I do agree overall, but it is very hard to achieve such a lean organization. Broad layoffs such as this tend to demotivate employees and cause your best employees to look for work where they don't have to worry as much about job security. I am fairly certain anybody with talent and drive would not be looking forward to continue working at Twitter in the coming days, at least without a significant pay raise (which Musk would want to avoid).

I dunno, if 50% of the chaff gets cut, that would be good with me. It all depends on who they’re letting go.

How confident are you in Elon's ability to identify "chaff" within a week? What makes you think the remaining 50% will continue to work at full capacity after this?

One way is to look at a few most recent perf reviews. Another way - look at some internal productivity metric that many companies introduced during Covid/WFH.

Have you ever seen either of those be remotely well correlated with actual job performance?

Yes. Underperformance is a decent indicator. Number of PRs is not a great one, but it can be somewhat correlated with eng velocity/productivity. Twitter will probably end up using a combination of metrics like that.

They will hopefully also talk to EMs, but at this scale might choose not to. It's going to be an ugly process but I doubt it's going to be a random one. They clearly understand that it's in their interest to retain the most skilled and performant employees.

Also, don't want to sound too cynical, but I would guess that it's actually not that hard to evaluate eng performance with all the data companies are collecting during WFH. I am sure Twitter requires using a VPN, so digging into that data would yield quite a revealing and precise performance metric. The only reason this approach is not widespread is ethical, not technological.

1000%