Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#441

Post by dmix » Fri, Nov 04, 2022, 2:42 PM UTC

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 /…

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.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#442

Post by nucleogenesis » Fri, Nov 04, 2022, 2:42 PM UTC

lupire wrote: post #333

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…

What's sad to me is, OK, if being a real hard-driving exploitative ass really is what it takes to organize people to make amazing products (mostly Jobs, a little of Musk), why aren't there any good people who do that to make their employees do great things for the world, and then put the profits to good use? (better use than Musk's "buy a $1M car and crash it immediately" style .) I think a lot of people would be OK…

It doesn’t take being horrible and exploitative to build amazing things - it takes that kind of to make insane amounts of money building amazing things.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#443

Post by trashtester » Fri, Nov 04, 2022, 2:44 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #208

In all the brouhaha about the Twitter acquisition this piece of info had personally escaped me: > Musk’s deal to buy Twitter included making the company take on $13 billion in debt from banks, which means Twitter will owe about $1 billion a year in interest payments puts things in a slightly different perspective. I had somehow assumed that all the acquisition money had come in from Musk himself together with a bunch…

There is not much difference. This is just one way to structure that. Basically, this is like a mortgage, where if Twitter goes bust, the bank takes a loss. But if Twitter just falls in value compared to the purchase price, the bank gets their money back. For Musk (and potential other owners), this means he doesn't have to offer any other collateral than Twitter for that loan.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#444

Post by dont__panic » Fri, Nov 04, 2022, 2:44 PM UTC

maxbond wrote: post #274

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…

Erring on the side of things often changing less then we may anticipate, my guess is that Twitter becomes a sort of Tumblr for people of a certain persuasion, that being the people who like the ideas Musk is putting forward. It still exists, it puts out new features from time to time, there's a large group of people who simultaneously love and hate it and spend enormous time and energy there, but it's role as the pri…

In an ideal world, we'd see municipalities, schools, and community services like fire/police move to an open platform like Mastodon.

In reality... they'll probably move to TikTok because "that's what the kids use these days".

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#445

Post by EMM_386 » Fri, Nov 04, 2022, 2:45 PM UTC

PM_me_your_math wrote: post #414

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…

Twitter employees were treated nicely. Too nicely. And yet they were not productive. The only new features they introduced in 10 years were losses in excess of 200MM to 1bn+ and the banning/shadow banning of those who went against the group think, fun police, and thought-gestapo. Each staffer had 10 bosses and every department had a ton of waste. Musk could never show up again after some changes, and the company woul…

It is incredible to look at these companies and see the staggering amount of losses and costs they have, plus the headcount.

There could be entire departments dedicated to figuring out whether or not the "like" and "retweet" buttons should have rounded corners or not, that sort of thing.

At some point, reality has to hit and apparently, Musk is the one who's going to bring it.

Is it being done in a shocking way to those who haven't been through this with other companies? Maybe. But how else is this company going to actually ever become profitable?

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#446

Post by Technetium » Fri, Nov 04, 2022, 2:45 PM UTC

admissionsguy wrote: post #371

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…

Then stop being employees. Jesus Christ, you people take those massive salaried yet act like little children throwing tantrums because you fear your boss may not coddle you as much.

This belligerently screams "entitled". Maybe you should read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#447

Post by lopkeny12ko » Fri, Nov 04, 2022, 2:46 PM UTC

stokesr wrote: post #336

Notified of your being let go via a personal email? So no opportunity to back up your data, save contacts (which might come in handy for finding other employment), any notes or drafts... Brilliant idea, honestly ...

"Back up your data?" Why would you back up company data to your personal storage? That sounds like huge legal trouble

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#448

Post by bentt » Fri, Nov 04, 2022, 2:46 PM UTC

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…

In a few years, if not sooner, Twitter will be right there with Tesla/SpaceX in terms of resume cachet. Everyone will see their culture has been transformed to one of rigor and performance. The "A" players will surface and they will do more with half the staff (or less even) than they ever did with 7500 people... and it will be noteworthy. Musk will be in the mix heavy for about 6 months. He'll make executive hires that work for him and then will wander back over to SpaceX as they get closer to Starship getting off the ground.

People will be flipping out the whole time and a few Twitter competitors will rise, which will be great. Each Twitter alike will take on its own culture and the bubbles will now be network wide, much like they are with big press outlets like Fox and NYT. But Twitter will be the big daddy that all the journalists are on and if you want to broadcast something it will be the best place.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#449

Post by giarc » Fri, Nov 04, 2022, 2:46 PM UTC

crnkofe wrote: post #129

Looking at how Musk handles business and public comms makes me loose more and more respect for this guy with every passing second. It's all fun and games when you have a few hundred mills in the bank. Hopefully the people that left were prepared. Given his public behavior it was kind of expected. I'm not sure if people that stayed are now worse or better off.

The people that stayed at least have a job, but they likely have to pick up the slack for all those that left.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#450

Post by geomark » Fri, Nov 04, 2022, 2:46 PM UTC

teeray wrote: post #361

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 bet there’s two things that cause this: 1) those who quit in solidarity, because they don’t like where things are going 2) those who are saddled with the work of those who were laid off / quit and burn out, causing them to quit (which can snowball to others remaining).

Regarding your point number 2, I've been having this debate over on Twitter (ha) about how much those who remain are saddled with extra work. I've been through a few layoffs in my career, though none as large as this one, and what usually happened was those of us who remained ended up with less work. That is because the ones who were let go were almost always low performers whose work usually needed a lot of review and redesign by the more competent ones, which was more work than just doing the whole thing over from the beginning. In some cases when it did cause a large burden to the remaining employees the project left behind by the laid off ones was left to die. And that often was the right answer since the low performers had so often been shuttled to projects that weren't very valuable to begin with. With no visibility into the Twitter case I don't know if there is much of the same effect that I experienced, although I am reading a lot of opinions on HN and elsewhere that some of the groups that have been decimated should have been killed off long ago.