[contravariant]

I see a lot of people assuming that twitter doesn't need that many employees. Usually stated with a high degree of certainty. Certainly I can't come up with a reason why they should have that many employees.

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.

So does anyone positively know that twitter's employees were not doing much useful, or is everyone (including, possibly, Elon Musk) just following their gut feeling?

[bombcar]

Jack seems to think they grew too quickly but what would he know?

https://twitter.com/jack/status/1588913276980633600

[dilyevsky]

Jack seems to think (and say) whatever is good for jack. In this case to peddle his new social network

[fragmede]

Not much. He spent all of his time running Square, and there are only so many hours in the day, which is why Twitter was languishing on the vine until this bit of excitement happened.

[kelp]

I was at Square from 2011 - 2017 and talked to Jack pretty often, including about how he managed his time. And his calendar was public.

When I was at Square and Jack was also working at Twitter, he split his days evenly across both companies.

At Square we were frustrated he wasn’t spending enough time on us.

I don’t know what it was like after mid 2017.

[bombcar]

Speaking of vine I wonder if the skeleton vine maintenance crew got the boot.

[cmeacham98]

"Grew too quickly" does not imply that Twitter currently has too many engineers, only that they did at some point in the past.

[bawolff]

Honestly the part that seems madness to me is not the downsizing but how quickly.

If a company doubled in size overnight that would be a huge red flag. Same thing for shrinking. Sudden scale changes are really really hard to pull off.

[harlequinn77]

You're right that this is all mostly assumption.

I've not seen anything about what they working, or even a break down by department, job role etc.

The only thing was something like "10 managers for every developer", and who knows if that's true.

I'd love to see some stats, but doubt we ever will.

I'd also love to get some responses from the remaining high performing tech talent about their opinion of it all. There was that guy who recently blew a whistle on the spread/blind-eye of bots and he seemed annoyed with the corporate culture.

On the other hand, every thread here and on social media is probably filled with upset people who have been laid off, hoping to swing public perception against New Twitter.

It's as clear as mud!

[paxys]

In any tech company out there only a small number of employees are tasked with keeping the lights on. The majority are working on new feature development. So "you can run [company] with fewer employees" is trivially true.

Of course the flip side of that is – without these employees you will also not be able to deliver on all these new features. In Twitter's case Elon has decided that whatever new features the previous leadership were cooking are irrelevant now.