The reality is most huge companies are majority bloat. The hiring numbers are also in part crap that goes into Series X Raise pitch decks. Oftentimes a lot of the new bloat pisses off competent people, because their work doesn't actually get less, it becomes more. Not only do they have to now nanny people that are often not actually competent in their job, they just happened to go through the coding interview with wholly unqualified interviewers, but they now also have to handle nightmare features that were built by people completely disconnected from the other side.
I'm not a friend of Elon's, but outside of the flashiness of the whole thing, I don't think his firing spree was wholly unwarranted.
The other day I saw a video of a bunch of people at twitter leaving that have been there for a decade or so. I mean wholly crap, this reminds me of old German industry where people retire in the place they started.
Except in these firing sprees it's not competent employees that remain - those people are usually the first to jump ship because they have options and see where it's headed. It's not like they get raises for staying to get a part of the savings from the cuts - usually they get pay freezes.
Restructuring is done on whatever idea the new owner(s) have in plan - which could be equally disconnected from "real product".
I'm not that optimistic about Twitter long term - never was TBH but this Musk thing is turning to a shitshow and also exposes what it's like working for him in his other companies.
You realise how annoying it is when you see people around you in the company making as much money as you and doing nothing useful to actually generate revenue. Data scientists that write a blog post about the most used hashtag or emoticon. Or PMs that we don't need...
>You realise how annoying it is when you see people around you in the company making as much money as you and doing nothing useful to actually generate revenue.
Absolutely. I also realize that when a company reaches the firing squad stage it's not a good idea to stick around - better polish up the CV and move to greener pastures. I have no insider information - they could be offering generous (and credible) retention bonuses for critical staff, but I've seen this happen twice before indirectly (I was gone before it started happening) and the people that stayed didn't have a good time, were lied to and left in the end anyway in a worse situation (or waited trough to bankruptcy and had to sue for outstanding wages in first place I worked in)
I have not been impressed with the average tech person's ability to understand parts of a business outside their immediate responsibilities. There were people on here seriously questioning the need for a general counsel for a company that's constantly under legal assault by every country on the planet. Never mind the long recurring "why does an ad-dependent company need people to manage relationships with the big spenders who expect that?" discussions.
By being a free speech platform without the censoring role of an editor, Twitter does not need to care if Qatar is mad about what is written there. If Qatar bans twitter, they ban twitter.
What is a "legal assault" and why does Lichtenstein have an ongoing "legal assault" against twitter?
The previous point is very reasonable, and I think your response is overly flippant and confrontational.
I've had coworkers hounded by managers from unrelated teams because my coworker wasn't working fast enough on a feature that was important to their team. They made assumptions about how many different tasks my coworker might have had assigned to them.
They were juggling like 3 or 4 fairly important features/fixes for various parts of the organization at the time because our team was (in my opinion) understaffed.
But of course, each of the relevant managers can only see "didn't satisfactorily complete my fix in the expected timeframe", and then perf review comes back and collates that info to "doesn't complete tasks on schedule" without taking a step back and recognizing that this is a failure mode of planning where one engineer was responsible for way too much stuff with no reasonable ability to push back.
At the same time, of course, engineers were getting promotions for doing exactly one thing well, which is as it should be.
There are lots of lessons in here, one of which is very likely "push back on work that causes you to overburden yourself", but I'd argue another important lesson is that you just don't see what others are working on. I'd be surprised if there were more than one or two people in your org who knew every task you've completed in the last 30 days, and to me it seems unreasonable to expect that you can make that assessment of more than 5ish people in your immediate radius.
But while we're throwing ad hominems for the fun of it; I'd rather have a bunch of "bloaters" on my team than the one person who is convinced that they are one of the golden few producing value, and everyone else is a lazy freeloader. I've worked with that type of person before and it's awful. It is rarely the case that they are _actually_ producing an 2-3x the value of other engineers, it's much more likely that they're just reducing morale and causing internal conflict while building some small piece of the pie and assuming that's the majority of the work.
Like someone who builds a button that says "delete my account" and says "I built the delete account feature" while not recognizing that there are a ton of people on the database teams that made the feature possible without performance hiccups or leaving dangling foreign keys.
You are bringing up a completely different problem that's a whole another case than bloat: bad managers that don't realise that some workers are juggling many problems, not just their own. That is very different to people doing a lot of work in secret in an unsecretive organisation, like twitter.
> I'd be surprised if there were more than one or two people in your org who knew every task you've completed in the last 30 days, and to me it seems unreasonable to expect that you can make that assessment of more than 5ish people in your immediate radius.
This is not the case at all in many work situations, a prime example being when you work on a team and all code and work produced is shared. None works on other teams. The code reviewer and hopefully project lead will know, or have a very good hunch, what everyone is producing.
I would argue that bad middle management is another bloat problem, so in essence; you just made another point for how bloat is very bad for an organisation. I wonder why you are so interested in defending the all too common effect of corporate bloat in an economy where its calculated that a large percentage of jobs are useless and there is a trend to collect multiple useless jobs.
Yes and no. I think we'd all agree that large tech companies have tons of really obvious staffing inefficiencies. There are many teams working on what are essentially vanity projects and many other teams have more staffing than they realistically need.
On the other hand the slash and burn Elon approach seems objectively terrible. Indiscriminately firing most of the company kills morale and is likely to send the company into a hiring death spiral where your good employees leave and you can't attract good talent. This won't automatically kill the product or the company but it's not going to lend itself to big positive successes in the future.
All companies I’ve worked at, startup to FAANG, have tried their best to reduce attrition and retain employees by providing growth opportunities.
Changing jobs is a skill/knowledge net-negative for the employer, and can be negative (outside of salary) for the employee as they have to relearn everything (relationships, tech debt, processes) etc.
Depends on if you want innovation or stability. For innovation, people building fiefdoms over decades of political maneuvering is terribly destructive to change.
Very few industries require constant learning for the business to compete so a highly tenured employee likely hasn’t learned anything new beyond minute process changes for 10+ years. Once people are ossified into a role like that, they will do anything and everything to shut down anything that has a whiff of threatening their current role.
That is actually not my experience. I worked at a scientific institute on space cameras, and since projects easily last 10 years from design to launch, we have a lot of older people.
Some were resisting change. Some were embracing it. All in all, I had a great time and gained a lot of respect. I love working in teams with all ages.
Your sentence "once people are ossified..." feels like a generalization to me.
> I mean wholly crap, this reminds me of old German industry where people retire in the place they started.
German here. I think this actually is a huge part of the success of the famous Mittelstand - all that institutional knowledge these people have is extremely valuable. It's not just basic stuff like "know time tracking, billing and other admin systems and internal processes", but also the stuff that really can speed up your work: whom to ask on the "kurzer Dienstweg" aka short-circuitting bureaucracy when needed, personal relationships with people in other departments on whose knowledge you rely (it's one thing if you get a random email asking for some shit from someone you don't know, but I'll always find some minutes to help out someone who has helped me out in the past), all the domain-specific knowledge about the precise needs and desires of your customers...
Attrition is bad for a company as a whole, the problem is US-centric capitalism cannot quantify that impact (and it doesn't want to, given that attrition-related problems are long-term issues with years of time to impact), and so there is no KPI for leadership other than attrition rate itself.
The only problem is that over the last years, employers' mindset has shifted from regular wage raises to paying the bare minimum which makes changing jobs every few years a virtual requirement for employees to get raises, and so we are already seeing the first glimpses of US employment culture and its issues cropping up.
> the problem is US-centric capitalism cannot quantify that impact (and it doesn't want to, given that attrition-related problems are long-term issues with years of time to impact)
This is false. People invest on many year horizons all of the time when they believe in the company. If there was good evidence that having an average tenure of 5+ years was a great boost to the company, people would clamor to invest in companies like that.
This was basically Google’s entire pitch when they were an early public company. Happy employees == great things. I remember when 60 minutes or dateline did some special about google before 2010 and people were floored by how good the employees got it. However, hiring standards relaxed and now google is slowly rotting from the inside to realize it’s the new IBM.
Long tenure alone is absolutely not an advantage. It’s very easy to have a bunch of dead weight that just looks like they know what’s going on.
So back to your point about experience mattering. That should show up in customer satisfaction, project turnaround speed, success rates, etc. Otherwise it’s pretty meaningless. And guess who already measures those KPIs…
> This is false. People invest on many year horizons all of the time when they believe in the company.
The perfect example of why that is not the case at least in Silicon Valley is Google and their messengers and social networks... just how many of them exist(ed)? Four? Five? Each of them was someone's promotion project, left to languish, suffer and eventually die afterwards. Honestly it's a wonder Gmail and Maps are still around, their UI hasn't been updated much in ages despite obvious potential for improvements... I guess the only reason why they are alive is that they generate absurd amounts of data.
> This is false. People invest on many year horizons all of the time when they believe in the company.
Granted, but they usually have the option to sell at many points along the way.
Think about an alternative financial instrument. What if you could invest $X in a public company (and get a higher rate of return because of the higher risk) but you lose the ability to sell until five years have passed?
This is one kind of option that might be worth trying. I want to see more mechanisms promoting long-term investment in our public markets. (Bonds are not identical to what I described BTW.)
The lack of these kinds of options (sure, bonds exist but I've not noticed them used with any notable significance in public companies) is why people talk about the short term quarterly focus of Wall Street.
I don’t understand what the point is. You have the option already to hold on for 5 years+. Many people do this (especially employees with vesting schedules) and they are rewarded for doing it.
> is why people talk about the short term quarterly focus of Wall Street.
This is a false meme though. Tesla was worth more than multiple profitable long standing car manufacturers combined before it ever turned a profit. Investors fixate on short term performance when the company has no long term vision and deriving cash flows is much easier (e.g. a container ship holding company).
> You have the option already to hold on for 5 years+.
The difference is having the option. :) Behavior tends to be different if you don't have the option to sell during a window of time.
In this hypothetical case it might serve as a built-in grace period. Companies that otherwise might have failed if measured and punished quarter by quarter might have time to build a product over five year time horizon.
> Long tenure alone is absolutely not an advantage.
It's also not necessarily a disadvantage. The real argument is that people management is important. Everyone from the new person who just joined to the decade long senior engineer need to be held to high standards. Which brings me to my next point.
The big problem with Twitter was management. Dorsey was barely a CEO for many years. Parag didn't seem to want to try anything. I think people routinely underestimate how important good leaders are. "There are no bad teams, only bad leaders" comes to mind. So far Elon has shown himself to be terrible in this regard. With SpaceX and Tesla he communicated a vision, with Twitter he's communicated very little and just instituted chaos.
> The big problem with Twitter was management. Dorsey was barely a CEO for many years. Parag didn't seem to want to try anything.
The problem was even worse: there was no vision at all from no one, not leadership, not the investors, not the users, what Twitter should be, other than "it is a way for instant communication with feeds". Everything else was completely lacking: what features do people want, what moderation policy should be applied, how does Twitter plan to make money.
The only ones that had at least some sort of vision where activists - the left wing, the advertisers and large parts of the users didn't want Nazis any more, and the right wing wanted "free speech" aka allowing Nazis.
I think this is down to the time horizons each kind of company optimizes for. Mittelstands are usually owned by families and they basically try to build a business that will feed the parents as well as kids when they come of age. Publicly listed companies usually optimize for this quarter. So even if you are looking at the same KPIs, you could get different outcomes just due to the utility functions being different.
> The reality is most huge companies are majority bloat.
This is true, and in my opinion, true for a reason. And that reason is not "most huge companies are dumb", as opposed to what Musk's cult seem to believe. The reality is, measuring what exactly is "bloat" and precisely cutting that bloat is extremely difficult and firing more than half of your workforce is probably like using a warhammer to do brain surgery.
Well, your alias actually refers to that process. Large organizations gain entropy over time. And entropy is precisly the inability to describe some structure at a micro/nano-level.
But while fighting the entropy can be hard, not doing so is almost certain to be lethal.
If an organism is infected by gangrene or cancer (the more extreme forms of entropy for a body), it may be more realistic to cut away whole body parts than to treat it in place, even if there is risk of sudden death.
It seems to em that this is what Musk is trying. Either Twitter will be gone within a year, or they may very well be sustainably profitable within 2-3 years.
Software engineers at Twitter got used to working on an money losing company for 10 years and being told they’re great at their job. Then they were fired en masse because someone’s called them out on it.
If your company is losing money all this time you are likely to be fired eventually in the real world. Job security in sw world had become so high that no one seemed to expect it. Everyone assumed “sure we’re losing money and the company has no direction” but all is fine.
They all stayed there in their tables working for 10 years in a rudderless company as if it was a government job.
This is factually untrue though. Twitter was making money in 2018 and 2019 (to the tune of ~1.2B/year in net profit out of ~3B revenue, which is a fairly high profit margin) they lost quite a bit of money in 2020 and less in the years thereafter. However, even in the years where they had negative net income EBITDA remained positive suggesting the losses were upfront investments that would be expected to be amortized over the coming years.
The only reason Twitter is in deep financial shit right now is because Elon acquired it in a leveraged buyout and the cost of servicing the debt is estimated around 1B/year.
Yeah, most of the complaints of Twitter was that it should be doing more in the space it commanded, not that it was losing tons of money every year. Though, 1-1.5B in yearly interest payments is going to make that tough going forward.
>The reality is most huge companies are majority bloat.
Something I learned early in my career is that some companies consider this a feature not a bug. As in, they are hoarding talent so that they don't go to work for their competitor.
I'm not a friend of Elon's, but outside of the flashiness of the whole thing, I don't think his firing spree was wholly unwarranted.
The other day I saw a video of a bunch of people at twitter leaving that have been there for a decade or so. I mean wholly crap, this reminds me of old German industry where people retire in the place they started.