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Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

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Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#921

Post by [deleted] »

tshaddox wrote: post #780
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…

> It's not surprising or controversial that Twitter would try to contain a leak of its own internal comms (a screenshot of their slack). It's not surprising or controversial, but it's in direct opposition to the idea that Twitter should allow all legal speech.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#922

Post by dclowd9901 »

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…

Doesn’t Craigslist have like 12 employees?

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#923

Post by dclowd9901 »

chasd00 wrote: post #364
edderly wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it'll be fine. You don't need 7000 people to run a micro blogging service. It's really that simple.

i think 7000 is too high as well but don't forget, in a business, the technology part is maybe 10% of the overall effort. There's a lot that goes into running a business beyond the tech.

Yes, where would businesses be without a fleet of energy sucking middle managers.

I don’t like EM at all, but truth is internet companies are making so much goddamn money, they have employee pools absolutely full of turds.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#924

Post by marvin »

twawaaay wrote: post #905

> Musk’s team has already tried to evaluate the productivity of Twitter employees by asking engineers to print out the code that they have written in the last 30 to 60 days. Musk also brought in Tesla engineers to look over Twitter code. At one company I worked we had a bug in the software for the device we were manufacturing. There were millions of units at peoples' homes and the bug caused couple hundred of these u…

If I had planned and written those two characters, I would have appended a comment like yours and any sensible engineer would have praised the solution.

It’s fairly obvious their metric isn’t «number of lines of code».

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#925

Post by nr2x »

compiler-guy wrote: post #750
john-radio wrote: post #402

A lot of the tweets that are quoted in the article have been removed. For example, Twitter employee Cristina Angeli is mentioned in the story for having tweeted an image of "staff members... flooding an internal Slack channel with blue heart emojis as they wait to learn their fate tomorrow", but that tweet is deleted on twitter itself because "This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules." This is ironic if you consider all…

Many of the child posts assume that Twitter deleted these tweets. That isn't clear to me. It's possible the original authors did (happy to see proof either way). When one is laid off, there are often clauses in the severance agreement that forbid disparaging the company or leaking secrets, or similar things. If I wanted that severance check and someone pointed out to me that the tweet may be in violation of the sever…

100%.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#926

Post by nequo »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #753
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 /…

This is an ignorant question: to what extent is it relevant that a hardware company like Apple effectively employs/contracts services of e.g. Foxconn to the tune of probably a million employees? It feel a little bit misleading to take a look at company in isolation, as different companies have different dependencies and depths of integration.

Great point. Revenue reflects the value added of the entire supply chain, not just Apple's. EBITDA/employee instead of revenue/employee would be a more appropriate measure. GP's numbers revised:

  Twitter EBITDA per employee: $211mn / 8k employees = $26k per employee
  
  Google (Alphabet) EBITDA per employee: $93.7bn / 135k employees = $694k per employee
  
  Apple EBITDA per employee: $130.5bn / 154k employees = $847k per employee
  
  Twitter EBITDA per employee if 3k instead of 8k: $211mn / 3k employees = $70k per employee

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#927

Post by faizshah »

ramg wrote: post #895
faizshah wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read this kind of comment all the time on HN, it’s so confusing to me. I only joined twitter 2 years ago because there are a large number of high quality tweet threads on finance, ML, NLP, breaking news etc. A lot of the time I get information earlier on twitter than I do on any other platform. If anything, for me, twitter has strengthened the quality of public discourse. If some big event happens I can read an exp…

If you don't mind me asking, which accounts are you following for your financial news? Thanks!

Too many, you can start with:

- https://twitter.com/saxomarketcall and their podcast

- https://twitter.com/macroalf

- https://twitter.com/unusual_whales

Then you’ll see their retweets and likes in your feed and thats how you can build a good list.

I would stay away from anyone whose primary focus is crypto, biotech or tech stocks unless you are a critical reader.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#928

Post by CrazyStat »

neel8986 wrote: post #886
CrazyStat wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink's total bandwidth is about the same as a small regional ISP. There is no way it will ever "control the world's internet". Starlink will serve many places where terrestrial wired or wireless access doesn't make sense, including oceans, very rural areas, uninhabited areas, airplanes, rockets, etc. It will never be able to serve 1% of a high density city. It will never control anything on the scale of the world…

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/11/04/poli... Example of how musk can blackmail governments at critical juncture. Never ever should any govt depend on this egomaniac POS for such critical infra

"Blackmail" is a strange word for "we decided to stop paying the monthly service fee and service ended as expected."

> Before the terminals went completely dark, Ukraine's Ministry of Defense made a request in early October to their British counterparts to pick up the $3.25 million monthly bill. The batch of terminals were also rotated out as concerns grew that service could be turned off, in order to minimize the impact, the source said.

> A British official said after discussions between the ministries "it was agreed there were higher priority military capabilities." Among many other channels of support, the UK has been flying thousands of Ukrainian troops to Britain for training before they head back to the frontlines.

It's possible for a perfectly reasonable person to justifiably strongly dislike Elon Musk, but what you're doing here is not that.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#929

Post by gscott »

epakai wrote: post #901
tshaddox wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if revenue and employee count were completely independent. Heck, you could fire everyone except one person and have an incredibly high ratio! (Don’t fire that last person or else you’ll get a divide by zero error.) Interestingly, he’s already tweeting out complaints about a massive drop in revenue. His theory is that this is caused not by his erratic behavior, but instead by activists who hate free s…

Musk's prime motivator for purchasing twitter seems to have been ideological. Of course people are going to oppose him on ideological grounds. More succinctly, Musk performed an activist takeover.

Twitter could have let him out of the deal but forced it. This is all on the (now former) board of directors who probably received a nice payout for a new mansion.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#930

Post by mc32 »

tshaddox wrote: post #780
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…

> It's not surprising or controversial that Twitter would try to contain a leak of its own internal comms (a screenshot of their slack). It's not surprising or controversial, but it's in direct opposition to the idea that Twitter should allow all legal speech.

Also possible the user(s) deleted some themselves in order to not violate terms and thus retain their severance ---which typically hinge on such things.
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