Musk's track record suggests it's a very effective strategy, especially when he's coming into organisations where the existing performance management processes are lacking, so you don't have good reliable data to look at to figure out who is required and who is not.

The public sector typically has practically no effective performance management processes. It's been a big problem for a long time. Trying to figure out who should stay when you don't have good data was always going to be error prone.

Given that, this strategy might actually be the best. It's quick, it's objective (did anything break?), and it's usually easily undone.

> and it's usually easily undone

Because employees are automatons that have no feelings and won’t hold a grudge.

Also, all employees are just cogs in the machine. You can totally lay off that grizzled senior dev and hire a kid fresh out of college, what’s the difference? It’s not like there was any institutional logic locked up in the senior’s head right?

/s if it wasn’t painfully obvious.

Not to mention the externality of having extra people floating around who know intimate details of the nations nuclear weapons secrets, who you have now pissed off.

I'm sure anyone who has been entrusted with such a position is fairly responsible, but it still seems like a bad idea.

Plus our adversaries would know we're hiring, and this bunch doesn't seem to care so much about proper vetting.

A grudge?

They've just been put into a strong negotiating position, because now both parties acknowledge that these are key employees.

I would never go back under a boss who thinks even for a second that I’m easily replaceable. It would immediately indicate to me, that I can’t trust in my boss at all. Nobody really can work effectively without trust. That’s the base of our whole society.

If you're not easily replaceable then the company has failed on some level.

This is why I think current org structures, and incentives, don't map properly to SWE and fuels this employment theater of "trust me I'm not a cog" => "trust me you are".

Don't know what an ideal arrangement would be, maybe SaaS is closer. Even then, still have to convince some 'cogs' to build your SaaS corp while you recoup 90% margins off their labor which is a fast path to class consciousness and we're back at square one!

Yes good, and now because their value is appreciated they can be paid what they will be paid in the private sector, perhaps ~180k/y instead of 60k/y. So if you fire 2/3 of the workforce and pay those that remain what they are "worth", you have saved exactly what ?

In your hypothetical scenario, it would be a no brainer to proceed.

Your key workers are now paid at market rate, and those who were unnecessary will find other jobs.

Sorry, they are servants of the public.

Maybe they ought not have been fired, but their feelings are 2nd place when their salary is funded predicated on men with guns forcing people to pay up. Maybe my feelings are hurt and I hold a grudge for being forced to pay their paycheck rather than spend that money on my family, but I'm nearly certain most of them don't care nor does much of HN.

They are humans first, public servants second. We are in the business of governing and employing humans. A wise government would acknowledge this truth.

Emotions are the motivator for everything, the question is, which emotion is getting the better of the human today? The better angel of their nature, or the other, darker one, that ineptitude stoked into relevance?

Everyone has a breaking point, for them, it’s losing a livelihood, for you, sadly, it’s the garnishing of your wage for the collective good.

I take it you’d also be fine paying 100% of the cost of the roads you use to buy food for your family? Men with guns take money from my family to pay for your roads after all.

Absolutely privatize them all. The roads for miles around my house are private easement (no tax) that are publicly accessible and it works beautifully. I built my own roads to access my land and it's great, my property taxes are near 0.

These firings will have no impact on your taxes. Instead of people having a job, the money will just get given to oligarchs and you’ll pay largely the same taxes but have moderately less government services. Socialism is needed to some degree for society to function. Capitalism alone is an awful system.

So, basically, left wing conspiracy theories?

In reality, whether taxes fall or not likely depends on whether the savings are returned in the form of income tax cuts, or whether the savings are used to repay the massive debt that has accumulated from decades of deficits. Both outcomes are good in the long run.

I hope you’re right, but I suspect you’ll be wrong. I think Obama was the last president to shrink the national debt. Clinton did before that.

False dichotomy. They will likely be used to continue tax cuts for the wealthiest (and corporations? I don't remember), which are set to expire. That is neither scenario that you envisioned.

Whom does income tax cuts help? Median US salary is 62k. That person pays ~12k in income taxes. Conservatives are going to ‘save’ that person 1k on their taxes or some other paltry sum and then cancel a bunch of services, fire a few hundred thousand workers, and raise tariffs to make the actual cost go up on everything that person buys.

Prediction: when Trump leaves office, the federal workforce, budget, and debt will all be higher than they were at the start of his second term.

come on, that was easy. for a challenge, predict how much each will go up.

What do you mean when you say "it's an effective strategy"? It's hard to say for certain since Twitter is now private, but it certainly seems to have lost value since Musk took over. What would "work in the public sector" entail for you?

The value wasn't lost, it was consumed. You're looking at what it was consumed to achieve, in the election results.

I would actually agree with you on that in the case of Twitter, but in what sense is that comparable to the current situation? Unless you mean that Musk is succeeding by destroying a bunch of American assets (i.e. the agencies) and then being lauded for this destruction. I could see that value once again going to Musk (and Trump), but in what sense would that value not be lost by your average US citizen? It's not like Musk bought these agencies before destroying them, he's just destroying them. He's no longer burning his own house down for life insurance, he's burning your house down for life insurance.

Operationally, Twitter is performing better than it did when it had 5x the headcount.

According to reports, revenue is down, but that's more due to advertisers objecting to Musk content moderation decisions (plus politics no doubt).

They are objectively in a worse financial position.

I wasn't getting advertisements for female sex toys (I'm male) on Twitter before Musk took over. That's a long way to fall.

Neither of us really know Twitter's financial position, given it's now private.

The rumours I'm hearing are that EBITDA is now above pre-acquistion. The fact that debt is trading hands without a haircut suggests that's probably accurate.

There was a lot of waste at Twitter. Given that headcount was cut by 80%, and advertisers are returning, I'd suggest it's doing fine.

It's wild — people that look at employment of the citizens of this country as just data to feed into some kind of profit/waste equation that needs to maximize profit, discard any hint of waste.

It's not waste when those employed have paychecks to spend in the economy. What would Corporate think if half the population of the U.S. were unemployed and/or homeless?

I guess that's fine as long as profits have been maximized.

Right? I am astounded by these takes. If every corp and every job was this way, our country would be a high-stress, unemployed wasteland. Any org will drop thousands in a heartbeat. Your family would never be safe.

We work so hard already. We already have such high stress. I do not believe we need to eke out the last %s of profit to pass to shareholders and create crushing stress and work on those remaining.

> Neither of us really know Twitter's financial position, given it's now private.

> The rumours I'm hearing are ...

You are literally contradicting yourself in two phrases one after another.

Literally every valuation shows its worth <10b, at best a 25% of its paid for value what, two years ago? a little more?

After reading through your posts its like you live in an alternate reality where Musk's integrity is bulletproof, his decisions are awesome, and he's basically doing it for the rest of us.

I don't know how you can sustain this with everyone throwing reality in your face that he's a short sighted rich kid who lies through his teeth and throws money around until he gets what he wants.

It was, but advertisers are now returning which has driven it's earnings back up while it's operational costs remain significantly below pre-acquisition.

According to https://www.wsj.com/finance/banks-sell-5-5-billion-of-x-loan... earnings are now nearly twice pre-acquisition.

I'm not going to respond to the ad hominem.

Advertisers are returning because Elon Musk is the long arm of the president and literally threatening tech companies with reprisal. On Twitter. It's open corruption! They're not even bothering to hide it.

paywalled article so this link isn't really worth much. And given your credibility I don't trust your analysis. Especially when you also seem to be ignoring any reasonable responses and focusing on arguing instead.

> Neither of us really know Twitter's financial position, given it's now private.

Then why are you making any argument that it was a success?

> There was a lot of waste at Twitter. Given that headcount was cut by 80%, and advertisers are returning, I'd suggest it's doing fine.

Why would you suggest it's fine? Without knowing their exact costs, debts, revenues, etc. you know _nothing_. Why would you suggest it's doing fine when knowing nothing about it's financial position?

It's odd you admit you do not know and then make your own opinion anyway.

This is one of the few times to listen to Wall Street, since it's not public. https://www.ft.com/content/4f44c0c1-0113-4054-be0b-adc119557...

Revenue is down because they fired most of the salespeople and told their customers to f off. Hardly a wise management strategy.

You are wrong on two accounts.

There are plenty of ways for getting rid of underperformers in a goverment organisation. I've seen entire teams being sacked, and also some of the hardest working people I know work for goverment organisations.

Also, you cannot run the goverment like an startup that is always running on the edge. A majority of startups fail and that's fine, but one goverment organisation failing could cause problems for the entire country.

>I fully acknowledge that it will result in mistakes,

The people arguing the other side are not talking about reversible mistakes with minor fallout. They are claiming that taken as a whole the damage will be very difficult to undo. Countering this simply by accepting that there will be mistakes doesn't quite suffice. As pg tried to remind Musk on twitter (I'm paraphrasing): Countless startups come into being and die within the system. But this is the system we're talking about. There is only one.

I take it you want the others to believe this administration geniunely cares about providing the public efficient services without fraud and corruption by establishing highly-efficient meritocratic institutions. There's overwhelming evidence in the events of the past few weeks that this not the case. Just looking at the Eric Adams fiasco and, say, the cabinet picks of Hegseth, Gaetz, Bondi (straight of the movie Idiocracy) show this administration does not care about fighting corruption or hiring people that are most qualified for the job.

Pg, the guy screaming about woke? He should be on Musk's side, they both want to de-woke society by force

I've never witnessed pg screaming about anything ever frankly, maybe people close to him have. He would be the last person I use the verb for.

A lot of people and Democrats in STEM fields who voted for Kamala in the elections, including pg who publicly stated he was voting for Kamala, thought the corporate DEIA initiatives were counterproductive to their stated goals. It's not a extreme minority position in the tech crowd, nor is there a complete lack of criticism of corporate DEIA in the progressive media either.

I also give pg credit for being one of the rare VCs who posts "pro-Palestinian" viewpoints on occasion. So he does buck the trend from time to time. Calling David Sacks, Musk's unwavering eternal sychophant, possibly "the most evil person in Silicon Valley" was also a great line in the sand for him. But the basis for this opinion was more from his knowledge of how terrible Sacks treated founders as an investor rather than from Sacks being a Musk acolyte.

You must have missed his recent blog post where he very much so did that: https://paulgraham.com/woke.html

> I fully acknowledge that it will result in mistakes

Yep, but as opposed to a startup those "mistakes" will be deadly.

Literally so.

> Yep, but as opposed to a startup those "mistakes" will be deadly.

Well, these mistakes are also deadly if it’s a move fast and break things startup in medtech. And these mistakes are deadly in healthcare.

I am calling this out because I see this complete myopia of abstracting people’s lives as OK to ever lose on purpose.

Statements like “no one thinks that!!!” “Most people are XYZ!!!” are thrown around because computer scientists start being computer scientists - we try to solve problems the way we do at work. Big O notation is not an acceptable way to manage other people’s lives.

In computer science, 100,000 people in the global population converge to zero. If you are counting DAU… OK.

If you are estimating the number of people you might accidentally kill… not OK.

If you are trying to reduce corruption and you don’t actually know if you will kill people or not, and you do it anyway… I don’t see how anyone can consider that ethical.

> you can't blame him for not wanting to wait 2 years

I do blame him. What harm of 2 years of status quo could be greater than the risks of completely breaking safety organizations?

> Elon who has to get rid of underperformers without credible data

No, this is not a valid solution to the problem, if there even are significant performance problems. “We don’t know exactly who the problematic people are, so let’s just fire every probationary employee, you know the ones who haven’t even been around long enough to be chronic underperformers?”

It’s either a very foolish attempt to solve the problem, and/or he actually just wants to destroy government.

> the real blame for this is with the previous administrators who neglected this problem for years

Trump was in charge 5-9 years ago, does he get some blame too?

> While you might not like his methods, you can't blame him for not wanting to wait 2 years for these issues to be addressed, data to be collected, and then action to be taken.

Yes, I definitely can blame him and anyone who wants to 180 the government in that time - that's stupid, childish, short sighted, and suicidal for keeping the lights on.

>this problem

What problem?

The problem of how people are fired? You dont fix that specific problem by firing everyone!

Somw other problem? Show us evidence that there was a problem, before you fire. That's how you do it in a democracy.

>The lack of effective performance management in the federal workforce. >Resulting in poor service provision and wasteful allocation of taxpayer funds.

Alleged. Not proven, alleged.

>No large private sector workforce would have gotten away with such broken processes.

What broken processes? You havent shown them to exist.

Large companies are built to maximixe profit. Governments are not, so why should their organizational choices be similar?

Performance management is important in both public and private sector organisations.

You have clearly never worked in any sizeable workforce, and I can assure you your basic presumption that large private sector workforces does not have broken processes is childishly naive. The "problem" is you, making assumptions of waste where there is none to speak off, unless you can provide some actual data to back that up. The average federal employee earns about $60k/y, they are not there for the money. Firing all federal employees will same about 7h of borrowing.

I'm sorry but the narrative you have invested in so deeply is not founded in reality, not that I expect anyone explaining facts to you will make any appreciable difference.

Enjoy the pain you elected to bring upon yourself, you deserve the government you got.

I've worked in several large federal departments, and private sector companies that are even larger by headcount.

Trust me, basic performance management processes that exist in the private sector are almost entirely absent in the public sector.

You can’t generalize about the entire public sector from a couple anecdotes. Of course there are going to be badly run groups inside an organization of that size. I can tell you there exists management inside the federal government that runs performance management and fires underperformers.

Since you fall victim to such an obvious fallacy, it makes sense that you would wind up hired into low-performing groups.

What processes are broken? What lack of effective performance management? What poor service provisions?

Where is your citation for any of this? And don't bother citing Musk since we already know he's a sociopathic liar.

You're right it's not a startup. It's an organization in a town that voted 90%+ in favor of keeping their jobs, not being prosecuted, or some kind of "threat to democracy".

You can't run an organization if the ground troops are resistant to executing the vision of leadership

Management is as much about convincing people you’re right as it is about getting your way always. Sometimes your subordinates are right and a good manager can still work with that situation. Even in a professional army like the US military there is disagreement and negotiation. This idea that we are all troops in some kind of militia who should blindly follow one person’s will is the bottom half of fascist ideology.

The term "ground troops" was just used as a metaphor for people at the bottom who do a big chunk of the actual work. Every organization would rather have people at least be pro "big picture" vision, and, yes, there should be dissonance and compromise on the "how" we get there part

You can say that but you could also have called them “workers.” Calling them ground troops is intended to evoke the image of people being shelled in foxholes and then running away. It is a bad euphemism that is meant to suggest we are fighting a war. You have to ask yourself—-when someone evokes the imagery of war, do you not think they are spoiling for a fight?

Pesky things, these laws.

Honest question, what laws in this context?

I can’t say if you’re serious or just trolling. It is beyond stupid to compare government institutions with private sector.

Let’s say (just for discussion purposes) that some government agency (USAID, for example) is wasting 100% of their budget on parties (again, just for discussion purposes). What is the right way to fix it? Step one - you hire an auditor and collect proof of any misconduct or wrongdoing. Step 2 - find out the people who did wrong. Ask for an explanation. Show the public your proof. And so on.

You don’t shut down departments without a shred of evidence, overnight. It is just cruel and stupid. But then, cruelty seems to be the point here.

You don’t set fire to your entire face because you got a pimple on your nose. You just treat the pimple

Whether or not it's a good strategy for either companies or the government, this particular case involved randomly firing a bunch of folks who build and maintain nuclear weapons and then almost immediately trying to un-fire them. There wasn't enough time to see if anything broke (not that you'd see that with nuclear weapons until it was way, way too late) but now you've managed to piss off a bunch of people who are likely only going to come back long enough to find a new job, if they come back at all, and you've probably also damaged your ability to retain even the people you didn't fire or attract new prospective employees. It's basically all damage with zero value and it certainly isn't going to fix any performance management problems.

I think it's a questionable strategy anyways, especially when applied to government, but carrying out the strategy in such a ham-fisted way seems unlikely to be the secret to making it successful.

>it's objective (did anything break?

Did you even try to read the article?

>The US government is trying to rehire nuclear safety employees it had fired on Thursday, after concerns grew that their dismissal could jeopardise national security, US media reported.

It hasn't even been one business day. We don't know how much this will break. The titanic took 4 hours to sink; these things don't instantly show its aftereffects. Clearly, the administration thinks something will break if they are reversing course.

> usually easily undone.

article:

>A memo sent to NNSA employees on Friday and obtained by NBC News read: "The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel."

We are definitely in unusual times.

You also responded 2 coments downstream to another story where this strategy cost a company an entire division and utterly missed its goals.

perhaps effective, but not efficient. shouldn't there be some due diligence on selecting people and departments from dismissal? some kind of measurement and analysis.

Whether or not it's a good idea depends on what outcome you desire. If the aim is to weaken the U.S. then putting a foolish unelected billionaire in charge of things that he has no idea about is a great idea.

> If the aim is to weaken the U.S.

Say if you're China and Russia...

> then putting a foolish unelected billionaire

With ties to both...

I don't think Trump's aim is to weaken the US. I don't think here's some big secret Russia conspiracy.

I think the situation is much simpler. Trump wants to be king. What happens to America in the future is immaterial. And a king needs a kingmaker, who in this case also wants to be MOTU.

Putin and Xi know this too, and help out making it happen - good for them with a clown begin the king of the US.

(Not sure if any help was needed this time though.)

>I don't think Trump's aim is to weaken the US. I don't think here's some big secret Russia conspiracy.

That's not really the claim these days. The Stelle Dossier accusations haven't really been substantiated.

He's more likely to be just a useful idiot. Far more easy to manipulate than politically educated stable people, and with less connection to the institutions of State.