Documents detail plans to gut Twitter’s workforce

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/20/musk-twitter-acquisition-staff-cuts/

by minimaxir • 4 years ago

97 51 4 years ago

washingtonpost.com

minimaxir• 4 years ago

How does a 75% workforce cut even work logistically for a company not on its deathbed?

sn0w_crash2• 4 years ago

How does a company like this need 7,500 people?

phillipcarter5• 4 years ago

Because it's a set of massive engineering systems, applications, advertising market, social institution, etc.? Big, complex sociotechnical systems require a lot of human beings to keep moving along.

bob1029• 4 years ago

25% of twitter's current employee base is still ~1,900 people...

I don't see why this would be infeasible.

thefreeman• 4 years ago

You think the top performing 25% are going to want to stick around when you fire 3/4 of their coworkers?

StanislavPetrov• 4 years ago

Sometimes a 75% workforce cut is exactly what a company on its deathbed needs. In the case of Twitter they wouldn't even need to fire anyone. Just make employees sign a statement reaffirming their commitment to free speech and the 1st Amendment (ala forced DEI statements at other companies) and 75% of Twitter employees would likely depart on their own.

Vespasian• 4 years ago

Unlikely.

Most Twitter employees (like people everywhere) go there to earn a living and as long as employment conditions remain acceptable they'll sign whatever management ask them to.

In particular if it's a meaningless broad statement such as "commitment to free speech and 1st amendment".

Most people there don't have anything to do with policy enactment or enforcement so why would they care (case in point those other companies, you mentioned which also retained their workforces).

If the real consequence is a work culture in which bullying and harassment is sanctioned (or even encouraged) by management THEN people will leave because it's unpleasant to work in such an environment.

The ones remaining won't necessarily be your high performers

LegitShady• 4 years ago

I don't think people should sign political affidavits from their employer. That's not useful or reasonable.

alephxyz• 4 years ago

Why would employees need to reaffirm their commitment to what the US Congress can or can't do?

ytpete• 4 years ago

The First Amendment only constrains the government - not any private company. So it's meaningless with regard to Twitter's moderation policies.

Nor is it useful as a voluntary limit on content moderation. Any social media site that allows absolutely anything First Amendment protected would quickly be overrun by porn and blood and gore.

0xB31B1B• 4 years ago

1) cut 35% of engineering team, including all L4s and L3s, and people who have scored 2/5 or lower on perf reviews 2) Cut 100% of marketing team, Elon is marketing team now. 3) Cut 100% of policy team. Elon is policy team now 4) Cut 80% of sales team. Elon is sales team now. 5) Cut 95% of Product team. They don't ship anything too much time talking, not enough time shipping 6) Cut support team by 90%, only highest tier gets support, 7) hire new leadership ASAP, probably before firing and agreements probably happening now to rebuild teams with people who actually want to work and ship.

phillipcarter5• 4 years ago

This is a pretty funny take. Suffice to say, you need a lot more than engineering to run a global enterprise, even if it's a tech company.

lapcat3• 4 years ago

Cut 80% of sales team. Elon is sales team now.

That can work for direct-to-consumer sales. It's unlikely to work for advertising sales.

Cut support team by 90%, only highest tier gets support

Twitter has a support team? Not much, in my experience.

x86x872• 4 years ago

Look at me! I'm marketing and sales now! Elon probably.

conro1108• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/HvaqT

samketchup• 4 years ago

I can't wait!

barbariangrunge• 4 years ago

I can’t imagine many engineering teams that would hold up very well if 75% of the team vanished —- you would lose so much knowledge of your own codebase for starters, and morale would be a disaster. 90% of those who remained would start thinking of switching jobs out of pure pessimism.

Then again, I bet it won’t happen. The actual cuts will be far smaller once it’s actually time to do it… Unless his finances are too strained I guess

x86x872• 4 years ago

By the time they make the cuts everyone that can find another job will be gone

helsinkiandrew• 4 years ago

700 have already resigned since Musk spoke to everyone in the company in September. I'm guessing there will be need to be a very good share option scheme to keep those that stay, but Twitter isn't a startup - it already has a $44B valuation and lots of expensive debt.

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-exodus-tur...

SilasX• 4 years ago

I can’t imagine many engineering teams that would hold up very well if 75% of the team vanished —- you would lose so much knowledge of your own codebase for starters,

If so, then, to be blunt, that means their documentation was crap and they had unnecessary choke points to begin with.

We need to stop normalizing tribal knowledge.

phillipcarter5• 4 years ago

A plan to reduce staff by 75% and double revenue in three years doesn't make a lot of sense to me. There's almost certainly a good deal of wasted money at Twitter, like at every large tech company. Dumb bets like NFT profile pics come to mind. But not to the tune of 75%. I cannot see how they can meaningfully operate, let alone meaningfully evolve to generate _more_ revenue, one of the largest social networks on earth with 1/4 staff.

anigbrowl2• 4 years ago

I think they're assuming MAGA types come back in force and that advertisers will be unable to resist the lure of so many eyeballs, but I have my doubts about the demand for dumpster fire branding opportunities.

toofy2• 4 years ago

are there really that many of them? the numbers we’re seeing from truth social and it’s similars seem to indicate otherwise.

my guess is, we’ll see far more users abandon twitter than we see of maga users swarming.

Balgair3• 4 years ago

A plan to reduce staff by 75% and double revenue in three years doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Elon's plans may not be all that well thought out, as history has evidenced.

knewter• 4 years ago

Ah yes, the doddering fool tripped into wealth

programmarchy• 4 years ago

Sounds like this plan was in place before Musk’s offer, but one way to do this would be to “authenticate all humans” as Musk said he wanted to do in order to remove bots. That would drastically reduce the content moderation workload.

Balgair3• 4 years ago

I would assume it would also reduce the number of users.

Also, why would it reduce the moderation workload?

avrionov• 4 years ago

Here are Twitter financials for the last year.

Revenue $5,078 (in millions)

Cost of Revenue $1,798 35.40%

Sales and Admin $1,760 34.67%

R&D $1,247 24.55%

Interest $52 1.02%

Unusual Items $441 8.69%

Their biggest expense 34.40% is "Cost of Revenue" followed by "Sales and Admin". For a company like twitter "Cost of Revenue" includes operations and Customer Care.

I don't think that they can cut 75% at once, just the severance payment will be huge and they may not have the money for that.

With R&D being only 24% it is possible to make large cuts in "Cost of Revenue" and "Sales and Admin" and keep more of the engineering team.

lapcat3• 4 years ago

I don't think that they can cut 75% at once, just the severance payment will be huge and they may not have the money for that.

What if the plan is just to scare away as many current employees as possible now, before the deal is completed, thereby minimizing layoffs?

I know a lot of engineers who have already left, but the prospect of a 75% cut may inspire more.

Heading into a possible/probable recession, it may be wise to secure one's next job immediately rather than waiting for the axe to fall.

datavirtue2• 4 years ago

Ha ha...watch them unionize real quick.

rexstjohn• 4 years ago

You are correct.

If you lay them off there are lots of expenses. If you scare them off then they will leave for free.

He is attempting to shake the tree before taking over on purpose.

error_salad• 4 years ago

I get that over employment is an issue, but cutting 75% of the workforce seems a bit too much. At that point I don't understand how the engineering team can cope, not even mentioning the loss of knowledge in the codebase and the loss of morale.

mzs• 4 years ago

Imagine how much worse moderation will become after the cuts. Twitter will become the online equivalent of "Charlie Goes America All Over Everybody's Ass."

cbeach• 4 years ago

I’ve reported content which blatantly goes against Twitter’s policies and the moderators chose not to remove it.

Twitter moderators allowed Taliban leaders to tweet all sorts of dangerous horrible stuff. But they permanently banned the democratically elected leader of the free world*

I think it’s clear at this point the moderator staff aren’t fit for purpose and a Scorched Earth approach is probably the only way to sort out Twitter

*Trump repeatedly tweeted calling for calm and discouraged violence by his supporters - in no way did he he incite the Capitol riots.

Documents detail plans to gut Twitter’s workforce

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