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Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

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Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#871
post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only 3 years ago Twitter had 5000 employees. They now have 8000 in 2022. That's a massive headcount growth for a company whose stock price declined significantly since then.

And no notable features have been released

You didn't see Twitter Spaces, Fleets, Birdwatch, Tweet Editing, and Twitter Blue? Some of those features have been successful for them, some not, but they've been releasing features.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#872
post #347
post #286

I’d be more likely to work with Twitter now to be frank. Elon is obviously trying to implement an engineering lead organisation where coding and productivity are valued. A lot of these companies tend to be manager heavy, I’ve worked in places where it seemed over half the people in meetings were managers or other unproductive people. It frequently felt like these people were stifling the work as they all had their ow…

Entrepreneur, salesman, celebrity or populariser? Sure. Definitely not an engineer.

I don't see how his ventures could have made the progress they have with a business/finance/sales person calling the shots. Elon is adept at engineering; you can see it whenever he is interviewed and goes down rabbit holes about metallurgy, simulations, manufacturing, etc. The achievements of Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink and others would not have happened without thousands of correct evaluations of and decisions on technical matters, and Elon is the singularity around which all of that orbits.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#873
post #850

There's an asymmetry here where Twitter and other companies get blamed for layoffs, but didn't get praised for providing highly paid jobs that put their employees in the top 1%. Even Stripe just had layoffs and they are a much more productive, tighter run ship. Twitter cutting deeper than Stripe shouldn't be surprising. It's not a secret that they were overstaffed and are known for rest & vest. This goes way back. In…

Well, it's mostly not Twitter betting blamed for layoffs, it's Musk. Twitter provided those jobs, not Musk. Musk is doing the layoffs, not Twitter. So someone not responsible in the least for the creation of those jobs is ending them.

That is not to say the layoffs were not needed or justified (I don't know) but the asymmetry exists because it's an asymmetric situation.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#874

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…

> And so the grand experiment begins.

If Elon "pulls it off" and shows other tech company leadership boards "you can get by with 1k employees instead of 7k" (or whatever the final number ends up being), what does that mean for the future of tech jobs?

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#876
post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to) Freedom of speech is not the first amendment and vice versa. Freedom of speech is an ideal that applies to all people and all spaces, public and private, while the First Amendment only applies in America and to the government. People think they sound smart when they say freedom of speech onl…

And freedom of speech also includes to the rights of private individuals and companies to determine what they share on their own platforms, and what they can or cannot be compelled to host or say.

It's a huge stretch to apply the same rights to companies. Companies are not people and do not automatically get the same rights individuals do.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#877

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Smart journalists are going to stop relying on Twitter's API now. I somehow have a feeling that this is not the first time in history that an embedded Tweet in a news story has been removed, either by Twitter or the author.

Yes, but it is probably (one of) the first times it was done so blatantly in Twitter's own interest.

Perhaps, but unless this becomes a substantial portion of removals the hand-wringing about Twitter's APIs becoming "unreliable" seems overblown.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#878
post #815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a much simpler and less juicy angle here: someone posted a screenshot of an internal communication , and it got removed. It's not surprising or controversial that Twitter would try to contain a leak of its own internal comms (a screenshot of their slack). This isn't "Twitter took down a disparaging post about Twitter", it's that they tried to stop the sharing of internal data. That being said, I don't…

Is Twitter going to remove all screenshots/leaks of any company's internal comms? If not, this is not a good look.

Any company can request that Twitter take down screenshots of their own internal communications. Both before and after Elon, I imagine Twitter would comply if the request went through the legal channels (i.e. lawyers sending letters).

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#879
Hot take, this was bound to happen at one point or another. Everything I’ve read, and witnessed from using the platform always came back to this thought: “how are they even making money on it?”

Policies also placed were just not popular regardless from what you heard from the vocal minority.

I personally hope Twitter develops into a platform that has more fair policies, and makes some sort of profit.

It sucks to be laid off, but honestly it was a bubble waiting to burst. At least these people are getting some sort of severance.

The only thing I hope is that the COs don’t get their golden parachute. They haven’t done much for the platform, and only made it worse for a majority of the user base.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#880

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…

> The app is simple but doing simple things at scale is hard. I wonder if we'll see more downtime and issues now.

So, here's what I've never figured out...

Once your app is built, and you've figured out how to scale it, and everything is autoscaling nicely, and you've reached the critical mass Twitter has...why do you still need all the engineers? Why do you need to keep growing?

At some point, isn't the scaling solved? Once you have a platform that can handle 400M MAUs, what more is there to build?

Does it really take 1,000 engineers to maintain? I'd think automation could take care of most grunt work involved with maintenance.

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