The fact that Twitter is running well with headcount down significantly matters

https://twitter.com/gavinsbaker/status/1601261872296361984

by mcenedella • 4 years ago

31 41 4 years ago

brntsllvn3• 4 years ago

Totally agree it's worth discovering how few employees it requires to keep the lights on. However harsh.

Musk mentioned cash burn was $4mm/day ($1.5bn/yr) and headcount reduction probably cuts that in half. Perhaps a sustainable business will emerge after all.

Not exactly equivalent, but I think Craigslist has like 40 employees. It's doesn't make billions in revenue like Twitter did (does?) but seems like a relevant case study.

coldtea3• 4 years ago

Musk mentioned cash burn was $4mm/day ($1.5bn/yr)

So he could afford to run it for 30 years with his own money, for the equivalent hit of like buying a car would be for an ordinary person, just out of spite if he had to!

brntsllvn3• 4 years ago

Yeah totally. Instead, he paid a premium rather than arguing for a discount via unsustainable cash burn.

db48x• 4 years ago

He doesn’t have NNN billion dollars, he as stock in companies he controls which is currently valued at NNN billion dollars (whatever his current net worth is). Those are very different things.

derbOac• 4 years ago

It's easier to keep the light switch on than to put in the wiring and sockets to begin with.

I'm sure there's a term for this type of bias but it's not the only type that's relevant to these discussions.

Rzor• 4 years ago

I think it's too soon to say that, but don't forget Musk's philosophy of working like hell (his famous 100h a week) and how this could bite Twitter in the future.

All in all, CEOs are paid for good decisions, not necessarily hard ones.

oska• 4 years ago

Does anyone ever go through life only making good decisions and not any hard ones?

myvoiceismypass• 4 years ago

How hard is a CEO _actually_ working if they literally spend more than half the day tweeting, posting memes, and responding to criticism?

mwint3• 4 years ago

CEOs responding to criticism is way more valuable than the stuff they usually do…

AnimalMuppet• 4 years ago

Define "well". In particular, define the time frame over which "well" is measured.

Twitter has run well... for the past month. That's not long, even in the "what have you done for me this quarter" world of corporate earnings. And even that's too short for any sane evaluation - tons of CEOs have destroyed a business by making things look good for a year or two.

He's doing this. So far, it's worked well enough to keep the lights on and the servers up. Beyond that, it's too early to tell.

quitit• 4 years ago

Twitter's ex-employees have detailed the extensive efforts they made to make twitter run well by automatically diagnosing and managing various sources of downtime.

However anyone with any amount of systems experience knows that updates, bugs and new features are going to be the pain points moving forward.

"Running well" is subjective - moderation is now garbage and advertisers have left in droves, it's easy to flood the website with spam to drown out messages (as various sleeper accounts just did during the chinese covid protests) and many features that have been broken still remain broken. Judging from share price depreciation across Musk's various businesses, I'm guessing the sentiment of "everyone in SV admires Elon" is at best naive, but most likely an attempt at manipulation to address Tesla's still-tumbling share price.

Is there even anyone out there who thought the site would just stop working? The expectation isn't that the infrastructure will fail, it's that Musk will make a series of impulsive decisions that render the site either irrelevant or unable to compete with other social media platforms. So far this seems to be a pretty accurate forecast of his actions.

wfme• 4 years ago

Is there even anyone out there who thought the site would just stop working

Yes, there were many authoritatively claiming this on here and Twitter.

The goalposts for failure will continue to move, though, and we’ll just pretend no one ever claimed those things.

i13e2• 4 years ago

Twitter now has billions in debt that it has to service and has lost half of their top 100 advertisers. Their plan to sell an 8$ subscription won't have the reach or ability to service that debt, and while layoffs were necessary to cut costs, doing it in such a classless and unorganized way opens them to serious site reliability issues going forward (they were even down a bit today, for example). I don't see this playing out well to be honest.

smoldesu2• 4 years ago

Frankly, that was going to happen either way. Twitter was losing money long before Elon took over, and advertising alone was never going to pay the bills for ~7500 employees.

i13e2• 4 years ago

Yes but the issue is that while laying off so many people could have reduced their burn to zero, losing half of your top 100 advertisers AND adding billions in debt, plus losing most of your staff is a recipe for disaster. Sorry if I didn't phrase that well in my comment.

I do agree that they would have collapsed eventually and this is just an accelerated version of that

snowwrestler• 4 years ago

Why wasn’t advertising going to pay the bills for 7,500 employees? Ads pay the bills for Meta and Google, which each have way more than 7,500 employees.

542458• 4 years ago

Twitter was profitable! They made a profit in 2018 and 2019 and would have been profitable in 2021 were it not for a one-time legal settlement. Or if you prefer to do it by quarters, they’ve been profitable for 16 of the last 20 quarters. Twitter’s main problem wasn’t that it wasn’t profitable, it’s that growth was slower than ideal and they had been unsuccessful at diversification.

Now with Twitter facing a new $1.2B per year in debt, servicing hitting profitability again will be a challenge.

tonetheman• 4 years ago

It matters maybe to CEO's who want to squeeze their own companies in a similar manner.

But saying they are running well with the head count down is just not known.

Are the people who remain all killing themselves to keep everything running? If so that is not sustainable.

Are systems running in spite of the down headcount, or really because of all the work done by those long fired?

And hate/spam is known to be going up. So they are at least not covering that.

He had money to run that company for years at a 4M burn rate but chose not to. He chose to fire people like a petulant child. And illegally in European countries.

Hopefully everyone sees it for what it is, he is an embarrassment of a CEO.

cramjabsyn2• 4 years ago

People act like musk is the genius who invented layoffs or being a cut throat executive. Yeah, firing people saves money. Yeah a ship can still run with a skeleton crew.

However, personally I think the story of a platform supporting thousands of families is more interesting than a platform serving to enrich a small (and openly toxic) few

asguy2• 4 years ago

However, personally I think the story of a platform supporting thousands of families is more interesting than a platform serving to enrich a small (and openly toxic) few

.. wasn’t Twitter operating at a net loss? So the VCs were the ones “supporting” those families… that’s a charity LARPing as a functional business

cramjabsyn2• 4 years ago

So the solution is to axe a large portion of the staff, burn established advertisers and alienate a large portion of the user base? Seems more like a playbook to torpedo the company.

quags• 4 years ago

It has not been long enough to really see. Security? Backups? DB Admin? These are easy to cut now and suffer later. Maybe many of these employees were useless but if shit ever hits the fan and you get an all hands on deck situation will be the real test.

mindcrash• 4 years ago

Are there any people left who fully understand Manhattan* from top to bottom?

If not, they already have a short- to longterm problem unless they find something in the OSS community with the same characteristics.

*) https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2014/manhattan-...

nateburke• 4 years ago

Twitter no longer has to post quarterly numbers publicly.

Whether or not its business is "running well" is idle speculation at this point, since that data is private.

The CEO in the linked emails should stop wasting his time thinking about someone else's company.

wittycardio• 4 years ago

It's not running well. Far more glitchy than it used to be. You couldn't reply on iPhones a few days ago. I constantly get page load failures on web. It has a decade+ of engineering work on it so I don't expect it to just collapse. But definitely seeing issues

tamaharbor• 4 years ago

Sounds like when the US Government occasionally shuts down, yet seems to run just fine. (Except for shutting down Federal vacation destinations).

ryanbrunner• 4 years ago

I'm relatively sure that we could fire everyone but one person from our company and keep our site running (we have a very small team and site with, so that's "only" firing like 85% of the company).

The problem would be that we wouldn't have any sales, product management, design, proper support, etc. "The site literally functions" is a very low bar and not nearly enough to keep revenues where they need to be, let alone actually grow and advance the company.

Come to think of it, I have a better example. I used to work for a company (Highrise) that no longer exists - it was shut down by our parent company, and no employees are working on the product. New signups have been turned off, but it's still running and people are still using it. I can't say for certain absolutely no effort is being put into it, but I'm fairly sure it's pretty minimal, and it just keeps going. It's going to wither on the vine, but we never really had that many server issues to begin with if no one was touching anything, and so it can just kinda keep going with 0 staff.

The fact that Twitter is running well with headcount down significantly matters

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