“Reportedly, Elon stack-ranked Twitter engineers by LoC and fired the bottom X%”

... which likely means he's gotten rid everyone who worked on particularly challenging things, like security, privacy, performance, & reliability.

- @mcmillen

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...:

“He […] had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code.

He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000“

I'm reminded of IBM vs Microsoft when they were writing OS/2, and supposedly the fact that MS engs were reducing the LoC was aggravating to the IBM engs.

This reminds me of the hundreds of similar, highly paid positions at Netflix.

Netflix allows 4 (four!) subtitle languages to be selected from by users, essentially saying "fuck you" to anyone who would like subtitles in the other 50-70 languages that are available. It's the opposite of "accessibility".

Someone at Netflix came up with this system. A designer designed the UI for it. A programmer coded this up. Someone budgeted for it, tracked it, and approved it for go-live.

Wait, it goes on: Someone had to write the tech support page for this, train support staff to lie to customers and say that this is for "copyright reasons" (it isn't), and so on. Literally hundreds of people had to be involved to actively reduce accessibility.

Managers like Elon look at organisations like this and see nothing but fat that can be cut to make the organisation leaner and more capable.