While a lot of tech companies were reluctant to make cuts at first, they realized it didn't spell the end, Zuckerberg said.
Translation: They all saw Twitter cut 80% of its staff and yet is still online.
the main driver is “more money for me,” meaning more money for zuck, more money for shareholders, more money for the employees that remain.
If they saw that and thought they "we should do that too", they are idiots.
I remember the denialism on tech-focused forums like this one about that move, turns out it was the correct one from the owner's point of view. Of course that it s*cked big time for the employees being laid-off, but that's why we need to unionise in this industry and form some sort of solidarity/class consciousness, i.e. realising that the likes of "Zuck", "paulg", "Sam Altman" are not our friends, to the contrary.
First, Elon cut a bunch of "non-essential" core Twitter staff, like the trust and safety teams. This is going to cause long term brand damage - in fact, it already is!
Second, Elon completely cut all non-core Twitter projects. Twitter was being used by its major investors as a platform to build and test new social experiments and startup concepts. As far as I can tell, this was about 1000 engineers and product people. This was probably a pretty solid cut for someone like him, but also a pretty gross example of the whims of capital - who knows what great idea was killed off.
Lastly, when they say Twitter cut 80% of their staff, they never mentioned what happened after: massive attrition from people who "survived" but could go elsewhere. Way beyond what Elon thought would happen. Way beyond the 10-20% additional resignations after a normal layoff happens. This may have almost killed Twitter
Maybe its a bit more complicated than that? If software is built around the business and if the business is no longer changing much maybe they simply don't need as many people around? After all, software can run hands off if you don't mess with it much.
IMHO it should be possible for musk to run Twitter singlehandedly all by himself if He has no intention to change anything. It should run fine until it needs something fixed due to a bug, a legal requirement or a partner change(some provider of some service changing something about their service).
Its kind of obvious that we are no longer in the age of Internet exploration, things are quite stagnant for some time and you don't need much explorers and sailors to do the same things. Know How is there, tools are mature. The average techie jobs have been automated to great extend, be it through tools they created or AI that can take care of busywork or understand legacy codebase without the need of retaining the people who built it.
The interesting things are happening in the AI, robotics and other areas but your average "tech" worker is not equipped to do these things.
Not sure if this was a Freudian slip, but love the capital "He" here as if Musk is on the same level as God.
No its not.
FB copied the twitter verified as meta verified. Did not even change the name.
Is it though? Any time there's a Twitter link, clicking on it has at least a 1/3 chance of seeing "Something went wrong. Try again?".
I think they're not understaffed, for now. They're delivering new features and fixing most bugs. A understaffed engineering team usually struggles with that.
But still, let's assume the reports are true and there was nontrivial reduction in reliability... It was a very extreme engineering cut for a service which is still "generally working". I believe that tech executives are simply assuming that Twitter's decline has a lot more to do with Elon Musk's controversial persona than the service's reliability. While an 80% cut might be too much, they think, a 20% cut would work just fine.
Also, most of the time, video will not play if you open the post directly. The play button will have no effect.
There's a certain organization size at which coordination costs dwarf everything else.
Suppose the following toy model:
New Engineer is the Nth employee.
They add Value of 2, and coordination costs of N^.06.
There will come a point (around 100k employees) where each additional employee reduces productivity.
Better to have 10 organizations of 10k people, than one of 100k, imo.
All of my friends who feel real love for their work and live and breathe tech are still employed or have no problem finding employment. It‘s these people who drive innovation if managed competently and I guess companies want to go back to that. This is not to say that it‘s all fun and roses. A lot of tech employees that love tech in itself work long hours, are stressed and are unable to not think about work at home. I‘m that type of person. Companies really profit of these types.
And then it's the fact that most who see productive people being slashed will ultimately reach the conclusion that productivity isn't the most important but being loud enough is.
Feels like a fine line. But yes, if these companies were bloated then something needed to be done. I'm just curious if "departing with very talented people" is the way to go.
This is hard. Which is why you identify obvious outliers first. It's much easier to identify obvious slackers and top engineers who sell their soul for your company (again, not a good thing, but for the sake of the argument -- and realism -- we're forgoing ethics here) than it is to identify lower-than-average or higher-than-average employees who are much closer to the median.
Next, a company looking for saving costs would be looking at top-earning employees with a long tenure. There is most likely not a lot of fat to trim here, but the profits could outweigh the risks.
If you're looking to increase productivity and profits only, you'd also have a look at non-value-producing employees, or those who introduce friction. These employees may add to a company's culture by providing equality strategies or acceptance groups in strong economic times, which in turn could also attract more employees with a similar culture fit, but money is scarce now and shareholders want profits, so they must go. I've seen this happen first hand.
In my circles, those who get offers and those who are still employed are artisans par excellence, of course. No exceptions. Luck and circumstances have nothing to do with it. Others must really be shit or DEI.It could well be that some degree of inefficiency is a good price to pay for all the intangibles that make for a great workplace that produces great work and attracts talented people.
For layoffs to not result in employee disillusionment, actual efficiency must be created - e.g. less people can achieve more with similar effort.
The danger is the new wage bill efficiency is actually creating overwork and mounting technical debt that is unsustainable.
The decision makers are rewarded in the short term for seemingly creating 'efficiency' value when in fact they may have doomed their business by destroying institutional knowledge and lynchpin employees that were not measured on the balance sheet.
The delayed effects are business functionality slowly falters, eventually past tipping points, then cascades to irreversible intermittent faliure.
Shareholder value is maximised in the short term and the policy makers leave well rewarded before the negative implications of the decimation are perceived.
The difficult questions for companies are :
- how to layoff the least ( or negatively ) performant employees instead of a random selection,
- how to not have the best employees leave in the wake of layoffs because the layoffs created a culture of fear and uncertainty,
- how to maintain the motivation of remaining employees so that they remain aligned with company goals, especially in light of the now increased workload for those who remain.
Probably the answer is to share ownership and increase reward with those that remain to increase their engagement.
Currently the majority of companies never do this.
Certainly the remaining employees have to, at best, raise the overwork with management as a problem whereas the management see it as efficiency. At worst the employee will have to fight their corner so as prove their workload is now unsustainable. Without proper support, it can be, that the employee must cut corners to keep up and trust relationships can become adverserial.
One would hope these CEOs have real insight into creating efficiency but in some cases the suspicion is that the real issue is upper tiers who have absolutely no idea how their business actually runs on the shop floor.
The wider societal implications are unemployement and a lack of the (perhaps) vital social function the business provided, and the loss of customer faith in the company to deliver as before.
I never believed that was the case, am I wrong?
Which is more valuable: a company with a thousand employees that generates 100 million in profit, or a company with 5 employees that generates the same amount? Beyond the question, I understand it's very simplistic and that the value of a company goes far beyond the number of employees, but I'd like to understand how investors view employees.
More people = more growth (supposedly) = more money.
So the real reason is the cargo cult Musk started at Twitter. Everyone now wants to proof that they also can keep the lights on with minimal staff.