[bdcravens]

I know this is an against the grain (for HN at least) take, but I don't disagree.

If you're not working on, or supporting, the company's product, you MAY have a BS job.

Good example: Twitter, which functioned well after layoffs of 80% or so (the owner's persona has damaged the revenue and reputation extensively, but the product itself has been fine). They're maybe the boldest, but hardly the only company in the past couple of years to do mass layoffs and not collapse at the core.

With Google of course, many projects are at some point considered core, to be dismissed later, so the line between "product" and "BS" is blurry and changing.

[dfadsadsf]

Twitter is not great example because revenue collapsed while rest of the industry revenue is up 20% and Meta revenue is up 35%. Besides his personal antics, he fired a lot of sales, safety/trust and support people. He also did it in very public way which worried brands a lot. It’s unclear what contributed the most but final result is not great.

Very few people work on weekend which tells you you need way less people to keep lights on - so keeping lights on with 20% of eng is not surprising.

[ltdanimal]

The Twitter example is the exact nearsighted reason a lot of comments like the one we're all talking about come up.

A lot of smart people spent years trying to make a resilient system and then everyone claims they aren't needed when it doesn't immediately crumble.

There are also many examples of huge gaps in content moderation, customer reps, and other "useless" functions that has lead to it's decay other than just it's unhinged CEO.

Twitter swallowed a poison pill, and we're just seeing some of the onset of sickness.

[horns4lyfe]

Oh no, the gaps in content moderation! How will Twitter be able to perform surveillance and propagandize for the federal government?

[tech_ken]

Anecdotal-ish evidence but it does not seem like Twitter is functioning nearly as well as it used to: https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/search/?q=broken&sort=relev...

[bdcravens]

Possibly but couldn't that be attributed to confirmation bias? It's not like Twitter was bug-free when they were still 7500 employees strong.

[tech_ken]

Yeah sure, as I said it’s basically anecdotal data nothing I would say perfectly proves any particular point. Still it’s more evidence than the original comment provided to support their statement