And I think you are vastly underestimating the percieved impact by the people involved, which was kind of my point.
Both Twitter going down for an hour and a plant that assembles cars going down for an hour aren't that big of a deal in the huge scheme of things, but for people who are intimately connected (either work there, know someone who does, are emotionally connected to the product in some fashion, etc), it feels a lot bigger than it is.
Dozens of employees, some of which may be essential to critical operations if they are in fact this desperate to get them back. If Twitter is down for 24 hours because they fired the three people that know the affected subsystem the best, the "it's only dozens out of 5700" proportion says nothing about actual business impact.
Twitter is not great example because revenue collapsed while rest of the industry revenue is up 20% and Meta revenue is up 35%. Besides his personal antics, he fired a lot of sales, safety/trust and support people. He also did it in very public way which worried brands a lot. It’s unclear what contributed the most but final result is not great.
Very few people work on weekend which tells you you need way less people to keep lights on - so keeping lights on with 20% of eng is not surprising.
This is roughly my feeling, but I'm a little less sure of the absolutely/undoubtedly part. Someone below is asking for evidence but I don't think any one of us could produce evidence for or against this. It all boils down to either "Twitter had ~7500 employees and..."
1. ... that feels like a huge amount for a company that has basically a single product
2. ... that feels entirely appropriate for a company operating at their scale
What we've observed is that they've kinda managed to keep going despite Elon axing an enormous number of employees, but they've also had a few high-profile outages like this one today, the 2FA issue and 16hr Aus outage. I don't know if these are enough for either side to declare that they're correct.
One thing I would like to say - even though I had a feeling Twitter was probably overstaffed, I was in no way celebrating the redundancies. Similarly even though I'm not a fan of Elon Musk, I'm not delighting in all these little goofs he's doing and how it's impacting him personally - every little embarrassment he suffers and every dip in Tesla stock makes it more likely he'll just call it quits or fuck up Twitter more. For all its faults, I quite like Twitter and I don't want it to just disappear.
I don't see how the events up to today doesn't tell us that Twitter can indeed survive on a reduced workforce.
There may be growing and adapting pains but, overall, the service is working and not degrading.
The company may very well not survive much longer but I don't think it'll have anything to do with having fired all those devs.
The problematic side was the business side, so if laying of a few thousand people extended the runway to figure things out, it made all the sense. And if it ends crashing and burning regardless, then, who cares?
Yeap. Most people commenting here are just bitter and are looking for any excuse to confirm their biases.
From a business perspective does it matter that Twitter is down for a moment? It's not a plane or medical machine. It's not blocking anyone from doing anything useful. Everyone are just going to check & post when it is up again.
It also doesn't mean that Twitter employees have a bad work experience like most here assume. Maybe they've got a permission to iterate fast, even if it risks bringing things down, and everyone are having a jolly good time, skipping on the boring chores ensuring everything will go smoothly usually takes.
Or, nobody moved the goalposts and you're reading different people. It's not that difficult a conclusion, is it?
Claiming "Twitter will go down tomorrow because people got fired" is utterly stupid. It's like claiming "My teeth will fall tomorrow because my dentist got fired".
In a situation you have to make choices as to what is important and, I don't think transferring knowledge is as important as everyone thinks in this case. The users don't directly make twitter money so there's no direct losses from downtime, plus advertisers are being scared away so the indirect losses from downtime from not being able to show ads is also minimized at the moment. The biggest cost is tipping the exodus numbers so far that what is left of twitter loses it's network effects to attract new users onces the next version is launched and the exodus is really far from that level right now. So, what's the expected value of a 12-48 hour outage on the small chance that something totally breaks and it takes your team of really smart people that long to figure it out without the knowledge transfer? I would say it's pretty small. On the other hand what is the benefit of using a decent chunk of the remaining six billion in cash in the company to pay off and push out all the people that will work life balance the plan into not working (and the smaller subset of wokes that will actively sabotage it)? I would say pretty high, given what the plan apparently is. There is also a time value to getting this done because the faster they do it the faster it can fade from collective consciousness and the faster things die down enough for Elon to step back from the CEO role, put a kinder, gentler but competent face in that role, rebuild advertiser relationships and make this thing print money.
I know if I was in his position I would be trying to fire more people than I actually think I need to right now just to make sure I don't have to prolong the bad press with later layoffs and to ensure there are roles to fill in three to six months when I get a full handle on the business and know what I actually need. This would accomplish both generating good press and ensure I can fill positions with people aligned with my vision and work ethic.
Unfortunately what EM does and Twitter does is being watched extremely closely by the entire tech industry, so like it or not it has massive ripple effects. We saw this when Twitter cut staff to a shoestring, and suddenly other companies also started cutting costs, assuming those costs were unnecessary overhead.
I'm sure they severely messed up in a bunch of things during the layoffs. And things broke in the process.
But the catastrophic scenario that some people painted, where Twitter was basically walking dead timebomb ready to crash irreparably at any second, wasn't true, clearly.
My statement referred to Tesla. I agree that it sucks for Twitter employees who depended on remote work arrangements.
However, 7500 people is way too much staff in my opinion. As I mentioned, I worked at one of the world's biggest websites and it had about 1% of that staff.
Realistically, if an unprofitable company is getting acquired, the acquirer is most likely going to cut a lot of positions. One way to do this is to be really demanding and let people self-select out of the company. 3 months severance is a decent period of time to find a new job.
Highly doubtful. Will it go down immediately? No. Will the bitrot accelerate and things start breaking/deteriorating with no one around to fix them? Yes.
It's hard to argue that Twitter wasn't incredibly overstaffed. Maybe even 80% overstaffed. But ripping 80% of the humans out of the equation basically overnight is not a recipe for a successful transition.
I don't disagree with anything you said, but I think my main point might have been lost, so let me reiterate: The value saved is unlikely to outweigh the cost in morale.
I feel like this is especially true when you're talking about a small number of people with much lower wages. Twitter is getting a lot of negative press lately, laying people off is guaranteed to get press (as we see), and will start rumors flying. In exchange for that they've maybe saved a couple million dollars. You're welcome to disagree, but to me, it doesn't seem like a good exchange for them.
As more of an operator type, people in my crowd are more curious than anything. It's obvious that you could take a car company, fire everyone except for the sales, marketing and people working in the factories, and things would keep going for a while with significantly improved margins. However, that's not a recipe for long term success. Your competitors cars will continue to improve while yours will stay the same, and your systems slowly (and sometimes quickly) break down.
The real test will be when Twitter needs to move fast in response to market changes (VR maybe?)
I honestly think the engineering/ops problems are the least of their failures. They bled revenue not because of outages, but because wild policy swings and chaotic management style alienated some of their biggest customers.
If they had frozen features and left the existing policies in tact, I suspect we would have a dramatically different narrative about the layoffs. If brief interruptions like this are the worst that happens when you cut engineering to the bone, it's a good argument that is Twitter was indeed wildly overstaffed.
Instead, though, we have a company in crisis due to its mismanagement of other areas, so we're primed to view stuff like this through the lens of that broader failure.
I had the same thoughts now in regards to the Twitter layoffs. I mean Twitter still looks like a pretty trivial product that some nerds could hack together in a garage. So why more than 7000 employees? What were all these people doing?
Do you have any examples offhand where this was true? To me it seems that the Twitter mob has much less real-world impact than people think. Someone loses a particular gig one day, then gets hired somewhere else like nothing happened. Half the time it ends up being free publicity.
Both Twitter going down for an hour and a plant that assembles cars going down for an hour aren't that big of a deal in the huge scheme of things, but for people who are intimately connected (either work there, know someone who does, are emotionally connected to the product in some fashion, etc), it feels a lot bigger than it is.
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