alt Hacker NewsI also believe the Twitter exodus exposed the software engineering headcount sham for what it is. Something like 80% of the company left or was let go, and despite all the smug laughing about how the platform would go under within weeks, it just kept on going.
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they were doing far more than propping up twitter. they were also doing tons of engineering on the side like bootstrap, and shaping fundamental internet technologies.
Musk, in traditional private equity ways, killed anything that wasnt immediately making money. Then he made it pay to play and monetized the hell out of it. All of that BEFORE he opened the far-right floodgates.
Now its a shell of its former self and coasting on the momentum it once enjoyed.
I strongly disagree with this take; do you think all companies are 80% SREs? Did Twitter make money by serving pages to users?
The Twitter exodus does relate to this, kind of; it's an example of the "fall back on existing revenue streams" strategy (you could call it a private equity playbook, but it's more universal than that) exaggerated by the guy acquiring it not needing more revenue and clobbering the revenue part too.
Twitter pre-Musk had an _enormous_ amount of experiments going on. They were building streaming services, clones of every social network you can think of (Spaces etc.), an entire sports brand around MLB, and so on and so on.
They also had an army of sales people who sold ads and an army of engineers building and optimizing an ad platform, which is (or was?) their actual business.
The "platform going down" narrative from both sides was 100% irrelevant to what was actually going on. "We laid off PMs, salespeople, and engineers and the system didn't crash" is a complete non-sequitor that should be obvious to anyone who's involved in software engineering or maintenance. If anything, I'd expect laying off most of any company to make it much more stable; when you don't change things you introduce fewer bugs.
Keep in mind that we don't know how many engineers from his other companies have worked or are working on Twitter since it (a) went private, then (b) merged with SpaceX. So the "I fired 80% of my staff and nothing happened" meme is a bit incomplete
It kept on going, but they have been far less stable from a technical OR leadership perspective. They had a user exodus. They had advertisers leave in droves. I suspect it was a net negative change.
Price's Law (more of an observation than a law) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%27s_law impacts and software with large teams are no exception. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34736936 )
50% of the output is produced by the square root of the team size.
In bloated organizations, there is a lot of fat to cut.
Trying to do anything other than posting on the platform is a mess. Advertising dashboards etc were broken for so long that I gave up trying all together.
Also look at their recent account merging efforts and all the problems people have encountered and posted about on the platform itself.
You can see from the replies (highly political responses that are focused on the EM angle rather than particularly caring about the twitter angle) that really don't like this answer. Unfortunately for them it's true. After some initial stumbles after the firings (which journalists were practically cheering from the rooftops), today it seems to be much the same as it was before all that. And that makes reddit types really really mad.
I suspect this is what got Meta and other companies at least considering whether they would benefit from doing this at a much smaller scale, because there were some mass firings the next year at other companies, but this could have just been in the pipes anyway due to overhiring before.
This is because nobody can say how many people are needed to develop or maintain some body of software. So companies hire however many employees they can afford. When the number they can afford changes they hire more or fire some. The number of staff has pretty much nothing to do with the actual work. AI introduces another factor to the equation: it allows one person to perform N times as much softy-work as before. So even if you have no idea how many people you need (as always, see above) you do know that you can get by with 1/N.
I'm sure their dau decline and actually blocking most usage (non-logged in users) has helped a lot.
Twitter lost 80% of the value for their shareholders so what the heck are you on about man?
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Platform was super unreliable for a while after that - although that might be related to making all the software changes to turn it in to an even worse cesspit.
Edit: Enron Musk apologists will always crack me up.
> Something like 80% of the company left or was let go, and despite all the smug laughing about how the platform would go under within weeks, it just kept on going
I’ve heard this claim many times and is not backed by any more evidence than “it works on my machine”.
If the company really did continue to operate in the same manner, it wouldn’t have been worth 80% less in 2024 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...), nor would it need to be rolled up and financially engineered into being part of an AI company that then gets rolled into a rocket company.
It has been losing users, safety standards have dropped and overall the platform is worse off than before. There’s a reason why no other company has done something similar with their employee counts.