Twitter has remained functional largely because all the former employees did their jobs effectively. I've seen what happens when companies lay a tech department to waste and it looks like this. This is a one-way cost reduction program that will forever reduce the quality of workers available to the company.

The way this pans out is that in the short term, nothing much happens except deadlines start to get pushed out. As time goes on everything becomes more and more dysfunctional. All progress grinds to a halt; simply treading water created by ongoing churn and operational needs ends up becoming impossible. Next the business tries to get more and more out of the remaining staff until they get fed up with it and leave. Shortly before the wheels really come off, legal and compliance issues will suddenly start ballooning. That's where we are now. Nobody wants to work on these kind of projects -- they do nothing for your career and nobody will celebrate your work -- but they are not optional. Elon seems to have decided simply not to comply with laws he dislikes in regulatory environments where he thinks he can get away with it. This can work for a while, but companies with no internal governance and that regularly flout laws can don't tend to last for too long without making painful changes. Let's see how it turns out. Given the reported state of the company it sounds like he has about a year to figure it out.

In cutting its workforce down from 7,500 to 1,800 employees, I wonder what percentage of Twitter's legal/compliance staff were kept on.

> but clearly the "if you fire all these engineers the service is going to collapse and stop working" doomsaying was unfounded.

Despite all the firings, Twitter's financials are worst than pre-acquisition. How comes? Advertisers pulling out. Why? Firing abuse and content moderation teams meant there was a lot more unsavory spam on the platform and advertisers didn't want any of it near their brand. Remember the Twitter Blue two days of spam?

Not only that, but it's been leaked that Twitter is trying hard to recruit some laid-off employees with huge comp packages. Without a lot of success.

> Despite all the firings, Twitter's financials are worst than pre-acquisition. How comes? Advertisers pulling out. Why? Firing abuse and content moderation teams meant there was a lot more unsavory spam on the platform and advertisers didn't want any of it near their brand.

Advertising revenue for Meta and Google has also tanked to the tune of 30-50% of their stock value, so it's disingenuous to link Twitter's ad revenue woes directly to any increase in spam (which is in and of itself an unsourced claim).

Brands pulled out specifically because of it [0] [1]

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-lost-half-top-advert...

[1] https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/11/4/23438917/twitter-verifi...

Both of those are from November, from what I've heard most brands stopped advertising while the drama was going on and they wanted clarity around the future of the platform (making sure it didn't becoming explicitly "alt-right" or "free speech" like Rumble/Truth Social), but got back in after things settled down.

> but got back in after things settled down.

Unless targeting has wildly changed, that doesn’t seem to be the case (have things “settled down”, even?) None of the major brands that I used to get ads from regularly are hitting me with ads at all now, and most of the ads I see are for the same type of places I was seeing just after the major backouts.

Twitter and Elon Musk didn't invent layoffs.