I see a lot of people assuming that twitter doesn't need that many employees. Usually stated with a high degree of certainty. Certainly I can't come up with a reason why they should have that many employees.
However, lack of counterarguments is the weakest form of evidence, and such situations have the annoying property that public opinion is easily swayed and frequently in the wrong direction.
So does anyone positively know that twitter's employees were not doing much useful, or is everyone (including, possibly, Elon Musk) just following their gut feeling?
Not much. He spent all of his time running Square, and there are only so many hours in the day, which is why Twitter was languishing on the vine until this bit of excitement happened.
I've not seen anything about what they working, or even a break down by department, job role etc.
The only thing was something like "10 managers for every developer", and who knows if that's true.
I'd love to see some stats, but doubt we ever will.
I'd also love to get some responses from the remaining high performing tech talent about their opinion of it all.
There was that guy who recently blew a whistle on the spread/blind-eye of bots and he seemed annoyed with the corporate culture.
On the other hand, every thread here and on social media is probably filled with upset people who have been laid off, hoping to swing public perception against New Twitter.
Honestly the part that seems madness to me is not the downsizing but how quickly.
If a company doubled in size overnight that would be a huge red flag. Same thing for shrinking. Sudden scale changes are really really hard to pull off.
In any tech company out there only a small number of employees are tasked with keeping the lights on. The majority are working on new feature development. So "you can run [company] with fewer employees" is trivially true.
Of course the flip side of that is – without these employees you will also not be able to deliver on all these new features. In Twitter's case Elon has decided that whatever new features the previous leadership were cooking are irrelevant now.
I'm sure you can run a version of twitter or Facebook with just a couple of hundred people but it will be a struggle.
Both companies have to work with 100s of governments, government agencies, advertisers and large organisations across the globe. Hard to do with just a handful of people.
You could automate all moderation and spam filtering and maintain that system with a team of a dozen people. It would work to an extent but with lots of problems.
20 programmers rolling out features? Sure but don't expect too much.
Having worked at (and presumably left) a company when it was a tiny fraction of its current size is probably a stronger signal that you don't know what it takes (in terms of headcount) to run a large company than a signal that you do.
Did Twitter require just that many people? Maybe, maybe not. But a 50% haircut with no meaningful basis in role/performance is an indicator that the layoffs were anything but appropriate.
For a point of comparison, Discord scaled to 100 million MAU with just 5 platform engineers. That's about 1/3 of Twitter's user count and Discord was also doing both voice and video chat.
At this point, Discord is probably larger than Twitter even on the MAU metric and is handling far more concurrent users and absurdly more events. They've had to scale their staff in the past two years, but it's still considerably smaller than Twitter will be even even after the layoffs.
They also have a much higher-quality product and have done a much better job adding features that users actually want, and shipping them at a faster rate
Discord is an intranet-as-a-service non-public facing system. They are on casual mode.
Twitter has been the public space, the conflux where everything happens all together & becomes known.
Its laughable to me that anyone would try to compare the two. From a technical perspective, scaling discord is intensely stupidly easier, since few subdiscords have to scale to tens of thousands of active users. From a social perspective, scaling discord is eighty bajillion gazillion times easier, since each subdiscord has its own authoritarian dictatorial owners who have complete & total say over their regime. And twitter is just everyone, all together, one huge vast chat room, and theres a huge obligation to only boot jackasses if they really cross some hard set lines.
Twitter is 100x the engineering difficulty with far far far far far more fan out, far more engagement, and it's a million times more difficult socially to handle. This belittling shade you throw is grossly out of order & ignorant.
Sorry, do you honestly think that Tweets are more complicated than real time video and voice?
At a certain point the difficulty of the problem you are solving far outweighs the difference in scale. And Discord's scale is nothing to sniff at, either.
> Sorry, do you honestly think that Tweets are more complicated than real time video and voice
do you not? have you heard of metcalfe's law? the value of a network is proportional to the square of the nimber of users. so too is the difficulty in supporting & running the vastly more interconnected network.
video is easy as shit. yeah you need bandwidth/transit. but people join & leave infrequently. they are low impact consumers: them joining does not change the total load significantly, it's only a little more linear growth. whatever to that, irrelevant.
twitter is a vastly wider & more connected not-so-micro- cosm. if there are 50m followers, and they tweet, the burden of rippling that event out is huge. tracking & making visible every fav, retweet & reply further escallates the difficulty by more deep deep orders of magnitude.
it's laughable to me that you would try to say discord has a higher event rate than twitter. first, i think thats horseshit, totslly absurdly flat wrong in extreme if you count favs, retweets, et-cetera. but more so, event rate is pointless. it's event receievers that actually count, that matter. and the little intranet micro-world discords are, by any measure, totally pointless & irrelevant by compare versus the all-connected fabric that is twitter. discord has no scale, is itrelevant entirely, in how far it has to spread any given message/event. discord is a large number of the tiniest little fishbowls; it compares not at all to the sea.
I'm really curious what you think is so hard about Twitter.
As far as I can tell it is basically a CRUD app with some real time analytics to surface some trends.
You said some stuff about Events bubbling, like if I Retweet something you seem to think there's a lot of complexity there. But as far as I can figure all that does is create a new row in a database somewhere and when someone who follows me fetches their feed, my new retweet gets included in there.
Aside from the scale, what's hard about it? Am I completely missing something?
Is this even the hard part anymore? In 2006 maybe, but nowadays it seems like scaling is pretty solved. I always feel like scaling is more just expensive than hard.
I mean, you can make things easy for you and just choose GCP and use Spanner instead of trying to build your own from scratch, but that doesn't make the problem itself easy.
That's right. Unlike Slack, they don't delete or archive older messages, even on free accounts. This is a major reason more and more open source projects have been migrating from Slack to Discord.
It's definitely not a perfect comparison and technical debt is a very compelling factor. It's a point of comparison, though, with some things more difficult for Twitter but also several things Discord has to deal with that Twitter doesn't.
I don't know how many people it would actually take to run Twitter, but I suspect the number is far lower than most would expect. In particular, the product team has always seemed enormous to me compared to those at other social media companies when comparing customer numbers and velocity of new features.
That is the same analogy as Wordpress being scalable because it runs a third of the web or Ruby Rails because it is being used in Shopify.
I am not a Discord expert, but AFAIK, all three are similar in that they run their own instances. A Wordpress with App and DB per site, and I assume mostly similar to a Shopify Store, and every Discord Server where each and every instances of them aren't interconnected.
Twitter is one giant space with the Top 50 account each having a reach of over 40M users.
And for another point of comparison. Twitter has ~250M Global DAU over dozen of time zones. Weibo in China has similar DAU in a single time zone.
No, it isn't the same as Wordpress. For Wordpress, a ton of instances are self-hosted. For Discord, there are exactly zero self-hosted instances. Every single discord channel, message, and user interaction goes through Discord servers. It is a single giant space.
If I block someone on one server, they are blocked on all servers for me. If some server I am in has custom emojis and stickers, and I am a discord nitro subscriber, I can reuse those emojis and stickers by posting them on other servers. Other users on that other server can see them, but cannot use them. If i change anything on my profile, it will be reflected on all servers.
There are probably tons of other cross-server relationships that I forgot to mention, simply because I only listed the first few that came to my head.
The ownership is besides the point here. The point is the Wordpress installs don't talk to each other, neither do Discord servers, behind the scenes. Discord's servers aren't one giant big powerful computer, it's a lot of smaller ones. Behind the scenes, each Discord "server" exists separate from all the rest of them. After the load balancer, the StableDiffusion Discord messages don't intermix with the Midjourney Discord messages, so their internal architecture can be that each "Discord server" is self-contained to it's own group of servers that don't talk to other servers. (Discord's decision to call them servers here is really unfortunate and confusing.)
This means that for scalability reasons, it's easy to create a new "Discord server" as it only has to be connected to the other people on that server, and not the whole rest of the Discordverse.
Twitter has no such luxury. So when that one cat video goes hella viral, the system as a whole needs to handle that access pattern, which is actually difficult to scale. We'll have to wait and see how the site handles the world cup in a few weeks, as that is an event that stresses the service.
Discord’s architecture is easily shard-able by channel, though. There’s no shared “multi-channel” experience like workspaces in Slack. Sure, users can message each other directly which could cause some complexities but the volume of DMs is likely a fraction of the channel message volume.
Twitter is a mess when you try to think on how to break apart the architecture across various users, regions, celebrity accounts, trending topics, etc. Back in the day they used to allocate servers just for specific celebrities just to give an idea on how they were trying to scale.
Sometime, departmental heads will try their best to save themselves. In order to meet the downsizing target they will find as many people to get rid of in order to save themselves. It is common to see this happen in many companies. Just that, most will hide it as rehiring for replacements (which usually at a lower budget but with bigger tasks to assume than previous leaving staff). In tweeter case, decisions might be sub-optimal when Elon took over. Anyway, recession is around the corner, so tweeter can easily find the best when market is in a slump in coming 3 mths.
Seems more likely they are just trying to get some people back in to train whoever will be taking over their duties. Which is why cutting so many employees should be done carefully and with at least a little bit of planning. You are throwing so much institutional knowledge in the garbage by just cutting off half your workforce overnight.
To me this comment is a bit naive, as the main point of hiring people in silicon valley for a public tech company is to keep people from working on something worthwhile so that competition doesn't exist. That's why so many people "work" at TWTR and other large tech companies companies. Obviously all of these companies are extremely overstaffed, as anyone who has worked at one can easily attest to.
you need a ton of people to run an ad platform modern advertisers will actually use. and a ton of ad sales people to convince them to use it. twitter the product is pretty simple. twitter the business is not
1. Could twitter have been built in such a way that it was a stable company with half as many people?
2. Could you chop X% of twitter off and have the remainder of the company want to and be able to restructure and self-repair into a stable company.
I think the answer to #1 is yes, but #2 is a complete mystery to me.
It's the difference between "Could a raspberry pi run linux?" and "Can I remove half material in my mac by weight of my mac and still have it run linux?"
at its core twitter is ad delivery + a timeline of followers/curated recommendations
you can make a twitter clone front + back in a night from scratch
they already have the hard “scale” to handle lots of traffic in a stable/fast manner done
how many employees and managers do you need to maintain this + add new features? 7,000 seems pretty high. 3,000 sounds kind of high too but i don’t know the split between departments like legal, HR, etc.
VC-funded companies don’t hire the number of employees they need, they hire the amount they can afford. For hyper growth companies, whatever brilliant spark created their trajectory will eventually be usurped by empire builders who worm their way into anything with the smell of success. The headcount needed is then always inflated due to middle management ambitions, and systems are set up to utilize (and implicitly justify) the available resources.
Am I the only one who thinks the Twitter UI is awful? To be fair, all I’ve ever seen is the desktop/browser UI, don’t know what the mobile app looks like. For that matter, I think both Facebook and LinkedIn’s UI’s are pretty bad.
I’ve been communicating online since USENET days. I find it interesting to see just how many times the same thing has been reinvented and how bad it can be.
The issue is not the layoffs, the issue is how they are managed. No other company is taking as much heat as twitter for layoffs because no one is managing it as badly. Elon Musk is heading the same path as Mark Zuckerberg - his brand has ended.
If some other ownership group came in and chopped 50% the exact same way…there would be less controversy. It might still make the news because it’s Twitter, much as other well known tech companies make the news with their layoffs…but the drama is because it’s Musk.
It's Musk, but also, because it's Musk, there is just a lot more coverage of the details of what is going on.
The biggest issue I see is that the employees are just in the dark. They literally have to follow Musk's public Twitter feed to glean anything about what is going on.
It creates a lot of chaos to fire your executive team then immediately start layoffs. Normally, something like this should be organized and clearly communicated and done with care and empathy. This whole process comes across as rough shod and unplanned.
>The biggest issue I see is that the employees are just in the dark.
Employees are almost always in the dark prior to getting “the pink slip”. In my 35+ year career have been through multiple layoffs through multiple companies/buyouts both on the surviving and RIF implementation side as well as the side getting cut. Never, ever was there full transparency and this was intentional. Most often the RIF itself is hidden from the general employee populace until the moment it starts happening. Then it starts happening and everyone sits around during the chaos and wonders if they are next while blood and tears run down the halls of the offices. Layoffs are ugly and there is no way to make them less ugly unless gobs of cash are provided to soften the blow. Even then, speaking from experience, it still sucks…just sucks a little less.
Everyone who got RIF’ed from the executives downward should not have been surprised. His intentions has been broadcast publicly from Musk himself for six months. I think this has actually been more transparent than most and perhaps because it’s more public than most, the external scrutiny makes it seem worse than others. It’s not, because as I said before, it’s always ugly.
I'm not talking about transparency in who is going to be fired. Apparently, employees have no idea who is in charge. Musk is the "chief twit" and no one has replaced the executives who were fired. Musk seems to be barking out ideas for new features with little thought and no one really knows what is going on.
These people all don’t appreciate that social media is a regulated business now.
It’s a Silicon Valley thing to treat that as an optional cost center but Elon is fucking around and will find out in Europe and Asia in relatively short order
The tweet's author is a product designer who worked at FB for 4 years from 2008-2012, i.e. they left before FB hit massive scale, and more importantly has little to no understanding of the engineering / ops / content moderation required to run FB in the year 2022. They have since not worked at any company aside from as an investor (see https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobby-goodlatte/). I'm not making any claim on whether FB has too many employees, but this person is clueless.
A company I helped found and run went through many up and down cycles where we expanded and shrank head count several times over a period of a few years.
My takeaway was this: there is a strong tendency to want to convince yourself you don't have to let go of as many people as you do. But then you just end up doing it in waves and in fact it's much more painful.
The way Musk did this is inexcusable and reprehensible, but I have no doubt that Twitter was incredibly bloated. In fact, one could make the argument that it didn't really matter who got fired, it could be a random decision. Not very empathetic but from the business perspective I think that's probably the case, and Elon Musk may be a nutcase but one thing he knows something about is how tech companies work.
That you can run Twitter with a much smaller crew is probably true, but also kind of irrelevant. Question is, can you make it so overnight.
You write stuff totally differently depending on whether it's going to be maintained by just you, or a team of 50 DevOps etc. Yes you could probably run stuff on N servers instead of M where N << M, thus requiring much fewer sysadmin support etc but that requires that you designed things that way from the get go.
But how much work is it to realign stuff to run this way? Probably initially more work than just keeping it going as is.
It's like, you can't take a ICE car and turn it electric by just cutting out the engine and sticking a battery where the fuel tank was.
When is startup mode you can get away with anything. Trying to stabilize the business to sustain it requires spending money on non-engineering parts of the business. Spending on those areas are what often dooms the company to bloat. A lot of these companies also try to spin up projects to spend capital on the "next best thing". But they don't realize that the only reason they exist is purely down to luck and not any type of smarts from the founders. But the founders generally don't realize they had dumb luck.
You see this with Google and Facebook where their main product was being the one which got momentum at that time and everything else they try to invent is pure trash. The only growth FB has had is through acquisitions and then it's a scattergun approach. These companies are filled with waste.
However, lack of counterarguments is the weakest form of evidence, and such situations have the annoying property that public opinion is easily swayed and frequently in the wrong direction.
So does anyone positively know that twitter's employees were not doing much useful, or is everyone (including, possibly, Elon Musk) just following their gut feeling?
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