If twitter can manage to run smoothly with 300 employees, RIP tech workers

you're right - it's hard to contribute to a plan that doesn't exist.

on a platform that generates the vast majority of its revenue from selling ad space, driving away your user base as a result of some strange personal vendetta is probably not the best use of you $44b investment

Well, the fun thing is, that we all know what a website looks like with just a couple of employees.

It's THIS ONE!

Many years ago, Peter Thiel called out that employees at Twitter sit around smoking weed all day

letsrun always works for me. and there are PLENTY of ads to provide revenue.

why do websites need 10k employees....makes no sense to me....

There's tons of bloat at any large corporation. Jobs like HR and recruiting and middle management are like 75% bloat lol. But something tells me Musk isn't just getting rid of the grifters, and he's fired some people with deep institutional/legacy knowledge that he'll regret pretty soon.

I know it’s not a “sexy” take, but maybe it is too early to opine on whether what he is doing is working or not working.

Lol. At companies like Twitter, 5% of people do 95% of the work.

twitter is hitting alltime highs for daily active users.

The content moderation clowns and VP of user engagement are the ones who are making sure General Motors and other customers spend the millions of dollars a year on advertising. There's a reason that at pharmaceutical companies the people who make the most money are in sales, not the people producing the medicine.

We just started doing advertising on Twitter this year and have spent over $100k and probably would have spent more next year, but there's a good chance we pull our advertising because the chaos is bad. The content moderators are the ones who ensure our ads aren't placed next to racial slurs of other content that could negatively affect the company. The account managers are the people who make sure our issues get resolved quickly. Those are people that are cut. So sure it's great to save $300k by firing the guy who's managing our account and some content moderators, but if us and the other 9 accounts he's managing all leave then that $300k savings just cost you $1 million. If even 4 of the 10 someone is theoretically managing left it would be a net loss and they are losing more and bigger accounts.

But clearly companies like Facebook and Google cannot make any profit off of primarily advertising revenue so Twitter needs to be more like letsrun with their revolutionary subscription model where they are just rolling in piles of cash. (Honestly, Elon is only 80% a moron, he probably knows he can't rely on advertising if he wants twitter to be a cesspool of hate speech so he needs a different revenue source. He just has no idea what that is and the idea of charging your most popular users is the dumbest ever.

It's like Netflix charging movie/TV producers for having shows on their app, why would anyone agree to that? Twitter already has a great deal where users are creating free content for him. If he wanted to charge users for an add free version of Twitter that might be more palatable because A) there are a lot more users than blue check people so there is more revenue possible, and B) they are actually getting a benefit from it potentially as it would improve their service.

If you want to charge content creators, the best way would be to provide tools for them to monetize their feeds and take a 30% cut or so like Apple etc. But if you feel like you are smarter than everyone else in the world and you surround yourself with people who just feed your ego, then you make some dumb decisions.

fair point - but who knows how long those mean daily active user numbers will stick around. you nearly always see spikes in activity around events like this, especially with Elon involved. who knows.

the main problem is that more than a few huge advertising partners are fleeing because of the uncertainty around what is happening with the platform. sure, Elon is "trimming the fat" by consolidating the workforce, but more realistically they're just trying to remain profitable with such a huge loss in revenue. idk how this will all pan out, but it's fun to watch unfold.

No one is irreplaceable.
In Twitter’s case, institutional and legacy anchors may be more of a liability than asset.

the problem is that Twitter is not a viable business with their current ad model. They gotta do something, and Elon's guess is as good as yours.

I work up the ladder at a publicly traded company. We underwent a merger in the past 5 years, disrupted by the pandemic.

Most of the ad-hoc liasion between marketing tech is dead weight loss in our company. Front-end developers is a different sub-section too. Many newbies are one trick ponies. They know react but not core js. Or, backend developer similar problem, they know nosql but not how to optimize db engines.

But we also have other constraints like quotas, diversity and state to state legislation.

From Elon's view, say CA has something law on the books to employ one CA employee per remote team. He may think to himself, therefore, each of these remote teams inflates capital expenditure on labor. That's why he maybe ended remote work...

excellent… get a job. tech wimp bums will be replaced by robots that will write the code.. can’t wait.

There's some merit to what you're saying You can train new people to have the knowledge and skills. When it hits the fan, there's always some dude who sits on a$$ almost all day, he comes in and does some esoteric routine that's saved in a Confluence page in who-knows-where, and it's all magically fixed and crisis averted.

If Musk's layoff plan was gradual and stepped, you'd be more right. But I'd bet good money we're gonna see some big tech issues there in the near future because that guy is now working somewhere else.

They do need to improve their ad targeting system, but they were still bringing in nearly 90% of $5 billion in revenue from ads. A commission system that let users monetize their feeds, some modest restructuring/lay-offs and improved targeting could have easily pushed them into profitability in a year or two. Add an ad free subscription option and paid search maybe seem like better options than deserting your biggest revenue source and firing your employees with minimal direction.

He did absolutely no due diligence in vetting out who to keep or not.

The mere order of come in, work crazy hours or leave is proof of this.

Some of the "hardest" workers are the least talented and they need to put in time because they are inefficient.

On the other hand, some people work a light schedule but come up with great ideas that add value. Those people get lost with this approach.

<sarc>Yes, because everybody works for free.</sarc>

Nobody at Twitter has come up with a new "great idea" in the last 10 years.