8 ms·

“I worked at Facebook when we [were] 200. [Twitter’s] layoffs are appropriate”

62 points by GaylordTuring 4y ago

contravariant 4y ago
I see a lot of people assuming that twitter doesn't need that many employees. Usually stated with a high degree of certainty. Certainly I can't come up with a reason why they should have that many employees. However, lack of counterarguments is the weakest form of evidence, and such situations have the annoying property that public opinion is easily swayed and frequently in the wrong direction. So does anyone positively know that twitter's employees were not doing much useful, or is everyone (including, possibly, Elon Musk) just following their gut feeling?
- bombcar 4y ago
  Jack seems to think they grew too quickly but what would he know? https://twitter.com/jack/status/1588913276980633600 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1588913276980633600
  - fragmede 4y ago
    Not much. He spent all of his time running Square, and there are only so many hours in the day, which is why Twitter was languishing on the vine until this bit of excitement happened.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Speaking of vine I wonder if the skeleton vine maintenance crew got the boot.
    - kelp 4y ago
      I was at Square from 2011 - 2017 and talked to Jack pretty often, including about how he managed his time. And his calendar was public. When I was at Square and Jack was also working at Twitter, he split his days evenly across both companies. At Square we were frustrated he wasn’t spending enough time on us. I don’t know what it was like after mid 2017.
  - dilyevsky 4y ago
    Jack seems to think (and say) whatever is good for jack. In this case to peddle his new social network
  - cmeacham98 4y ago
    "Grew too quickly" does not imply that Twitter currently has too many engineers, only that they did at some point in the past.
- harlequinn77 4y ago
  You're right that this is all mostly assumption. I've not seen anything about what they working, or even a break down by department, job role etc. The only thing was something like "10 managers for every developer", and who knows if that's true. I'd love to see some stats, but doubt we ever will. I'd also love to get some responses from the remaining high performing tech talent about their opinion of it all. There was that guy who recently blew a whistle on the spread/blind-eye of bots and he seemed annoyed with the corporate culture. On the other hand, every thread here and on social media is probably filled with upset people who have been laid off, hoping to swing public perception against New Twitter. It's as clear as mud!
- bawolff 4y ago
  Honestly the part that seems madness to me is not the downsizing but how quickly. If a company doubled in size overnight that would be a huge red flag. Same thing for shrinking. Sudden scale changes are really really hard to pull off.
- paxys 4y ago
  In any tech company out there only a small number of employees are tasked with keeping the lights on. The majority are working on new feature development. So "you can run [company] with fewer employees" is trivially true. Of course the flip side of that is – without these employees you will also not be able to deliver on all these new features. In Twitter's case Elon has decided that whatever new features the previous leadership were cooking are irrelevant now.
slyall 4y ago
I'm sure you can run a version of twitter or Facebook with just a couple of hundred people but it will be a struggle. Both companies have to work with 100s of governments, government agencies, advertisers and large organisations across the globe. Hard to do with just a handful of people. You could automate all moderation and spam filtering and maintain that system with a team of a dozen people. It would work to an extent but with lots of problems. 20 programmers rolling out features? Sure but don't expect too much.
woodruffw 4y ago
Having worked at (and presumably left) a company when it was a tiny fraction of its current size is probably a stronger signal that you don't know what it takes (in terms of headcount) to run a large company than a signal that you do. Did Twitter require just that many people? Maybe, maybe not. But a 50% haircut with no meaningful basis in role/performance is an indicator that the layoffs were anything but appropriate.
- justahuman74 4y ago
  A 50% haircut without a careful planning is straight-up negligent. It's like there's anger at being forced to follow-through on the transaction and decided that he's happy to burn the cash.
fermentation 4y ago
Any new insights here compared to other investors foaming at the mouth over the prospect of fb laying off folks?
AlchemistCamp 4y ago
For a point of comparison, Discord scaled to 100 million MAU with just 5 platform engineers. That's about 1/3 of Twitter's user count and Discord was also doing both voice and video chat. At this point, Discord is probably larger than Twitter even on the MAU metric and is handling far more concurrent users and absurdly more events. They've had to scale their staff in the past two years, but it's still considerably smaller than Twitter will be even even after the layoffs. Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748028 More details: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/08/real-time-communication-at-scale-with-elixir-at-discord/ https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/08/real-time-communicat...
- brundolf 4y ago
  They also have a much higher-quality product and have done a much better job adding features that users actually want, and shipping them at a faster rate Something to think about there
- tootie 4y ago
  Businesses don't run on engineering
  - justahuman74 4y ago
    You're right, we should hire more MBAs
    - pbak 4y ago
      Well, Twitter obviously did :-)
- rektide 4y ago
  Discord is an intranet-as-a-service non-public facing system. They are on casual mode. Twitter has been the public space, the conflux where everything happens all together & becomes known. Its laughable to me that anyone would try to compare the two. From a technical perspective, scaling discord is intensely stupidly easier, since few subdiscords have to scale to tens of thousands of active users. From a social perspective, scaling discord is eighty bajillion gazillion times easier, since each subdiscord has its own authoritarian dictatorial owners who have complete & total say over their regime. And twitter is just everyone, all together, one huge vast chat room, and theres a huge obligation to only boot jackasses if they really cross some hard set lines. Twitter is 100x the engineering difficulty with far far far far far more fan out, far more engagement, and it's a million times more difficult socially to handle. This belittling shade you throw is grossly out of order & ignorant.
sp332 4y ago
Well the new probably-true rumor is that they're already trying to hire back some of the people they got rid of. https://mobile.twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1589075543420325888 https://mobile.twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/15890755434203... Edit: Oh there's already an HN post about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33488224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33488224
- homeland221 4y ago
  Sometime, departmental heads will try their best to save themselves. In order to meet the downsizing target they will find as many people to get rid of in order to save themselves. It is common to see this happen in many companies. Just that, most will hide it as rehiring for replacements (which usually at a lower budget but with bigger tasks to assume than previous leaving staff). In tweeter case, decisions might be sub-optimal when Elon took over. Anyway, recession is around the corner, so tweeter can easily find the best when market is in a slump in coming 3 mths.
- jjeaff 4y ago
  Seems more likely they are just trying to get some people back in to train whoever will be taking over their duties. Which is why cutting so many employees should be done carefully and with at least a little bit of planning. You are throwing so much institutional knowledge in the garbage by just cutting off half your workforce overnight.
brundolf 4y ago
The amount, but probably not the way they were executed (in several different ways)
swellguy 4y ago
To me this comment is a bit naive, as the main point of hiring people in silicon valley for a public tech company is to keep people from working on something worthwhile so that competition doesn't exist. That's why so many people "work" at TWTR and other large tech companies companies. Obviously all of these companies are extremely overstaffed, as anyone who has worked at one can easily attest to.
querulous 4y ago
you need a ton of people to run an ad platform modern advertisers will actually use. and a ton of ad sales people to convince them to use it. twitter the product is pretty simple. twitter the business is not
zug_zug 4y ago
There are two very different questions: 1. Could twitter have been built in such a way that it was a stable company with half as many people? 2. Could you chop X% of twitter off and have the remainder of the company want to and be able to restructure and self-repair into a stable company. I think the answer to #1 is yes, but #2 is a complete mystery to me. It's the difference between "Could a raspberry pi run linux?" and "Can I remove half material in my mac by weight of my mac and still have it run linux?"
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  at its core twitter is ad delivery + a timeline of followers/curated recommendations you can make a twitter clone front + back in a night from scratch they already have the hard “scale” to handle lots of traffic in a stable/fast manner done how many employees and managers do you need to maintain this + add new features? 7,000 seems pretty high. 3,000 sounds kind of high too but i don’t know the split between departments like legal, HR, etc.
dasil003 4y ago
VC-funded companies don’t hire the number of employees they need, they hire the amount they can afford. For hyper growth companies, whatever brilliant spark created their trajectory will eventually be usurped by empire builders who worm their way into anything with the smell of success. The headcount needed is then always inflated due to middle management ambitions, and systems are set up to utilize (and implicitly justify) the available resources.
robomartin 4y ago
Am I the only one who thinks the Twitter UI is awful? To be fair, all I’ve ever seen is the desktop/browser UI, don’t know what the mobile app looks like. For that matter, I think both Facebook and LinkedIn’s UI’s are pretty bad. I’ve been communicating online since USENET days. I find it interesting to see just how many times the same thing has been reinvented and how bad it can be.
yrgulation 4y ago
The issue is not the layoffs, the issue is how they are managed. No other company is taking as much heat as twitter for layoffs because no one is managing it as badly. Elon Musk is heading the same path as Mark Zuckerberg - his brand has ended.
- kcplate 4y ago
  If some other ownership group came in and chopped 50% the exact same way…there would be less controversy. It might still make the news because it’s Twitter, much as other well known tech companies make the news with their layoffs…but the drama is because it’s Musk.
  - jjeaff 4y ago
    It's Musk, but also, because it's Musk, there is just a lot more coverage of the details of what is going on. The biggest issue I see is that the employees are just in the dark. They literally have to follow Musk's public Twitter feed to glean anything about what is going on. It creates a lot of chaos to fire your executive team then immediately start layoffs. Normally, something like this should be organized and clearly communicated and done with care and empathy. This whole process comes across as rough shod and unplanned.
    - kcplate 4y ago
      >The biggest issue I see is that the employees are just in the dark. Employees are almost always in the dark prior to getting “the pink slip”. In my 35+ year career have been through multiple layoffs through multiple companies/buyouts both on the surviving and RIF implementation side as well as the side getting cut. Never, ever was there full transparency and this was intentional. Most often the RIF itself is hidden from the general employee populace until the moment it starts happening. Then it starts happening and everyone sits around during the chaos and wonders if they are next while blood and tears run down the halls of the offices. Layoffs are ugly and there is no way to make them less ugly unless gobs of cash are provided to soften the blow. Even then, speaking from experience, it still sucks…just sucks a little less. Everyone who got RIF’ed from the executives downward should not have been surprised. His intentions has been broadcast publicly from Musk himself for six months. I think this has actually been more transparent than most and perhaps because it’s more public than most, the external scrutiny makes it seem worse than others. It’s not, because as I said before, it’s always ugly.
hatenberg 4y ago
These people all don’t appreciate that social media is a regulated business now. It’s a Silicon Valley thing to treat that as an optional cost center but Elon is fucking around and will find out in Europe and Asia in relatively short order
trashdigitalnom 4y ago
Layoffs are great. They weed out the unproductive, the weak, the ones that don’t deserve such salary. The good employees will find employment regardless. The bad ones won’t. Nothing to see here. In fact, the world could use way way way more layoffs now.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  Hot take.
- mola 4y ago
  I wish you many happy layoffs.
  - trashdigitalnom 4y ago
    I am not worried. Unlike many people, I worked low paying jobs from cleaning rat poop with bleach to making high salary as wall st engineers. If I got laid off, other people will have it way worse. I am strong, smart, capable and not ashamed to do even dirty work. Not worried a bit.
d2049 4y ago
The tweet's author is a product designer who worked at FB for 4 years from 2008-2012, i.e. they left before FB hit massive scale, and more importantly has little to no understanding of the engineering / ops / content moderation required to run FB in the year 2022. They have since not worked at any company aside from as an investor (see https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobby-goodlatte/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobby-goodlatte/). I'm not making any claim on whether FB has too many employees, but this person is clueless.
danbmil99 4y ago
A company I helped found and run went through many up and down cycles where we expanded and shrank head count several times over a period of a few years. My takeaway was this: there is a strong tendency to want to convince yourself you don't have to let go of as many people as you do. But then you just end up doing it in waves and in fact it's much more painful. The way Musk did this is inexcusable and reprehensible, but I have no doubt that Twitter was incredibly bloated. In fact, one could make the argument that it didn't really matter who got fired, it could be a random decision. Not very empathetic but from the business perspective I think that's probably the case, and Elon Musk may be a nutcase but one thing he knows something about is how tech companies work.
rich_sasha 4y ago
That you can run Twitter with a much smaller crew is probably true, but also kind of irrelevant. Question is, can you make it so overnight. You write stuff totally differently depending on whether it's going to be maintained by just you, or a team of 50 DevOps etc. Yes you could probably run stuff on N servers instead of M where N << M, thus requiring much fewer sysadmin support etc but that requires that you designed things that way from the get go. But how much work is it to realign stuff to run this way? Probably initially more work than just keeping it going as is. It's like, you can't take a ICE car and turn it electric by just cutting out the engine and sticking a battery where the fuel tank was.
sys_64738 4y ago
When is startup mode you can get away with anything. Trying to stabilize the business to sustain it requires spending money on non-engineering parts of the business. Spending on those areas are what often dooms the company to bloat. A lot of these companies also try to spin up projects to spend capital on the "next best thing". But they don't realize that the only reason they exist is purely down to luck and not any type of smarts from the founders. But the founders generally don't realize they had dumb luck. You see this with Google and Facebook where their main product was being the one which got momentum at that time and everything else they try to invent is pure trash. The only growth FB has had is through acquisitions and then it's a scattergun approach. These companies are filled with waste.

62 points by GaylordTuring 4y ago

I see a lot of people assuming that twitter doesn't need that many employees. Usually stated with a high degree of certainty. Certainly I can't come up with a reason why they should have that many employees. However, lack of counterarguments is the weakest form of evidence, and such situations have the annoying property that public opinion is easily swayed and frequently in the wrong direction. So does anyone positively know that twitter's employees were not doing much useful, or is everyone (including, possibly, Elon Musk) just following their gut feeling?

bombcar 4y ago
Jack seems to think they grew too quickly but what would he know? https://twitter.com/jack/status/1588913276980633600 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1588913276980633600
- fragmede 4y ago
  Not much. He spent all of his time running Square, and there are only so many hours in the day, which is why Twitter was languishing on the vine until this bit of excitement happened.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Speaking of vine I wonder if the skeleton vine maintenance crew got the boot.
  - kelp 4y ago
    I was at Square from 2011 - 2017 and talked to Jack pretty often, including about how he managed his time. And his calendar was public. When I was at Square and Jack was also working at Twitter, he split his days evenly across both companies. At Square we were frustrated he wasn’t spending enough time on us. I don’t know what it was like after mid 2017.
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  Jack seems to think (and say) whatever is good for jack. In this case to peddle his new social network
- cmeacham98 4y ago
  "Grew too quickly" does not imply that Twitter currently has too many engineers, only that they did at some point in the past.
harlequinn77 4y ago
You're right that this is all mostly assumption. I've not seen anything about what they working, or even a break down by department, job role etc. The only thing was something like "10 managers for every developer", and who knows if that's true. I'd love to see some stats, but doubt we ever will. I'd also love to get some responses from the remaining high performing tech talent about their opinion of it all. There was that guy who recently blew a whistle on the spread/blind-eye of bots and he seemed annoyed with the corporate culture. On the other hand, every thread here and on social media is probably filled with upset people who have been laid off, hoping to swing public perception against New Twitter. It's as clear as mud!
bawolff 4y ago
Honestly the part that seems madness to me is not the downsizing but how quickly. If a company doubled in size overnight that would be a huge red flag. Same thing for shrinking. Sudden scale changes are really really hard to pull off.
paxys 4y ago
In any tech company out there only a small number of employees are tasked with keeping the lights on. The majority are working on new feature development. So "you can run [company] with fewer employees" is trivially true. Of course the flip side of that is – without these employees you will also not be able to deliver on all these new features. In Twitter's case Elon has decided that whatever new features the previous leadership were cooking are irrelevant now.

slyall 4y ago

I'm sure you can run a version of twitter or Facebook with just a couple of hundred people but it will be a struggle. Both companies have to work with 100s of governments, government agencies, advertisers and large organisations across the globe. Hard to do with just a handful of people. You could automate all moderation and spam filtering and maintain that system with a team of a dozen people. It would work to an extent but with lots of problems. 20 programmers rolling out features? Sure but don't expect too much.

woodruffw 4y ago

Having worked at (and presumably left) a company when it was a tiny fraction of its current size is probably a stronger signal that you don't know what it takes (in terms of headcount) to run a large company than a signal that you do. Did Twitter require just that many people? Maybe, maybe not. But a 50% haircut with no meaningful basis in role/performance is an indicator that the layoffs were anything but appropriate.

justahuman74 4y ago
A 50% haircut without a careful planning is straight-up negligent. It's like there's anger at being forced to follow-through on the transaction and decided that he's happy to burn the cash.

fermentation 4y ago

Any new insights here compared to other investors foaming at the mouth over the prospect of fb laying off folks?

AlchemistCamp 4y ago

For a point of comparison, Discord scaled to 100 million MAU with just 5 platform engineers. That's about 1/3 of Twitter's user count and Discord was also doing both voice and video chat. At this point, Discord is probably larger than Twitter even on the MAU metric and is handling far more concurrent users and absurdly more events. They've had to scale their staff in the past two years, but it's still considerably smaller than Twitter will be even even after the layoffs. Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748028 More details: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/08/real-time-communication-at-scale-with-elixir-at-discord/ https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/08/real-time-communicat...

brundolf 4y ago
They also have a much higher-quality product and have done a much better job adding features that users actually want, and shipping them at a faster rate Something to think about there
tootie 4y ago
Businesses don't run on engineering
- justahuman74 4y ago
  You're right, we should hire more MBAs
  - pbak 4y ago
    Well, Twitter obviously did :-)
rektide 4y ago
Discord is an intranet-as-a-service non-public facing system. They are on casual mode. Twitter has been the public space, the conflux where everything happens all together & becomes known. Its laughable to me that anyone would try to compare the two. From a technical perspective, scaling discord is intensely stupidly easier, since few subdiscords have to scale to tens of thousands of active users. From a social perspective, scaling discord is eighty bajillion gazillion times easier, since each subdiscord has its own authoritarian dictatorial owners who have complete & total say over their regime. And twitter is just everyone, all together, one huge vast chat room, and theres a huge obligation to only boot jackasses if they really cross some hard set lines. Twitter is 100x the engineering difficulty with far far far far far more fan out, far more engagement, and it's a million times more difficult socially to handle. This belittling shade you throw is grossly out of order & ignorant.

sp332 4y ago

Well the new probably-true rumor is that they're already trying to hire back some of the people they got rid of. https://mobile.twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1589075543420325888 https://mobile.twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/15890755434203... Edit: Oh there's already an HN post about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33488224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33488224

homeland221 4y ago
Sometime, departmental heads will try their best to save themselves. In order to meet the downsizing target they will find as many people to get rid of in order to save themselves. It is common to see this happen in many companies. Just that, most will hide it as rehiring for replacements (which usually at a lower budget but with bigger tasks to assume than previous leaving staff). In tweeter case, decisions might be sub-optimal when Elon took over. Anyway, recession is around the corner, so tweeter can easily find the best when market is in a slump in coming 3 mths.
jjeaff 4y ago
Seems more likely they are just trying to get some people back in to train whoever will be taking over their duties. Which is why cutting so many employees should be done carefully and with at least a little bit of planning. You are throwing so much institutional knowledge in the garbage by just cutting off half your workforce overnight.

brundolf 4y ago

The amount, but probably not the way they were executed (in several different ways)

swellguy 4y ago

To me this comment is a bit naive, as the main point of hiring people in silicon valley for a public tech company is to keep people from working on something worthwhile so that competition doesn't exist. That's why so many people "work" at TWTR and other large tech companies companies. Obviously all of these companies are extremely overstaffed, as anyone who has worked at one can easily attest to.

querulous 4y ago

you need a ton of people to run an ad platform modern advertisers will actually use. and a ton of ad sales people to convince them to use it. twitter the product is pretty simple. twitter the business is not

zug_zug 4y ago

There are two very different questions: 1. Could twitter have been built in such a way that it was a stable company with half as many people? 2. Could you chop X% of twitter off and have the remainder of the company want to and be able to restructure and self-repair into a stable company. I think the answer to #1 is yes, but #2 is a complete mystery to me. It's the difference between "Could a raspberry pi run linux?" and "Can I remove half material in my mac by weight of my mac and still have it run linux?"

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
at its core twitter is ad delivery + a timeline of followers/curated recommendations you can make a twitter clone front + back in a night from scratch they already have the hard “scale” to handle lots of traffic in a stable/fast manner done how many employees and managers do you need to maintain this + add new features? 7,000 seems pretty high. 3,000 sounds kind of high too but i don’t know the split between departments like legal, HR, etc.

dasil003 4y ago

VC-funded companies don’t hire the number of employees they need, they hire the amount they can afford. For hyper growth companies, whatever brilliant spark created their trajectory will eventually be usurped by empire builders who worm their way into anything with the smell of success. The headcount needed is then always inflated due to middle management ambitions, and systems are set up to utilize (and implicitly justify) the available resources.

robomartin 4y ago

Am I the only one who thinks the Twitter UI is awful? To be fair, all I’ve ever seen is the desktop/browser UI, don’t know what the mobile app looks like. For that matter, I think both Facebook and LinkedIn’s UI’s are pretty bad. I’ve been communicating online since USENET days. I find it interesting to see just how many times the same thing has been reinvented and how bad it can be.

yrgulation 4y ago

The issue is not the layoffs, the issue is how they are managed. No other company is taking as much heat as twitter for layoffs because no one is managing it as badly. Elon Musk is heading the same path as Mark Zuckerberg - his brand has ended.

kcplate 4y ago
If some other ownership group came in and chopped 50% the exact same way…there would be less controversy. It might still make the news because it’s Twitter, much as other well known tech companies make the news with their layoffs…but the drama is because it’s Musk.
- jjeaff 4y ago
  It's Musk, but also, because it's Musk, there is just a lot more coverage of the details of what is going on. The biggest issue I see is that the employees are just in the dark. They literally have to follow Musk's public Twitter feed to glean anything about what is going on. It creates a lot of chaos to fire your executive team then immediately start layoffs. Normally, something like this should be organized and clearly communicated and done with care and empathy. This whole process comes across as rough shod and unplanned.
  - kcplate 4y ago
    >The biggest issue I see is that the employees are just in the dark. Employees are almost always in the dark prior to getting “the pink slip”. In my 35+ year career have been through multiple layoffs through multiple companies/buyouts both on the surviving and RIF implementation side as well as the side getting cut. Never, ever was there full transparency and this was intentional. Most often the RIF itself is hidden from the general employee populace until the moment it starts happening. Then it starts happening and everyone sits around during the chaos and wonders if they are next while blood and tears run down the halls of the offices. Layoffs are ugly and there is no way to make them less ugly unless gobs of cash are provided to soften the blow. Even then, speaking from experience, it still sucks…just sucks a little less. Everyone who got RIF’ed from the executives downward should not have been surprised. His intentions has been broadcast publicly from Musk himself for six months. I think this has actually been more transparent than most and perhaps because it’s more public than most, the external scrutiny makes it seem worse than others. It’s not, because as I said before, it’s always ugly.

hatenberg 4y ago

These people all don’t appreciate that social media is a regulated business now. It’s a Silicon Valley thing to treat that as an optional cost center but Elon is fucking around and will find out in Europe and Asia in relatively short order

trashdigitalnom 4y ago

Layoffs are great. They weed out the unproductive, the weak, the ones that don’t deserve such salary. The good employees will find employment regardless. The bad ones won’t. Nothing to see here. In fact, the world could use way way way more layoffs now.

EdwardDiego 4y ago
Hot take.
mola 4y ago
I wish you many happy layoffs.
- trashdigitalnom 4y ago
  I am not worried. Unlike many people, I worked low paying jobs from cleaning rat poop with bleach to making high salary as wall st engineers. If I got laid off, other people will have it way worse. I am strong, smart, capable and not ashamed to do even dirty work. Not worried a bit.

d2049 4y ago

The tweet's author is a product designer who worked at FB for 4 years from 2008-2012, i.e. they left before FB hit massive scale, and more importantly has little to no understanding of the engineering / ops / content moderation required to run FB in the year 2022. They have since not worked at any company aside from as an investor (see https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobby-goodlatte/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobby-goodlatte/). I'm not making any claim on whether FB has too many employees, but this person is clueless.

danbmil99 4y ago

A company I helped found and run went through many up and down cycles where we expanded and shrank head count several times over a period of a few years. My takeaway was this: there is a strong tendency to want to convince yourself you don't have to let go of as many people as you do. But then you just end up doing it in waves and in fact it's much more painful. The way Musk did this is inexcusable and reprehensible, but I have no doubt that Twitter was incredibly bloated. In fact, one could make the argument that it didn't really matter who got fired, it could be a random decision. Not very empathetic but from the business perspective I think that's probably the case, and Elon Musk may be a nutcase but one thing he knows something about is how tech companies work.

rich_sasha 4y ago

That you can run Twitter with a much smaller crew is probably true, but also kind of irrelevant. Question is, can you make it so overnight. You write stuff totally differently depending on whether it's going to be maintained by just you, or a team of 50 DevOps etc. Yes you could probably run stuff on N servers instead of M where N << M, thus requiring much fewer sysadmin support etc but that requires that you designed things that way from the get go. But how much work is it to realign stuff to run this way? Probably initially more work than just keeping it going as is. It's like, you can't take a ICE car and turn it electric by just cutting out the engine and sticking a battery where the fuel tank was.

sys_64738 4y ago

When is startup mode you can get away with anything. Trying to stabilize the business to sustain it requires spending money on non-engineering parts of the business. Spending on those areas are what often dooms the company to bloat. A lot of these companies also try to spin up projects to spend capital on the "next best thing". But they don't realize that the only reason they exist is purely down to luck and not any type of smarts from the founders. But the founders generally don't realize they had dumb luck. You see this with Google and Facebook where their main product was being the one which got momentum at that time and everything else they try to invent is pure trash. The only growth FB has had is through acquisitions and then it's a scattergun approach. These companies are filled with waste.