HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

What happens when Twitter survives despite reducing headcount by 80-90%?

It's going to send a message that companies are more overstaffed than we thought. This may explain an underlying fear driving even some engineers to put their reputation on the line with confident declarations that Twitter is going to fail. Some were saying it wouldn't survive the night. It's now morning. Others saying it won't last the weekend or coming week. We'll soon find out. I would expect some bumps along the way. Twitter Blue was a bump.

Perhaps Twitter is just the first to go lean before the recession. Elon merely the first dancer who is willing to look dumb. Now who's going to be the first follower to transform the lone nut into a leader?

Watch this 2 minute to see how this works, you may have seen this before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ

Now here's a counterbalance to the fear with an optimistic take: This is a correction. A small number of tech companies have been hoarding talent. The talent gets a 3 month severance and made available to the larger ecosystem.

⬐ superultra

That could happen, but if you were running, say, a grocery store, and 90 of your 100 employees walked out the door in a single swoop, everything would look pretty good for a little while, maybe even a day or two. There's still merchandise on the shelves, customers are still able to check out because you've routed your staff there. But over time things will start to cascade. The freezer breaks. Someone breaks a bottle of wine in aisle 10. A customer can't find anything and walks out. Etc etc.

But yeah, for that little bit at the start, everything "looks" fine.

Point being: it's way too soon to say twitter is surviving.

⬐ taylodl

If it requires more than 20% - 30% of your staff to sustain operations then you've implemented it wrong. So sure, you should be able to keep operations going having sustained large staff reductions, but you aren't going to be doing anything to expand your business opportunities. Maybe Musk doesn't think that's required, but if they lose too many key operations personnel then they may be screwed.

⬐ yabones

It "survived", but apparently with some minor disruptions [1], which isn't a good signal at all. Any social media site should be able to survive a Thursday night with no major news events, celebrity deaths, natural disasters, or scandals.

What will be the true test is the world cup. If it can survive the final game (estimated 1.5 to 2 Billion viewership), that will be impressive. Historically, that's been a major engineering challenge for any "public" social network. With 90% less staff, it might not be possible to monitor, triage, test, fix, etc. on the fly.

[1] https://downdetector.com/status/twitter/

⬐ francisofascii

I suspect you right to some extent. But "survive" has two meanings: 1) keep the site up and running, and 2) make money. A site of this size earns gobs more money with just a small fractional increase in traffic. I have no doubt Twitter can stay running on a skeleton crew, but can it earn more revenue in the long run than it would have with a larger crew.

⬐ Andrew_nenakhov

I think that Twitter won't fail anytime soon. These rash HR moves probably have a mid-term goal of completely replacing the company personnel. When 95% or so of donations made by Twitter staff went to Democratic party, it is safe to say that his political stance of allowing free speech for all parties will be heavily resented by the current workforce, and might lead to demotivation, low productivity and even sabotage. Replace potentially unloyal people who don't even want to go to the office with a new skeleton crew, get everything functioning, then bring in new personnel to work on new features.

⬐ memish

Actually Tesla is similar with 94% donations to Democrats.

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/5YhfWLZR2-EYkeJCv0Pwdf7AsBI=...

⬐ memish

Yes, and actually Tesla is similar in that their staff donates 94% to Democrats. That's not an issue because it's not affecting the output of electric cars in a negative way. Perhaps it's even positive since they are more motivated in the direction of electrification and its role with regard to climate change. But Twitter is the public square and needs to be neutral.

⬐ jjav

> It's going to send a message that companies are more overstaffed than we thought.

Consider the FTX news, where the new CEO appointed to clean up the mess called it a complete failure of corporate governance.

There is a huge amount of work that isn't directly related to keeping a website running that is required to sustain a large corporation and keep it legal. You can ignore all of this for a while, but not forever.

From various reports it seems Twitter has fired everyone in security, privacy, media relations, regulatory compliance and we probably haven't heard of everything.

⬐ g9yuayon

I wish companies could go lean. I had tremendous growth when working for Netflix partly because engineers there got to build meaningful systems with huge ownership and very small teams. Case in point, my coworker and I owned four or five high-traffic systems and carried a pager 24x7. It didn't bother us at all as our we got alerts maybe once or twice a month.

That said, a lean company requires strong leadership, technical depth in management, and specific types of cultures. I don't believe that most companies are up to such challenge.

⬐ flycaliguy

I’ll preface that this is a conspiracy theory take…

This is not a demo for tech companies, it’s a demo for government.

I think when Twitter survives it will serve as inspiration for Trump’s Schedule F purge plan. Trump will campaign on the promise to do the same thing to the government.

⬐ BucketsMcG

I don't think there's any doubt that many tech companies are hideously, bafflingly over-staffed (3000 people working on just the music functionality of Alexa? What could they possibly be doing?). But maybe take a bit of time to understand what everybody is (and isn't) doing before throwing half out and alienating the rest?

This is just a masterclass in how not to do it. He doesn't look dumb because he's reducing the headcount. He looks dumb because he's going about it like an absolute lunatic.

⬐ ryandrake

> What could they possibly be doing?

People constantly underestimate the size of the support staff needed to keep the engineering team productive. For every ten or so software engineers you hire to work on a new product or feature, you're going to need 5-10 QA engineers, another project manager, another product manager, maybe another build engineer, maybe more internal IT staff... You need these people. Software doesn't just leap from developers' fingertips directly onto store shelves. And now that that program's engineering manager has so many more direct reports, that manager needs another manager to split his duties up... And now that there are so many managers, their Director maybe needs a personal assistant to help keep her schedule better organized. All that extra staff eventually requires more HR support, more people working in facilities/building management, more janitors. On the business side, this product is going to need a few more marketers, maybe salespeople to sell it, business analysts to track its effectiveness, and so on. After a couple rounds of this, the company looks up and somehow has 3,000 people and HN sneers about what could they all be doing...

⬐ _Tev

That would easily explain 300 employees. But 3000? For this?

> just the music functionality of Alexa

Seems absurd to say without a link to source

⬐ mkipper

There's a difference between saying "I could bang that out in a weekend and replace the whole department" and recognizing that 3,000 people supporting a relatively small feature is a sign of bloat in an organization. Surely there's _some_ point where the headcount becomes a sign of a problem -- would it be okay to make OP's comment if 100,000 people were working that feature?

I agree with your general point that a "software team" in a big org requires a lot more people than just engineers developing new features, and that the headcount doesn't necessarily scale linearly. That doesn't change the fact that in a normal business, if 3,000 full-time staff (support staff and all) are working on something, it's probably something pretty big that generates enough revenue or has enough growth potential to justify that cost. Even if a team is working hard and "doing stuff", they can still be grossly overstaffed.

I have seriously and honestly asked myself this! In my own head and never publicly, of course. I don't believe it's subject to rational/utilitarian analysis. It has, gradually at first, accelerating to a tipping point, become fashionable (albeit in a very serious way) to seek to protect this category of person. Admittedly reductionist, but I believe the core essence is simply this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ

I think protection, respect, dignity, rights for LGBTQ people is great! But as you note, there is something extra here. It seems like the entire population, which is mostly cis and hetero, is being asked... well, not asked, really. It's not a request anymore, is it? Strongly urged, to deconstruct and overhaul how we think and speak about sex and gender in all contexts and at all times. And this is a bit difficult to square with the goodness of protecting LGBTQ people. It's a little extra.

I was going to write that the growth of this movement consists of cishet people ("allies!"), since it's not a recruitment drive to turn people. But then I realized that's not strictly true either. While I do not believe that sexuality and dysphoria are chosen, there is some fuzziness in the [TQ] part. I could, with high sincerity, choose to identify as agender, possibly a bit genderfluid, which under the current rules qualifies me to identify as non-binary, which under the current rules qualifies me to identify myself as transgender. I don't do that. I don't see it as being in my interest, but that could change. I could join up in the future.

In closing, I wish that there was the same level of zeal for protecting the very poor, homeless, mentally and chronically ill!

⬐ buckfast

> In closing, I wish that there was the same level of zeal for protecting the very poor, homeless, mentally and chronically ill!

Very much agreed. I suspect that a lot of these identity issues are being deliberately pushed as a distraction from these more fundamental and wider societal concerns of material wellbeing that successive governments have largely failed at addressing.

> While I do not believe that sexuality and dysphoria are chosen

The leap of logic with gender dysphoria in recent years seems to be that if a person has dysphoria, then they actually are the alternate gender (in terms of a replacement to the concept of sex) that they desire to be. So, we're told, people identify into the role of a man or a woman, rather than simply existing as such in material biological reality. Personally I find that assertion rather questionable, but it seems it's no longer acceptable to question this.

Ah yes the classic Dancing Guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ

⬐ cronix

This would have been gold if it was narrated by Steve Irwin/Crocodile Hunter. I felt like I was watching a nature documentary.

⬐ geoduck14

I was expecting cops to arrest him for being stoned.

Also, YT recommended this video: https://youtu.be/SA7bKo4HRTg

It might be the best 5 minutes of your day

⬐ MerelyMortal

In case anyone else wants to know about it before investing their time:

The YouTube video title is "Funniest Leadership Speech ever!"

It's a little humerous, but I didn't hear anything about leadership - the word was never even said by the speaker! The speaker ended by saying "…and that's where I learned where I'm from." So yeah... not about leadership at all. Decent speech, but bad YouTube title. There wasn't any lessons or anything, just a story about the guy when he was a kid.

⬐ culi

> the word was never even said by the speaker

the first sentence of his speech starts off with "when you think of leadership" lol

⬐ MerelyMortal

Oops. I guess that's how uninspiring the speech was. Thank you for the correction.

⬐ felipemnoa

This is so incredible! Not sure if real or not but it seems plausible as to how movements are created. Very illuminating if true. Hope to apply it in future ventures.

⬐ wizzwizz4

For people who want to avoid YouTube, the transcript is https://sive.rs/ff and the video is https://sive.rs/file/DancingGuy-ff.m4v.

The challenge I faced earlier was to get things executed ( expected outcome) from different teams. When I found my first follower , the one who really buys my vision and takes it down, things started to roll faster. This might give you an idea of first followers.

https://youtu.be/fW8amMCVAJQ

One of my favorite lessons in making a difference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ

> Scientists have described dancing mania as a "collective mental disorder", "collective hysterical disorder", and "mass madness".

You can call it a disorder but it's also human nature. I can see this instance being classified as a modern outbreak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ

We're really excited about this new series on The Macro about the first employees at startups. First employees are often unsung heroes at companies, but often incredible crucial to getting them off the ground and setting the culture of the startup.

I'm always remind of Derek Sivers video on First Followers when I think of them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ

Read the video caption as well. Tons of valuable nuggets.

⬐ mobileman

That was awesome. Now, how to get people to be my first follower