> But going into a respected tech company like Twitter and gutting 80% of the workforce, acting like you know better than the engineers who built the thing, and rolling out and back policies and features without any real plan or thought, is showing that Elon believes he can just rinse and repeat his grindcore/dictatorial culture on any company and it will be successful.
I think gutting 80% of your workforce and showing that Twitter will continue running as a site is a pretty incredible POC. I don't know if you can separate the chaos based on erratic decision making and Musk personality. But I imagine some tech execs running successful simple products with huge eng head count behind it looks at this and thinks that an engineering product doesn't necessarily need thousands of engineers. I think the next few years you'll see a huge reduction in head count across the board. And on top of that, the amount of change and experimentation (some or most of it bad) can continue with a much lower headcount.
> We all are seeing this unfold and these posts are shorthand ways of calling this out
HN isn't a place to vote your sentiment like a popularity contest. It's a place for discussion. So if you post the equivalent of "space man bad", and someone does believe, yes, space man is bad, he shouldn't necessarily upvote it. It's just low quality low information post, something normally shunned on this platform.
> I think gutting 80% of your workforce and showing that Twitter will continue running as a site is a pretty incredible POC.
Twitter may have had some bloat, but it also had excellent SREs and solid reliability engineering. Nobody who knew about that expected it to collapse overnight.
But serious failures will happen, as the graceful degradation turns into not-so-graceful outages, new features break things in unexpected ways, and the remaining infra staff burn out. It’s just a matter of time.
I'd love to hear some predictions or metrics to look out for in the next few months/years. Tech valuations and free money have been frothy for so long, no one bothered asking what is actually needed to run a service at a meaningful scale, but we may have the answer soon.
I'm reminded of corporate raider Carl Ichan firing 12 floors at of people after spending some time and not being able to figure out what they do. The company was ACM (manufacturing railcars), about 30 years ago. Turns out those 12 floors of people were actually costing jobs in other place just to support them. Well he fired all 12 floors and nothing changed.
I think gutting 80% of your workforce and showing that Twitter will continue running as a site is a pretty incredible POC. I don't know if you can separate the chaos based on erratic decision making and Musk personality. But I imagine some tech execs running successful simple products with huge eng head count behind it looks at this and thinks that an engineering product doesn't necessarily need thousands of engineers. I think the next few years you'll see a huge reduction in head count across the board. And on top of that, the amount of change and experimentation (some or most of it bad) can continue with a much lower headcount.
> We all are seeing this unfold and these posts are shorthand ways of calling this out
HN isn't a place to vote your sentiment like a popularity contest. It's a place for discussion. So if you post the equivalent of "space man bad", and someone does believe, yes, space man is bad, he shouldn't necessarily upvote it. It's just low quality low information post, something normally shunned on this platform.