[morelinks]

I don’t work in tech (and my question here will prove that) but how does a company lay off 10,000 people without seriously harming their product or ceasing products all together? Is tech that bloated? What are people doing all day where it’s realistic to lay of 10,000 people?

[stu2b50]

Working on R&D for anticipated features. The number of employees that work purely on KTLO is going to be under half at least. The rest are justifying the large revenue multipliers tech stocks get - from their rather high growth rates, which are from expansion and moonshots that pan out.

Now that interest rates are high, the calculus for expansion projects is very different. You may very well be spending more money than you anticipated returning from your moonshots.

[jwagenet]

KLTO: keep the lights on, in case anyone else was wondering.

[satvikpendem]

This was such an unnecessary term to initialize by the parent, when it had a pivotal meaning in the sentence. I was wondering what the hell. KLTO meant and thought it was the internal codename for TikTok or something.

[seizethecheese]

This is not borne out by the data. The data shows most layoffs are in recruiting, HR, product, design, data science. Yes, it’s cutting new projects but it’s also just trimming fat.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I don't understand your comment. If you're cutting back on future features, not existing operations, you'd absolutely expect product and design to take a big hit, and then of course recruiting and HR because your employee counts are down and you're not hiring.

Data science tends to span both (future product dev and analysis of existing functionality), and data science can be particularly tricky to assign a value to, so not surprised there are also significant cuts there.

[seizethecheese]

What I left out is that engineering is mostly not being cut.

[x86x87]

the twitter approach! let go of all people that are not needed for KTLO

[wpietri]

And then another 25%. And then fire anybody who is honest with the CEO.

[x86x87]

And call it muskops! Musk now singlehandedly keeps twitter up!

[darth_avocado]

1. You stop pretty much building anything new. That’s what most people are working on.

2. If you go deeper with cuts, most things will continue to work. But behind the scenes it’s a dumpster fire with people just trying to keep things running as much as possible. Things still work, but there will be bigger consequences down the road.

3. You go even deeper. Things work until they don’t. People who can fix it are no longer there. You decide to diversify away from that part of business and lose revenue.

The thing is there is a bloat in every single organization you have and tech companies are no different. But depending on how big 10000 is as a percentage of your total headcount, the impact can be anywhere from small to catastrophic

[hellomyguys]

>Is tech that bloated?

Yes

>What are people doing all day where it’s realistic to lay of 10,000 people?

They're probably in meetings, while a fraction of their time is actually spent doing work.

[gabereiser]

Teens by the millions are addicted to the scroll... They could just put it on autopilot at this point and their revenue streams wouldn't budge.

[gretch]

This mentality wouldn’t have worked out for MySpace or Snapchat or Facebook and it’s probably not going to be good for whoever is momentarily king of the hill.

[satvikpendem]

I wonder if there will ever come a point where the algorithms are really just that good to keep people and newer generations hooked permanently, and that currently we are still in a supoptimal local maxima. For example, people play at the same casinos for decades.

[gabereiser]

Will ever come? It's here now.

https://wallaroomedia.com/blog/social-media/tiktok-statistic...

[nathanvanfleet]

Maybe they had internal teams that were working on a new social network app and are now divesting from that (not working on it, not releasing it). Maybe they had a lot of smaller teams who were iterating on the experience to increase engagement, lower friction etc which they will now not pursue etc. "Bloat" is a bit naive that somehow they are just paid to look at the left corner of their office or something. The company built out teams to look into new experiences or to make the experience better and they are going to be doing less of that at least for a while

[paxys]

The vast majority of employees at any tech company are working on the next version of the product. So huge layoffs will not impact their ability to keep the lights on, but will likely have an impact on the product roadmap a few months or even years down the line.

[tootie]

Not everyone at a tech company works on the product. It takes a ton of staff to do things like marketing, ad sales, content moderation. They may be backing away from some markets or maybe they automated a lot of the work.

[loeg]

It's essentially the same as R&D layoffs in other industries, it's just that tech companies have comparatively huge R&D departments funded by outsized proceeds from other business units.