> Every place I've worked that had more than 50 staff, 90% of the productive work was done by 10% of the staff.

That’s my feeling too. But I’m not 100% sure that feeling aligns perfectly with “reality”. We humans have blind spots, and it may be that some of the 80% actually do very important stuff that I happen to be blind to.

That’s very likely. In a past life I’ve done a bunch of auditing for m and a, apart the obvious nepotistic paid internships more often than not people thought to be unproductive were really important to the organisation. Think about payroll, legal and the likes. They’re not necessarily productive in terms of the main product, but they help reduce the legal risk for the company and insure that people in the ‘productive departments’ may stay productive. As software developers we tend to only see the number of features/fixes someone pushes to the product as the main metric of productivity, however there’s way more to running a largish company.

They're the ones that quit when you tell them they have to go hardcore or take a severance package.

I’m not so sure about that. I think the chance of running a company without the 80% unproductive naysayers has a very strong appeal to the 10%. Also, in bloated “political” organizations they typically run on 10% of mental capacity anyway, so a “hardcore death match” may not have the same meaning to them.

You will find out how much un-sexy but highly important work was done by those underperforming non-hardcore people. Which is usually quite a lot, including keeping the literal lights on.

Yea, I don’t want to exclude the possibility of that outcome. If Elon does run this $44 billion social experiment I will watch very carefully though. It will be very interesting indeed.

(And my feeling is that a lot of the Elon-hate comes from people who fear that the outcome will be more in line with my expectations than yours.)

Imagine the relief of not filling out dozens of useless forms for five layers of management that do not really understand what you do anyway. One could really GSD at that point.

Supposing that the "correct" 80% is getting cut in this exercise - Musk is still essentially promising sweatshop work conditions for those who remain. It's evident that what he wants is for engineers to work early mornings, late nights, weekends, holidays, maximally in the office, under a trigger-happy boss who shit-talks you, your company and your work on social media, and is motivated by pure financial desperation.

right, because by definition the most talented and productive employees have the best prospects at other employers

Also true. But there they will face “the hegemony of the 80%” yet again…