This is an important point.
Especially overt the last two (three now?) years, it's become pretty apparent many software jobs are superfluous, even those that are ostensibly "skilled" or "difficult."
I do wonder what the actual "needed" number of technical staff these companies would have in a perfectly "efficient" environment. Let's hope we don't have to find out.
Twitter was the experiment. Elon showed up and started cutting headcount left and right. People were even encouraged to just walk out. On paper this was supposed to lead to the immanent collapse of it's service.
That didn't happen and instead every other tech CEO started to wonder about the amount of fat in their org.
"On paper this was supposed to lead to the immanent collapse of it's service."
I don't know anyone who expected this. The typical failure mode is slow degradation and lack of new development, not sudden collapse. Services become flakier, innovation stops. There was probably some fat to cut,as you put it, but the concept of eating your seed corn is also relevant.
>> I don't know anyone who expected this
You can read the HN threads from when this happened. People expected its imminent collapse.
It was done during the 2022 FIFA World Cup and you had people here predicting that it wouldn't last through the weekend due to that.
Twitter generated $5bn in revenue in 2021. Since Musk bought it, it's been on a rapid decline. In 2024 it generated $2.5bn in revenue... 50% of its pre-Musk numbers (46% with inflation)!
Worse, it continues to trend downward.
Most sane tech CEOs would prefer to keep their upward trend and $5+ billion revenue rather than saving $1 billion to lose $2.5 billion and invert their slope.
Remarkably - it’s more profitable now.
Also, most layoffs don’t cause huge cuts to advertising spend on their platform because of personal spite or political reasons. The product for all intents and purposes as an advertiser is the exact same.
That's just objectively not true.
Yeah I think people understate how large of an impact this had.
My immediate reaction to that was the "jig is up"--I argued with friends that Twitters functionality would remain intact, there'd be no major outages, etc and they couldn't understand how that'd be possible.
Many if not most engineers are working on things 2-5 years out, not keeping services running.
i think the total reduction was about 2/3 if memory serves? so 1 in 3 is that number you'd be looking at for "actually useful". heavy air quotes on that.