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Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

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Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#761

Post by philjohn »

spyremeown wrote: post #544

I have a question: why companies like Twitter need so many people? I'm sorry but it doesn't seem that hard to replicated Twitter functionality and scalability (with the right people on team). What are the engineers actually doing the whole day? Why do they need so many lines of code? All mysterious to me.

It's a fair question, and shows that a lot of these sites are like icebergs - they look simple until you delve beneath the surface.

How are you detecting human trafficing and reporting it (FOSTA-SESTA)?

How are you detecting CSAM and reporting offenders to NCMEC?

How are you detecting and removing spam? How are you preventing fraudulent ad clicks? How do you deal with "whale" accounts (very large follower counts) and returning an algorithmic feed for their followers?

I interviewed for their deveng team and they were doing things like build-caches because it sped up compiles and increased productivity. Also optimising the Scala compiler (more productivity gains).

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#762

Post by andrei_says_ »

devwastaken wrote: post #384
rdtwo wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that’s true. Twitter is/was the only remaining news medium where experts had a voice. During the pandemic doctors and infectious diseases experts were using it to call or government blow hards. Now that’s going to die as well and we may return to complete darkness.

I saw the opposite. "Experts" being totally wrong and fear mongering without evidence. It was rural governments that said "prove it". Recall how various studies on covid lethality, vaccination and masks were wildly different. The Israel study is a quick one. This is exactly what happened when influenza was new in the 1920's. Yet the "experts" made it sound like everyone is going to die if you are not wearing a mask 2…

Maybe we have different definitions for “expert”?

I’ve been following epidemiology experts and no one implied “everyone dying”, nor recommended “24/7” mask wearing (rather cited lowered transmission rates) and yes isolation lowered transmission rates too.

The flak they had to take for inconveniencing the lifestyle of people in the interest of prioritizing health outcomes for all, is insane.

If anything, we learned that the thought of care for others at a small cost to the self is extremely triggering for many Americans and is easily politicized as a wedge issue to influence voting.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#764

Post by joenathanone »

plgonzalezrx8 wrote: post #563
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 /…

[redacted]: Hey Elon -my name is Jake Sherman. I loled at this. Why redact the name if its in the content. SMH

Because his name is really Sake Jherman.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#765

Post by philjohn »

pphysch wrote: post #737
xivzgrev wrote: post #715

Elon Musk is great at building new things. Time will tell if he can re-invent an existing thing. So far, it's not looking great. Corporate raiders / PE usually have a well defined thesis and plan to hit the ground running - Elon clearly does not. His plan seems to be "I need to double free cash flow ASAP, we'll figure out how along the way". Trying to figure out how to lay off half of the company, without negatively…

> Corporate raiders / PE usually have a well defined thesis and plan to hit the ground running - Elon clearly does not. He clearly does, but most people don't care to engage with it in good faith. Something like: - Twitter's value is its integrated GLOBAL network of professionals/leaders/celebrities - Twitter Co has not remotely leveraged this, going for a FB/Reddit/etc content-centric advertiser model instead - Spri…

It doesn't sound like the subscriber model will be KYC (no verification of identity).

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#766

Post by r00fus »

dmix wrote: post #484
Tainnor wrote: post #429

I don't care a lot about Twitter itself, and I'm willing to entertain the notion that it could function equally "well" with a much smaller fraction of the workforce... But this is something that should be implemented gradually. Here is someone who just stepped into the company, and he's laying off people en masse. Even if you concede that Musk is some sort of genius (which I don't, but that's besides the point), that…

It's almost like blaming the new president for having to raise taxes after the last president spent too much $$ and raised the deficit during the good times. When Twitter massively expanded their headcount over the last 3 years their stock price was nearly 30%+ higher than it was before the stock market tanked. People here aren't paying the bills or looking at the financial sheets. We're taking a human look at it (wh…

All of what you said does not absolve the fact that Musk is acting whimsically and clearly showing errors of judgement in his words an actions since taking ownership.

Memes aside (I kinda LOL at his sink joke), he is breaking laws and terminating entire departments without any handover or planning.

The entire verified fiasco is a good indicator - the new process won't actually require verification of identity - is essentially a shakedown of existing verified users.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#767

Post by wilsonnb3 »

robswc wrote: post #647
notacoward wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think it will be four years? Considering his attention span, and the rapidity with which Twitter is already deteriorating, I suspect it will be much less than that.

I know this is cliche to say... but I have been reading this comment for the past 10 years. Maybe one year it will be true but it has a terrible track record. I was assured Tesla would be "dead" by 2018 and in the 2000s you would get comments about how re-usable rockets were just impossible. For the record, I think twitter is a different beast but at the end of the day, I think life will go on.

On the other hand, Hyperloop and the Boring Company went about as well as everyone said they would...which was not very well.

You win some, you lose some, I guess.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#769

Post by ink_13 »

Alex3917 wrote: post #297
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 feel bad for the folks losing their job because that always sucks I'm not trying to minimize the fact that this sucks for those affected, but let's not also forget that prior to the acquisition, the employees were given multiple opportunities to unionize and/or turn Twitter into an employee-owned company. This is the direction they collectively chose to go in instead.

Were they, though? Or would Twitter have employed the standard Big Tech response, which is to immediately terminate anyone who does the barest amount of serious organizing?

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#770

Post by viscanti »

isx726552 wrote: post #752
yummies wrote: post #639

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…

> someone posted a screenshot of an internal communication, and it got removed Yeah, except Musk himself already did that: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586885887341645824 I mean it’s his company he can do as he likes, but that was one of the first things he did after the buyout.

So did Elon look up every private message in company chat that had the word Elon in it? Then he's sharing some of the juicy ones on twitter?
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