You're assuming that someone leaving immediately causes things to break down. A lot of things will take some time to see the effects of people leaving.

Fire your entire payroll department. No one will notice... until the biweekly paychecks don't go out, and now your employees aren't getting paid.

Fire badge security. No one will notice... until you need someone to make a new badge for a new employee.

Fire your IT staff. No one will notice... until the server crashes and no one can reboot it.

Fire your system reliability engineers. No one will notice... until the World Cup is on and you have 10x regular traffic and now the site is crashing under the load.

Fire your lawyers. No one will notice... until you're now being sued for violating all the laws in all the countries for posting child porn (because you previously fired all the content moderators who were preventing that from being posted).

Also imagine job postings.

Ignoring Elon for sake of discussion, it would be a big a big boon for my career to work at Twitter.. but when 80% of the staff left? I'd be worried onboarding would be a mess. That i'd be handed several projects that no one knows how they work or what the ramifications are.

Ignoring all the red flags and focusing solely on onboarding sounds like misery.. not sure i'd want to take that job.

I imagine many will.. but .. oof.

> it would be a big a big boon for my career to work at Twitter..

And I'm not even sure it would be a big career boost to join twitter at this point. The way things are going there you'd probably be burned out pretty quickly which would mean a shortish tenure.

The risk is large, but so are the opportunities. I don't do "hardcore" anymore but younger me would be tempted by the challenge of it. Plus, I imagine there would be giant buckets of money to go along with it. A short tenure with a big payout will be worth it to some people.

Just one brand name on your resume can entirely change the trajectory of your career compensation. I see so many people working as SWEs at these small businesses or even fortune 500 companies. Sure they make 6 figures usually but their compensation is not in the same stratosphere as even entry level big tech SWE since so much of big tech pay is in equity.

Yup, that's where i was thinking. My career is smaller startups and smaller businesses. I make enough, but a bigger name on my resume would help a lot. Especially since i'm not someone who enjoys or expects to do well in the classical interviews.

I think there's actually some risk of too much time at Elon twitter making your resume toxic. It's no secret what kind of environment he's fostering there, and many companies simply don't want to hire the type of person who thrives in that situation, regardless of how technically skilled they are.

I suspect you're right. His brand is definitely tarnished at this point.

For any budding Douglas Couplands out there, I think there's going to be at least a few chapters, if not a whole novel's worth of stories in being at Twitter the next six months to a year. (To say nothing of the last month!)

It probably would be an absolute hell-scape as you imagine, but for someone looking to make a name for themselves, it's an incredible opportunity to jump in, carve out a solid niche and then use that leverage to push your career forward. I can understand those who are leaving as that not what they signed on for, but there's a lot of people who would gladly roll the dice for that opportunity, I would've 5 years ago.

This is essentially what happens to a startup that scales rapidly. It goes from fire to fire as it grows, scrambling to deal with each new issue that arises and hiring new people as needed. It's not pretty, but is generally accepted as far more effective than attempting to hire and build way ahead of your immediate needs (the YAGNI principle).

Musk's approach is drastic and will probably include a lot of turbulence as you say, but it's probably also the fastest way to find the minimum number of employees required to run Twitter.

You couldn't use this strategy with any kind of critical service, but ultimately nobody is really hurt that much if things break at Twitter, so there is more latitude to take risks.

I'm not saying I like or agree with Musk's approach, but I see the logic.

That's true but there's some missing attraction that's present in fast-growing startups but not here - there's little room for big stock / options growth (unless Musk provides options at less than the $44b price, or a high all cash comp) and the product is already mature so lots of interesting engineering challenges are already solved (and your challenge will rather be to figure out the existing codebase and how to work with it). There's also less of a promise of lots of fast hiring and moving up the chain as I imagine Twitter wants to remain fairly lean.

Of course there's plusses too including working a large impact product with little bureaucracy and being on a even playing field versus your peers with little institution knowledge.

I guess what I'm trying to say is it's dissimilar to a fast-growing start up in important ways that attract people wanting to work for you.

I think there are plenty of engineers who would find the challenge of running a massive global service with a very small team to be inherently interesting in itself, regardless of the specific tasks involved. Some folks also enjoy high stakes rescue operations--the team that saved healthcare.gov comes to mind as one example.

He fired badge security, deactivated all badges & then asked that guy to come back just so workers could get out of the parking garage which required a badge to do so. You can see the tweet about it. It happened YESTERDAY.

The badge employee was not real. Musk just played along. It's becoming hard to distinguish these things.

That was from a parody account.

That was a parody tweet. In fact, the account name had "(Parody)" in it.

That's hilarious. And sad.

Reminds me of a cleaners strike were after 2 weeks everyone suddenly realised that those invisible men and women do important work. A corporation is a machine in which even the tiniest cog matters.

And knowledge drain? I mean the codebase must be substantial?

I mean, try hiring Scala engineers on a good day, and especially those who are willing to deal with this crap.

Doesn't this assume that you won't eventually just replace some of these people?

This is equivalent to saying "I've decided not to go to the mechanic anymore. And look, five days later, my car is totally fine!"

Not a good analogy. You can't easy rebuild or upgrade car. In software you rebuild and upgrade every day without stopping.

Yeah, a better analogy would be stepping out of the driver seat while you're on the highway. Sure it'll coast for a while, but on the first turn...

5 days is good enough time to find a better mechanic that does a high quality job, for less, and doesn't want to collude with federal agencies [1] about where you can drive and where you cannot: https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...

I very much doubt that. Twitter must have had some bloat, but there's no way that 80% of the workforce was bloat. I'd be extremely surprised if Twitter(as in, the website/app, not the registered legal entity) still exists and works by the end of this year.

80% imo could so very easily be bloat. Features/services that are underutilized and haemorrhaging money don't need to be upkept, teams dedicated to curating content like twitter headlines and moderating content don't need to be there (at the scale it's currently at). Staffing for hospitality services at Twitter HQ and all the ancillary services that are unnecessary or under-utilized. As long as the servers are running, people will be able to post 240 chars of content and some rich media images, the Twitter platform is not ground breaking tech

Well ok sure, but then I can't imagine that the cuts Musk has done would accurately get rid of the bloat and not just a random selection of 80% of their employees. If you were one of the 20% of people doing actual work, why the hell would you stay if the only future promise is working longer hours and "being more hardcore"? Frankly I'd only agree to that if I was already doing nothing, because zero multiplied by anything is still zero. If you already are doing your job and the company asks you to work even more than before, then get your severance and go.

There no way in hell that this 80% of workforce was actual bloat.

Elon said "At its heart, Twitter is a software and servers company, so I think this makes sense."

But Twitter is not a software and servers company -- it's a media company. It has more in common with Hulu than Microsoft. The ability to post 240 chars of content is not a business. The users aren't the customers. As you say, the Twitter platform is not ground breaking tech -- that was never where the value was.

> Teams dedicated to curating content like twitter headlines and moderating content don't need to be there

This is where I think you and Elon are wrong. The "content" is the product and the advertisers are the customers. The assumption is that that these teams are not helping bring in advertisers but you and I don't know that. Elon didn't even care to find out because he fundamentally misunderstands the business he's in.

A lot of the teams support advertisers (the actual customer, not the users). They would be either a) keeping conversations such that advertisers want to have their brands next to them b) keeping relationships with advertisers or c) running machine learning to match ads with users.

If your advertisers go away, then a whole lot of the iceberg of complexity underneath the bird app goes away.

A leaner organization could reduce reliance on advertising as payrolls go down, and if traffic increases (as Elon is claiming, who knows if true) than advertisers would pay more for greater exposure. Also FB using AI or target marketing to the extreme for their ads just ended up turning people away from the platform by sterilizing it of any actual content you’d like to see.

That's one thing I fully believe Musk on. Twitter is the hottest news in the industry right now. There's no better place to read about it than Twitter itself. Thing of it is... most of the traffic I've seen is rubberneckers. He can only crash his gigayacht so many times before it's no longer a spectacle.

Advertising is basically their whole business, right? Technically I guess most companies can employ fewer people and do less of their core business but that isn’t a great trajectory to be on…

The problem is he's getting rid of the solid workforce and keeping the bloat. No decent engineer would work 80 hours a week in the office over 40 in the home.

For comparison, Reddit has only 700 employees. How does Reddit handle scale and moderation with only 10% of the number of employees Twitter had in 2021?

By shifting moderation responsibilities to the individual mods on each subreddit. Reddit employees do very little moderation on their own - mostly reviewing entire subreddits once they get reported enough times - and banning them entirely if they are unsavoury enough. They basically outsourced it to volunteers in exchange for a platform to have your community on(interestingly, Discord works in the exact same way - discord employees only review servers once they get bad enough and ban them, general reports go to server mods and only to them)

Reddit effectively farms out moderation to volunteers. It's a lot like feudalism. Subreddit mods put in the labor of the day to day moderation of the sub in exchange for the ability to wield power over the subreddit. When a subreddit is shirking in it's moderation duties, or otherwise doing something the central power doesn't like the subreddit is deleted.

Reddit has something like over 20,000 unpaid mods that are active daily

It seems you're in a narrow minority with that opinion, though it's closer than I would've guessed. 65% for No Outages by Dec 15, '22.

https://polymarket.com/market/will-twitter-report-any-outage...

Current SSL cert is valid through 23:59 on Monday, December 12. If there's a big binary even to bet on causing quick failure, this would seem to be it - just inside the testing window. Now... if twitter can't report the outage because twitter is out, does Yes or No pay out?

These sorts of massive cuts, coupled with massively decreasing workplace quality, and with removing any chance of financial reward (no more liquidity in shares of the company!!), are going to cause the most talented people to go to greener pastures.

The people who stay will be those with the least options.

Musk has made employment at Twitter hugely risky, with no possibility of reward. Really boneheaded business, completely incompetent cutting off the workforce, honestly. Hard to imagine a worse way of pruning the workforce.

> are going to cause the most talented people to go to greener pastures.

People keep repeating this trope as if Twitter is some paragon of technical excellence and innovation. It is no such thing. It is a popular website with a textbox for user input.

You don't need "talent", you simply need to people who get the job done.

Saying something like this just demonstrates that you have extremely limited technical knowledge, and are willing to say anything to defend Musk.

And defenses like this go a looooong ways towards destructing the myth that Musk had technical acumen, because the only people defending him are those that can't do the work.

The projection on here is getting cartoonish.

John Carmack, "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."

Agreed that the projection is cartoonish, but looking at the actual actions at Twitter speak for themselves.

And discounting the scale of Twitter is also quite cartoonish projection.

Even if this were correct, the specific 20% matters.

I mean, it's possible, but the organisation would need to be extremely disfunctional for that to be the case - that's the level of bloat I'd expect out of a government agency not a private corporation. If you have teams where 8 out of 10 people do literally nothing or pretend, it should be obvious.

That's not what the Pareto Principle says, when reasonably applied to the engineering department [or employees in general] at Twitter.

It says that 80% of the results come from 20% of the sources. That's not 8/10 people are doing nothing, but rather 8/10 people are doing things that only contribute to 20% of what makes Twitter Twitter.

On any given team of ten, it's likely that the entire team is in either the 80 or the 20 bucket, by virtue of what they're working on, not by virtue of how hard they're working or how talented they are.

Price's Law works better there.

> Derek de Solla Price, a British physicist, historian of science, and information scientist, discovered something about his peers in academia. He noticed that there were always a handful of people who dominated the publications within a subject. Price recognized a pattern which was later named after him.

> What is Price’s Law?

> 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.

https://expressingthegeniuswithin.com/prices-law-and-how-it-...

https://entreresource.com/prices-law/

They’re getting at two different things: Pareto is getting at whether the work should be done at all; Price is getting at who does the work that gets done. Both are reasonable lenses to consider.

Simplistic answers to difficult and chaotic questions are bogus, heuristics. They may work on average, but twitter is not an average company.

I'd take that bet. 1BTC?

I'm good thanks. Not really into gambling.

Linked elsewhere in this thread - https://polymarket.com/market/will-twitter-report-any-outage...

And no, I don't gamble on events or crypto.

I understand why cowards will proclaim both the death of twitter and bitcoin and not back it up with their wallet. However, you are neither thanks for the link.

> Twitter must had some bloat, but there's no way that 80% of the workforce was bloat.

I firmly believe, lets say 80%, of Twitter is bloat. But sacking them like this wont prove anything due to practicalities. You just can't unwind a mess like Musk is doing. If some employees sole productive task in a week is to reset a server that still has to be done and it will take a lot of work to figure out which button to press when the site falls over.

Tell me you have never worked in a large enterprise without telling me that you haven't. Elon seems completely out of his depth in handling Twitter. And so does many people endorsing him. For them, Twitter is a glorified website.

Twitter is undoubtedly overstaffed. Their website is a trash fire that fails in spectacular ways to deliver the most basic funcionality inherent in the browser: show some text and some pictures. And it's been this way for years while they are patting themselves on the back for "creating the best PWA app in the world".

However, what Musk is doing is absolutely hillarious, and is a much bigger trash fire that has nothing to do with optimizing the head count, or figuring out how to correctly reduce staffing etc.

Steve Jobs returning to a flailing Apple he is not.

What are you talking about? Twitter’s resiliency program is widely known to be one of the best in the world. They’ve been around so long that they’ve literally had to invent a lot of what we consider basic modern distributed computing from scratch. It will become a trash fire with everyone who maintained these massive systems gone, but don’t imply that they created bad systems, or failed at ‘just displaying text’, because they clearly haven’t.

It's far more likely that Elon consulted Twitter when they were having issues and just didn't take the credit. The distributed work of SpaceX and Tesla is far more important and hardened than what Twitter has achieved.

[citation required]

Parody, surely?

I would not underestimate the challenges they face operating on the scale they do. I would expect problems in databases, servers, message queues propagate pretty quickly all over the system. Then you need a specific expertise to locate and fix such problems.

I seriously doubt that. The dynamics play out completely different.

Let's look at the admin/security teams. These are the people that literally keep things running. If a significant percentage of people from those teams quit, the others have to immediately pick up the slack (much longer on calls...) the added workload then leads to an avalanche where more and mor epeople quit. And it is always in the most business critical teams where these dynamics play out.

Highly doubtful. Will it go down immediately? No. Will the bitrot accelerate and things start breaking/deteriorating with no one around to fix them? Yes.

It's hard to argue that Twitter wasn't incredibly overstaffed. Maybe even 80% overstaffed. But ripping 80% of the humans out of the equation basically overnight is not a recipe for a successful transition.

For sure Twitter could continue to function as before with 20% of staff. Problem is : not the 20% that they actually have.

How can we definitely say that though? We don't even know what staff has left, nor what the plans are to replace them if they were critical.

This is exactly the point I was going to make.

I have no doubt Twitter and most companies could be run in maintenance mode with 20% of the current staff. However figuring out which 20% is the tricky part.

Typically I only need 20% of the lights in my house to do what I need, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea for Elon Musk to come into my house and just randomly remove 80% of my lightbulbs.

To successfully pull off such a major change in staffing in such a short window would require knowing the ins and outs of the company extremely well.

If George Hotz joins Twitter, as he recently offered [1], you may be right.

I think people may be underestimating Elon's ability to bring in folks from the "secret guild of silicon valley" [2] to help him in this task. George coming on, even temporarily, might bring in more.

[1]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33658843

[2]:https://medriscoll.com/2011/08/19/the-guild-of-silicon-valle...

Holy shit, yea that's a good point. Elon could get a dream team to rebuild the fundamentals, and switch over to a maintenance team later.

Often done in the game dev world.

I bet 20% of their workforce was support + inside sales reps for advertisers.

I'd further guess that 10-20% of their workforce was staying on top of regulations. If twitter works, but does not comply with the FTC consent order and gets fined out of business, that is not a technical failure but still is failure.

Large enterprises, especially those under consent orders, spend a TON of effort in compliance. Given that environment is constantly changing, there is net new work needed in almost a Red Queen effect.

When has the FTC ever levied a fine that put someone out of business for an internet privacy related consent decree? I don't think it's ever happened.

Twitter was fined $765 million in 2021. Not sure by what organization.

Facebook was fined $5 billion dollars in 2019-ish, that would put most companies out of business. If Twitter doesn't have people actively working to keep up with new privacy directives in every jurisdiction they are in (every country in the world, every region/state in each country has different requirements), they will get hit with fines all day every day.

Issue that I see that it might be that workforce losses are not uniform. But there might be a few critical teams entirely lost. And what ever they are doing might be mission critical.

Now chance of such teams having fully out is anyone's guess.

I completely agree. But, stirring the pot like this often encourages the best employees to leave, so there is still considerable risk of his plan not working out.

Many tech companies are over-staffed: R+D pet projects, full time OSS devs, dev rel, etc. Some companies probably have staff who literally do one task like managing webpack config. I disagree with Musk about A LOT, but most companies have opportunities to trim fat before they even touch the core product.

As long as you're willing to accept a company that is not growing in revenue due to new value created, you can build a system entirely dedicated to maintenance of existing features with a small group.

In Twitter's case, however, how long is it until they're sued for child porn (lack of moderation) or get 50 million euro fines for running afoul of Germany's Network Enforcement Act?

I'd consider staff in those areas core to the product. Many of the dozens of projects at https://opensource.twitter.dev/projects/, not so much. Staff whose job revolves around standing at booths at conferences and handing out swag, ditto.

How many of those are active? How many of those were created for the purposes of twitter infrastructure and released as a side effect?

I'm sure that you can stop supporting the open source section. However, how much of their platform team is core to the product? How much is still required?

I'm sure many of those projects are out of date. Either way, they could probably make them all private for their purposes and stop accepting PRs (probably just turn them lose on the greater OSS community for those that still rely on them)

Imagine going to jail because someone uploaded a file to your computer

Which, by the way, is exactly what "Section 230" prevents.

Child porn is explicitly carved out from the section 230 immunity.

This is the essence of vulture capital LBOs —- load the company with debt, fire everyone that doesn’t contribute directly to the bottom line, cut all perks, close many offices, and then float an IPO to cash out.

For all of the high-minded free speech town square rhetoric from his camp, this looks much more like the game plan from worst PE actors from the 1980s. I guess it’s good there isn’t a pension fund to raid?

Good thing there's not a peak event like the world cup starting in a few days that will possibly stress test all their services that no longer have any devs owning them.

Every well built tech product will continue to “work” indefinitely with a small maintenance crew if no one touches or changes anything. Not changing anything, however, is not exactly what Elon has planned for Twitter. The company will only start to get tested when the current code and deploy freezes are lifted and new features start to ship.

That's the one thing I think Musk has been spot-on about: Twitter had far too many employees, many of them doing what amounts to nothing.

On the other hand, he hasn't stopped giving signals to his best talent that they're going to have a miserable time, and they should just quit. They would have a better time literally anywhere else.

Even if we agree that company is 80% bloated, you probably want the best 20% to stay.

---

In referring to a bunch of employees laid off, he said "I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses. Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere"[1]. About another specific employee he said "A tragic case of adult onset Tourette’s"[2].

Why would talent ever want to work for a CEO who will fire you on the spot for whatever reason, turn around and say this about them publicly (or privately!). If I was still working at twitter, this would make me quit.

[1]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592569305941807104

[2]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592582828499570688

But the advertisers might leave.

No they wont. Its corporate virtue signalling. As one example, I remember back in 2020 1000+ vowed to leave Facebook [1], but guess what...they came back.

The sad thing is that people are suckers who actually believe alot of this corporate PR.

[1]:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/business/media/facebook-b...

How many companies advertise on Tumblr or Digg? They continue to exist but are not seen as the next bastion of advertising. How will they target well when the platform is a cesspool? Sure they'll get impressions but not the clicks. Fewer celebrities will want to hang out on Twitter if anyone can easily impersonate them or if they don't have people at Twitter to give them white glove service.

If the audience is there, advertisers won't leave. Some of the ad pauses right now are mostly performative art. Every ad business is suffering right now with people cutting ad budgets, so pausing Twitter ads as a PR move was free advertising and also covered for the fact that advertisers needed to cut budgets anyhow.

People that claim "brand safety" honestly kind of make me laugh, look at all the World Cup sponsors...don't you think Qatar using slaves (some of which have died) to build the stadiums would be...not safe for your brand to associate with? I would, but they still are advertising, because the audience is massive. I think people dying from something you're helping to fund through advertising is probably worse to be associated with than a tweet saying "own the libs" is 3 pegs down from your ad. Call me crazy.

Probably will.

But, if not, absolutely no harm will come of it. What would be the worst part of losing twitter entirely?

100% agree. Once the dust settles my prediction is productivity will also soar.

Why would this happen? From the outside, it seems like Elon is absolutely decimating employee morale. See for example this thread from an engineer who has no beef with Elon and wants to see Twitter succeed, but still took the severance: https://twitter.com/peterclowes/status/1593458225533313025

Nobody in their right mind would publicly support Elon right now because they would be mobbed

Nobody in their right mind would publicly support Elon right now because he's acting like a lunatic and therefore undeserving of support.

Regardless of what you think of Twitter's future prospects, none of these destructive antics make it stronger. Twitter could still be saved, but it could have been saved even easier without all of this pointless and public display of arrogance and incompetence.

If you burn everything to the ground and then basically hire a whole new team to work on a whole new app and platform, then your productivity has nowhere to go but up.

Mmm... to be clear the baseline is not after you burn it to the ground, but before the acquisition.

At this point, the company was hemorrhaging cash. He had no choice but to stop the bleeding. It is a messy process and time works against you; mistakes will be made.

Once he gets to stabilize the cash flow, Twitter can provide a comp model to attract talent. About that, let's just say Geohot would not have worked for Parag, as an example. https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159295542717976576...

I’m not convinced, was the determination of what employees to keep and what employees to get rid of sound enough for that? Will quality employees to fill the gaps that exist in the future be willing to sign on with the company after all this? Was the way employees determined whether to leave conducive to keeping the best employees twitter had, or just the ones who didn’t have other good options?

I ultimately feel like Musk went too hardball too fast. Twitter can definitely recover of course, but I think the road to doing so is going to be much longer and harder than it had to be.

I think it's unlikely to just crash, but you're going to see more downtime, more security breaches, less effective moderation and they're probably going to lose revenue. Also, you'll just see more and worse ads. Unclear if they're actually saving more money than they're going to stop earning.

I was thinking the same thing with regards to security. If anyone wanted to attack Twitter, there probably won't come a better time than right now. I suspect there's a ton of disgruntled employees with some leftover access, and I doubt they have any idea who is responsible for patching servers and services at the moment.

I don’t believe workers are this expendable. Something is sure to go wrong at some point and there won’t be a worker with the correct knowledge to fix it. This can happen anywhere within the company. It can be an infrastructure problem (e.g. database failure), a software problem (i.e. a bug that could be fixed in minutes lingers for months), administrative problem, a payroll problem (and you’ll loose even more workers because payroll is flaky), PR problem, legal issue, etc.

With only 20% of your workers, there is no way these problems will be addressed with equal ease.

> Wild prediction: Twitter will continue to work as it did even after that ~80% workforce haircut.

Not only that.

If Elon succeeds that opens a new era in Sillicon Valley. An era where programmers are like steelworkers and coalminers in 1980s. You can raid large tech company (think Google or Apple), make workers redundant, cut costs mercilesly and return value to shareholders.

There are many people who could lose half their bodyweight and end up even healthier than they were before. But they won't get there by doing it with an axe.

Twitter certainly had bloat, but separating the fat from the critical healthy connective tissue requires care, which has clearly not been spent here.

My timeline has radically changed - like 80% of the tweet volume is gone since last night.

People are leaving or algorithms are failing to promote tweets.