You can fire 80% of software engineers and the company will survive

Re:You can fire 80% of software engineers and the company wi... by powerapple on Monday November 21, 2022 @01:16AM (#33689440)

I'd say it is true for most companies. But companies hire people not just for keep the current business going. A matter of fact, having fewer people may be beneficial if you want to stay in current business as it is. Companies, especially growth companies, hire people to speculate the next big thing. One of the employee is going to do something great, and expand the business.

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Re:You can fire 80% of software engineers and the company wi... by chii on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @06:50AM (#33704744)

> One of the employee is going to do something great, and expand the business.

employees that would do this is unlikely to remain at the company to actually do this. Existing corporate culture or management friction will very quickly force out such an engineer, or make such an engineer ineffective at producing such innovations.

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Re:You can fire 80% of software engineers and the company wi... by powerapple on Wednesday November 23, 2022 @01:24AM (#33715880)

Take google for example, from search to gmail, from gmail to Adwords, Adsense.

Another example is Tencent, from social network to a mail client, then WeChat, also expanded to games. QQ which is the original social network Tencent was built on, stayed almost the same with or worse with 100x head-counts.

It is always a rare event, but when it happens, it is a 1000x win for a company. It is something worth betting on.

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