do you mean "whale fall"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall
> The fail whale is a graphic that appears when the social networking website Twitter.com is experiencing technical difficulties. The image is of a whale being lifted by 8 orange birds and was created by Yiying Lu.
Sure, some go though catastrophic downfall and miraculously rebound from there, but that feels more like throwing someone down a mountain with a only a bottle of water and see if they can make it back to civiliation.
The more natural cycle would be frustrated workers moving out to make their own company and build something better from there. In the current climate that doesn’t work because of mono/duopolies and corruption, but that should be the thing to strive for IMHO.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33289954
A few people including myself remarked how it sounded like Google now
And I noted that I don't think Google will "ever" slim down, because they're making money and Apple wasn't
i.e. there's not enough justification for a leadership shake-up. Twitter had more justification -- there were many CEO changes and the board wasn't happy with the leadership
In that fantasy world something like Salesforce could get bought by Google and they’d reshape the whole Google’s product tree to solely focus on enterprise money, and a landslide of redundant engineers would probably be let go.
There was this case in 1996 and 1997 but this seems more the exception than the norm:
Laying off redundant people after a merger is basically part of the plan, and it’s more akin to cutting off the bits that don’t fit in the new org (they’re bringing in 500 Next people at the same time), than “slimming down” in the sense of making the same org leaner and more efficient.
Or if we take that definition, car manufacturers merging and getting rid of thousands of workers as a cost saving measure would also count as successful slimming downs, and we’d have many more example of it. That would work as well.
The answer to almost every modern financial wizardry is M&A. Sure, a DCF yields the theoretical value of a stock’s stream of cash flow. But in reality, M&A secures that lower bound. Yes, an efficient firm may reduce headcount willingly. But in reality, M&A provides the culture shock.
We have. That company is called Apple after SJ’s return.
It almost always is.
I don't know how you're relating those two things, but it's funny you should say that. At the time he was firing people, throngs of self-proclaimed "experts" started pontificating about how Twitter was going to implode and crash and burn. There was about two weeks of non-stop posts from various acquaintances on social media about it. They've all been very quiet lately.
They were right.
Makes you wonder if maybe they're the dead weight in their organizations, and therefore are unable to see how much of it is around.
Whether Twitter is doing better or worse really has nothing to do with these predictions that were made. The issue is that you obviously don't need literally hundreds or thousands of engineers to keep Twitter generally running and providing a similar kind of service. It might see a down tick in quality or outages, new features might take longer to be implemented. But that's not the service exploding and grinding to a halt.
I was just musing -- maybe some of the people making these kind of predictions are people who think meetings and work groups and committees and powerpoint slides constitutes useful work as opposed to a (sometimes unavoidable) drag that is to be minimized at all costs.
> The issue is that you obviously don't need literally hundreds or thousands of engineers to keep Twitter generally running and providing a similar kind of service. [...] It might see a down tick in quality or outages, new features might take longer to be implemented. But that's not the service exploding and grinding to a halt.
1. That is not a "similar kind of service", it's worse service. 2. Those aren't the only things that are happening. Normal people are finding out that "the service" is more than 240 character text values (even if HN engineers disagree).
And it is a similar level and of service. What's happening? Certainly nothing that "the experts" claimed would.
To me that's convincing circumstantial evidence that Spaces didn't break, he turned it off.
As it stands, it didn't seem like it helped focus the company in any way shape or form.
I fantasized about someone buying Google and slimming it down too, because it used to be a great place to work (I worked there for over a decade). There were lots of great builders but they got drowned out by careerists
In fact I worked in the SF office around "fail whale" times at Twitter (2009), and there was a steady trickle of coworkers over to Twitter. Though from what I hear the leadership there was the real problem, and allowed the other problem to fester