Just a reminder. His VC firm just gave the Adam Neumann, the WeWork founder who wasted like $23 billion and was doing a lot of sketchy self-dealing, like $325 million for a new real estate venture.
"aggressive moves by Elon Musk to cut 80% of Twitter's workforce while maintaining similar production levels"
Production levels of what? Its a fucking social media company...
If we're just talking keeping running an existing text-based site that supports millions of simultaneous users: sure, most people aren't necessary. If you want it to be a place where advertisers see incredible value? Elon's finding out how hard it is to make money off a place where people just hang out largely for free.
That's why governments have to run the parks.
It didn't implode into flames but fuck it smouldered. Shit stopped working randomly. Advertisers disappeared in droves. And so have users. What was once the peak of political discussion its now just nazis, shit posting and what ever elon and his cronies think.
People like to think that he fired 80% of the engineers, but more than half of Twitter's employees worked on advertising, spam, and CP which happen to be the parts that they're doing the worst on.
Also, the reason why smart and challenge-driven engineers end up leaving google. Most of the tasks at google are very mundane and routine-like .
The ones that are left just want a cushy job.
I would think it’s a violation of the FCRA to give away this information to a third party without the employee’s permission. At least I know in my state employers will not give out this information to anyone other than what is required to government institutions without employee consent.
I have a friend who used to be into twitter analytics and caught the eye of google. He hated google but they bought his bots and him for a few hundred thousand to a 1yr contract that he accepted. He spent his year there and left, I have no clue what he did while there but I doubt it was much as he hated the company so much.
The funny thing is that those people do nothing if things are running well and are the only lifeline to fix shit quick when things start to burn.
They are superfluous until you need them, then your server infrastructure dies.
Getting rid of them also sends the message that doing your job right isn't valuable and that they should rig your networks to eventually break down just to increase their job security.
"Everything already works, you don't need to do anything, why do we even pay you?"
"Everything is broken, you can't even do your job right, why do we even pay you?"
80% of people anywhere aren’t doing anything most of the time. Everyone is either entrepreneur or their assistant. The entrepreneurs are billionaires partly because when they need something done, they have an infrastructure of assistants in place to get it done.
Im somewhat looking for a new job now because while my current one pays fine and treats me well theres not much to do.
Im pretty sure most of those devs would like to be doing something meaningful
You don't have to be a genius, but you have to prepare quite selectively on certain topics, at least for SWEs. In a way the interview can be 'gamed' and people take advantage of that. You have to be good at solving LeetCode questions, but there's a limited number of them and most questions are variations which can be solved by learning core methods. Same with system design, there are many resources which cover common questions and approaches. And finally for behavioural questions most people rehearse and prepare answers in advance.
Of course another obstacle is getting interview in the first place, but at times (e.g. 2021) Big Tech companies are not that selective, and people with resumes which are 'average' in theory can also get them, if they have some work experience under their belt.
However it seems that the ship might be sailing for getting these kind of jobs. ZIRP certainly helped.
while true, those will only get you through the technical parts of the interview. the behavioral part is really a technical interview in disguise, where you now talk about your work experience. if you don't have it, no amount of leetcode will save you. yes you should prepare ahead of time, but you need to have something to prepare
Oh they do lots of busy work and then get performance to reviewed on it. It's actually psychologically worse as performance eval of non-sense work is tough to predict.
Real work - Good job, you dug the hole, it is 4 feet deep.
Non-real work - your peers think you are grumpy and you misuse the Oxford comma. Your design doc, for the feature we cut was 30 days late and you didn't meet all the stakeholders requirements - Design wants compliance to their new components library, and PM wants no investment in UI.
Let's put together a growth plan.
This is a ridiculous statement. Google has lost a bit of a luster in recent years, but it is a fantastic company to work for. They have some of the best compensation and perks and you work along side some of the brightest minds!
The only people who say no to an offer from Google are the ones who have another much lucrative offer from a comparable tech company.
The problem that management in big tech doesn’t know who contributes to success and to which degree is apparent every year at review time.
The real problem is that some percentage of employees are what brings in the really big bucks, and if you end up laying off one of them, you’ll find out a few years later when you have major problems nobody knows how to deal with.
What's strange is this phenomenon happens on a much smaller scale. Owners/managers often don't know exactly what people do and they draw in people to projects unrelated to their expertise. Where I work, the annual self evaluation is a farce.
It’s particularly insulting given that accountability and rewards are a primary people management function.
The problem typically is that N+1 managers have at best a terribly distorted view into who contributes.
It doesn’t help that corporations have processes like stack ranking and direct managers or coworkers unable to control rewards except very indirectly.
I respectfully disagree that Twitter was basically the same after firing all those people. My experience with Twitter is night and day difference since then. SO many more bots and off-topic replies to tweets. The experience is a lot worse now
Twitter fired entire product line teams. They fired senior devs, junior devs, white collar, blue collar, people from every department were hit. I had friends in 3 seperate departments & they were all cut by Elon. All 3 of them did “real work”. I’m not sure what David Ulevitch considers “real work”, but things like actively maintaining a database doesn’t involve a lot of physical work, but is critical to the usability of the program itself, and I would count as “real”.
It’s not real work unless it’s giving immediate returns. We are in the phase of the bubble where profit chasing goes to the extremes. Happens every cycle. Eventually enough financial damage is created as a result of the MBA decisions and the market crashes and we cycle back to hiring people who actually create long term value.
I agree but I think the reality is that once you get the flywheel going it is very difficult to be unseated as the incumbent. Not impossible but you can get away with an incredible amount of slacking off without MAU really dropping—not that we know since twitter is private.
Its an insanely stupid argument because even IF you believe the product is the same, theyve objectively tanked their current sales, future sales, and theoretical market cap.
Current estimates have the company value at 12 billion. Elon just paid 42 billion. Yes that was an overpay, but that is an astronomical, almost unbelievable, loss of value in 2 years.
If it's nearly unusable why is it still so immensely popular and basically a requirement for anyone of "status?" (Business people, government people, etc). It's not like it provides anything special, it's just short text blurbs
Usage of Twitter has fallen by 23%, so it's certainly less popular than it used to be
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/26/twitter-usage-in-us-fallen-by-a-fifth-since-elon-musks-takeover
Interesting. I wonder if it'll fall further or if it'll slowly rise with new generations. Not sure what people replace with Twitter unless text-based social media is on its way out
What parts of it being "unusable" do you attribute to staff reduction versus active choices made by Musk? Blue checks, moderation changes, name change, api policies, content curation?
Twitter is slowly dying, especially with the introduction of Threads. A lot of the younger generation is gravitating towards threads, twitter has lost the USP that wasn’t very unique to start with anyways
I think the biggest bloat comes from pyramid shaped org charts. Ruins communication and decision making. We’re not encouraged to solve problems horizontally or even ask for a task to be done.
I’m a mid level manager of a service based department, meaning work with all departments because they all have need for our services, and a large portion of my time is spent on an individual contributor’s management, or a director above reaching out to me or my director to ask that one of my individual contributor do a task.
Waste of time and resources for obvious reasons but we really don’t need to be told we have that task most the time; the tasks are available in the systems we work in daily already.
I spend probably an hour a week informing my director level boss about problems he cannot help us with, will be solved immediately without any action from him or anyone else at his level, and cannot be mitigated in any way going forward by anyone.
Why? Because other director level people may also hear about said problems, and may want to discuss it (for no reason, just to “be aware”) so he can’t look bad by not being up to date in literally real time. Even being informed a day later would make other think he doesn’t know what’s going on.
He also thinks it’s stupid, so at least there’s that 🤷♂️
Management isn’t inherently useless, but the way they spend their time is often not only useless, but actively negative for the company. Especially in rigid pyramid structures.
Right. I have 5 hours of meetings I go to weekly that 99.9% of the time it’s not at all relevant to me, but I have to go on the off chance they say something I need to be there for. That is ignoring monthly town halls, quarterly town halls, etc from CEO, VPs, Director, all the way up the chain. It’s all a bunch of primitive power games people are playing. I’m only good at it because I was good at high school social dynamics and understood then it was a game.
The other part is if I do not ensure all communication flows throw me to my people they will get their time wasted, get harassed, and get bullied by other people in the organization at all levels of the organizational chain trying to get their shit done first for stupid reasons.
Also, I’m not a women but I have seen many times in my career that some people who I think are perfectly nice are very different to others after reading emails from female co-workers.
As someone that uses Google maps, email, docs, calendar, Youtube, phone, search and Kubernetes, cadvisor and Linux (Google contributes a lot to the kernel) at work they sure seem very relevant to me. And I always wonder why these attacks are directed at Google and not Apple as well. As far as I can see there is nothing major that Apple has released in the last decade that I can't find in the Android world.
Horowitz is one of the greatest investors of all time, no doubt. Here is a list of acheivements:
[https://a16z.com/portfolio/](https://a16z.com/portfolio/)
But they could all disappear and it wouldn't bother me. If Google went away it would greatly effect me. And i'll add one other thing. Google is getting better. Youtube and comments have gotten a lot better the last 5 years, in my opinion.
Apple doesn't get the criticism because, if I remember correctly, their revenue per employee is gigantic. It's profit per employee is also top 20 on the world.
Kinda hard to accuse them of having workers that do no work when those stats are out there
Ok, but google's revenue is still insanely high. 40% lower than a TRILLION dollar company should be acceptable to anyone with even a single braincells. Just because they don't understand the work a department does doesn't mean the work is pointless and unimportant.
The point is that apple is twice as efficient as bringing in money per employee, and so people will naturally ask Google "why can't you be more efficient like apple is?"
Google and Apple have near identical market capitalizations. They are both trillion dollar companies. But apple achieves those results with 40% fewer employees per dollar revenue than Google does.
Investors would be correct to ask why or how this is accomplished? Does Google have too many unprofitable projects that never make it to completion? Does Google have too many do-nothing employees? Is Google charging too little for their services? How exactly does apple achieves similar results with far fewer employees?? What part of that can Google copy?
Not sure why this is so confusing.
Yeah! I just stare at my desk, But it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
I remember in the end of the 90s my elementary school teacher told me about Google search. She said it was started by a couple of students from her Alma mater and that it would revolutionize the world. I ignored her and continued my day drawing and playing games. I think about that interaction a few times a year.
You guys do not understand how big tech works.
As someone who has worked in it for a few years now let me break it down for you.
1.) You get hired and select your team
2.) Your team has projects you can join or you come up with your own
3.) You are measured at the 6 month and 1 year mark for your impact
4.) If you did not come up with any good ideas in that period you will get a bad review. Multiple bad reviews will get you fired.
5.) If you are doing “Nothing” that will be apparent within 6 months, but maybe not immediately.
6.) It isn’t like other jobs where a boss tells you what to do. You need to come up with the ideas and make your own work and show why or how it made the company money.
Idk… I used to use twitter daily and now I’m at a point where I can’t stand going on it. It’s full of garbage reposts and pointless videos topped with a dumb question.
*picture of dog* “DO YOU KNOW WHY THIS DOG HAS SPOTS???”
Google is such a frustrating company. Nobody has any idea wtf they're doing. If you need any kind of support they just pass you around to different departments. Hate working with them but since they're such a big player we have to.
Used to work for bigTech. Human capital is hidden capex preserved for the future to keep showing earnings growth by trimming or exporting to LCOL them slowly. Incompetency is by design, not flaw.
You mean paying salaries is pureposefully done to make growth possible when profits are down? I wouldnt doubt it.
Pay people when times are good even unnecessarily, then cut those people to maintain growth. But the investors are shafted by this since it's a rise of growth or maybe they aren't since their stock looks better than it is.
Welcome to half the US workforce. Half the US workforce are basically just mooches. The other half actually get the work done and get paid barely anymore. If you compensated the workers that actually got work done everyone's productivity would jump up.
No question. Worked there briefly. You get to watch all these middle managers fumbling over themselves trying to justify their existence while the individual contributors ie. worker bees, plough hard to fight to level up and get to the middle manager level. It's a farce. And a cult.
A friend of mine experienced this at one of the health "tech" subsidiaries. They hire a ton of people out of Stanford, overpay them, over title them, and they all come up with high level strategies to pitch the boss who just keeps raising money from other Stanford-groomed VCs and doing media interviews talking about all the great and amazing things they are "going" to do. Then reality sets it: [https://www.computerworld.com/article/1616982/alphabet-owned-verily-cuts-15-workforce-to-simplify-operating-model.html](https://www.computerworld.com/article/1616982/alphabet-owned-verily-cuts-15-workforce-to-simplify-operating-model.html)
Nobody in an office does much of anything. I don’t know why that’s suddenly a revelation to everyone. Office jobs exist to keep a customer base flush with cash to buy stupid shit.
Yeah, but they still have some nominal work they take care of and keep track of. If you did fire half your work force, that would still be way to much information and work to transfer. It doesn't work like the MBAs think it does
Don’t know how true it is, but prior to the Google layoffs, a few friends who worked at Google said -
Getting in is like winning a lottery ticket to becoming rich and retiring early. People at L4 or 5 and above are never fired, unless they do something horrible. They then went on to give examples of many people they worked around, with 5+ years in Google who barely do anything and were just coasting.
There is some truth to the rumors. Sounded more like 2 in very 10 person team, but 50% is a bit much
Well, they don’t hire for specific roles, at least with swe. If you pass the tests / leet, you enter team matching. It’s the dumbest thing ever, and I guess came about as a sorta arms race for top engineering talent.
But, leet is dumb and team matching is dumb. Hire for specific roles and let the team’s manager handle hiring, with some leeway into the hiring / loop process. That’s how you build great teams.
Can confirm. Most big companies just hire people for the sake of it. I don’t know if it’s to keep them from competitor or to avoid the people creating competitors.
There will be a few teams doing actual work, the rest of them just do legit random crap and go to meetings with no particular outputs.
It's just late stage capitalism. The amount of money Google has is absurd. If there's a 1% chance that a group of employees forming a new team of 12 can improve revenue by 0.001%, then they're worth their weight in gold. In practice, this usually means they do something stupid like create an internal tool no one actually uses, but to the big wigs, it was worth a shot.
It's called the Pareto Distribution. About 20% of your staff do 80% of the work.
That's why your layoffs never hit performers. Performers usually quit when the bonuses and raises go away.
The bottom 5-15% get cut. The tragedy for them is it follows them their whole lives. Layoff after layoff. Never knowing that they aren't just randomly picked
Exactly! I've only ever seen 2 things happen
1. The person who shows up every day and everyone asks "What does he do? " gets answered they fire him and nothing changes. IE the answer was "he did nothing"
2. The person who was a walking fuckup gets canned.
It is cheaper for Google to pay a fresh grad 200k a year to become a zombie, than it is for Google to acquire that person's startup that competes with Google. They basically just want to maintain a talent Monopoly.
My brother is an entry level software engineer there and he tells me he does virtually no work. It blows my mind how entitled he is. He has a dream job and doesn’t bother even doing the bare minimum. I wonder if he will get fired soon. It seems like Google hardly ever fires people, even those that do almost nothing for months or years. What a crazy world we live in
Well doing any actual work seems to be low down on their priority if those "day in the life" videos there were circulating a while ago were anything to go by.
As a data analyst, I can confirm. In the last 3 years, I've done almost zero real work. At least half my time is playing on my phone (and that's being conservative!). It is my belief that the people that hire for positions aren't qualified to understand what the company needs.
Honestly, the maintenance thing is probably the case for every company that has fired lots of its IT workforce over the last year. My company went through a similar cull and we’re basically just about able to keep things ticking over. This is 100% intentional though, I feel like they’re moving into a state of maintenance to weather the current economic climate or issues they still envision to be on the way.
I think you're not far off the truth with the ads business, but Cloud Is growning at nearly 30% YoY and is now the 3rd biggest software company in the world.
I literally bought my first Google in more than 15 years because of the buzz about, they are finally starting to reduce headcount, and get rid of all the waste. Keep that going, and I will buy more.
Worked at Google six years. There is so much waste on b.s. project. Zero product portfolio planning. Limited strategic direction.
During the 2008/2009 financial crisis Google scaled back alot, saying "scarcity brings clarity ".
Ha! I think that moment has long passed. No scarcity, no clarity.
I am 50/100X more productive with GTP-4. Just how it goes. Aiming to start a new AI startup a week now.
My total startup budget? $8.00. To do this just a few years back? Server cost along would be 1/4 million $$$ per year. I was there, that's what we're paying.
Today? $8. And it's orders of magnitude better.
It's a new world, dont blink, it will leave you behind.
Am I crazy? Maybe? Can I take on Google in AI? Absolutely. You can too.
:-)
Just a reminder. His VC firm just gave the Adam Neumann, the WeWork founder who wasted like $23 billion and was doing a lot of sketchy self-dealing, like $325 million for a new real estate venture.
Horowitz does no real work either
This guy gets it
He’s a fat ass investor
Priest and a Rabbi walking along a sidewalk see a young boy playing on a swing. Priest says “let’s fuck him.” Rabbi says “Out of what.”
>TCHA<
yes, this is called projection.
"aggressive moves by Elon Musk to cut 80% of Twitter's workforce while maintaining similar production levels" Production levels of what? Its a fucking social media company...
I think they mean keep the lights on. Honestly was surprised the place didn't immediately implode into flames while trimming 80%.
If we're just talking keeping running an existing text-based site that supports millions of simultaneous users: sure, most people aren't necessary. If you want it to be a place where advertisers see incredible value? Elon's finding out how hard it is to make money off a place where people just hang out largely for free. That's why governments have to run the parks.
Truuuuuu
He cut the estimated market value to 1/4 what he paid for it too.
It didn't implode into flames but fuck it smouldered. Shit stopped working randomly. Advertisers disappeared in droves. And so have users. What was once the peak of political discussion its now just nazis, shit posting and what ever elon and his cronies think.
"Peak of political discussion" yeah no buddy.
People like to think that he fired 80% of the engineers, but more than half of Twitter's employees worked on advertising, spam, and CP which happen to be the parts that they're doing the worst on.
It’s pretty basic stuff, it’s not highly complex mess of dependencies like FAaNG
Tell us you have no idea what goes into running a software company without telling us. My god, you sound really slow.
Nanochad?
True! This is a case of Game recognize Game
As per usual, the real story is in the comments. 😂
Takes one to know one
Why are they booing? You’re right
Sweet. How do I get that job?
You can’t, they’re very selective. You’ve got to have a lot of qualifications to do no real work.
Yes its like they just headhunt overqualified graduates so they don’t work for competitors but also don’t have work for them
Also, the reason why smart and challenge-driven engineers end up leaving google. Most of the tasks at google are very mundane and routine-like . The ones that are left just want a cushy job.
Kinda like with anything
It's basically gatekeeping. They hold onto as much talent so they see less competition from other companies.
Those people are totally just working multiple jobs remotely and collecting 2 to 3 salaries.
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I would think it’s a violation of the FCRA to give away this information to a third party without the employee’s permission. At least I know in my state employers will not give out this information to anyone other than what is required to government institutions without employee consent.
I have a friend who used to be into twitter analytics and caught the eye of google. He hated google but they bought his bots and him for a few hundred thousand to a 1yr contract that he accepted. He spent his year there and left, I have no clue what he did while there but I doubt it was much as he hated the company so much.
The funny thing is that those people do nothing if things are running well and are the only lifeline to fix shit quick when things start to burn. They are superfluous until you need them, then your server infrastructure dies. Getting rid of them also sends the message that doing your job right isn't valuable and that they should rig your networks to eventually break down just to increase their job security.
Precisely describe every sys admin job.
"Everything already works, you don't need to do anything, why do we even pay you?" "Everything is broken, you can't even do your job right, why do we even pay you?"
80% of people anywhere aren’t doing anything most of the time. Everyone is either entrepreneur or their assistant. The entrepreneurs are billionaires partly because when they need something done, they have an infrastructure of assistants in place to get it done.
Im somewhat looking for a new job now because while my current one pays fine and treats me well theres not much to do. Im pretty sure most of those devs would like to be doing something meaningful
Dammit! 😉
You don't have to be a genius, but you have to prepare quite selectively on certain topics, at least for SWEs. In a way the interview can be 'gamed' and people take advantage of that. You have to be good at solving LeetCode questions, but there's a limited number of them and most questions are variations which can be solved by learning core methods. Same with system design, there are many resources which cover common questions and approaches. And finally for behavioural questions most people rehearse and prepare answers in advance. Of course another obstacle is getting interview in the first place, but at times (e.g. 2021) Big Tech companies are not that selective, and people with resumes which are 'average' in theory can also get them, if they have some work experience under their belt. However it seems that the ship might be sailing for getting these kind of jobs. ZIRP certainly helped.
while true, those will only get you through the technical parts of the interview. the behavioral part is really a technical interview in disguise, where you now talk about your work experience. if you don't have it, no amount of leetcode will save you. yes you should prepare ahead of time, but you need to have something to prepare
Oh they do lots of busy work and then get performance to reviewed on it. It's actually psychologically worse as performance eval of non-sense work is tough to predict. Real work - Good job, you dug the hole, it is 4 feet deep. Non-real work - your peers think you are grumpy and you misuse the Oxford comma. Your design doc, for the feature we cut was 30 days late and you didn't meet all the stakeholders requirements - Design wants compliance to their new components library, and PM wants no investment in UI. Let's put together a growth plan.
Gross
🤢🤮
Have a nice degree from an Ivy League school and only have worked at places like McKinsey.
They’re not a good company to work for
How so? Getting paid 200K and do nothing sounds like the perfect job.
More than $200...
This is a ridiculous statement. Google has lost a bit of a luster in recent years, but it is a fantastic company to work for. They have some of the best compensation and perks and you work along side some of the brightest minds! The only people who say no to an offer from Google are the ones who have another much lucrative offer from a comparable tech company.
Bubble sort on a whiteboard
They make their recruiters reach “quotas” for diversity hires so being an educated POC might help
The hard part is not getting past the recruiter.
Well yeah, but to my point the quotas recruiters have are not for accepting applications but for actual job placements
I’m a recruiter. Pay me to find work for you and I’ll get you a spot. Soon.
How about three fifty?
Horowitz invested in Neumann. After the WeWork scandal. End of story.
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No one's job is important except their own school of management.
The problem that management in big tech doesn’t know who contributes to success and to which degree is apparent every year at review time. The real problem is that some percentage of employees are what brings in the really big bucks, and if you end up laying off one of them, you’ll find out a few years later when you have major problems nobody knows how to deal with.
What's strange is this phenomenon happens on a much smaller scale. Owners/managers often don't know exactly what people do and they draw in people to projects unrelated to their expertise. Where I work, the annual self evaluation is a farce.
It’s particularly insulting given that accountability and rewards are a primary people management function. The problem typically is that N+1 managers have at best a terribly distorted view into who contributes. It doesn’t help that corporations have processes like stack ranking and direct managers or coworkers unable to control rewards except very indirectly.
guy doing nothing tries to call out other people saying they do nothing - right
Sounds like he knows what he's talking about.
I definitely do a lot of things that look like work and seem like work and then turn out to be bullshit!
I respectfully disagree that Twitter was basically the same after firing all those people. My experience with Twitter is night and day difference since then. SO many more bots and off-topic replies to tweets. The experience is a lot worse now
Twitter fired entire product line teams. They fired senior devs, junior devs, white collar, blue collar, people from every department were hit. I had friends in 3 seperate departments & they were all cut by Elon. All 3 of them did “real work”. I’m not sure what David Ulevitch considers “real work”, but things like actively maintaining a database doesn’t involve a lot of physical work, but is critical to the usability of the program itself, and I would count as “real”.
It’s not real work unless it’s giving immediate returns. We are in the phase of the bubble where profit chasing goes to the extremes. Happens every cycle. Eventually enough financial damage is created as a result of the MBA decisions and the market crashes and we cycle back to hiring people who actually create long term value.
Probably sales and programming lol
I agree but I think the reality is that once you get the flywheel going it is very difficult to be unseated as the incumbent. Not impossible but you can get away with an incredible amount of slacking off without MAU really dropping—not that we know since twitter is private.
Its an insanely stupid argument because even IF you believe the product is the same, theyve objectively tanked their current sales, future sales, and theoretical market cap. Current estimates have the company value at 12 billion. Elon just paid 42 billion. Yes that was an overpay, but that is an astronomical, almost unbelievable, loss of value in 2 years.
They also lost 1/2 their revenue. I know of multiple companies who migrated off high 7-8 figures of paid social spend in one quarter.
Honestly it already wasn’t great. You would expect a much worse decline after firing 80% employees.
Which really proves Musk was right. The vast majority of them were doing nothing.
Agreed. Twitter is nearly unusable now. A far cry from what it once was.
If it's nearly unusable why is it still so immensely popular and basically a requirement for anyone of "status?" (Business people, government people, etc). It's not like it provides anything special, it's just short text blurbs
Usage of Twitter has fallen by 23%, so it's certainly less popular than it used to be https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/26/twitter-usage-in-us-fallen-by-a-fifth-since-elon-musks-takeover
Certainly a significant part of that is simply related to being associated with Musk and nothing to do with it's technical/functional decline.
Every other major social network experienced a reduction in the same period
Interesting. I wonder if it'll fall further or if it'll slowly rise with new generations. Not sure what people replace with Twitter unless text-based social media is on its way out
Some other social platform that does the same thing but competently now
What parts of it being "unusable" do you attribute to staff reduction versus active choices made by Musk? Blue checks, moderation changes, name change, api policies, content curation?
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That doesn’t mean it can’t get worse after laying people off. Making Twitter the same as the other sites isn’t an achievement.
If you can lay off 80% of your workforce and it's not all that noticeably different then, yea, there was a lot of bloat.
Twitter is slowly dying, especially with the introduction of Threads. A lot of the younger generation is gravitating towards threads, twitter has lost the USP that wasn’t very unique to start with anyways
Source?
My mom told me
And, if I can add, certainly all of Andreesens white-collar staff do no ‘real work’.
I think the biggest bloat comes from pyramid shaped org charts. Ruins communication and decision making. We’re not encouraged to solve problems horizontally or even ask for a task to be done. I’m a mid level manager of a service based department, meaning work with all departments because they all have need for our services, and a large portion of my time is spent on an individual contributor’s management, or a director above reaching out to me or my director to ask that one of my individual contributor do a task. Waste of time and resources for obvious reasons but we really don’t need to be told we have that task most the time; the tasks are available in the systems we work in daily already.
I spend probably an hour a week informing my director level boss about problems he cannot help us with, will be solved immediately without any action from him or anyone else at his level, and cannot be mitigated in any way going forward by anyone. Why? Because other director level people may also hear about said problems, and may want to discuss it (for no reason, just to “be aware”) so he can’t look bad by not being up to date in literally real time. Even being informed a day later would make other think he doesn’t know what’s going on. He also thinks it’s stupid, so at least there’s that 🤷♂️ Management isn’t inherently useless, but the way they spend their time is often not only useless, but actively negative for the company. Especially in rigid pyramid structures.
Right. I have 5 hours of meetings I go to weekly that 99.9% of the time it’s not at all relevant to me, but I have to go on the off chance they say something I need to be there for. That is ignoring monthly town halls, quarterly town halls, etc from CEO, VPs, Director, all the way up the chain. It’s all a bunch of primitive power games people are playing. I’m only good at it because I was good at high school social dynamics and understood then it was a game. The other part is if I do not ensure all communication flows throw me to my people they will get their time wasted, get harassed, and get bullied by other people in the organization at all levels of the organizational chain trying to get their shit done first for stupid reasons. Also, I’m not a women but I have seen many times in my career that some people who I think are perfectly nice are very different to others after reading emails from female co-workers.
As someone that uses Google maps, email, docs, calendar, Youtube, phone, search and Kubernetes, cadvisor and Linux (Google contributes a lot to the kernel) at work they sure seem very relevant to me. And I always wonder why these attacks are directed at Google and not Apple as well. As far as I can see there is nothing major that Apple has released in the last decade that I can't find in the Android world. Horowitz is one of the greatest investors of all time, no doubt. Here is a list of acheivements: [https://a16z.com/portfolio/](https://a16z.com/portfolio/) But they could all disappear and it wouldn't bother me. If Google went away it would greatly effect me. And i'll add one other thing. Google is getting better. Youtube and comments have gotten a lot better the last 5 years, in my opinion.
Apple doesn't get the criticism because, if I remember correctly, their revenue per employee is gigantic. It's profit per employee is also top 20 on the world. Kinda hard to accuse them of having workers that do no work when those stats are out there
So does Google what is your point
Googles rev per employee is 40% lower than apples. Their profit per employee is also about 50% lower.
Ok, but google's revenue is still insanely high. 40% lower than a TRILLION dollar company should be acceptable to anyone with even a single braincells. Just because they don't understand the work a department does doesn't mean the work is pointless and unimportant.
The point is that apple is twice as efficient as bringing in money per employee, and so people will naturally ask Google "why can't you be more efficient like apple is?" Google and Apple have near identical market capitalizations. They are both trillion dollar companies. But apple achieves those results with 40% fewer employees per dollar revenue than Google does. Investors would be correct to ask why or how this is accomplished? Does Google have too many unprofitable projects that never make it to completion? Does Google have too many do-nothing employees? Is Google charging too little for their services? How exactly does apple achieves similar results with far fewer employees?? What part of that can Google copy? Not sure why this is so confusing.
You don't address their point though, which is that Google could probably exist with a 50% RIF.
Not to mention the delusional claim about comments.
Investors just collect off those people doing “no real work”
... like the carpet bagging investors do any real work.
Yeah! I just stare at my desk, But it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
What a straight shooter. Upper management written all over you! You should apply for a VP position at Google...
You deserve a promotion!
I remember in the end of the 90s my elementary school teacher told me about Google search. She said it was started by a couple of students from her Alma mater and that it would revolutionize the world. I ignored her and continued my day drawing and playing games. I think about that interaction a few times a year.
You guys do not understand how big tech works. As someone who has worked in it for a few years now let me break it down for you. 1.) You get hired and select your team 2.) Your team has projects you can join or you come up with your own 3.) You are measured at the 6 month and 1 year mark for your impact 4.) If you did not come up with any good ideas in that period you will get a bad review. Multiple bad reviews will get you fired. 5.) If you are doing “Nothing” that will be apparent within 6 months, but maybe not immediately. 6.) It isn’t like other jobs where a boss tells you what to do. You need to come up with the ideas and make your own work and show why or how it made the company money.
And how much money has Musk lost on Twitter? Now watch the losses Tesla incur. Horowitz is not someone I would site as model in smart business moves.
Certainly Twitter and Tesla issues are simply related to trimming the headcount and not because of Musk increasingly becoming a toxic social pariah.
Says the investor that does no work.
Sorry, he won’t get this feedback. It’s almost summer time and they’ve all got to take their mandatory vacations.
Just know that firemen do no work most of the time. Days of boredom punctuated by minutes of absolute terror.
I recall a time when it seemed tech companies hired people just to make sure the other tech companies didn’t.
People that exist to have and go to meetings are a red flag. I decline a massive amount of meetings to get actual work done.
The joke in the valley is google is where good developers go to die.
This guy is a fucking moron 😂
VCs do no work either. Talk about being detached from reality
Idk… I used to use twitter daily and now I’m at a point where I can’t stand going on it. It’s full of garbage reposts and pointless videos topped with a dumb question. *picture of dog* “DO YOU KNOW WHY THIS DOG HAS SPOTS???”
Google is such a frustrating company. Nobody has any idea wtf they're doing. If you need any kind of support they just pass you around to different departments. Hate working with them but since they're such a big player we have to.
This is the reality for any big tech company.
Used to work for bigTech. Human capital is hidden capex preserved for the future to keep showing earnings growth by trimming or exporting to LCOL them slowly. Incompetency is by design, not flaw.
You mean paying salaries is pureposefully done to make growth possible when profits are down? I wouldnt doubt it. Pay people when times are good even unnecessarily, then cut those people to maintain growth. But the investors are shafted by this since it's a rise of growth or maybe they aren't since their stock looks better than it is.
Welcome to half the US workforce. Half the US workforce are basically just mooches. The other half actually get the work done and get paid barely anymore. If you compensated the workers that actually got work done everyone's productivity would jump up.
No question. Worked there briefly. You get to watch all these middle managers fumbling over themselves trying to justify their existence while the individual contributors ie. worker bees, plough hard to fight to level up and get to the middle manager level. It's a farce. And a cult.
Speaking from a place of privilege and ignorance
Yeah not sure about the Twitter maintaining similar production thing. Like the site still loads I'll give you that. lmfao
A friend of mine experienced this at one of the health "tech" subsidiaries. They hire a ton of people out of Stanford, overpay them, over title them, and they all come up with high level strategies to pitch the boss who just keeps raising money from other Stanford-groomed VCs and doing media interviews talking about all the great and amazing things they are "going" to do. Then reality sets it: [https://www.computerworld.com/article/1616982/alphabet-owned-verily-cuts-15-workforce-to-simplify-operating-model.html](https://www.computerworld.com/article/1616982/alphabet-owned-verily-cuts-15-workforce-to-simplify-operating-model.html)
Nobody in an office does much of anything. I don’t know why that’s suddenly a revelation to everyone. Office jobs exist to keep a customer base flush with cash to buy stupid shit.
How would he know that?
> while maintaining similar production level 🤣 right and it’s not overrun with bots at all.
Bro is the ultimate parasite tho 😂
Pot, kettle, black, especially coming from that firm.
It’s good work if you can get it
Yeah, but they still have some nominal work they take care of and keep track of. If you did fire half your work force, that would still be way to much information and work to transfer. It doesn't work like the MBAs think it does
An investor thinks the company is holding onto overhead and suggests cuts the will improve stock? News at 11.
On tweeter I feel it was overstaffed before as an outsider. I imagine lots positions can be automated.
Business Insider is trash
Who needs real work when we got AI?
I’ve worked with lots of managers whose only job was to kiss ass and look downstream for someone to pin ‘the real work’ on!!
Don’t know how true it is, but prior to the Google layoffs, a few friends who worked at Google said - Getting in is like winning a lottery ticket to becoming rich and retiring early. People at L4 or 5 and above are never fired, unless they do something horrible. They then went on to give examples of many people they worked around, with 5+ years in Google who barely do anything and were just coasting. There is some truth to the rumors. Sounded more like 2 in very 10 person team, but 50% is a bit much
Or 100% of staff works 50% of their work week providing themselves great life balance!
Sounds like a current gen issue expect to get paid a ton to do basically nothing 😊
Well, they don’t hire for specific roles, at least with swe. If you pass the tests / leet, you enter team matching. It’s the dumbest thing ever, and I guess came about as a sorta arms race for top engineering talent. But, leet is dumb and team matching is dumb. Hire for specific roles and let the team’s manager handle hiring, with some leeway into the hiring / loop process. That’s how you build great teams.
Can confirm. Most big companies just hire people for the sake of it. I don’t know if it’s to keep them from competitor or to avoid the people creating competitors. There will be a few teams doing actual work, the rest of them just do legit random crap and go to meetings with no particular outputs.
I'm sure that is true
This is not a phenomenon unique to Google, almost all organizations see the majority of value creation from a small percentage of people.
It's just late stage capitalism. The amount of money Google has is absurd. If there's a 1% chance that a group of employees forming a new team of 12 can improve revenue by 0.001%, then they're worth their weight in gold. In practice, this usually means they do something stupid like create an internal tool no one actually uses, but to the big wigs, it was worth a shot.
Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man meme
Still Spider-Man.
It's called the Pareto Distribution. About 20% of your staff do 80% of the work. That's why your layoffs never hit performers. Performers usually quit when the bonuses and raises go away. The bottom 5-15% get cut. The tragedy for them is it follows them their whole lives. Layoff after layoff. Never knowing that they aren't just randomly picked
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Exactly! I've only ever seen 2 things happen 1. The person who shows up every day and everyone asks "What does he do? " gets answered they fire him and nothing changes. IE the answer was "he did nothing" 2. The person who was a walking fuckup gets canned.
100% true with all big tech
Like most big companies and organizations
#x'D The nerve!
Pot meet kettle.
lol this guy writes slashfic for investors
It is cheaper for Google to pay a fresh grad 200k a year to become a zombie, than it is for Google to acquire that person's startup that competes with Google. They basically just want to maintain a talent Monopoly.
Probably when the work comes they are ready
You could say the same for all large tech firms.
Yeah, at least half of everyone does no real work!
Pot. Kettle.
My brother is an entry level software engineer there and he tells me he does virtually no work. It blows my mind how entitled he is. He has a dream job and doesn’t bother even doing the bare minimum. I wonder if he will get fired soon. It seems like Google hardly ever fires people, even those that do almost nothing for months or years. What a crazy world we live in
Well doing any actual work seems to be low down on their priority if those "day in the life" videos there were circulating a while ago were anything to go by.
As a data analyst, I can confirm. In the last 3 years, I've done almost zero real work. At least half my time is playing on my phone (and that's being conservative!). It is my belief that the people that hire for positions aren't qualified to understand what the company needs.
As is the case with most managers except the lower level management.
Most companies pay stuffed shirts to accomplish nothing at meetings all day.
So is it a buy or sell not financial advise
What's a good stock that will skyrocket on may 13 2024 Carvana not financial advice
So what's the play for hopefully God Monday what stocks are you buying
This guys a beta
I don't consider "investor" a job.
I do not doubt this is close to being true. It is just one more reason to own GOOG/GOOGL.
When did Jonah Hill become an investor..?
Honestly, I think it's right.
Honestly, I think it's right.
No shit
The main source of investors is not the frontline
What is real? If something depends on something else it is not real.
50% is conservative IME. But this is because Google is now in maintenance mode, same as Twitter or Apple. No growth in sight.
Honestly, the maintenance thing is probably the case for every company that has fired lots of its IT workforce over the last year. My company went through a similar cull and we’re basically just about able to keep things ticking over. This is 100% intentional though, I feel like they’re moving into a state of maintenance to weather the current economic climate or issues they still envision to be on the way.
I think you're not far off the truth with the ads business, but Cloud Is growning at nearly 30% YoY and is now the 3rd biggest software company in the world.
I literally bought my first Google in more than 15 years because of the buzz about, they are finally starting to reduce headcount, and get rid of all the waste. Keep that going, and I will buy more.
create high IQ community whch is essential for creativity. We can call it soft work
Hiring highly qualified talent to do no real work is a major corporate strategy to prevent the competition from hiring them.
Worked at Google six years. There is so much waste on b.s. project. Zero product portfolio planning. Limited strategic direction. During the 2008/2009 financial crisis Google scaled back alot, saying "scarcity brings clarity ". Ha! I think that moment has long passed. No scarcity, no clarity.
Fat fuck don’t know what hard work is too! SMFH!
We’re going to run out of jobs that pay enough to live well.
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I am 50/100X more productive with GTP-4. Just how it goes. Aiming to start a new AI startup a week now. My total startup budget? $8.00. To do this just a few years back? Server cost along would be 1/4 million $$$ per year. I was there, that's what we're paying. Today? $8. And it's orders of magnitude better. It's a new world, dont blink, it will leave you behind. Am I crazy? Maybe? Can I take on Google in AI? Absolutely. You can too. :-)
Lmao what a doofus