[swellguy]

Big companies are also ridiculously overstaffed, as Elon Musk proved empirically. And many of them have only one thing that works and ambitions of doing more than will never work out. So there's a lot of wasted talent, in other words, but this ability to waste talent necessitates in person communication, just to make sure everyone is stack ranked according to the current arbitrary and probably mindless goals.

[ryandrake]

Musk didn’t prove anything. All he showed so far is that if you turn off the airplane engine mid-flight, it will glide for a time on momentum.

[grepfru_it]

Still waiting for all the major failures people have been clamoring about. I think the real talk is that you can run a lot of dotcoms on a skeleton crew and when money becomes tight you can trim a lot of fat. It’s not something people like to hear because they realize they are the fat

[wepple]

Perhaps that’s me, the fat? If I were let go tomorrow there wouldn’t be any negative consequences for probably at least a year.

I do security things, and it seems those folks are all gone from Twitter.

But my hypothesis is that the negatives won’t emerge for some time, at which point something bad happens and everyone will be standing around shaking their heads at how negligent it was.

Although more generally I do sympathize with the idea that most tech companies are at least a little bloated because money has so often been cheap & revenues always go up historically

[rightbyte]

I don't like the "trim fat" methaphor. Layoffs are more or less random. There is no good, from the company perspective, selection.

[grepfru_it]

Now is the time for managers and directors to find reasons to let go of the employees they don’t like. Some people don’t like eating fat, others will suck on it all day. Personally I trim a bit of fat off my meats before smoking them

[danaris]

There have been major failures. Several times there were outages at Twitter that were plenty serious enough to be a death knell, or near enough, for a company with less network effect keeping people using them.

[grepfru_it]

I’ve taken FAANG sites down and took it personally when anyone got a 500 error for a minor change. Truth is, no one really cares. You can complain it’s down but who are you going to leave them for? Welcome to running a lean ship. Twitter isn’t hurting

[rightbyte]

Come on. I have been whining about Twitter et al. being bloated for years. There is no way all those engineers were needed.

I Twitter fails due to the mass layoffs it doesn't prove much either since it might be too hard to unwind a mess.