151–160 of 333 posts
You know it's satire from the title (and the first paragraph) because it uses terms like "fired" and "let go". Nobody uses those anymore. You're "impacted".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies reduce initiatives and headcount at the same time. It's usually approached as a budget reduction exercise: Company is reducing budgets by X%. Select which projects get cancelled. Now work with managers to identify enough employees to lay off to reduce headcount spend by X%. Now reorganize remaining employees across remaining projects, with the understanding that a few extra people will leave due to future l…
Twitter shed 80% and still works, is still the go to outside of fringe empty echo chambers of the left and right divide. Not only that but they added a significant amount of features like Grok, which I know nothing about really, and Substack like payments. 80% is a lot and it works just fine. 7,500 to 1,300 in Jan 2023. Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...
They have a ton of outages, the app is constantly buggy, the ad network is ridiculous, the moderation is nonexistent. I faced a bug that new tweets wouldn't load _for weeks_. If it was any other company, we would be saying they are done, but since it is Elon at the helm, some people pretend that Twitter still works.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies reduce initiatives and headcount at the same time. It's usually approached as a budget reduction exercise: Company is reducing budgets by X%. Select which projects get cancelled. Now work with managers to identify enough employees to lay off to reduce headcount spend by X%. Now reorganize remaining employees across remaining projects, with the understanding that a few extra people will leave due to future l…
Twitter shed 80% and still works, is still the go to outside of fringe empty echo chambers of the left and right divide. Not only that but they added a significant amount of features like Grok, which I know nothing about really, and Substack like payments. 80% is a lot and it works just fine. 7,500 to 1,300 in Jan 2023. Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...
The parent reply has an important point: a good % of headcount reductions tend to affect r&d and the type of projects where cutting investment doesn’t have a negative short or even medium term effect on the company. Sometimes it can even be positive for operations (e.g. infra teams have to support less product teams). This is mostly why it’s very uncommon to see headcount reductions lead to instability, etc.
Long term effects (e.g. stagnation, no innovation..) may manifest, but are harder to see clearly in advance, and when they do happen the connection to those layoffs from N years ago is not obvious/even remembered
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter shed 80% and still works, is still the go to outside of fringe empty echo chambers of the left and right divide. Not only that but they added a significant amount of features like Grok, which I know nothing about really, and Substack like payments. 80% is a lot and it works just fine. 7,500 to 1,300 in Jan 2023. Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...
They effectively disabled the developer API via absurd pricing. That alone would cancel a ton of projects/teams due to the load that likely placed on their servers. The user experience is also not even close to the same, while they've not really added any new features that likely weren't already in the pipeline. Not even to mention their tanking revenue and valuation. It's not even close to a "working the same as bef…
If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? One thing that is baffling to me is that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch. The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here.
> If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? How can you be so callous? This is why people don't like startup people. Yes, obviously it's a bad thing, because those people are now without a source of income and often without health insurance. I say " obviously " because it's pretty reasonable to expect people aren't sociopaths, and c…
If 100 fewer employees is bad; is 100 more good?
I can't decide if I'd prefer to hear a bunch of nonsense from an executive at the moment of being let go, or no explanation and just an email saying I'm part of a layoff.
There's a third option - no warning at all, your laptop is remotely disabled, and you have to figure it out yourself.
If the company fires hundreds or thousands of people and there is no visible dip in the productivity, is it really a bad thing? One thing that is baffling to me is that these companies can fire 10% of their workforce and they just keep on chugging without a hitch. The bullshit job phenomenon is the problem here.
Sure, some bullshit is going to slip in, but it’s still a bunch of human beings trying to make a living on this dumb rock. Software itself is all bullshit in the grand scheme of things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is anyone so quick to take the company side? For starters, productivity is a broad term, so without defining what it means in context it isn’t doing anyone any favors. You won’t feel the dip or record it until after the event happens, and often not right away. When productivity drops a year from now for example, that could be due to layoffs. It’s not always immediate in its impact. I also question this from the o…
> They are the ones that ultimately messed up as they had poor strategic vision Everything is a gamble, the right decision can still lead to a bad result due to randomness. So just because a gamble didn't pan out doesn't mean that it was the wrong thing to do. For example, not hiring extra is also a gamble, it means you gamble on the market not growing and you would lose a ton of money if the market didn't stall.
This assumes hiring is the only way to grow the company. More specifically, it assumes ramped up hiring is the only way.
There are balances that can be struck, for example, instead of hiring 100 people, maybe hire 20 and see how onboarding and growth pans out? Perhaps evaluate business inefficiencies that serve to slow people down like bad process etc. so people can focus more time on what matters.
Automated onboarding, group sales calls and other tactics let you make more with the same amount of people.
There are other things you can do, not just hire. And I'm never going to say don't hire people, but what executives did was irresponsible and I knew it even at the time.
IMO, this stuff happens because executives know they won't be held responsible if it can't be sustained, and that is really the core issue.
Proportions are what matters. I like many am tired of seeing a world that favors oscillation in the extremes like this, and its the average person who takes the brunt when it goes south and the higher ups rake in the brunt of it when things are going well.
For what its worth, if we had European style safety nets, this would be a moot point in a way, because we have so much of American society tied to having a job (be it health insurance, ability to afford rent etc)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter shed 80% and still works, is still the go to outside of fringe empty echo chambers of the left and right divide. Not only that but they added a significant amount of features like Grok, which I know nothing about really, and Substack like payments. 80% is a lot and it works just fine. 7,500 to 1,300 in Jan 2023. Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...
They effectively disabled the developer API via absurd pricing. That alone would cancel a ton of projects/teams due to the load that likely placed on their servers. The user experience is also not even close to the same, while they've not really added any new features that likely weren't already in the pipeline. Not even to mention their tanking revenue and valuation. It's not even close to a "working the same as bef…
You know it's satire from the title (and the first paragraph) because it uses terms like "fired" and "let go". Nobody uses those anymore. You're "impacted".
"Unfortunately, you have been impacted by my resignation"