Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dna_polymerase 980 days ago
There were a lot of videos in this style from the twitter people. Turns out they run fine on 20 % remaining workforce.
4 comments

Surely this is because Elon is there picking up the slack for the missing 80%.
Or, you know, the people dealing with the advertisers ("partners") are gone and no money is coming in. But sure the servers are still running ;)
no idea why you need a dedicated person for dealing with the advertisers. it seemed to be just pressure from adl to scare the advertisers away, or otherwise adl will generate controversy

a very slimy and backwards model

Without internal Twitter context, but having seen companies with marketing teams... there's a lot of people involved in doing close work with partners, whether advertisement ones or others. On the tech side it's kind of like AWS support - sure, everyone had access to the support portal, but once you start spending $$$, you'll get dedicated people sitting in your company's slack channel, providing support, advice and planning if you need it. (Sure, it doesn't always work great, but the idea holds) I'm sure that whoever was the big ad spender with Twitter has a dedicated contact reachable more directly. (And possibly negotiating better deals than advertised to everyone)
> a very slimy and backwards model

perhaps it is, but that's the business a lot of big tech is in. ads drive everything. google is an advertising company with a lot of data mining on the front-end.

if your ad game and monitization isn't tight then you don't have a company, you have a public service, and one that will gas out pretty quickly.

because advertising and marketing are still very much industries where your "face card" matters and where companies will spend millions of dollars elsewhere if Chet from Advertising gets laid off.
Underrated.
"the missing 80%" you mean the ones that would go from the salad bar to the yoga class and then go into a DEI meeting and talking about how we must change "the color of our vibes"?

Yeah I think Elon is almost picking up that slack. But I doubt anyone could find him at an yoga class

You’ve made up a guy and are mad about it but go off
There was probably a lot of slack at twitter, but as an outsider it's incredibly hard to correctly identify who is the slack and who is doing real work (and a lot of people are somewhat in-between) in such a short amount of time. Musk took a massive risk and I'm sure a lot of the collateral damage were people doing genuine work.

Keep in mind a lot of the slacker are really good at pretending to do real work and they've had a long time to hone their skills.

That's any company. Twitter is not special.

The gp I think is talking about rage bait videos on social media where people used to post how work was so easy at xyz company. We should know better than rely on rage bait for information. Ask your friends who worked there if they knew anyone slacking off.

with that i agree, the video was just a funny video and not meant to be taken as a documentary.
I mean, they're making a lot less money, so I dunno. It's easy to run a company with a skeleton crew if you run it at a loss. it's the cost efficiency that makes it harder.
Half the revenue and being fined for failing to prevent child sexual abuse is fine?
Pareto principle in full effect