by victorronin on 11/21/22, 2:06 AM with 196 comments
by somesortofthing on 11/21/22, 2:52 AM
Forget about new products, forget about improvements to existing products, forget infrastructure work/cost optimization, forget not having major data breaches regularly, forget mitigating large-scale security vulnerabilities(i.e. log4j), forget being able to capitalize on market trends on a useful timescale, and forget about the ability to deal with situations that require more engineering capacity that your company uses on an average day.
Entering "survival mode" and keeping only enough engineering capacity on board to keep the service running on a normal day is implicitly a bet that no emergent events are going to demand more capacity from you than is needed on that normal day. The product might be standing now, but you can't do anything useful with a paralyzed company that's going to topple over the first time it faces a stiff breeze.
by throwyawayyyy on 11/21/22, 2:48 AM
> And one last thing. The company that has deep enough pockets can survive tons of shit. If you wave a check big enough, you will find people willing to go through hell and back and who will drag the company forward. I believe this is a very important point. I felt that we (software engineers) sometimes have too big egos believing that if enough software engineers left, the company will fall apart. The reality is that (big money) can help navigate quite dire circumstances for companies.
Does Twitter have deep pockets? And if it offered you whatever it would take for you to spend some months in hell, do you trust that it would be able to pay? Twitter is in an awful situation, and in sharp distinction to Musk's previous near-death experiences, there's no government coming to bail him out.
by 88913527 on 11/21/22, 2:31 AM
Growth often comes with dead weight. You can't 10x your staff overnight and expect the same output per engineer. And as you grow, your organizational structure impacts your architecture (Conway's law). The downsizing frequently is an unwinnable scenario, and people need to recognize that going into it.
by ZephyrBlu on 11/21/22, 2:36 AM
Dependencies on other teams, management constantly changing their mind, having to put out fires, helping other teams, etc. There are very few teams where this kind of thing doesn't happen.
Also, something to keep in mind when saying things like "you can fire 80% of your SWEs and survive" is slack. You might survive, but have no slack which means any sort of tail event is going to destroy your company.
by jmuguy on 11/21/22, 2:34 AM
by lamontcg on 11/21/22, 3:02 AM
Doubt.
Employees often have very imperfect information into what other employees are doing in their day to day jobs. The team that looks lazy because they don't immediately prioritize your bugs and requests may be understaffed compared to the operational load.
And unsexy jobs that keep the operation running may be done very well by people who aren't part of the most popular kids, but you'll wind up missing them once they're gone.
by lovich on 11/21/22, 2:23 AM
If “survive” means, won’t immediately collapse and can continue on for months to years while extracting value I’d agree. If “survive” instead means that they can’t both do required maintenance to keep the company operating _and_ simultaneously build out new features and aspects of the business, Kim not sure I’m as convinced
by unwise-exe on 11/21/22, 3:01 AM
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Are those newfangled 360 reviews really that much more effective than other review processes?
And of course this fails to account for how nobody likes, say, those meddling busybodies on the security team, or those idiots at the support desk who always make you unplug and restart things before letting you explain what the real issue is; or how everyone likes that one person who always brings donuts and spends more time being friendly with other teams than actually working.
by syrrim on 11/21/22, 2:39 AM
by logicalmonster on 11/21/22, 2:30 AM
2) For what it's worth, the Twitter employees let go were not just programmers, but also fulfilled other roles. I'm not quite sure what percentage of programmers Twitter lost, but I bet they lost a much higher percentage of other roles such as HR and content moderators.
> BTW. Figuring it who is the core team is not that complicated. You just ask everybody to name five people who are doing well and who they want to work with again (in the next company).
For what it's worth, this might yield a misleading answer because it could become a popularity contest.
The charismatic guy who plays office politics and tries to make everybody their pal might score highly here, but the smart engineer who just sits down quietly and churns out good features might be forgotten.
by ck2 on 11/21/22, 2:32 AM
"It's called medium because most of the articles aren't very well done" ?
Enough with the twitter analysis already, just let him finish running it into the ground and after he fails to make the first or second billion dollar annual financing payment someone else will finally just take over or sell the domain.
by rosywoozlechan on 11/21/22, 2:31 AM
by rhaway84773 on 11/21/22, 9:09 AM
One of the problems with cutting 80% of the workforce even if you know which 20% is useful and manage to only spare them is that competitors exist. You don’t just need people to make sure your product works, but you also need people to make sure your product runs slightly better than every competitor.
An existing social graph is a significant moat, but it’s not foolproof.
The problem is that if we assume that the 20% useful people can be identified perfectly, then someone else could build a company that has 25% more useful people than the company that just cut 80% of its staff and probably out deliver you for long enough that they’d be able to easily chip into the moat you’ve built fairly quickly.
As an aside, the Pareto principle is often misused and isn’t close to being any sort of law. It applies in vastly fewer situations that it doesn’t apply in…try applying the Pareto principle to the floor of any manufacturing facility, for example.
by andrewflnr on 11/21/22, 4:12 AM
by rrwo on 11/21/22, 4:00 AM
Also, some of the people who have been working at a company for a long time know the systems in detail. They may not be the people who'd win a popularity contest, but you don't want these people to suddenly leave.
by gonzo41 on 11/21/22, 2:40 AM
by ohCh6zos on 11/21/22, 2:49 AM
by chrismcb on 11/21/22, 4:06 AM
by crackercrews on 11/21/22, 2:48 AM
New hires won't know the internals of Twitter but they can dive in and help. They can also be motivated by equity-heavy comp packages.
by fooker on 11/21/22, 12:32 PM
What if it actually works out for Twitter?
If it does, this will set the baseline for how you can treat software developers.
The special treatment (in compensation, flexibility, etc) we seem to enjoy over other white collar professions will be gone.
by taylodl on 11/21/22, 4:07 PM
Twitter is no longer positioned to add any new services or abilities. The Twitter we had is the best Twitter will ever be. Maybe that's enough. More likely is people have left who are key to maintaining operational excellence. Like the Titanic, their absence may not be noticed for some time.
My initial takeaway from this disaster isn't you can let 80% of your engineers go and you'll be just fine. Though I'm quite happy for my competitors to draw that conclusion!
by sargstuff on 11/21/22, 4:00 AM
Still think if a company needs to involve software engineer, removal of 80% of software engineer, the total software engineer count less 80% needs to total 1 or more.
Hopefully this wasn't the bean counter reasoning for minimum employees required for company health plan.
by whatever1 on 11/21/22, 6:12 AM
It also self drives if I let the steering wheel.
Until it doesn’t.
by kristopolous on 11/21/22, 2:47 AM
When the agency being exercised is departure you get two remainers - the zealots and the hanger-ons.
You can try to roll the clock back to a nimble pivot or preserve startup but you're looking at wildly different skillsets to make that work and those people have likely just left.
It's possible to pump out great things with this configuration, but only a fool would sign up for the task. Or maybe a Michael Milken who fancies himself as a Steve Jobs.
by jemmyw on 11/21/22, 5:40 AM
Hire to work on your core product and for specific purpose. Don't let managers hire willy nilly to grow their fiefdom.
by hayst4ck on 11/21/22, 3:10 AM
I couldn't help but read "H1B slaves" in place of workaholics.
That might sound mildly hyperbolic, but if you can force someone out of the country, that gives you tyrannical power over them. The power imbalance is so large it must be seen as coercive.
I'd be very interested to see the H1B demographics of post Musk Twitter.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/politics/twitter-layoffs-visa...
> “Firing folks who are on a H-1B in a major economic downturn is not just putting them out of the job, it’s tantamount to ruining their lives,” one former employee told CNN, adding that some people who had accepted Musk’s ultimatum had accepted it “out of self-preservation.”
> For that reason, some staff at Twitter who are on H-1B visas are staying on despite wanting to leave the company, a former employee told CNN, adding that they’re “concerned with being forced into a flooded job market where they may be unable to find a job and before being forced out of the country.”
by FrontierPsych on 11/24/22, 3:20 AM
20% of the customers pay 80% of the revenue.
You can't just willy-nilly cut any 80%.
You have to look at the actual sales per customer and only then cut the 80% that are time wasters.
If you have 1000 engineers, you MUST know which specific engineers are the 200 that are delivering 80% of the results.
If you have 200 salespeople, you have to know which exact and specific 40 salespeople you keep and the 160 that you fire.
.
But the problem in many companies that suck, or it was a good company and now it sucks, is that generally, the best employees, the 20%, have the most options. If they get too much problems, those 20% will be the first out the door. So the company starts getting into a death spiral. As more of the top 20% leave, that means the remaining top 20% will have to do the work of the ones that left. And soon they will say no way and they will quit, until all that is left is the 80% that does 20% of the work.
I have nothing against the 80/20 heuristic, but like most things, you better know exactly what you're talking about.
Also, in any company, every company, top management should know exactly who the best employees are, and treat them way better than anyone else. You bend over backwards for them. You do not treat all employees equally. It is an utter disaster to lose a golden goose employee, in any capacity, a top 20% receptionist, a top 20% janitor - doesn't matter. All top 20%-ers are top 20%-ers. Bend over backwards to keep your top 20% janitor if you have 100 janitors because you have a really really big building, treat the 20% top priority - get the CEO to talk the top 20% janitor if needed. If nothing else, it is good corporate self-discipline. Because the more top 20's you have in every area, they all feed off of each other's energy.
by dehrmann on 11/21/22, 2:38 AM
by Markoff on 11/21/22, 9:12 AM
This is completely ignoring the number of engineers you start with. Let's say you have Twitter with 10000 engineers and Twitter with 40000 engineers, in one case I end up with 2000 engineers, in other with 8000 engineers, you are telling me the result will be same?
First you need to find out how big overemployment and how productive employees you have to come up with some percentages, some companies are efficient, some companies ar stagnating hardly introducing any new features over years (cough Twitter cough), so clearly there is big overhead of engineers.
by layer8 on 11/21/22, 3:08 AM
by bediger4000 on 11/21/22, 2:30 AM
by atishay811 on 11/21/22, 3:54 AM
by 4b11b4 on 11/21/22, 3:21 AM
by Gustomaximus on 11/21/22, 3:27 AM
https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/
The key question is how to you find & keep the 100 or so key people from a 7,500 company when reducing numbers.
by dTal on 11/21/22, 2:36 PM
by egberts1 on 11/21/22, 2:47 AM
by physicsguy on 11/21/22, 6:17 AM
by albertopv on 11/21/22, 5:23 AM
by jti107 on 11/21/22, 6:22 PM
another point is twitter isn’t a pure tech company…it’s an ad business on a tech platform. if all the sales and content people quit or are fired I question the long term (2+ years) survivability especially with 10+ billion in debt and annual 1+ billion loan payments
by rugina on 11/21/22, 10:55 AM
by Havoc on 11/21/22, 1:57 PM
by dehrmann on 11/21/22, 2:35 AM
This will get you a list of solid team players. It's a list of who can keep a company going, but not the company.
by thefz on 11/21/22, 3:24 PM
by windex on 11/21/22, 12:26 PM
by PeterStuer on 11/21/22, 6:37 AM
by vinyl7 on 11/21/22, 2:04 PM
by LatteLazy on 11/21/22, 7:29 AM
by Onanymous on 11/21/22, 10:03 AM
by Communitivity on 11/21/22, 2:30 PM
These are some of the reports to consider:
* Twitter had around 7500 staff when Elon Musk purchased it. Twitter by many accounts now has less than 1000 staff. Some accounts place that number less than 500.
* I think the losses aren't done. Elon Musk reportedly started reviewing every coder's performance, accomplishments over the last six months, and code snippets. He might be going to give the best of them a bonus (inciting jealousy and possible resignations in some of the others). More likely in my opinion, he's going to fire more people.
* Advertisers are seeming to shun Twitter now. See GroupM's labeling of Twitter a 'high risk' [1]. Hiring, or re-hiring, needed staff will be hard with the volatility perceived and with a lack of money as inducement.
I love Twitter, and use it for many things. It's too early to say Twitter's ultimate fate for certain, but I suspect this Thanksgiving will be Twitter's last. Banks could always buy a failing Twitter and bring it back. Who knows?
[1] https://digiday.com/marketing/never-been-critical-twitters-a...
by woodruffw on 11/21/22, 2:39 AM
As an extension of this, I propose we remove 4/5ths of each airliner. The 20% that remains, so long as we pick the right 20%, will surely fly correctly.
Seriously: who writes this dreck? You don't have to believe that every single employee at a company is productive or necessary to understand that you can't saddle your remaining employees, even if you picked the "right" ones, with the remaining workload.
by oh_my_goodness on 11/21/22, 1:09 PM