The point is they didn’t complain because they were aligned with the people asking them to handle, and they also handled it real quick, not stand tos report flow for sure.
Presumably you'd build a coherent plan for what the future company would need, figure out which employees are best suited to get you there, and then make strategic layoffs to non-core services and teams outside of that scope. Or you could send a Google doc to every employee with two days notice saying "Click here to work yourself to death for uncertain reward" and then be surprised when hardly anyone agrees.
considering that Black Friday, Qatar World Cup and Christmas are all in the next 30 days, one might have thought he'd want to capitalize on the increased traffic and advertiser interest in his first week on the job.
It doesn't even look like there will be any advertisers left by the time the dust settles.
Apparently usage of Twitter is growing, instead of decreasing. So you as an advertiser will just ignore a platform with a massive user base just because you don't like the owner?
Advertisers can buy ads anywhere. Twitter has always had the least amount of bargaining power of all the ad-driven social networks.
It was up to Musk to assure Twitter's biggest revenue sources that he would lead with a steady hand. He hasn't done anything except publicly revel in firing people, then ignore the issue of trolls using his $8/mo. feature to impersonate corporate brands.
Digital ad campaigns have budgets, and they can be shifted around platforms without much hassle. The money will be shifted to platforms that actually listen to what advertisers are asking for, which is basic brand safety.
He is pushing the limits (and maybe finding them) of how quickly you can correct head count in a larger company. We won’t know if his actual vision for the product is bad until he gets done with this transitional period and can start releasing updates. Basically I’d argue not much happened yet but HR meetings.
Have you ever worked on a large org with a main product that kept getting updated under the hoods to support more and more "invisible" features that ultimately drive how the product works?
Because if you did you should know that updates are constantly happening...
Twitter's longest standing and most valuable users access it solely via 3rd party smartphone apps, which use an API that's not been updated for many years and have zero new features from twitter in that time.
The service is identical to 2009 or something as far as I'm concerned, and still appears broken as far as video embeds go to this day. It's one of the heaviest and slowest loading sites I can think of.
To be fair, that design and engineering staff took over a year and couldn't deliver an "edit" feature. Project Veritas caught some Twitter engineer on camera claiming to work 4 hours per week.
This is not an endorsement of Elon or anything he's doing with Twitter, but Twitter's core product is not complicated. For some comparisons:
Rumble has 35 employees
When WhatsApp was sold to FB in 2014 they had 55 employees.
WeChat has about 1400 employees.
My guess is you could successfully run Twitter with a few hundred employees.
Internal reps for large advertisers and agencies alone would exceed that number. Long tail advertisers can self-serve, but ad platforms need their whales and whales expect inside reps.
I posit brand ads require more staffing, because they require more sales efforts to get advertisers to buy. Direct response is easier to measure the ROAS, but for brand ads, it's a really good idea to have someone selling ads constantly to your existing clients. Otherwise, many clients in the mid-size space ($100k-$5M/year, approximately) probably can't measure their return, which means those budgets are always at risk of being cut.
With direct response, even data-naive decision makers can figure the value of.
According to Wikipedia WeChat's parent company Tencent had 112,000 employees in 2021. That company has many different products, but where does the 1,400 number come from?
WeChat does push to talk voice chat, image sharing like snapchat, broadcast messaging, video conferencing, video sharing, and digital payments. What is Twitter doing behind the scenes that justifies multiple times the amount of employees at WeChat?
WeChat has always been part of Tencent. It was piggybacking on the infra of what was already one of the biggest tech companies in the world. That's like comparing the number of Gmail employees to Twitter, sure it serves lots of users, but it doesn't have to worry about so much of what a standalone company has to deal with
They weren't making money with those 1000 employees, either. Revenue 10X'd since then (along with cost).
WhatsApp/YouTube were in the same boat when purchased. Good at getting active users but monetizing takes a lot of employees and they hadn't tackled that yet when acquired
If it’s a conceptually complex system then the devs weren’t really that good in the first place. Yeah, technical debt happens, but you can’t have both that the system had good technical leadership and it can’t possibly stay up under replacement employees. (My impression is that it will stay up.)
What magical unicorn of a place have you worked at that could survive multiple entire teams quitting at once? Do you think the induction manuals literally jump of the shelf and explain themselves to the new hires that there isn't an HR team to hire, a security team to grant their access and a department to welcome them?
This is like the flight crew being raptured. The plane is going to crash.
This is the ground crew being raptured, the flight crew all exploding, the plane had an engine removed "to trim the fat", the company who sold you fuel pulled out of the deal, everyone on the plane who has ever played flight simulator dies and is replaced one of those people who know just enough to fuck up.
All could, and one of them passed through full employee replacement when it failed to raise a round of funding. They would have to suffer and hire good people, not miscellaneous cogs, but they would survive.
There's a possibility that it's a Rube Goldberg machine written by bad devs that is actually crap and deserves a rewrite, but it's the thing that currently Elon has. If it goes down and there's no one left to bring it back up, how is that not a disaster for him? Is he going to say "Just give us 3 months folks, we'll be back online with much better code, I've got the hardcore devs right h..."
Actually he'll promise a self-coding website within 1 month.. Another month, promise.. Just pay us 8 bucks now and you'll get it very soon!
Hum, idk, it depends on who left. I think I agree that never coming back up is a tall order. There ought to be enough competent people left, but I’d bet something like Twitter will set a record (at least for the past decade) for downtime in the next year
The commenters in an unrelated thread aren't the ones letting Twitter employees eat dirt... that's a single person that just laid off something like 70% of the organization in the past two weeks.
Unfortunately no, the Ventura behavior is another thing, you simply have to download the image to use it as a wallpaper (in order to don't have a huge folder in "/System/Library/Desktop\ Pictures" .
I don't know if macOS Ventura fixes this behavior of Photos, I'll try when it will be out of beta.
