“I worked at Facebook when we [were] 200. [Twitter’s] layoffs are appropriate”

https://twitter.com/rsg/status/1588969950668283905

by GaylordTuring • 4 years ago

62 64 4 years ago

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?

bombcar2• 4 years ago

Jack seems to think they grew too quickly but what would he know?

https://twitter.com/jack/status/1588913276980633600

fragmede4• 4 years ago

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.

dilyevsky• 4 years ago

Jack seems to think (and say) whatever is good for jack. In this case to peddle his new social network

cmeacham98• 4 years ago

"Grew too quickly" does not imply that Twitter currently has too many engineers, only that they did at some point in the past.

harlequinn77• 4 years ago

You're right that this is all mostly assumption.

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.

It's as clear as mud!

bawolff• 4 years ago

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.

paxys• 4 years ago

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.

slyall• 4 years ago

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.

woodruffw• 4 years ago

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.

justahuman743• 4 years ago

A 50% haircut without a careful planning is straight-up negligent.

It's like there's anger at being forced to follow-through on the transaction and decided that he's happy to burn the cash.

fermentation• 4 years ago

Any new insights here compared to other investors foaming at the mouth over the prospect of fb laying off folks?

AlchemistCamp3• 4 years ago

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.

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748028

More details: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/08/real-time-communicat...

brundolf2• 4 years ago

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

Something to think about there

tootie• 4 years ago

Businesses don't run on engineering

justahuman743• 4 years ago

You're right, we should hire more MBAs

rektide3• 4 years ago

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.

bluefirebrand3• 4 years ago

Twitter is 100x the engineering difficulty

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.

hooloovoo_zoo• 4 years ago

They’re very different scaling problems though. Discord only has to handle very small graphs and most of the data is never stored.

nulld3v• 4 years ago

most of the data is never stored.

Doesn't Discord currently have an infinite retention policy?

alphabettsy• 4 years ago

I think there’s probably a lot more to consider. Like the fact that Twitter is much older and likely has significant technical debt.

There’s also the fact that Twitter is in many ways an Ads and News platform. The comes with significant non-engineering overhead.

AlchemistCamp3• 4 years ago

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.

ksec2• 4 years ago

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.

filoleg2• 4 years ago

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.

recursv_thnkng• 4 years ago

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.

sp332• 4 years ago

Well the new probably-true rumor is that they're already trying to hire back some of the people they got rid of. https://mobile.twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/15890755434203...

Edit: Oh there's already an HN post about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33488224

homeland221• 4 years ago

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.

jjeaff3• 4 years ago

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.

brundolf2• 4 years ago

The amount, but probably not the way they were executed (in several different ways)

swellguy• 4 years ago

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.

querulous• 4 years ago

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

zug_zug• 4 years ago

There are two very different questions:

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?"

MuffinFlavored• 4 years ago

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.

dasil003• 4 years ago

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.

robomartin• 4 years ago

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.

yrgulation• 4 years ago

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.

kcplate3• 4 years ago

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.

jjeaff3• 4 years ago

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.

hatenberg• 4 years ago

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

trashdigitalnom2• 4 years ago

Layoffs are great. They weed out the unproductive, the weak, the ones that don’t deserve such salary.

The good employees will find employment regardless. The bad ones won’t.

Nothing to see here. In fact, the world could use way way way more layoffs now.

EdwardDiego• 4 years ago

Hot take.

mola• 4 years ago

I wish you many happy layoffs.

trashdigitalnom2• 4 years ago

I am not worried. Unlike many people, I worked low paying jobs from cleaning rat poop with bleach to making high salary as wall st engineers.

If I got laid off, other people will have it way worse. I am strong, smart, capable and not ashamed to do even dirty work. Not worried a bit.

d2049• 4 years ago

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.

danbmil99• 4 years ago

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.

rich_sasha• 4 years ago

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.

sys_64738• 4 years ago

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.

“I worked at Facebook when we [were] 200. [Twitter’s] layoffs are appropriate”

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