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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?

#51

Post by ghaff »

rocqua wrote: post #40
vinay_ys wrote: post #20

It is likely they will try to maintain the total comp levels for at least a year, meanwhile they will reassess the entire talent pool and make whatever correction they deem necessary. Twitter has no meaningful assets other than the talented people that work there. If sufficient number of critical talent leave (intentionally or accidentally), it could hurt twitter significantly in the near term. People from other indu…

Your argument that there are key people at twitter that need to stay on to keep up understanding of the code makes sense to me. But I don't think the following quote is true: > Twitter has no meaningful assets other than the talented people that work there. I think the main asset of twitter is their userbase and more importantly their brand. The simple fact that twitter is at the core of politics and the news-cycle i…

Not to trivialize Twitter's infrastructure and the people who keep it running--remember the fail whale?--but the #1 through #10 reasons of why it would/will be very difficult for anyone/ones to stand up another Twitter is that everyone (to a first approximation) is on Twitter and the vast majority won't move somewhere else or they'll try moving to a bunch of different places.

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

#52

Post by recuter »

phphphphp wrote: post #45
adlpz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

  If we fail to effectively manage our growth, our business and operating results could be harmed.

  We continue to experience rapid growth in our headcount and operations, which will continue to place significant demands on our management, operational and financial infrastructure. As of June 30, 2013, we had approximately 2,000 employees, an increase of over 1,800 employees since January 1, 2010. 

  ..As we continue to grow, we are subject to the risks of over-hiring, over-compensating our employees and over-expanding our operating infrastructure, and to the challenges of integrating, developing and motivating a rapidly growing employee base in various countries around the world. In addition, we may not be able to innovate or execute as quickly as a smaller, more efficient organization. If we fail to effectively manage our hiring needs and successfully integrate our new hires, our efficiency and ability to meet our forecasts and our employee morale, productivity and retention could suffer, and our business and operating results could be adversely affected.

  Our corporate culture has contributed to our success, and if we cannot maintain this culture as we grow, we could lose the innovation, creativity and teamwork fostered by our culture, and our business may be harmed.

  Moreover, liquidity available to our employee securityholders following this offering could lead to disparities of wealth among our employees, which could adversely impact relations among employees and our culture in general. Our transition from a private company to a public company may result in a change to our corporate culture, which could harm our business.
- Twitter S-1 IPO filing October 3, 2013

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

#53

Post by vinay_ys »

rocqua wrote: post #40
vinay_ys wrote: post #20

It is likely they will try to maintain the total comp levels for at least a year, meanwhile they will reassess the entire talent pool and make whatever correction they deem necessary. Twitter has no meaningful assets other than the talented people that work there. If sufficient number of critical talent leave (intentionally or accidentally), it could hurt twitter significantly in the near term. People from other indu…

Your argument that there are key people at twitter that need to stay on to keep up understanding of the code makes sense to me. But I don't think the following quote is true: > Twitter has no meaningful assets other than the talented people that work there. I think the main asset of twitter is their userbase and more importantly their brand. The simple fact that twitter is at the core of politics and the news-cycle i…

It will take very little disruption to the service quality (think slow/janky app, service/feature outages, buggy functionality like search/filter not working reliably) for users to flee the service and move on to the next happening thing. The current user base twitter has is a result of key input activities – stable/performant software service at scale, growth hacking and marketing to cultivate/retain high-profile content generators/curators, third party tools ecosystem for whale users etc. Each of these things are not in a stable equilibrium. They need constant attention to keep them working. That requires talent AND understanding of current systems/mechanics. So if I were buying a service like Twitter, I would consider the brand/userbase as output (it is what I'm valuing, but not what I'm buying) and consider the code/mechanics and the talent that goes with it as the input (what I'm really buying).

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

#54

Post by deepGem »

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…

25% is if the organization is ultra efficient. I think most organizations other than select FAANG/Stripe are at 75%+. I think pmarca quoted the number to be something like 1:4 which makes the efficiency at 25%, 75% dead weight. FAANG is probably at 50%.

The good big companies are overstaffed by 2x. The bad big companies are overstaffed by 4x or more.

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1515195878604087297

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

#55

Post by snowwrestler »

stutsmansoft wrote: post #41
bko wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Twitter app written by one guy did not have scale, analytics, reporting, advertising, compliance, or moderation features.

Engineers are constantly surprised at how necessary it becomes to do those things as a company grows, and how hard it is to do them well. Musk himself has been repeatedly surprised at how hard it is to scale operations efficiently, at both SpaceX and at Tesla.

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

#56

Post by helsinkiandrew »

binarymax wrote: post #18
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #3

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/25/technology/twitter-employ... "At the meeting with employees on Monday, executives tried to assure employees that they wouldn’t be shortchanged by Mr. Musk’s acquisition. Mr. Agrawal told employees that their stock options would convert to cash when the deal with Mr. Musk closes, which he estimated would take between three and six months. Employees would receive their same benefits p…

This is the best source, however I’m hardened and cynical and what execs “assure” in a meeting has no bearing on what they’ll do in 6 months.

It's up to what Musk wants to do with the existing workforce, but 'promising' existing plans/compensations will be upheld for a period gives him time to introduce some kind of option plan in the new Twitter holding company to retain staff he wants/needs and sack the rest before there's an exodus not of his choosing.

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

#57

Post by newswasboring »

thaeli wrote: post #42
bko wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doesn't it scare you that your actual product is written by someone else? As i am moving away from what is called IC positions in silicon valley, i am increasingly afraid of this. The projects i am passionate about and responsible for are actually developed by other people. And these are people whom I know are at least as good at if not better at the job than me.

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

#58

Post by bko »

thaeli wrote: post #42
bko wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are best practices for offshoring in your estimation?

Does your team work directly with devs or is there an intermediary offshore layer to manage the people actually pushing code? From what I read the variance in quality of offshore engs is huge. I get a lot of connection requests with offshore managers, don't know if they're worth it or you should just hire offshore devs directly and manage them yourselves. Its hard because you don't know the nuances and blindspots of engineers in different countries and cultural issues.

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

#59

Post by onionisafruit »

deepGem wrote: post #54
bko wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

25% is if the organization is ultra efficient. I think most organizations other than select FAANG/Stripe are at 75%+. I think pmarca quoted the number to be something like 1:4 which makes the efficiency at 25%, 75% dead weight. FAANG is probably at 50%. The good big companies are overstaffed by 2x. The bad big companies are overstaffed by 4x or more. https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1515195878604087297

1:4 would be 20% to 80%

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

#60

Post by newswasboring »

vrc wrote: post #23
baby wrote: post #15

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

I’d assume it would allow Musk to restructure Twitter along longer-term goals. My sense is that he will eventually take it public again, but it’s a hard road to make huge changes to a company’s trajectory when your “fiduciary duty” relies on quarterly earnings reports. For example, killing bots will decimate DAU and would tank the stock. But do that and wait a year or two and perhaps Twitter flourishes as a true p2p…

Is "fiduciary duty" defined by the company in it's by laws or is there a law outlining it?
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