I strongly disagree with this take; do you think all companies are 80% SREs? Did Twitter make money by serving pages to users?
The Twitter exodus does relate to this, kind of; it's an example of the "fall back on existing revenue streams" strategy (you could call it a private equity playbook, but it's more universal than that) exaggerated by the guy acquiring it not needing more revenue and clobbering the revenue part too.
Twitter pre-Musk had an _enormous_ amount of experiments going on. They were building streaming services, clones of every social network you can think of (Spaces etc.), an entire sports brand around MLB, and so on and so on.
They also had an army of sales people who sold ads and an army of engineers building and optimizing an ad platform, which is (or was?) their actual business.
The "platform going down" narrative from both sides was 100% irrelevant to what was actually going on. "We laid off PMs, salespeople, and engineers and the system didn't crash" is a complete non-sequitor that should be obvious to anyone who's involved in software engineering or maintenance. If anything, I'd expect laying off most of any company to make it much more stable; when you don't change things you introduce fewer bugs.
This is so true. Twitter built TikTok three years before TikTok itself launched. (Vine)
If you aren't growing and building, then obviously you don't need the same amount of people only to maintain what you have. It doesn't take that many people to fix bugs, renew SSL certificates and plug security holes.
Game studios knew this since forever. Once you finish building, if you aren't building something new, then you're laying off. It's not a new thing Twitter/Musk has just discovered. Odd that whenever this is discussed, it's framed as if Twitter-then is the same thing as Twitter-now, minus most of its employees and doing just fine.
Exactly. As an SRE I can wrap up my job and leave within the quarter if changes and growth stop.
Laying off all those people didn't tank the site, it tanked the business!
twitter had an enormous trust&safety moderation org and a lot of the headcount reduction was simply automating trust&safety processes and removing humans as much as possible
It’s true they had a decent sized trust and safety org that was basically all fired, but I don’t think it was anywhere close to most of the layoffs. They laid off ~75% of their headcount, do you really think the company was 3/4 (or even 1/4) trust and safety moderators?
they were moderating the whole world, think about that for a moment
I’m thinking about it, but I’m pretty sure the trust and safety org was far less than 75% of their employees. The low level human moderator work was almost all outside contractors, not employees included in their headcount and layoff numbers.
Sadly that didn't seem to work out very well for women and children.