[maximumcomfy]

What a meme article. "Random professor says layoffs don't improve profitably"

Real reason:

Twitter cut half its staff and still works fine. Everyone said it would explode and the servers would shit the bed, but you don't need 7000 employees to maintain 5 features. As soon as it was clear half the employees were redundant, other companies realized they could lay off some of their useless people too. Companies had huge bloat and realized the core operations would be fine if you can some people, so they did.

[Salgat]

Theres no indication that it's doing fine. In fact, Twitter has lost half of its top 100 advertisers recently (which is where most of its revenue is). Unfortunately Twitter is not a public company so we have no idea how much of it is being propped up right now.

https://www.npr.org/2022/11/25/1139180002/twitter-loses-50-t...

[flarg]

The tech is fine, but Twitter is a total cesspool now. Maybe there's more to tech firms than just tech?

[fsociety]

Features have been breaking in production, journalists have commented on “weird behaviors” in the app AKA consistency issues. I think long-term these small breakages will burn the engineering team out, in addition to the unnecessary drama they have been brought into.

More interestingly, I have a theory that the app has not had a large-scale breakage precisely because of the reason they had bloat.

Having a large org run on microservices makes it likely that you are running more infra than you require. But then failures tend to be self-contained in systems. This then means that on average, a failure will only affect one small part of the system rather than the whole.

It will be interesting to hear post-mortems from engineers once the spotlight dies down and people are ready to talk about what is happening internally.

[devwastaken]

Twitter was doing amazing, until sold. You're thinking in traditional business, not silicon valley type. Twitters original investors got all their money back out of it. That was the goal. Not a service that was efficient or could live off of having less.

By having all those workers and features in the works, it prolonged their position and increased evaluation. Which as we can see worked amazingly. Usually they would have sold to a tech giant like Microsoft or Facebook. An entity that can eat the cost because they don't know what to do with themselves and don't care about profits.

Musk won't make back what they bought Twitter for, not even close, and neither would have the original investors if nobody bought it.