11–20 of 54 posts
So the real reason is the cargo cult Musk started at Twitter. Everyone now wants to proof that they also can keep the lights on with minimal staff.
Zuckerberg said that companies are no longer shrinking their employee size simply because of overhiring — they're now realizing there can be benefits to being leaner. While a lot of tech companies were reluctant to make cuts at first, they realized it didn't spell the end, Zuckerberg said. Translation: They all saw Twitter cut 80% of its staff and yet is still online.
When public markets rewarded growth, you could let costs balloon and hire teams without worrying about profitability. Now, public markets reward profitability so you need to cut costs. Isn’t it that simple and this is just Zuck’s corporate spin on it?
Zuckerberg said that companies are no longer shrinking their employee size simply because of overhiring — they're now realizing there can be benefits to being leaner. While a lot of tech companies were reluctant to make cuts at first, they realized it didn't spell the end, Zuckerberg said. Translation: They all saw Twitter cut 80% of its staff and yet is still online.
Maybe its a bit more complicated than that? If software is built around the business and if the business is no longer changing much maybe they simply don't need as many people around? After all, software can run hands off if you don't mess with it much.
IMHO it should be possible for musk to run Twitter singlehandedly all by himself if He has no intention to change anything. It should run fine until it needs something fixed due to a bug, a legal requirement or a partner change(some provider of some service changing something about their service).
Its kind of obvious that we are no longer in the age of Internet exploration, things are quite stagnant for some time and you don't need much explorers and sailors to do the same things. Know How is there, tools are mature. The average techie jobs have been automated to great extend, be it through tools they created or AI that can take care of busywork or understand legacy codebase without the need of retaining the people who built it.
The interesting things are happening in the AI, robotics and other areas but your average "tech" worker is not equipped to do these things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Translation: They all saw Twitter cut 80% of its staff and yet is still online. Is it though? Any time there's a Twitter link, clicking on it has at least a 1/3 chance of seeing "Something went wrong. Try again?".
I mean, that was 100% before Elon took over though, not 1/3.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20471601
If this happened now you would see dozens of articles saying that twitter is melting down. But now, it turns out Twitter ran perfectly before! I can't help but scoff.
Zuckerberg said that companies are no longer shrinking their employee size simply because of overhiring — they're now realizing there can be benefits to being leaner. While a lot of tech companies were reluctant to make cuts at first, they realized it didn't spell the end, Zuckerberg said. Translation: They all saw Twitter cut 80% of its staff and yet is still online.
>They all saw Twitter cut 80% of its staff and yet is still online. Maybe its a bit more complicated than that? If software is built around the business and if the business is no longer changing much maybe they simply don't need as many people around? After all, software can run hands off if you don't mess with it much. IMHO it should be possible for musk to run Twitter singlehandedly all by himself if He has no inte…
Not sure if this was a Freudian slip, but love the capital "He" here as if Musk is on the same level as God.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>They all saw Twitter cut 80% of its staff and yet is still online. Maybe its a bit more complicated than that? If software is built around the business and if the business is no longer changing much maybe they simply don't need as many people around? After all, software can run hands off if you don't mess with it much. IMHO it should be possible for musk to run Twitter singlehandedly all by himself if He has no inte…
>IMHO it should be possible for musk to run Twitter singlehandedly all by himself if He has no intention to change anything. Not sure if this was a Freudian slip, but love the capital "He" here as if Musk is on the same level as God.
Zuckerberg said that companies are no longer shrinking their employee size simply because of overhiring — they're now realizing there can be benefits to being leaner. While a lot of tech companies were reluctant to make cuts at first, they realized it didn't spell the end, Zuckerberg said. Translation: They all saw Twitter cut 80% of its staff and yet is still online.
> Translation: They all saw Twitter cut 80% of its staff and yet is still online. Is it though? Any time there's a Twitter link, clicking on it has at least a 1/3 chance of seeing "Something went wrong. Try again?".
But still, let's assume the reports are true and there was nontrivial reduction in reliability... It was a very extreme engineering cut for a service which is still "generally working". I believe that tech executives are simply assuming that Twitter's decline has a lot more to do with Elon Musk's controversial persona than the service's reliability. While an 80% cut might be too much, they think, a 20% cut would work just fine.
There's a certain organization size at which coordination costs dwarf everything else.
Suppose the following toy model:
New Engineer is the Nth employee.
They add Value of 2, and coordination costs of N^.06.
There will come a point (around 100k employees) where each additional employee reduces productivity.
Better to have 10 organizations of 10k people, than one of 100k, imo.