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Ask HN: What happens with stock grants for Twitter employees?

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Re: Ask HN: What happens with stock grants for Twitter employees?

#41

Post by stutsmansoft »

bko wrote: post #25
unnouinceput wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, we all know the truth, hence why the question pop-up in the first place. Elon will cut deep in left and right among employees within an year. I guess only 30% of existing ones will still work at Twitter in a year after deal is done.

My limited experience in engineering organizations, I have found that the core task can be accomplished with probably 25% fewer engineers. The rest are working on products that are going nowhere or are generally inefficient at their jobs. It's not even "50% of the people don't do anything, we just don't know what 50%". It's pretty obvious to everyone. Is this the norm? Are there any eng orgs that exist without this p…

It’s absurd how huge engineering teams have become.

Remember the twitter app was originally written by one guy - I bet that team has 50 people on it now, and it’s not better for it.

Re: Ask HN: What happens with stock grants for Twitter employees?

#42

Post by thaeli »

bko wrote: post #25
unnouinceput wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, we all know the truth, hence why the question pop-up in the first place. Elon will cut deep in left and right among employees within an year. I guess only 30% of existing ones will still work at Twitter in a year after deal is done.

My limited experience in engineering organizations, I have found that the core task can be accomplished with probably 25% fewer engineers. The rest are working on products that are going nowhere or are generally inefficient at their jobs. It's not even "50% of the people don't do anything, we just don't know what 50%". It's pretty obvious to everyone. Is this the norm? Are there any eng orgs that exist without this p…

Very lean eng orgs that rely heavily on offshoring. Every software engineer at my work, I know what they do and they're important to our core tasks. But probably 95% of our actual dev is done by offshore project teams, so the eng org itself is very senior/lead heavy and primarily supervises rather than writing a lot of code themselves.

Re: Ask HN: What happens with stock grants for Twitter employees?

#43

Post by martythemaniak »

I don't know why any sane twitter employee would stay on. Twitter employees have spent years being mocked as useless idiots that can't ship code and are destroying society with "Wokeness". Now they don't have any financial upside to look forward to either.

I follow a bunch of Tesla/Spacex accounts on Twitter and you can plainly see that any dissent from Musks wishes will be punished with online mobs and harassment. Currently they're all laughing at how massive they layoffs will be. I don't know why anyone would subject themselves to this.

Re: Ask HN: What happens with stock grants for Twitter employees?

#44

Post by __alexs »

recuter wrote: post #22
unnouinceput wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, we all know the truth, hence why the question pop-up in the first place. Elon will cut deep in left and right among employees within an year. I guess only 30% of existing ones will still work at Twitter in a year after deal is done.

Well that's just impossible bud. The number of twitter employees in 2018 was 4000 and it is about double that now. What on earth do you think they've all been doing? You can't possibly run something like twitter with just 2000 employees like you suggest. The fail whale might reappear.

There is no relationship between total head count and operating work load in most companies. Twitter isn't a factory. They don't need 8000 people to churn out widgets and every extra person means another extra widget they can make per day.

The marginal value of each extra employee is negative but you rake in so much cash from monetising all the free content users are making for you you'd be stupid not to spend it on wild ass bets.

If you have a product that takes 100 people to run but generates billions in revenue it is standard practice in public companies to just hire lots more people. It's mostly speculative in that you hope that one of those thousands of people will come up with something else that makes billions.

Re: Ask HN: What happens with stock grants for Twitter employees?

#45

Post by phphphphp »

adlpz wrote: post #33
recuter wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's just impossible bud. The number of twitter employees in 2018 was 4000 and it is about double that now. What on earth do you think they've all been doing? You can't possibly run something like twitter with just 2000 employees like you suggest. The fail whale might reappear.

Actual question for anyone familiar with the company inner workings: What are those ~8000 people doing at Twitter?!? I guess they do sales and advertising stuff. Would that be a large chunk? The tech doesn't seem that crazy and they don't really ship much so I wouldn't thing they need that many technical people. Is it mostly an army of moderators? I know nothing of how such massive-scale tech companies work, but just…

You can have literally infinite numbers of people working on things that might seem like they don’t need that many people from the outside, because every organisation is very different. If you walked into Twitter, and spoke to people, you’d probably find that there’s a justification within the context of Twitter for most people even if a different company could do more with less (or less with more).

Headcount is an artifact rather than a choice, the amount of people working on Twitter will be a consequence of decisions made more than a decade ago, not as a consequence of how many people Twitter needs today to operate as they are today — which is true for all companies.

Re: Ask HN: What happens with stock grants for Twitter employees?

#46

Post by pydry »

bko wrote: post #25
unnouinceput wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, we all know the truth, hence why the question pop-up in the first place. Elon will cut deep in left and right among employees within an year. I guess only 30% of existing ones will still work at Twitter in a year after deal is done.

My limited experience in engineering organizations, I have found that the core task can be accomplished with probably 25% fewer engineers. The rest are working on products that are going nowhere or are generally inefficient at their jobs. It's not even "50% of the people don't do anything, we just don't know what 50%". It's pretty obvious to everyone. Is this the norm? Are there any eng orgs that exist without this p…

IME the core task can often be accomplished with 1/5th the engineers but

A) most of that is throwing manpower at corporate dysfunction

B) ive never seen an attempt to shed engineers that didnt inadvertently impact the core productive engineers. Worse, sometimes they end up being the first out of the door.

Re: Ask HN: What happens with stock grants for Twitter employees?

#47

Post by rocqua »

baby wrote: post #15

Also: what is the point of taking the company private?

Public companies have to follow a lot of rules, and have a 'fiducary duty' to shareholders. The rules are annoying and expensive. But the real downside is the fiducary duty. It opens you up to lawsuits, and it means you are legally required to care about your stock price. This can prevent you from making decisions that would drop the stock price. Relatedly, the shareholders can (with lots of difficulty) prevent certain changes being made by changing who sits on the board. This limits what you can do in general.

Going private removes many of these limitations, allowing much more flexibility. Going private does mean you can no longer go to the most liquid market (the public market) for extra equity financing. And of course you need to buy out all the shareholders.

Re: Ask HN: What happens with stock grants for Twitter employees?

#49

Post by ghaff »

saagarjha wrote: post #34
jbverschoor wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make sense for stock you'll get in 3 years, as it assumes appreciation in value.

There will be no stock in three years if the acquisition goes through. My understanding is that effort is being made to compensate employees in a roughly equivalent manner, albeit without appreciation or deprecation being involved since Twitter will cease to be a public company.

A lot of people in public firm tech have effectively normalized not just large RSU grants but the assumption that they'll significantly rise in value. Twitter may, depending upon the agreements and Musk's wishes if this goes through, pay out unvested shares cash equivalents on their current schedule at the acquisition price. But there will presumably be no further rise and no further RSUs.

Presumably the treatment of unvested shares is somewhere in all the acquisition legal paperwork because it would need to be accounted for.

Re: Ask HN: What happens with stock grants for Twitter employees?

#50

Post by saagarjha »

ghaff wrote: post #49
saagarjha wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be no stock in three years if the acquisition goes through. My understanding is that effort is being made to compensate employees in a roughly equivalent manner, albeit without appreciation or deprecation being involved since Twitter will cease to be a public company.

A lot of people in public firm tech have effectively normalized not just large RSU grants but the assumption that they'll significantly rise in value. Twitter may, depending upon the agreements and Musk's wishes if this goes through, pay out unvested shares cash equivalents on their current schedule at the acquisition price. But there will presumably be no further rise and no further RSUs. Presumably the treatment of…

That is correct.
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