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I think the real question is: Twitter grew 3x on the headcount front with a flat stock price over the course of less than 5 years. What exactly where these thou

I think the real question is: Twitter grew 3x on the headcount front with a flat stock price over the course of less than 5 years. What exactly where these thousands of employees actually doing and why did the previous CEO think what they were doing was worth hiring them for? That's just basic accountability from a stock holder or employee perspective. That's apparently a ton of money being wasted on nothing at all.

mirzap 4y ago
Yeah, and they were even profitable with ~3k employees. Then the hiring spree started and they went negative. Even if there wasn't Musk they would have to let go at least 30% of the people.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  The stock was rightly crashing when the company was public. A social media site that manges to lose money during the pandemic is truly mismanaged.
halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
This is the real question? Your question has nothing to do with the blog post and if you take a look around, what Twitter did was literally done across the entire industry, hence all the layoffs recently. There was a hiring glut to take advantage of cheap capital during COVID recovery. The capital has dried up, glut has ended and a lot of people lost their jobs. Why is that so hard to see? None of this is unique in any way to Twitter.
- subroutine 4y ago
  A bunch of people just got axed from Twitter because covid cash dried up? Shit I thought it was because Elon took over and fired anyone who refused to work at the office instead of at home.
  - halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
    The question was why they were hired, not why they were fired...
    - subroutine 4y ago
      The unemployment rate in Feb 2020 was 3.5%; by April 2020 it was up to 14%. It has never been lower than 3.5% since then. If there was a hiring glut due to covid it must have been a very industry-specific glut.
      - zdragnar 4y ago
        It definitely was industry specific. The need to satisfy a boom in remote working and people bored out of their minds in quarantine drove a ton of hiring in tech. If you had money to invest, tech stocks and companies were among the few places it made sense to pour money into during the pandemic. There have been several front-page posts on HN in the past few weeks about big name company CEOs apologizing for massively over hiring during the pandemic not realizing that it wouldn't pay off once the lockdowns ended and people decided to go back to living their normal lives again.
  - inferiorhuman 4y ago
    Now to be fair, as of last week Musk-o backed off the mandated return-to-office. Turns out that didn't quite go as planned.
    - subroutine 4y ago
      What a wild card. Has Musk said why he purchased twitter in the first place? IRL he seems so introverted. It's just odd to me he'd have any interest in a social media company.
      - lmm 4y ago
        He's long been extremely active on Twitter.
- TedShiller 4y ago
xedrac 4y ago
I think a likely answer is "moderating". That would explain why Elon was ok letting so many go so quickly.
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  From what I understand, contractors were used for moderating.
whatshisface 4y ago
If the 3x headcount increase really did add no value, there are still about 1/3rd profitable employees there now. In fact giant layoffs tend to cut the best people first because they are the ones who feel comfortable walking. The people that are the last to go are the ones who are very entrenched in the organization and who don't estimate their chances outside of it highly, and that's the exact description of who Elon thinks he's laying off.
- xyzzyz 4y ago
  > In fact giant layoffs tend to cut the best people first because they are the ones who feel comfortable walking. This is more true when the layoffs happen because the company’s situation deteriorates. If the company cuts jobs because revenues fall and products fail, better employees are indeed more likely to move to greener pastures before mediocre ones do. If, however, the company prospects improve, rather than worsen, this is no longer the case.
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    Twitter has lost a lot of revenue recently and is now in a lot of debt, although that might not have had time to sink in. In real terms it is in a much worse place, and remember that betting on a success is something you'd do as an investor, not as a rank and file employee.
  - frognumber 4y ago
    I'm not sure. I think I'm a good employee, but I like job stability. If I'm working somewhere with layoffs, I'll likely go somewhere without. There also isn't a measure of employee quality, and layoffs are often not about the individual (e.g. Amazon cutting robotics). I've had no clue how likely I was to be laid off during most points in my career.
- JamesBarney 4y ago
  I've found the opposite. I almost never see low performing employees fired outside of a mass layoff. In every layoffs I've seen 10x as many people were fired as quit. So you lose a bunch of low performers involuntarily, and a few top performers both voluntarily and involuntarily and that leads to the average quality improve.
pessimizer 4y ago
It had to take a bunch of them to wreck the UI.
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> Twitter grew 3x on the headcount front There were multiple executives making $10m/yr+ There were board members There were shareholders Why did all of them not stop this headcount increase if it's as easily reduced as "too much headcount bad, smaller headcount good"? These are paid professionals who are supposedly wealthy, good at their jobs, smart, informed, etc. How can us commenters on HackerNews sit from our armchair and say "ah, goofballs should've just not let headcount get so high!" These qualified people thought at the time it was a good idea to get up to 7.5k people. How were they all wrong?
- helloharvey 4y ago
- jdminhbg 4y ago
  > How can us commenters on HackerNews sit from our armchair and say "ah, goofballs should've just not let headcount get so high!" The cliche HN comment on sites like Twitter (and many, many others, any time headcount comes up) has always been "why do they need so many people?" I've mostly dismissed it the same way I dismiss "I could build Uber in a weekend," but with every other tech giant laying people off, maybe I shouldn't. Maybe the effect of all that extra money sloshing around in the system was to incentivize hiring everyone to make sure you didn't accidentally get a false negative, and not all of those hires were good ones.
  - abakker 4y ago
    I think this is not too far wrong. I also think in addition that the really competitive job market of the last 2 years and the hiring they were doing inevitably resulted in some highly paid people who were not good fits or good at their jobs. I think that covid wage hikes and job competitiveness is doing a bit of reckoning now as there is finally enough data to evaluate performance relative to output. OTOH, at non tech companies, all the research interviews and surveys I have done recently continue to show a talent shortage and fears of losing tech staff, so maybe it is just that Tech companies are saturated and have too much capital for their creativity.
ezoe 4y ago
Redundancy. Now the systems are stable but human workers either be sick, leave, or die eventually. Rising the pay has diminishing returns. You can't prevent workers leaving because of lost of interests, be sick or die by throwing more money at them. The article wrote about achieving stability by the distributed system so an unexpected death of one rack doesn't affect the service availability. The same can be done for the human workers unexpectedly not working anymore. Have a multiple workers doing the same things improve stability. Sure, it's inefficient in terms of money. But alternative is one sick important employee catch a COVID-19 and die lost the knowledge of the system. Documents doesn't solve it because you want the manual operation available right now rather than a few months later when replaced workers learned from the documents.
- randmeerkat 4y ago
  > Rising the pay has diminishing returns. You can't prevent workers leaving because of lost of interests, be sick or die by throwing more money at them. People would absolutely be more engaged and more excited about their work if they were paid more. The only reason people work is literally for money…
  - lukaslalinsky 4y ago
    This really only works in situations where people are typically underpaid and need to get up to some living standard. In most software engineering jobs, people have enough money to live an enjoyable life. At that point, having more money is not really such a strong motivator.
  - disillusioned 4y ago
    >The only reason people work is literally for money… Well, yes, but also that's super reductive. The primary reason people work is literally for money. The specific _place_ people work is for things that interest them, engage them, challenge them, provide a path for continued growth in their career, or contribute to a common good they believe in. And I would argue that it's not necessarily a given that people will be "more engaged and more excited about their work if they were paid more," but instead, may be willing to stick around in an unengaging, unexciting environment _longer_ when they're paid more.
ab8 4y ago
Tesla has 99k employees
- sooyoo 4y ago
  Ever tried assembling a car in your home office?
- rajamaka 4y ago
  Tesla's product can't be replicated with a 2000 line CRUD app
  - nikau 4y ago
    I thought it was going to be 100% robots moving so fast you need strobe lights
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    Neither can Twitter's.
jansan 4y ago
Did't you see the "Day in my life at the Twitter office video!"? https://www.tiktok.com/@realpankhilpatel/video/7159187292631076142?is_from_webapp=v1&item_id=7159187292631076142 https://www.tiktok.com/@realpankhilpatel/video/7159187292631... Normal people don't have vacations like that.
- bearmode 4y ago
  There is nothing here that other big tech companies don't have. To attract the best, they spend a shitload on perks and benefits.
  - jansan 4y ago
    Looks like they are not only attracting the best, but also a bunch of freeloaders.
summerlight 4y ago
Twitter used to experience significant downtime compared to all other major platforms and one of the reason was its lack of redundancies across everything. Headcount is one such thing and it takes manpower to automate infrastructures as discussed in the post. Sure, you can run the platform with 1/10 headcount with significantly degraded user experiences (say ~98%). This is not a problem for startups but people usually have higher expectations for established companies. As always, the last 2% is a hard problem and business doesn't really want to deal with a such unreliable platform. You wanna onboard big advertisers which potentially spend $100M ARR? Then you need to assign a dedicated account manager to handle all customer escalations. PMs then triage and plan their feature requests and later engineers implement it. Which all adds up. And they also uses your competitor's product, like Google, FB, TikTok etc etc... Twitter is a severely underdog here, so you need to support at least a minimal, essential subset of features in those products to convince them to spend their money on Twitter. That alone takes hundreds of engineers, data scientists and PM thanks to modern ad serving stacks with massive complexity. Yeah, it ultimately boils down into a simple fact that it's really hard to take other folk's money. You need to first earn trust from them. They want to see if your product is capable of following a modern standard of digital ad serving for now and foreseeable futures. Twitter has spent lots of time for earning trusts and the original post is one evidence of such efforts. And this usually needs more man power. You might be able to do that in a more efficient manner, but I don't think that's as simple as firing 75% of your entire headcount.
- donkeyd 4y ago
  > Sure, you can run the platform with 1/10 headcount with significantly degraded user experiences (say ~98%). This is not a problem for startups but people usually have higher expectations for established companies. This exactly. During the recent Whatsapp outage, many threads popped up on HN about how big of an issue this is in Europe, since Whatsapp is the main messaging platform in Europe. Thankfully, these outages are short and far between, so they never actually cause real issues. This is obviously costing Meta/Facebook a lot of money, but allows them to be an essential service. So essential in fact, that every major news outlet in my country sends a push message as soon as Whatsapp is down. If Twitter wants to be a comparably important platform, they need that same stability. And Twitter, for me, is very much the best place to stay up-to-date on any current event (in near real-time). Reddit used to be pretty good with Live, but that's pretty much died (and was mostly a summary of tweets anyway). I really hope Twitter survives Elon, because I don't know of an alternative right now that has the same value in this use case.
bmn__ 4y ago
> What exactly where these thousands of employees actually doing https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/libsoftiktok/status/1585395267552960512 https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/libsoftiktok/status/158539526...
mhio 4y ago
Have a browse through their engineering blog: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us It's largely focussed on the event stream behind the core service and data analytics. There's maybe one entry on the main data store and one on search over the last few years.
kybernetyk 4y ago
>What exactly where these thousands of employees actually doing They had wine on tap.
- amrocha 4y ago
  Ok? Are we going to pretend that perks like that aren't common in the tech industry? Are you being disingenuous on purpose?
- fhaldridge7 4y ago
  I have worked at companies with beer on tap. It doesn't mean that people are constantly drinking. The only time someone touched it was Friday evenings
busymom0 4y ago
Not just that. From my personal experience, twitter had to be one of the slowest websites I use. Even in my 2020 mac, it often shows the memory warning in safari. Things take a while to load. And the UX is terrible with having to constantly click to read child comments, having to click on “show hidden replies” etc. I honestly have no idea how a company with thousands of employees and a billion in loss was able to operate such a terribly performing website.
francisofascii 4y ago
> What exactly where these thousands of employees actually doing Maybe trying to increase traffic, attract advertisers, add efficiencies. Not everyone is an SRE. As long as your efforts increase revenue by more than you cost as an employee, you are adding value.

mirzap 4y ago

Yeah, and they were even profitable with ~3k employees. Then the hiring spree started and they went negative. Even if there wasn't Musk they would have to let go at least 30% of the people.

spaceman_2020 4y ago
The stock was rightly crashing when the company was public. A social media site that manges to lose money during the pandemic is truly mismanaged.

halfmatthalfcat 4y ago

This is the real question? Your question has nothing to do with the blog post and if you take a look around, what Twitter did was literally done across the entire industry, hence all the layoffs recently. There was a hiring glut to take advantage of cheap capital during COVID recovery. The capital has dried up, glut has ended and a lot of people lost their jobs. Why is that so hard to see? None of this is unique in any way to Twitter.

subroutine 4y ago
A bunch of people just got axed from Twitter because covid cash dried up? Shit I thought it was because Elon took over and fired anyone who refused to work at the office instead of at home.
- halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
  The question was why they were hired, not why they were fired...
  - subroutine 4y ago
    The unemployment rate in Feb 2020 was 3.5%; by April 2020 it was up to 14%. It has never been lower than 3.5% since then. If there was a hiring glut due to covid it must have been a very industry-specific glut.
    - zdragnar 4y ago
      It definitely was industry specific. The need to satisfy a boom in remote working and people bored out of their minds in quarantine drove a ton of hiring in tech. If you had money to invest, tech stocks and companies were among the few places it made sense to pour money into during the pandemic. There have been several front-page posts on HN in the past few weeks about big name company CEOs apologizing for massively over hiring during the pandemic not realizing that it wouldn't pay off once the lockdowns ended and people decided to go back to living their normal lives again.
- inferiorhuman 4y ago
  Now to be fair, as of last week Musk-o backed off the mandated return-to-office. Turns out that didn't quite go as planned.
  - subroutine 4y ago
    What a wild card. Has Musk said why he purchased twitter in the first place? IRL he seems so introverted. It's just odd to me he'd have any interest in a social media company.
    - lmm 4y ago
      He's long been extremely active on Twitter.
TedShiller 4y ago

xedrac 4y ago

I think a likely answer is "moderating". That would explain why Elon was ok letting so many go so quickly.

Robotbeat 4y ago
From what I understand, contractors were used for moderating.

whatshisface 4y ago

If the 3x headcount increase really did add no value, there are still about 1/3rd profitable employees there now. In fact giant layoffs tend to cut the best people first because they are the ones who feel comfortable walking. The people that are the last to go are the ones who are very entrenched in the organization and who don't estimate their chances outside of it highly, and that's the exact description of who Elon thinks he's laying off.

xyzzyz 4y ago
> In fact giant layoffs tend to cut the best people first because they are the ones who feel comfortable walking. This is more true when the layoffs happen because the company’s situation deteriorates. If the company cuts jobs because revenues fall and products fail, better employees are indeed more likely to move to greener pastures before mediocre ones do. If, however, the company prospects improve, rather than worsen, this is no longer the case.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  Twitter has lost a lot of revenue recently and is now in a lot of debt, although that might not have had time to sink in. In real terms it is in a much worse place, and remember that betting on a success is something you'd do as an investor, not as a rank and file employee.
- frognumber 4y ago
  I'm not sure. I think I'm a good employee, but I like job stability. If I'm working somewhere with layoffs, I'll likely go somewhere without. There also isn't a measure of employee quality, and layoffs are often not about the individual (e.g. Amazon cutting robotics). I've had no clue how likely I was to be laid off during most points in my career.
JamesBarney 4y ago
I've found the opposite. I almost never see low performing employees fired outside of a mass layoff. In every layoffs I've seen 10x as many people were fired as quit. So you lose a bunch of low performers involuntarily, and a few top performers both voluntarily and involuntarily and that leads to the average quality improve.

pessimizer 4y ago

It had to take a bunch of them to wreck the UI.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

> Twitter grew 3x on the headcount front There were multiple executives making $10m/yr+ There were board members There were shareholders Why did all of them not stop this headcount increase if it's as easily reduced as "too much headcount bad, smaller headcount good"? These are paid professionals who are supposedly wealthy, good at their jobs, smart, informed, etc. How can us commenters on HackerNews sit from our armchair and say "ah, goofballs should've just not let headcount get so high!" These qualified people thought at the time it was a good idea to get up to 7.5k people. How were they all wrong?

helloharvey 4y ago
jdminhbg 4y ago
> How can us commenters on HackerNews sit from our armchair and say "ah, goofballs should've just not let headcount get so high!" The cliche HN comment on sites like Twitter (and many, many others, any time headcount comes up) has always been "why do they need so many people?" I've mostly dismissed it the same way I dismiss "I could build Uber in a weekend," but with every other tech giant laying people off, maybe I shouldn't. Maybe the effect of all that extra money sloshing around in the system was to incentivize hiring everyone to make sure you didn't accidentally get a false negative, and not all of those hires were good ones.
- abakker 4y ago
  I think this is not too far wrong. I also think in addition that the really competitive job market of the last 2 years and the hiring they were doing inevitably resulted in some highly paid people who were not good fits or good at their jobs. I think that covid wage hikes and job competitiveness is doing a bit of reckoning now as there is finally enough data to evaluate performance relative to output. OTOH, at non tech companies, all the research interviews and surveys I have done recently continue to show a talent shortage and fears of losing tech staff, so maybe it is just that Tech companies are saturated and have too much capital for their creativity.

ezoe 4y ago

Redundancy. Now the systems are stable but human workers either be sick, leave, or die eventually. Rising the pay has diminishing returns. You can't prevent workers leaving because of lost of interests, be sick or die by throwing more money at them. The article wrote about achieving stability by the distributed system so an unexpected death of one rack doesn't affect the service availability. The same can be done for the human workers unexpectedly not working anymore. Have a multiple workers doing the same things improve stability. Sure, it's inefficient in terms of money. But alternative is one sick important employee catch a COVID-19 and die lost the knowledge of the system. Documents doesn't solve it because you want the manual operation available right now rather than a few months later when replaced workers learned from the documents.

randmeerkat 4y ago
> Rising the pay has diminishing returns. You can't prevent workers leaving because of lost of interests, be sick or die by throwing more money at them. People would absolutely be more engaged and more excited about their work if they were paid more. The only reason people work is literally for money…
- lukaslalinsky 4y ago
  This really only works in situations where people are typically underpaid and need to get up to some living standard. In most software engineering jobs, people have enough money to live an enjoyable life. At that point, having more money is not really such a strong motivator.
- disillusioned 4y ago
  >The only reason people work is literally for money… Well, yes, but also that's super reductive. The primary reason people work is literally for money. The specific _place_ people work is for things that interest them, engage them, challenge them, provide a path for continued growth in their career, or contribute to a common good they believe in. And I would argue that it's not necessarily a given that people will be "more engaged and more excited about their work if they were paid more," but instead, may be willing to stick around in an unengaging, unexciting environment _longer_ when they're paid more.

ab8 4y ago

Tesla has 99k employees

sooyoo 4y ago
Ever tried assembling a car in your home office?
rajamaka 4y ago
Tesla's product can't be replicated with a 2000 line CRUD app
- nikau 4y ago
  I thought it was going to be 100% robots moving so fast you need strobe lights
- saagarjha 4y ago
  Neither can Twitter's.

jansan 4y ago

Did't you see the "Day in my life at the Twitter office video!"? https://www.tiktok.com/@realpankhilpatel/video/7159187292631076142?is_from_webapp=v1&item_id=7159187292631076142 https://www.tiktok.com/@realpankhilpatel/video/7159187292631... Normal people don't have vacations like that.

bearmode 4y ago
There is nothing here that other big tech companies don't have. To attract the best, they spend a shitload on perks and benefits.
- jansan 4y ago
  Looks like they are not only attracting the best, but also a bunch of freeloaders.

summerlight 4y ago

Twitter used to experience significant downtime compared to all other major platforms and one of the reason was its lack of redundancies across everything. Headcount is one such thing and it takes manpower to automate infrastructures as discussed in the post. Sure, you can run the platform with 1/10 headcount with significantly degraded user experiences (say ~98%). This is not a problem for startups but people usually have higher expectations for established companies. As always, the last 2% is a hard problem and business doesn't really want to deal with a such unreliable platform. You wanna onboard big advertisers which potentially spend $100M ARR? Then you need to assign a dedicated account manager to handle all customer escalations. PMs then triage and plan their feature requests and later engineers implement it. Which all adds up. And they also uses your competitor's product, like Google, FB, TikTok etc etc... Twitter is a severely underdog here, so you need to support at least a minimal, essential subset of features in those products to convince them to spend their money on Twitter. That alone takes hundreds of engineers, data scientists and PM thanks to modern ad serving stacks with massive complexity. Yeah, it ultimately boils down into a simple fact that it's really hard to take other folk's money. You need to first earn trust from them. They want to see if your product is capable of following a modern standard of digital ad serving for now and foreseeable futures. Twitter has spent lots of time for earning trusts and the original post is one evidence of such efforts. And this usually needs more man power. You might be able to do that in a more efficient manner, but I don't think that's as simple as firing 75% of your entire headcount.

donkeyd 4y ago
> Sure, you can run the platform with 1/10 headcount with significantly degraded user experiences (say ~98%). This is not a problem for startups but people usually have higher expectations for established companies. This exactly. During the recent Whatsapp outage, many threads popped up on HN about how big of an issue this is in Europe, since Whatsapp is the main messaging platform in Europe. Thankfully, these outages are short and far between, so they never actually cause real issues. This is obviously costing Meta/Facebook a lot of money, but allows them to be an essential service. So essential in fact, that every major news outlet in my country sends a push message as soon as Whatsapp is down. If Twitter wants to be a comparably important platform, they need that same stability. And Twitter, for me, is very much the best place to stay up-to-date on any current event (in near real-time). Reddit used to be pretty good with Live, but that's pretty much died (and was mostly a summary of tweets anyway). I really hope Twitter survives Elon, because I don't know of an alternative right now that has the same value in this use case.

bmn__ 4y ago

> What exactly where these thousands of employees actually doing https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/libsoftiktok/status/1585395267552960512 https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/libsoftiktok/status/158539526...

mhio 4y ago

Have a browse through their engineering blog: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us It's largely focussed on the event stream behind the core service and data analytics. There's maybe one entry on the main data store and one on search over the last few years.

kybernetyk 4y ago

>What exactly where these thousands of employees actually doing They had wine on tap.

amrocha 4y ago
Ok? Are we going to pretend that perks like that aren't common in the tech industry? Are you being disingenuous on purpose?
fhaldridge7 4y ago
I have worked at companies with beer on tap. It doesn't mean that people are constantly drinking. The only time someone touched it was Friday evenings

busymom0 4y ago

Not just that. From my personal experience, twitter had to be one of the slowest websites I use. Even in my 2020 mac, it often shows the memory warning in safari. Things take a while to load. And the UX is terrible with having to constantly click to read child comments, having to click on “show hidden replies” etc. I honestly have no idea how a company with thousands of employees and a billion in loss was able to operate such a terribly performing website.

francisofascii 4y ago

> What exactly where these thousands of employees actually doing Maybe trying to increase traffic, attract advertisers, add efficiencies. Not everyone is an SRE. As long as your efforts increase revenue by more than you cost as an employee, you are adding value.