Do people see Elon's takeover of Twitter as a success? I think he leveraged Twitter as a social media platform to make himself wealthy, but as far as I can tell, the actual company has been losing a ton of money.
I was trying to stay away from the debate about the success of it by making that comment about it not failing even with a fraction of the former employees. My sarcastic reply to your question, though, is it depends on which side of the aisle you sit on. More seriously, there is something extremely telling about a tech company cutting half or more of its workforce and still living. I can guarantee you every major tech company took note of that reality and so I have to believe it begged some questions about headcounts.
It brings you back to that old HN saw "why do these companies need so many people to do that?" Maybe the answer actually was they didn't/don't.
>there is something extremely telling about a tech company cutting half or more of its workforce and still living.
this seems a gross misunderstanding of how software companies work at scale. Twitter doesn't hire engineers to run a monitoring system cause they need it to stay alive (there are alternatives to building and running their own!), they chose to do it to save money or increase revenue.
Twitter doesn't need an ad network, they can use Google, or build their own and take more profit. They might know that for every 3 engineers they hire on their ad network, they increase their click rate and thus revenue.
The same can be said for any infra team. You don't need to build much infra, but companies do it because sometimes it's a way to save hundreds of millions of dollars in cloud costs or licensing fees.
Are we disagreeing here? I'm not sure how you took my comment, but it seems like what you're arguing here doesn't really rebut what I was saying. Or at least is not directly related. FWIW I agree with everything you're saying, except for the tone, which, to be honest, I don't love.
>" Maybe the answer actually was they didn't/don't.
I'm disputing the claim that the above statement was ever in question. FAANG doesn't employ people because they mistakenly thought they needed that many, they do it because adding more employees has either lowered their infra costs or increased their revenue.
Typically cutting is a top-down decision, while hiring is organic. If they think they can justify budget for it, managers want to hire. Managing more people has direct rewards apart from anything the headcount is doing for the organization overall, so incentives are misaligned.
All the big FAANG companies that did major layoffs have rehired to the original amount since then.
I really believe the layoffs were not about needing less people, it was about gaining some ground in the employee/employer dynamic.
From a pure economics perspective, this is healthy for the business.
There are always low performers. Periodically transitioning out the bottom 10% or so, and rehiring different people, possibly in a different departmental distribution, is always net beneficial to the company.
Using regional/national/global events as the explanation is always better than blaming yourself.
Of course, it's impossible to segregate people into performance bins with perfect accuracy, and it's always bad for individual humans in the short term.
Arguments are made that it's good for society in the longer term, and wars are fought between opposing sides of that opinion. :)
> More seriously, there is something extremely telling about a tech company cutting half or more of its workforce and still living. I can guarantee you every major tech company took note of that reality and so I have to believe it begged some questions about headcounts.
I just don’t understand how it’s possible. I admit I was one of the skeptics predicting Twitter’s immediate demise after laying off so many. Everywhere I have ever worked had at least 3X more work to do than staff to do it. You can’t get rid of even one person without feeling the pain. I just can’t fathom working for a company that can get rid of so many people and not struggle! My current company wouldn’t be able to even keep the lights on in the offices if it lost 80% of its staff.
Ignoring the financial aspects, I agree to some extent with OPs opinion this trend of doing more with less engineers really took off following Elon reducing Twitters headcount.
It's worth remembering Twitter was a buggy mess before Elon bought it. Sure it's still a buggy mess today, but the staffing costs are dramatically lower.
Losing a ton of money was something Twitter was also pretty good at even before Elon too - only profitable 2 years out of the 8 leading up to the acquisition while it was still a public company etc.
To be honest if it wasn't for Elon's hand in various other ways and he was somehow perceived by most to be apolitical many people would call the cuts a success and it would be losing a lot lot less or be making money.
For every engineer who sees things not working on the site and going unfixed, there's a manager who sees how many people still use it.
We don't know if it is losing money. It's a private company.
He reduced the headcount to roughly what it was in 2017. At the time of the acquisition, many of the employees were in non technical roles, contributing nothing of value, posting videos about their empty work day on TikTok. Jack Dorsey admitted that he made a mistake by over hiring - more than doubled the headcount from 2017 to 2021.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272140/employees-of-twit...
We know the value as perceived by investors has dropped. We know usage and revenue has dropped. There are now several competitors in the same space, some fairly successful.