“I worked at Facebook when we [were] 200. [Twitter’s] layoffs are appropriate”

For a point of comparison, Discord scaled to 100 million MAU with just 5 platform engineers. That&#x27;s about 1&#x2F;3 of Twitter&#x27;s user count and Discord was also doing both voice and video chat.<p>At this point, Discord is probably larger than Twitter even on the MAU metric and is handling <i>far</i> more concurrent users and absurdly more events. They&#x27;ve had to scale their staff in the past two years, but it&#x27;s still considerably smaller than Twitter will be even even after the layoffs.<p>Related discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14748028" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14748028</a><p>More details: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;elixir-lang.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;10&#x2F;08&#x2F;real-time-communication-at-scale-with-elixir-at-discord&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;elixir-lang.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;10&#x2F;08&#x2F;real-time-communicat...</a>

Having worked at (and presumably left) a company when it was a tiny fraction of its current size is probably a stronger signal that you <i>don&#x27;t</i> know what it takes (in terms of headcount) to run a large company than a signal that you do.<p>Did Twitter require <i>just that</i> many people? Maybe, maybe not. But a 50% haircut with no meaningful basis in role&#x2F;performance is an indicator that the layoffs were anything but appropriate.

VC-funded companies don’t hire the number of employees they <i>need</i>, they hire the amount they can <i>afford</i>. For hyper growth companies, whatever brilliant spark created their trajectory will eventually be usurped by empire builders who worm their way into anything with the smell of success. The headcount needed is then always inflated due to middle management ambitions, and systems are set up to utilize (and implicitly justify) the available resources.

Well the new probably-true rumor is that they&#x27;re already trying to hire back some of the people they got rid of. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;CaseyNewton&#x2F;status&#x2F;1589075543420325888" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;CaseyNewton&#x2F;status&#x2F;15890755434203...</a><p>Edit: Oh there&#x27;s already an HN post about it. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33488224" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33488224</a>

There are two very different questions:<p>1. Could twitter have been built in such a way that it was a stable company with half as many people?<p>2. Could you chop X% of twitter off and have the remainder of the company want to and be able to restructure and self-repair into a stable company.<p>I think the answer to #1 is yes, but #2 is a complete mystery to me.<p>It&#x27;s the difference between &quot;Could a raspberry pi run linux?&quot; and &quot;Can I remove half material in my mac by weight of my mac and still have it run linux?&quot;

The issue is not the layoffs, the issue is how they are managed. No other company is taking as much heat as twitter for layoffs because no one is managing it as badly. Elon Musk is heading the same path as Mark Zuckerberg - his brand has ended.

I&#x27;m sure you can run a version of twitter or Facebook with just a couple of hundred people but it will be a struggle.<p>Both companies have to work with 100s of governments, government agencies, advertisers and large organisations across the globe. Hard to do with just a handful of people.<p>You could automate all moderation and spam filtering and maintain that system with a team of a dozen people. It would work to an extent but with lots of problems.<p>20 programmers rolling out features? Sure but don&#x27;t expect too much.

The tweet&#x27;s author is a product designer who worked at FB for 4 years from 2008-2012, i.e. they left before FB hit massive scale, and more importantly has little to no understanding of the engineering &#x2F; ops &#x2F; content moderation required to run FB in the year 2022. They have since not worked at any company aside from as an investor (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;bobby-goodlatte&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;bobby-goodlatte&#x2F;</a>). I&#x27;m not making any claim on whether FB has too many employees, but this person is clueless.

These people all don’t appreciate that social media is a regulated business now.<p>It’s a Silicon Valley thing to treat that as an optional cost center but Elon is fucking around and will find out in Europe and Asia in relatively short order

Am I the only one who thinks the Twitter UI is awful? To be fair, all I’ve ever seen is the desktop&#x2F;browser UI, don’t know what the mobile app looks like. For that matter, I think both Facebook and LinkedIn’s UI’s are pretty bad.<p>I’ve been communicating online since USENET days. I find it interesting to see just how many times the same thing has been reinvented and how bad it can be.

you need a ton of people to run an ad platform modern advertisers will actually use. and a ton of ad sales people to convince them to use it. twitter the product is pretty simple. twitter the business is not

When is startup mode you can get away with anything. Trying to stabilize the business to sustain it requires spending money on non-engineering parts of the business. Spending on those areas are what often dooms the company to bloat. A lot of these companies also try to spin up projects to spend capital on the &quot;next best thing&quot;. But they don&#x27;t realize that the only reason they exist is purely down to luck and not any type of smarts from the founders. But the founders generally don&#x27;t realize they had dumb luck.<p>You see this with Google and Facebook where their main product was being the one which got momentum at that time and everything else they try to invent is pure trash. The only growth FB has had is through acquisitions and then it&#x27;s a scattergun approach. These companies are filled with waste.

That you <i>can</i> run Twitter with a much smaller crew is probably true, but also kind of irrelevant. Question is, can you make it so overnight.<p>You write stuff totally differently depending on whether it&#x27;s going to be maintained by just you, or a team of 50 DevOps etc. Yes you could probably run stuff on N servers instead of M where N &lt;&lt; M, thus requiring much fewer sysadmin support etc but that requires that you <i>designed</i> things that way from the get go.<p>But how much work is it to realign stuff to run this way? Probably initially more work than just keeping it going as is.<p>It&#x27;s like, you can&#x27;t take a ICE car and turn it electric by just cutting out the engine and sticking a battery where the fuel tank was.

To me this comment is a bit naive, as the main point of hiring people in silicon valley for a public tech company is to keep people from working on something worthwhile so that competition doesn&#x27;t exist. That&#x27;s why so many people &quot;work&quot; at TWTR and other large tech companies companies. Obviously all of these companies are extremely overstaffed, as anyone who has worked at one can easily attest to.

The amount, but probably not the way they were executed (in several different ways)

Any new insights here compared to other investors foaming at the mouth over the prospect of fb laying off folks?

A company I helped found and run went through many up and down cycles where we expanded and shrank head count several times over a period of a few years.<p>My takeaway was this: there is a strong tendency to want to convince yourself you don&#x27;t have to let go of as many people as you do. But then you just end up doing it in waves and in fact it&#x27;s much more painful.<p>The way Musk did this is inexcusable and reprehensible, but I have no doubt that Twitter was incredibly bloated. In fact, one could make the argument that it didn&#x27;t really matter who got fired, it could be a random decision. Not very empathetic but from the business perspective I think that&#x27;s probably the case, and Elon Musk may be a nutcase but one thing he knows something about is how tech companies work.

Layoffs are great. They weed out the unproductive, the weak, the ones that don’t deserve such salary.<p>The good employees will find employment regardless. The bad ones won’t.<p>Nothing to see here. In fact, the world could use way way way more layoffs now.

I see a lot of people <i>assuming</i> that twitter doesn&#x27;t need that many employees. Usually stated with a high degree of certainty. Certainly I can&#x27;t come up with a reason why they should have that many employees.<p>However, lack of counterarguments is the weakest form of evidence, and such situations have the annoying property that public opinion is easily swayed and frequently in the wrong direction.<p>So does anyone positively <i>know</i> that twitter&#x27;s employees were not doing much useful, or is everyone (including, possibly, Elon Musk) just following their gut feeling?