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Ask HN: Is Elon Musk right about firing 85% of Twitter engineers?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Elon Musk right about firing 85% of Twitter engineers?

#11

Post by sheperd209 »

dagw wrote: post #9

Just maintaining and keeping an already built platform running at its current state doesn't require many engineers. So if that is your only goal then cutting your workforce to a skeleton crew will probably work for quite a while. It's only when you want to add new features, explore new markets and/or find new ways to increase revenue that all those extra people become. I don't know what all those people at Twitter wh…

I hear you, but Twitter has been adding new features, no? They introduced community notes, video streaming capabilities etc...

Re: Ask HN: Is Elon Musk right about firing 85% of Twitter engineers?

#12

Post by sheperd209 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #8
nullindividual wrote: post #6

> But what we haven't seen is twitter the actual website/platform implode like many engineers predicted. Twitter had plenty of issues post-firing. There were outages, features not working correctly, etc. Let's not forget that the firing was a giant f-up, poorly planned, and done at the behest of a mentally ill billionaire.

> were outages, features not working correctly, etc. But then it stabilised. While launching new features. Twitter's value destruction has been entirely a function of Musk's personal antics. Not their engineering quality.

yup, you've taken words right out of my mouth. I am just curious what was the output of the 85% of engineers that were fired. Mind you, among them were ver senior/director level, so it wasn't just college graduates and middle managers

Re: Ask HN: Is Elon Musk right about firing 85% of Twitter engineers?

#14

Post by pauljonas »

nullindividual wrote: post #6

> But what we haven't seen is twitter the actual website/platform implode like many engineers predicted. Twitter had plenty of issues post-firing. There were outages, features not working correctly, etc. Let's not forget that the firing was a giant f-up, poorly planned, and done at the behest of a mentally ill billionaire.

There are still many features not working.

I used to search within lists (was like the best feature of Twitter, for my usage) quite a bit -- after Musk gutted the team after taking over, it no longer works, and has been that way for many months.

Re: Ask HN: Is Elon Musk right about firing 85% of Twitter engineers?

#15

Post by panick21_ »

nullindividual wrote: post #6

> But what we haven't seen is twitter the actual website/platform implode like many engineers predicted. Twitter had plenty of issues post-firing. There were outages, features not working correctly, etc. Let's not forget that the firing was a giant f-up, poorly planned, and done at the behest of a mentally ill billionaire.

It also had issues before the take over.

Re: Ask HN: Is Elon Musk right about firing 85% of Twitter engineers?

#16

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

sheperd209 wrote: post #11
dagw wrote: post #9

Just maintaining and keeping an already built platform running at its current state doesn't require many engineers. So if that is your only goal then cutting your workforce to a skeleton crew will probably work for quite a while. It's only when you want to add new features, explore new markets and/or find new ways to increase revenue that all those extra people become. I don't know what all those people at Twitter wh…

I hear you, but Twitter has been adding new features, no? They introduced community notes, video streaming capabilities etc...

If your point was "Twitter has been adding new features despite their engineering cuts", that is incorrect. Community notes and video streaming were all added before the Musk acquisition. The only engineering changes I can think of since the acquisition have been semi-disasters in my opinion:

1. Paying for blue checks. Which for me just means that blue checks are the hallmark of the lowest quality comments and posts now.

2. Renaming from Twitter to X. This one highlights how Twitter is basically unable to even do this correctly without a proper engineering team. Normally you'd implement this so that navigating to twitter.com would redirect to x.com, but Twitter had to do the opposite because changing the primary domain name likely would have touched a ton of underlying assumptions throughout the code, and Twitter was no longer equipped to be able to handle a change of that magnitude.

Re: Ask HN: Is Elon Musk right about firing 85% of Twitter engineers?

#18

Post by dagw »

Nextgrid wrote: post #7

When you build a house you don't keep the builders around once the house is built. You occasionally get a maintenance guy to keep things running but in a well-constructed building the maintenance effort is significantly lower than the initial effort to build it. Why should it be any different for an IT system? Once the system is built, stable and does not require changes (Twitter's feature set hasn't meaningfully cha…

I'd say it's more like building a hotel than building a house. Sure you might not need the people that built the hotel, and the hotel probably won't fall down if you just have a minimal maintenance staff. However, if you want the hotel to thrive and grow and be profitable long term, you probably want to hire more than just a couple maintenance guys.
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