Yup. Thing is though, nothing about their financial situation justifies this level of recklessness. Yes, there’s an urgent need to cut costs and find new sources of revenue, thanks to Musk’s own decisions to perform a leveraged buyout and then scare off advertisers. But that doesn’t justify making such sweeping changes in so short a time that there’s no way a proper due diligence is being done.
Honestly, I suspect the issue is much simpler. I think Musk detests and can’t bring himself to respect Twitter’s engineers at all, thanks to preconceptions he developed on the outside. That’s why he’s so happy to mock and trash their work in public, why he wanted to get rid of half of them without even giving them the courtesy of speaking to them, and why he believes he knows better. Expect most of those remaining to be replaced as soon as Musk finds other willing saps to take their places.
It’s the same reason so many of Musk’s fans, including a bunch of people on HN, reacted with such evident glee at seeing Twitter engineers being laid off. That’s not a healthy mindset.
Twitter was also very bloated. Musk has an agenda, some of it is personal. I think from a business standpoint this was well overdue especially from some ex-twitter employees I've talked to.
It's also not the first time I have seen this type of layoff. I was a part of a few companies that got taken over by vulture capitalists and it's much the same. Everyone gets sorted into an arbitrary bucket based on metrics. Usually, these include commits, vacation taken, etc. Then the MBAs sort the list and fire the worst. Hostile takeovers are always, always bad for the employee. Twitter, however had other problems than a usual company. A dramatic lack of profitability, too many salaries to pay, etc. I'm not saying his methods are just but for Twitter to even have a chance at profit there needs to be some very, very dramatic changes.
If you were to believe the media Musk is literally destroying free speech (on a private platform?) and firing people for no reason. I doubt he would do this. He's a jerk, but he's not an idiot. It doesnt help twitter employees happen to be the most vocal, often whiniest, group of people so this is getting megaphoned to death in a way that wouldn't happen almost anywhere else.
This comment strikes me being rooted in a limited and almost comical understanding of business finance, especially at this scale. This isn't Hollywood. Since neither of us are privy to twitter's books (and Musk is, btw) it is equally (and more likely) that he's dumping positions that are double and triple redundant - a common occurrence in bloated bureaucratic teams of large companies that are poorly run and/or structured. I fully expect Musk to lay off most of Twitter's existing team and cycle through most staff in the next six months. He still has to weed out bad actors and saboteurs, as well. I also find it irresponsible for you to assume his motivations and intentions when you've been given none that reflect your supposition.
Their advertisers have been leaving in droves, Twitter itself has been breaking itself in new and profound ways since his take over and the site itself was broken (per Musk's own admission) as a result of the move. Profitability is in the dumpster, they're dealing with multiple court cases for refusing to abide by their legal obligations in regards to severance AND rent. And this entire critical move was caused by their lease running out with zero plans in place due to the financial crashing of Twitter.
I can't tell exactly where you lie, because you blast Twitter for having incompetent engineers, yet defend Twitter for also having incompetent engineers but this time under Musk. He 'supposedly' cleaned up Twitter (well, the employees, never mind the moderation policies when he personally unbans someone that posts CSAM), but runs it worse than anyone pre-acquisition did.
Did you know that Musk's acquisition put Twitter under massive debt and his actions chasing off advertisers means they're losing even more money by the day?
Twitter was a mess prior to Musk, but stable enough to remain afloat. When Musk acquired it, it became a flaming hot mess. Layoffs like these is like treating an infected finger with amputation. It temporarily solves the problem, but then you're still left without a finger.
This is all true, and the whole situation will probably end mostly poorly for most Twitter stakeholders.
I'm not one to defend Musk's management practices, but I think the main idea motivating this purge (which may or may not be a correct idea) is that Twitter, specifically, does not need "rockstar" engineers anymore at all.
Sure, he'll take them if they kiss the ring and work for peanuts, but he wants people who follow orders and don't talk back. He's not unique here: all management everywhere always wants this wants this but, in some endeavors you have to tolerate people who aren't this way, either because you don't know the right orders to give, or just because they're the only talent that can get done what you need to get done. Twitter's main corporate priority at this point is keeping the lights on as cheaply as possible, since they have a huge nut of debt they they can't afford to service, and on top of it all revenue is down. Again, I'm not saying this situation is desirable for Twitter employees, users, management, advertisers, or ownership (or even Musk himself), but this is the situation.
My complaint with Musk is that he's running the company in a chaotic and destructive way. It's true, I don't agree with his politics, but that's not the problem here. He's got $1B/year of interest to pay, but has lost half of his advertisers. He's gutted the moderation teams, and says he will reinstate all of the banned accounts. He's capriciously laid off much of the staff. It's hard to see how Twitter will continue to survive.
if you look at musk and his friends talking about how to restructure twitter it looks less incompetent. if you remember that he is under a mountain of financial pressure you can also see that these moves are for survival, not to make twitter more awesome. a decimated shell of a company is preferable, for someone who just massively overpaid for a non-growth company, to a much larger organization with higher cost structure.
I dont understand why he wanted twitter and I think the incompetence is in the way he pursued the deal, but once one is saddled with such a problem the steps to get out from under it (or at least minimize the damage) are clear. forcing employees out is necessary.
Yeah, unfortunately Musk has done so much incompetent stuff that it's not as easy to make the case that the Twitter implosion is due to the staff reduction rather than one of the twenty other boneheaded things that have happened. The narrative could totally settle on: "The massive staff cuts would have worked out just fine if he hadn't also taken on too much debt in the financing and scared off advertisers with his own personal tweeting and gotten rid of verification and started promoting the replies of paying customers and turned off non-logged-in access and search engine visibility." Personally I think it is all of the above.
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.
Twitter before this wasn't doing great, but they had cash on hand to last for years. Since taking over Musk has slashed costs by getting rid of benefits and laying people off, but also slashed income by alienating advertisers. Along with doing things like saying in a court hearing that the FTC consent decree on Twitter isn't binding which is opening them up to legal liability. The company is overall in far worse shape now then it was when he took over.
Apparently, Twitter instantly lost ~15% of their 2023 revenue because of their poor showing at NewFronts where a lot of upfront ad buying is done. And with Musk firing the very teams the advertisers care about e.g. ethics, brand safety, human rights the industry is turning against them. Decade of painstaking work by Twitter to attract these advertisers gone in a week. And even worse Musk fired many of the relationship managers and so the company can't smooth things over.
It really isn't inconceivable with this trajectory that Musk could bankrupt the company within a year.
If it is possible for Twitter to layoff employees, retain previous customers, and add more... I dunno, what was the previous management doing? I mean it is of course possible that Musk is just much more competent than them.
This is what I find ... interesting about the engineering layoffs - was Musk right? Was there a large part of the engineering function at Twitter that was just existing on some mythology, and was in fact just not needed? If so, are the FAANG companies (and others) the same? Legions of engineering roles just bullshit wastes of $200K salaries plus share options and free pizza?
I utterly hate Musk, so firmly hope he was wrong. Just wish Xitter went down more.
You have to wonder about Elon Musk's "first principle" thinking if he lashes out in such basic ways that defy basic engineering intuition.
Twitter's source code is valuable to Twitter, much like Twitter's engineers and their institutional knowhow were valuable to Twitter (before Musk fired them by the thousands).
But outside Twitter, taking their code and assets and trying to awkwardly graft them onto Meta/Instagram's stacks would not only not help, but actually slow them down and cause the product's functionality and stability to suffer.
Twitter's layoffs represent pure loss to Twitter, and much less gain to anyone else. Trying to spin it as if the nature of Twitter's operation is some big valuable secret is such cringe coming from leadership that supposedly prides itself on being technical and hands-on.
Musk might have been right about some things. There probably was some degree of bloat. But to say he's badly mishandled this whole saga is a gross understatement. It is very difficult to utterly kill a site like Twitter; the fact that we're even considering that as a realistic possibility shows just how badly.
I think Musk is used to Tesla and SpaceX, which are both companies that a lot of people are (or at least were) excited to work for because they believe in the mission and what's being created. Plus there aren't many alternatives if you want to do that work. Twitter really isn't like that for most people; a Twitter developer has many other options to do similar work. Add to that the fact that he's both cranked up the intensity of the abuse and that it's more visible to everyone, and you can't expect a lot of good people to stick around. And despite the fact that it might coast for quite a while on the back of excellent work in the past, eventually you do need good people to keep a business going. (This is leaving aside the direct impacts of his actions on users and advertisers!)
It is possible to criticize Musk and his management of Twitter for completely apolitical reasons. You have to be a sycophant to describe his management style as anything other than chaotic. There are literally employees at the company who don't have any work because there is no one to assign them to a department or team. There are people who don't even know if they work there anymore because the layoffs were handled so poorly. It goes way beyond Musk's opinions on free speech or whatever political opinion you want to blame. The whole purchase has clearly been a train wreck up until this point.
Musk has done a lot of stupid things, but I think the absolute stupidest was regarding Twitter users as freeloaders to be milked, mocked, or both.
I doubt anybody would argue against finding ways to make Twitter profitable, but Twitter is one of these companies where the users really defined the culture, service, stature, and even their most iconic features (@replies, hashtags). Musk's attitude towards them from the beginning has been one of hostility and resentment, so it's hardly surprising that the company is crumbling.
There's certainly discussion to be had about his personality flaws, but from a basic business perspective, he didn't understand the first thing about the company he spent $44 billion on, went in there with no plan to speak of, and has been managing it ever since by trial and error, with a particular focus on the "error" part.
Never mind the fact that he's an asshole; that's just bad, lazy business.
Honestly, I suspect the issue is much simpler. I think Musk detests and can’t bring himself to respect Twitter’s engineers at all, thanks to preconceptions he developed on the outside. That’s why he’s so happy to mock and trash their work in public, why he wanted to get rid of half of them without even giving them the courtesy of speaking to them, and why he believes he knows better. Expect most of those remaining to be replaced as soon as Musk finds other willing saps to take their places.
It’s the same reason so many of Musk’s fans, including a bunch of people on HN, reacted with such evident glee at seeing Twitter engineers being laid off. That’s not a healthy mindset.
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