Ask HN: Is Elon Musk right about firing 85% of Twitter engineers?

Re:Ask HN: Is Elon Musk right about firing 85% of Twitter en... by dagw on Friday December 15, 2023 @11:17AM (#38655585)

Just maintaining and keeping an already built platform running at its current state doesn't require many engineers. So if that is your only goal then cutting your workforce to a skeleton crew will probably work for quite a while. It's only when you want to add new features, explore new markets and/or find new ways to increase revenue that all those extra people become.

I don't know what all those people at Twitter where doing, but I have worked at large companies and many engineers where working on developing possible new products and revenue streams, many of which, for different reasons, never see the light of day. If you're just looking at it from the outside it looks like there are a lot of people literally producing nothing.

With all that being said, I'm sure there are lots of companies out there (including pre Musk Twitter) who could lose a bunch of people without it affecting their bottom line or long term productivity.

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Re:Ask HN: Is Elon Musk right about firing 85% of Twitter en... by sheperd209 on Friday December 15, 2023 @11:38AM (#38655802)

I hear you, but Twitter has been adding new features, no? They introduced community notes, video streaming capabilities etc...

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Re:Ask HN: Is Elon Musk right about firing 85% of Twitter en... by hn_throwaway_99 on Friday December 15, 2023 @12:34PM (#38656408)

If your point was "Twitter has been adding new features despite their engineering cuts", that is incorrect. Community notes and video streaming were all added before the Musk acquisition. The only engineering changes I can think of since the acquisition have been semi-disasters in my opinion:

1. Paying for blue checks. Which for me just means that blue checks are the hallmark of the lowest quality comments and posts now.

2. Renaming from Twitter to X. This one highlights how Twitter is basically unable to even do this correctly without a proper engineering team. Normally you'd implement this so that navigating to twitter.com would redirect to x.com, but Twitter had to do the opposite because changing the primary domain name likely would have touched a ton of underlying assumptions throughout the code, and Twitter was no longer equipped to be able to handle a change of that magnitude.

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