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Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

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Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#461

Post by q1w2 »

john-radio wrote: post #402

A lot of the tweets that are quoted in the article have been removed. For example, Twitter employee Cristina Angeli is mentioned in the story for having tweeted an image of "staff members... flooding an internal Slack channel with blue heart emojis as they wait to learn their fate tomorrow", but that tweet is deleted on twitter itself because "This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules." This is ironic if you consider all…

> Smart journalists are going to stop relying on Twitter's API now.

This seems unlikely. Journalists are pragmatists and won't abandon Twitter unless there is an alternative.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#462

Post by humanistbot »

edderly wrote: post #301
losvedir wrote: post #180

And so the grand experiment begins. I feel bad for the folks losing their job because that always sucks, and I hope there's a decent severance package. Now we'll see what happens to Twitter... I hardly use it, so if it implodes it won't bother me too much. But I am curious to see if all the "how do you need X people to do Y?" commenters are correct in this case. The app is simple but doing simple things at scale is h…

I think it'll be fine. You don't need 7000 people to run a micro blogging service. It's really that simple.

You don't if you don't need any content moderation.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#463

Post by generalizations »

el_benhameen wrote: post #373
bichiliad wrote: post #344

When there were layoffs at Etsy back in 2017, one of the unintended consequences were that a lot more people quit voluntarily afterwards. Attrition was a lot higher than expected. I have to believe that the people who remain are not all going to want to stay at the company that Twitter is becoming, whether it be for lack of institutional knowledge, peer support, or just because they liked their coworkers and are sad…

I kind of figured this was part of the goal at Twitter. 75% of staff was the number that was originally floated, so maybe the thinking here is that after a brutal layoff round, another quarter will say “fuck it” and leave.

And after that, the ones who stay are probably the ones most in line with the kind of culture Elon is aiming for.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#464

Post by arrrg »

thinkingemote wrote: post #409

Musk and friends compare Twitter to other tech companies and see that it's ratio of employees to revenue is lowest. He therefore thinks he must halve the number employees and/or increase revenue to get this ratio up. From the chat log exhibits from the Twitter vs Musk case: https://danluu.com/elon-twitter-texts/#47 A VC (Jason Calacanis) does back of the envelope calculations: Twitter revenue per employee: $5B rev /…

How do you fire the right people? Where is the information about who to fire and who to keep coming from?

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#466

Post by grumple »

KaiserPro wrote: post #308

THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion. Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive". Musk is not a proponent of that. He is a micromanaging, capricious, easily distracted, arrogant and vindictive CEO. If twitter thrives then we can expect copycats to try and spread his shitty work philosophy (like everyone ido…

There's already a bigger org doing this - Amazon. They are constantly hiring and struggling to replace those who leave - even during their new corporate hiring freeze.

Tech workers are still in very high demand. And the younger generation seems much more willing to unionize or refuse poor working conditions.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#467

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

edderly wrote: post #301
losvedir wrote: post #180

And so the grand experiment begins. I feel bad for the folks losing their job because that always sucks, and I hope there's a decent severance package. Now we'll see what happens to Twitter... I hardly use it, so if it implodes it won't bother me too much. But I am curious to see if all the "how do you need X people to do Y?" commenters are correct in this case. The app is simple but doing simple things at scale is h…

I think it'll be fine. You don't need 7000 people to run a micro blogging service. It's really that simple.

It's possible you need 100 engineers and 6,900 moderators.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#468

Post by mikkergp »

naasking wrote: post #389
mikkergp wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be interesting to see how Elon defines success. Twitter in it's current form is a dead end, and there's no way "more free speech" is going increase either revenue or users. So if you think Elon is going to succeed at making Twitter a better Twitter as we know it, then I'm confident this take is wrong. Which is why he's focused on the everything X app or whatever. Now, I wouldn't want to underestimate Elon, he…

> It's one of the smallest social networks and Twitter as Twitter, i.e. the one big open forum with politicians, journalists scientists etc _is_ it's competitive advantage. So I don't know how you get from Twitter to X when almost every other social media does the things X would do better than Twitter. Being the elites' gathering place is indeed its biggest advantage, and the fact that consumers can get public visibi…

Maybe, but most of these things would require "brand safety" which is in the opposite direction of free speech. Maybe if twitter had billions of users like facebook, they could strongarm companies and get away with it, but all of the things you describe are probably going to require twitter directly interfacing with said celebrities/politiians/journalists, which will require lots more employees and a different tact than Musk seems to be taking.

Besides the fact that "more free speech" seems to involve making fun of trans people and bringing back donald trump, which do not correlate with more accurate feedback to elites.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#469

Post by khazhoux »

KaiserPro wrote: post #308

THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion. Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive". Musk is not a proponent of that. He is a micromanaging, capricious, easily distracted, arrogant and vindictive CEO. If twitter thrives then we can expect copycats to try and spread his shitty work philosophy (like everyone ido…

> THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion.

How bold, to speak for everyone ;-)

I really don't see this as a "treat employees nicely" issue. I'm open to being convinced otherwise. But... Elon's premise from day 0 was that Twitter was mismanaged -- bloated, misguided, bad as a business and broken as product. This echoes the sentiment even by many here on HN over the years. Now Elon owns it, and is undoing the hiring decisions of previous management, to start with a clean slate. Seems to me this was simply an inexorable part of his takeover, and so you may as well be saying it "wasn't nice" of Elon to buy the company.

Also, a completely different counterpoint: If an employee's layoff is inevitable, it is much nicer for that is be part of a mass layoff like this, rather than a surgical one later. Because these people have a perfect explanation for their dismissal when they apply at their next job.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#470

Post by lithos »

lumost wrote: post #460
KaiserPro wrote: post #308

THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion. Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive". Musk is not a proponent of that. He is a micromanaging, capricious, easily distracted, arrogant and vindictive CEO. If twitter thrives then we can expect copycats to try and spread his shitty work philosophy (like everyone ido…

I suspect that part of this is a re-buttle to WFH. In the past, managers generally could see who was doing what. Now it's based on trust. If someone decides to watch TV all day while sometimes checking slack... well then they can. No one ever had any idea how long coding tasks took anyway. Some people are doing fine in this new world, and some are struggling. Whether I'm succeeding or struggling depends on the day.

Why should a manager care as long as the employee's output is average or better?
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