Ask HN: Twitter laid off 75% of staff, were they needed?

WERE

It's not fair to say anything at this point. A body can continue operating with many parts removed, even for months, possibly years.

Like Chesterton's Fence, one cannot simply surmise that the culled parts were unnecessary. Many of the answers to such questions went out the door along with that fateful layoff wave.

What we can conclude is that Musk's impulsiveness may become his undoing this time around if his luck doesn't hold.

So do we know whether they need the offices around the world, or they fired facilities management and forgot to pay for the rent? Or perhaps they are going bankrupt and if so do they know or finance is gone too?

Plenty of developers seem to do nothing too.

Software that works can continue to work for months or years without maintenance. Angelfire, and most pages on Angelfire are still up. Other things fall apart faster.

Unpaid rent. Stinky offices. No follow-up on legally required notice and severance. Regulatory fines pile up. Lawsuits pile up. It's the lo-tech schlamperei that will bite first.

It's impossible to know now that Twitter is private and does not have to disclose quarterly results publicly.

We'll find out soon.

It's kinda funny how people think that firing people that are building fault tolerant distributed systems make the said systems immediately go down, including Elmo pulling the plug on a "critical rack" or whatever his tweet was. The effects will be seen in weeks, months or even years, as with any roles that were just removed but not replaced or covered.

Three quick points- despise Musk as well-

a) sorry to hear the "often repeated..."- a business even one in software is a complex entity in the real world with lots of surfaces and functions. Finance, Sales, Marketing, PR, BD, Enterprise, HR, etc etc all exist for good reasons. Would strongly suggest enhancing mental model to understand those reasons. Will make a person a better eng

b) re the above, if one understands the concept of technical debt, based on the concept of financial debt- Musk is incurring enormous debt in all operational areas right now. Financially beyond what he already put on the balance sheet. Regulators in many countries he operates in are readying fines. Lawsuits are being filed. Poor press relations will make it hard for good news at twitter to emerge and give bad news at any of his other businesses more attention. In terms of corporate relationships, many avenues for revenue, especially enterprise-side, are completely off the table now.

c) in many large businesses I have worked with, they are far more overstaffed with engineers doing the wrong things, and understaffed in areas that would be more meaningful for the business. Very little code is truly part of the asset infrastructure. The vast majority is liability, and engineers writing more of it are just burning good money

Looking only at immediate fallback, it might look like they didn't need to pay rent to occupy offices, either.

I wouldn't be surprised if TWTR just replaced all these non-essential, full time employees with administrative contracting firms.

Then all this becomes expense for the business that can be written off.

It's not about need. It's about ROI. Does Twitter (or any tech company) _need_ 7500 employees to stay operational? The answer is no.

But let me ask you a different question. Can one engineer increase the companies revenues by 0.1%?

If they can, they just made the company $5m/yr

If the ROI equation of an incremental hire can increase the companies revenues by 0.1% or even 0.01% the right move is to hire as many people as you can while the return on investment holds.

It’s clear to me those workers did a lot, and it’s showing. Just because the company with lots of momentum doesn’t shut down doesn’t mean those employees weren’t needed. It sounds like Twitter is not paying its bills, hasn’t processed the severance promised to laid off employees, is doing a bad job of working with partners and selling ads, has stopped doing effective moderation, the workplaces are dirtier, core services are regularly broken, managers aren’t managing, most of the “features” we’re getting are just things that were already done and rejected (the new for-you/following timeline swipe was rolled out and then back early last year) ga that were just a matter of moving existing data around (the views counter), and no truly new features have been developed yet.

Hard to evaluate this like other businesses.

The revenue is not as important to the owner compared to the reach and influence.

It seems like the lost staff were somewhat necessary for twitter’s old model, since the company seems to be losing advertising revenue. The technical service is also becoming less reliable, which supports other comments here that it is building up technical debt.

But I think that Musk had an idea for transforming Twitter into a new distribution for distributing music and video. It might be easier to transform the company and build the new service after breaking down the original model.

Maybe simply creating a new startup without messing with Twitter would have been more prudent, but probably less exciting for Musk.

Well, their API has been broken for days, and they haven't acknowledged it yet.

So I would say their current staffing levels are probably not sufficient.

I liked how before he fired most of the staff people were sanctimoniously explaining that Twitter was an incredibly complex system and if you couldn't understand how 4,000 engineers were needed you were an amateur.

Now they're gone and Twitter is still here but the goalposts have been moved to "well actually it's gonna break in t+X weeks" or "well it's not about the system working, it's about marginal profit per engineer".

What are you talking about? Twitter has not fired 75% of its staff. Elon Musk has toyed with the idea but no mass-firings have yet occurred.

Strange take to be focusing on the business side - the job of the business side is to make sure the organization makes money, according to Musk it's currently losing millions of $ per day, far more than before, and has lost large parts of its revenue. So by that measure we'd have to conclude the business people were in fact necessary. Although it's hard to say, since the financials aren't published, and a non-negligible portion of the losses will be due to the financial debt that is only a result of the takeover. And the loss in revenue is at least partially attributable to Musk's persona - some of the first companies to pull their ads were car companies that compete with Tesla, eg. But still, the reduced emphasis on moderation, PR, legal..., is arguably a genuine concern for many ad clients.

The more pressing question is arguably how necessary some of the engineers were (since quite a few were fired too). So many people have been predicting that the breakdown of the site is imminent, or just a few weeks away, or at least that it will slowly start degrading (with some shifting goalposts, maybe). The question is whether we are really seeing any of that. The site still seems to be functional as far as I can tell - I rarely log in, and I noticed that the "Please login" modal seemed to have some difficulties loading some elements lately - but I couldn't even reproduce the modal now, so maybe they decided to remove it (which would show that they still have the ability to make UI changes). I recently read that third-party APIs were down, but that might also have been a deliberate decision. Sure, they are probably accumulating some technical debt right now, but arguably it's the business side that would currently be the much bigger concern for the survival of the company (if it had to operate under market conditions, rather than being a pet project of one of the richest people on the planet).

They obviously weren’t. It’s a finished product. Name one thing they’ve done in the last 3 years. You can’t, it’s the same fucking website it has always been.

Let me preface this by saying I also dislike Musk and do not think he is managing twitter well.

Yes, they were not necessary.

Please, before you call me ignorant and downvote, just let me elaborate. I have seen the issue first-hand, it is subtle and specific to large companies.

First, companies want their stock price to go up. This is more important to them than profit margins, because the people making decisions (as are most employees) are renumerated largely in stock. Simply keeping a business profitable and stable will not increase stock prices, you need to convince investors that you have great plans which will make the company stronger. Hiring more employees makes this look more convincing.

Secondly, the best way for managers on all levels to increase their standing and compensation is to manage more people. As a result, it doesn't matter if your team is running optimally with 20 people and there's no point in starting new big projects, you must come up with reasons to hire more people to progress your career. Therefore, every manager is adamant about having perpetually understaffed teams.

The result is that more projects will be started - regardless of whether they make sense - and more people will be hired to work on those projects. At all levels, perpetually.

It is debatable how bad this inflation is, but the case of twitter shows that even a horribly abrupt and mismanaged exodus of 75% of employees will have no discernible mid-term effects on the product.

At risk of sounding extreme, I'd say that if the layoffs happened in an organised fashion and none of Musks's ill-conceived ideas were implemented, such loss of workforce would not have affected income. I also believe that if most large, established tech companies were built with efficiency in mind rather than perpetual stock growth, they could be effectively ran with 10% of the workforce.

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