about making as much money as you can in the fastest way possible.
In its original formulation In such a country the talents, energy and perseverance of a person ... have far greater opportunity to display than in monarchies
You want a better life balance, better working hours, less staying in the office and more paid time to raise your kids?
Come to Europe!
For much less money of course.
Because you can't have both.
So yeah, it might be easier to do something with 3 people than one, but most of the time too many people are enemy of the efficiency.
You know what took the most part of upgrading the log4j incident where I work?
Coordination between too many levels of hierarchy.
That is actually the worst part of working in large companies, that's what actually stifle innovation and paralyzes them.
Twitter was already doing bad, it's been doing bad for years.
I left Twitter (as a user) 5 years ago, because it was already terrible.
I'm no Musk fan at all, but at least he's making things clear: if that's the end result people are used to, we don't need that many people to achieve it, we simply need motivated people (by money).
As SDE employee in Germany you might earn 60k-120k. Where the end of the range is more often found in larger companies with about 10y+ of experience.
But you have health care that never puts you in a position where you have to decide between ruin or death of a family member, what can be done will be done even e.g. if you need brain cancer be burned out with a particle accelerator (no joke). You will never be in a position where you instantly are ruined when you loose your job (1y at 70% income and at least social care later). You are forced to have an extend of retirement solution/insurance, which costs, but at least you cannot mess it up or loose in when you are insolvent.
So this stuff I call the true freedom, not gun ownership or freedom of speech that goes to far. Being free of crushing fear about your family health and future risks, this is freedom in Germany and other European countries. - This freedom also reduces violence and crime you are confronted with a lot, because the motivation or psychic conditions for it are much less common.
So for me Germany is the perfect place for raising a family imo. But maybe yes there might be a reduced chance to become really rich here as a SDE
What? Citation needed.
This spread through Minecraft servers like wildfire. The damage was mostly kids crashing the game on other kids, but that's still a denial of service.
Log4Shell definitely had "in the wild" exploitation. A trivial amount of googling gives evidence.
In most organization management courses, you are taught " you cannot change the culture". The truth is you can and you do it by firing people, firing or pushing out a lot of people.
My point is that Twitter is a bad case study for engineers, its a very standard case for mba though. You cannot and should not view Twitter thru a primarily engineering point of view.
---
Are those newfangled 360 reviews really that much more effective than other review processes?
And of course this fails to account for how nobody likes, say, those meddling busybodies on the security team, or those idiots at the support desk who always make you unplug and restart things before letting you explain what the real issue is; or how everyone likes that one person who always brings donuts and spends more time being friendly with other teams than actually working.
well they were an exercise in bullshit back at amazon in 2001...
Doubt.
Employees often have very imperfect information into what other employees are doing in their day to day jobs. The team that looks lazy because they don't immediately prioritize your bugs and requests may be understaffed compared to the operational load.
And unsexy jobs that keep the operation running may be done very well by people who aren't part of the most popular kids, but you'll wind up missing them once they're gone.
I couldn't help but read "H1B slaves" in place of workaholics.
That might sound mildly hyperbolic, but if you can force someone out of the country, that gives you tyrannical power over them. The power imbalance is so large it must be seen as coercive.
I'd be very interested to see the H1B demographics of post Musk Twitter.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/politics/twitter-layoffs-visa...
> “Firing folks who are on a H-1B in a major economic downturn is not just putting them out of the job, it’s tantamount to ruining their lives,” one former employee told CNN, adding that some people who had accepted Musk’s ultimatum had accepted it “out of self-preservation.”
> For that reason, some staff at Twitter who are on H-1B visas are staying on despite wanting to leave the company, a former employee told CNN, adding that they’re “concerned with being forced into a flooded job market where they may be unable to find a job and before being forced out of the country.”