The car analogy is amusing, but how much does it really hold up? Have we ever seen another major social media company drop this much of its staff in one go? I certainly can’t think of an example. I think we’re in somewhat uncharted waters here.
A driverless car won’t last long, we know that for a fact. I think it remains to be seen how long a bloatless twitter can last. I’m personally optimistic.
It's also really hard to define 'last' though. Does 'last' mean just for up-time? Does it mean up-time without a major security incident while maintaining the same DAU? Does it mean business as usual on all fronts except number of employees? We know that Twitter already had some security issues with their God Mode admin panel.
I really wonder, for example, whether no angry ex-employees still have access to critical systems or data. This is usually pretty well regulated in large organizations like twitter, but since they've lost the majority of their staff, who knows when the people looking after that left?
I'm not convinced Twitter had a ton of bloat. (Most of the teams actually involved don't seem to think so). Just because Elon can't understand something, doesn't make that thing "bloat".
Twitter definitely had a few weird features that could be cut (the audio podcasting thing, for example). But calling most of Twitter microservices "bloat" is about as dumb as calling a cars Seatbelt and Airbag and Crumple Zones and that spare tire in the trunk "bloat" -- it's only "bloat" if you assume all people will always be perfect and no one will ever make a mistake anywhere, and nothing bad will ever happen.
I've told this example before, but my close friend and roommate did a year at Twitter in 2019. He was tasked with implementing versions of simple, relaxing JS games like Tetris which would be used by Twitter's moderation staff when they felt they had accumulated too much stress and needed a break. He was making $300k USD to copy an open-source version of Tetris to be played by paid staff! This was actually one of his more engaging projects, most days he said that he wrote 0 code at all. He got great reviews and was being encouraged by his manager to pursue the senior track; from what I could observe from the outside, there was a complete misalignment of goals at pretty much all levels.
Perhaps we disagree which is totally fine, but I think this type of allocation of eng resources absolutely counts as "bloat". You may see that work as comparable to a seatbelt or crumple zone, but I personally see it as more comparable to all the other expensive, useless nonsense which plagues modern cars.
(1) = https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1594724749954863105?s=20&...
1) Twitter could easily live without 10-30% staff and there was some bloat, positions to be cut
2) Believing that 90% of organization does nothing useful is insane.
Oh my god, this is incredible. Thank you for this story.
Now overall I wouldn't say this is unusual in tech. I know plenty of people at other major tech companies, including other FAANGs, that say the exact same thing. But just because its appears to be a industry wide issue does not make it okay. It seems to me like that this would signify bloat. You only have enough work for your developers to be working half time.
We aren't even getting into the whole rest and vest. That has been discussed here many times: https://www.google.com/search?q=rest+and+vesters+paid+for+no...
Company soft killed the product, everybody left, they didn't hire anyone to replace. We went from 20 engs to 3. Worst codebase ever made by ex FANGs hotshots who thought they understood something about system architecture. Very "clever" and complicated. Data consistency issues happening everyday, likely due to misuse of messagging queues. Chargebacks being ignored and mailed in physical letters every month. A couple of millions going through the platform every year.
My task was to run a team of mostly juniors maintaining and adding features to that mess.
I had no clue what that codebase was doing. We just left things as they were, fixing fires as they came. Nothing too bad happened. Slowly built a leaner replacement for some components. We simplified things over time and we even rebuilt some of the knowledge of the old platform, which helped with the daily outages.
The issues started happening not as often. Eventually. I moved on from that company, removing again a big chunk of knowledge. Over time I've heard tales of other people coming in and rebuilding that knowledge, over and over.
The platform is still standing.
I call these sort of folks (very) smart juniors. Probably can whip leetcode or whiteboard tests like few others (after some preparation). Then you let them roam wild on your product, because they're of course experts. Then some period passes, and/or they leave, and you can only cry. Complex hard-to-grok approaches to simple problems that have tons of caveats/edge cases, no documentation of work done and why it was done as it was, because they are oh-so-cool and such lowly tasks are for peasants.
Either they have no clue how long term sustainable company looks like or they don't care, in any case not a good fit.
These days I go in opposite direction as probably most here - FAANG type of company (or cargo-culted startup) is a big fat warning sign when hiring. Unless I would be working at some wannabe another FAANG startup, which I am not, I would sure as hell make sure the person can actually deliver long term improvements for everybody and not just upp their CV with another bleeding edge technology and move, leaving more damage than added value and making everything worse.
https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th...
It's a tricky one, because on one hand it increase my trust that their system was built robustly, but at the same time the passage of time would increase the chance of unseen/unaddressed "wear an tear" (bot figurative and literal) that might be going unaddressed, or under-addressed. But we have no view into that.
We won't really know until they suffer a major problem whether or not they have enough staff yet to keep sufficient maintenance going that such an event doesn't cascade into something much worse and/or whether or not they will be able to recover from it in a reasonable amount of time.
Horrible systems can survive, but often they survive through sheer luck.
What happens if someone like Bytedance decides to launch a Twitter clone that does everything better?
Meta takes a lot of criticism for being Meta but you have to hand it to them, they've copied every other innovative social media feature that has shown up in competitors' products.
Does Twitter have enough staff to launch a major new feature?
The problem is that Twitter is now saddled with debt. It probably can't make investments in new products, and we can speculate whether it has the necessary headcount in the sales staff needed to maintain advertiser relationships that pay 90% of its revenue. [1, 2] Enterprise clients usually expect a dedicated CSM relationship.
That's exactly what happened to Toys R Us, which slid into liquidation due to the debt saddled on it by its private equity firm rather than a fundamental issue with its business.
In 2021, Twitter had a net loss of $221.4 million, and in 2020 they lost over $1 billion. Revenue was around $5 billion in 2021, about 90% from advertisers. [1]
The company (not Elon) is now loaded with $13 billion in debt. [2]
> Last year, Twitter’s interest expense was about $50 million. With the new debt taken on in the deal, that will now balloon to about $1 billion a year. Yet the company’s operations last year generated about $630 million in cash flow to meet its financial obligations. > > That means that Twitter is generating less money per year than what it owes its lenders. The company also does not appear to have a lot of extra cash on hand. While it had about $6 billion in cash before Mr. Musk’s buyout, a large portion of that probably went into the cost of closing the acquisition. > > That gives Mr. Musk little wiggle room, Mr. Pascarella said. “They are essentially going to take all the financial resources of the company and just pour it into servicing the debt,” he said.
I personally don't see how Twitter gets out of this without bankruptcy. I think Twitter can go the next 5 years without an infrastructure outage and still likely ends up bankrupt.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-elon-musks-twitter-faces-mo...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/30/technology/elon-musk-twit...
I think it's hard to just use time as a measure. If there are no security issues and they add no features, then things should run fine. Which, ironically points to how solid the team was that was fired.
Of course if Twitter not only limps along, but thrives in this new setup then I'll definitely change my opinion. Being in the US, this might end up the case while Twitter for the rest of the world falls apart.
Keep in mind, that I think Twitter was bloated and needed a big shakeup. Randomly dumping people and those who tried to correct me is not the heuristic I would have used.
With that said, Twitter still has 2 huge problems. No vision and saddled with an enormous amount of debt. Right now, Musk is taking the PE approach to cut and milk what's there. The problem is, there isn't much to milk.
