This was an interesting article until it started praising musk for slashing half of twitter - I don’t think the HR and legal departments were doing fake work, and the current lack of stability seems to indicate that a good portion of those people layed off where actually important.
The fact that Twitter had to ask some of the people it laid off to come back shortly after having fired them says it all about how incompetent and self-defeating those layoffs were.
If they asked most of the fired people to come back you would have a point, but they just asked a small fraction of the fired people to come back. That doesn't seem unreasonable, you will make errors and it is good to admit when you made an error.
Would you think the whole ordeal was done better if they just refused to admit that any of the firings were in error? Nobody makes no mistakes when firing. There are many issues with the Twitter firings, but asking some of them to come back isn't a negative sign at all.
No that is in my opinion, still insane. Laying someone off and then being like, "oops, you were actually important", is indicative they have no clue. Maybe they could have waited a bit to figure shit out instead of scorch-earthing everything.
Maybe. Maybe once those plans were noticed, they would have been resisted and thwarted by people who wanted to retain their power within the organization. Political struggles happen even in "healthy" companies.
> Maybe once those plans were noticed, they would have been resisted and thwarted by people who wanted to retain their power within the organization.
I'm perplexed by the mental gymnastics you had to resort to to try to deflect any responsibility from Musk, let alone the despair to omit any reference to the extremely poor judgement and outright incompetence it takes to pull this sort of stunt, and instead fabricate this theory where this impulsive shot in the foot was actually a brilliant plan to thwart entrenched interests.
Occam's razor and Musk's track record reject this hypothesis. Musk f-ed up, just like he keeps on f-ing up, like the recent shit fest of Musk posting a stream of brain dead and profoundly I'll advised tweets trying to publicly smear a employee with disabilities.
You're really worked up about the simply proposed possibility of how someone might (MIGHT) go about firing a lot of people, especially in an organization already hostile to new ownership. It seems like you need a devil figure to channel anger against, rather than someone who does some stupid stuff and maybe some not so stupid stuff.
> but they just asked a small fraction of the fired people to come back.
That we know of (meaning they posted publicly about it). The real number could be way higher.
> but asking some of them to come back isn't a negative sign at all.
It's a very negative sign, especially at the scale it happened (as I said, we know about the cases where the person accepted to go back or publicly stated they were offered to come back).
If you fire people hastily but then are forced to ask them to come back because you discovered they were actually key personnel, that speaks to incompetence. The speed of Twitter's layoffs were completely under the control of Musk. There was no crisis or external factor that made them cut people so quickly.
Mistakes certainly can happen, but they're much more likely to happy when things are done chaotically without proper planning.
The truth about the Twitter layoffs is that the company is not even remotely profitable and likely never will be, so it doesn't really matter that much as long as the company barely continues to operate. You can certainly barely operate a web services company with a barebones crew: we all do it every year during the holidays! But long term growth? Yeah, good luck with that.
Twitter is now just nice yacht for a billionaire. The acquisition was no different than Ron Watkins buying 8chan.
Twitter lost 200mil on 5b in revenue in 2021 and has had a handful of profitable quarters in recent history. Not sure why you think it's "not even remotely profitable and likely never will be".
Of course, that's a pre-Elon analysis. Elon's loans alone add 1 bil/year in interest costs, and reports say there's been a large drop in revenue since his purchase.
> The truth about the Twitter layoffs is that the company is not even remotely profitable and likely never will be, so it doesn't really matter that much as long as the company barely continues to operate.
But it was profitable at certain times. Despite all the reported "bloat". Ironically now, it has little hopes of being profitable thanks to advertisers pulling out due to lax moderation (some of the automated stuff no longer working because the maintainers are gone!). So even if they managed to run the site with a skeleton crew, assuming they keep breaking non-essential features, it's unclear they could ever become profitable again.
There seems to be this echo chamber around the Twitter acquisition that thinks most software companies are bloated and that software engineers basically do nothing. They seem to believe Twitter will make that demonstration. It's particularly pervasive in semi or non-technical circles. I guess it's the same crowd that bought into no-code and low-code tools to "get rid of expensive developers" for the last decade.
While Twitter hasn't suffered any complete outage as of yet, several products and features seem to be broken, as well as a good chunk of their API (I don't buy the claim it's intentional because the latencies and error rates have been jumping up). To be completely honest, this level of service degradation would have killed more serious products. It's fine for Twitter because there's no SLA, no enterprise customers and no critical infra running on it.
Twitter actually had some profitable years lately and in the last 5 years before Musk bought it they recorded a net profit. Revenue had been grown 60% over that time.
But now with Twitter reportedly losing 40% of its advertisers and taking on $1 billion of annual debt servicing costs, it seems unlikely they'll be able to get back to profitable if things keep going this way.
Staff reductions for changes in priorities/direction is normally fine, I think the problem Musk's Twitter had is they cut far too fast, far too quick, with seemingly a balance sheet at the forefront.
It is the whole "Learn WHY things are how they are, before you suggest changing them" which all new engineers need to learn, also seemingly applies to restructuring. If they had waited a couple of months, they could have made strategically smart changes, and over the long term it likely won't cost them more.
Really? Since the sale I’ve seen lots more bugs (e.g. replies failing to load, like button not working, images not loading, menus not working, Tweets not loading, etc.)
What differences have you noticed? The main one I see is that there are more blue check marks but now I have kind of trained myself to ignore those more and just pay attention if it’s gray/gold or an official org page.
As someone without an account, I am finally able to browse and read it.
In the last months before he took over it had become literally unusable. After some seconds of scrolling a sign-up window would show up which was impossible to dismiss and neither ublock nor umatrix helped.
- failures are happening more often. Just in the past week they broke "following" page for half a day, and then image uploads for a few hours (with hilarious "your account has hit the API limit for their own site)
- they just randomly killed third-party apps that made Twitter what it was with zero warning or explanation
- destroyed all possible credibility of blue checkmarks. Which are not just celebrities, but also government agencies
- people report an increase in harassment and trolls
> Some outages for increased velocity can be a good trade off for twitter.
What increased velocity?
> So destroying the blue checkmark credibility is probably "mischief managed".
This statement makes no sense
> For government accounts, they now have gray checkmarks.
Wat?
Is this the velocity you're talking about? When they introduced paid blue checkmarks, then realized it's a bad idea, and introduced "official" label to only backpedal less than a day later, only to introduce gray checkmarks? First time I hear of gray checkmarks btw.
Just checked: of course there are now gray checkmarks. And of course they are randomly assigned. And of course there are also golden checkmarks because reasons. Also randomly assigned.
Musk stressed the hell out of twitter. His technique and demeanor were total trash. They probably fired the wrong people in many situations. But he did prove that they were overhired by 50% or more.
This is and has always been nonsense. FAANGs (and more) all compete against each other and if they do not derive significant value from these hires, it doesn't make any strategic sense to bloat your headcount just to prevent your rivals from also bloating their own headcounts.
In case someone goes "but what about the startups" - it doesn't make sense for any individual large tech company to hire people just to prevent them from starting startups or being hired at startups, given that most startups don't compete with them and often help create moat for their own business, not to mention that their own hiring (as opposed to big tech hiring as a whole) has a negligible effect on the talent pool as a whole.
Sure but that collusion actually makes sense from their perspective and is literally the exact opposite of what's being alleged, which is that Big Tech is essentially keeping the cost of talent artificially high in order to hurt their competition.
> But it absolutely calls in question the notion these companies wouldn't do something just because they're "competing" against each other.
This doesn't make any sense and you're misunderstanding the original comment. The point is the idea that they are hurting their bottom line by overhiring, but the whole thing works out because it prevents their competition from hiring is completely nonsensical, when you're alleging that they are all doing it. If they are all hurting themselves by overhiring, they can't be deriving any benefit from keeping the talent away from your competition. Your competition is also overhiring and doesn't need the talent either. So keeping them away from your competition helps your competition at your expense.
> The point is the idea that they are hurting their bottom line by overhiring, but the whole thing works out because it prevents their competition from hiring is completely nonsensical, when you're alleging that they are all doing it. If they are all hurting themselves by overhiring, they can't be deriving any benefit from keeping the talent away from your competition.
Is there a reason why you think FAANG only competes against each other and no one else? FAANG colluding to prevent other companies from getting access to tech talent is exactly something they would do even tho they are "competing" against each other. OpenAI for example is now seen a direct competitor against Alphabet and its cash cow.
Once again, this doesn't even make the slightest bit of economic sense and you're once again failing to understand extremely very basic points. No one is saying saying FAANG only competes against each other. It's just that you're completely unable to articulate any actual theory as to what's going on and why anyone would do it. Like which companies are talent-starved vs which companies are part of the cabal? How does the cabal even know which other companies are talent-starved and which other companies are trying to do the same thing they are? How do they even coordinate this? Even assuming your theory (which is simply mathematically impossible) is plausible, do you think all these big company CEOs meet and decide on quotas, so that everyone has to hire X amount? Everyone benefits from hiring less, right? What is the enforcement mechanism here?
Also, it's simply not economically possible for the cabal to be so threatened by the talent-starved companies as to engage in completely self-sabotaging actions to increase their own cost, while these apparently exceptional talent-starved companies are unable to outbid companies that derive no actual value from the talent.
Anyone who's familiar with any type of organization (and even have cursory knowledge of economics) should be able to see that overhiring has mostly to do with the fact that managing a larger team confers status to the manager while the cost is borne by the organization, so there are systemic incentives for managers at all levels to increase and compete for scope, which is inherently inefficient with respect to the goals of the organization at large. Ignoring these dynamics and focusing on implausibly airtight collusion between large entities that are made up of 10s or even 100s of thousands of people that constantly leak everything is just pure naivete.
It feels like an open secret, but that's still not evidence. I was expecting something like leaked emails from execs explicitly talking about it or something.
I kinda doubt Google is having anyone do actual known-useless-to-all work just so they don't work at a competitor, but I think it's probably very possible that preventing someone form working at a competitor is _part_ of the value-add Google sees in hiring someone, which means they don't need to see quite as much clear value in what they'll be working on at Google.
I'm not convinced most people at very large companies are doing "real" work most of the time anyway. Wouldn't need to do anything special at these large companies to create fake work just for these people, it would just be "regular" work.
I don't understand why this sentiment is so prevalent. It's like people watch Silicon Valley the TV show and think it's actually representative of big tech.
I don't know anyone who does what I could consider "fake work".
Unless you think anyone who doesn't measurably and immediately impact the bottom line is doing "fake work".
> I don't understand why this sentiment is so prevalent. It's like people watch Silicon Valley the TV show and think it's actually representative of big tech.
I'm not limiting this sentiment to just big tech.
For example very big companies tend to have a large number of people who do a lot of talking without saying actually saying anything. I would argue being trapped in those long meetings is "fake" work. The large number of employees working from home since COVID has shown most of those long meetings didn't need to happen.
Now that the four day work week is gaining momentum with no lost of productivity[1] we have even more proof of the amount of "fake" work being done.
Sure, Rabois will Rabois. My comment was aimed at the editorialized headline, which treats his provocative comment as fact and serves as clickbait for the article.
In my experience, companies don’t need to go out of their way to create bullshit work or keep around useless people. They’ll do that incidentally anyway.
"Fake work" is a pretty funny accusation from guy whose company (Opendoor) is 97% down from all time high and dangerously close to getting delisted from NASDAQ.
This happened to someone I bumped into on a Meetup group last year. She'd been hired by Google for a research project. She said she hadn't done anything useful for a year and was just there to put it on her CV and was suicidally bored. I bet she got laid off recently.
Anyway it's not like it doesn't happen anywhere else. On two separate contracts I completed the work embarrassingly early and was paid to finish the contract and look busy so I didn't show the managers up or the staff on the team I was working on. We're talking really basic shit here like being hired to make a single web form that writes a row into a SQL table.
This article is a word salad. The headline is not supported by evidence and looks like a causal fallacy.
The outcome can be explained by the archetype of too much money, large company politics, leadership that lacks understanding of the problem space, the Peter principle and the innovator's dilemma.
Pfft, these guys are amateurs, I work in government contracting and we’ve been doing this for years!
Note that I think my job is at least somewhat important, I write code so at least I produce something. But there’s dozens of not hundreds of people whose jobs consist entirely of meetings, signing paperwork, and taking multi-hour lunch breaks…
>Sundar Pichai previously said he takes "full responsibility" for the decisions which lead to mass layoffs, and has now been accused of hiring sprees for "vanity".
How does one take "full responsibility" for such decisions? Give yourself pat on a back? Pay raise to compensate for moral losses?
Ok so, apologies, didn't read, but it's a juicy idea unto itself.
Personally I really want companies to build like ~4 teams with the same mission, same goal. Not fake work, but duplicative work. (Whether we tell folks this is happening or not: either way.)
Over time, try to figure out what are the best potentials/possibilities, what are the most promising components/people. Organizationally iterate. Developers are iterative as fuck, imo. Organizations just kind of have people & stay there, doing whatever. Trying to explore the space of dynamical organizations is a huge huge huge interest that I think society is no where near, but could greatly better the world & what happens.
Imo, we have a very: your org goes to battle with the team they have mentality. Personally I think orgs would, long term, do much better with a more deliberate effort to explore broader takes. I have a hard time connecting it explicitly, but I really dug the thinkpiece MIT paper "Two Scenarios for 21st Century Organizations: Shifting Networks of Small Firms or All-Encompassing 'Virtual Countries'?"[1], which to me suggested more dynamical orgs that had more than the single-poker-in-each-fire view that predominates the corporate world.
We want to think that the people who run companies are very smart and would not do such things. but what we have to accept is that they are human too. So they're all essentially stupid.
Yes, as opposed to rich investors like Marc Andreessen who really are very smart and certainly don't "work through a screen and are totally abstracted from tangible physical reality and the real-world consequences of their opinions and beliefs."
I think avoiding smart people starting competitors by keeping them employed with high comps might be a good strategy for some of these cash rich and profitable companies. They might have been thinking of this as a good insurance.
It's good strategy for the company, but bad for society*. I regard this as an example of market failure, where productive folk (who presumably want to do things that are cool and noteworthy) are diverted into sinecures to limit corporate competitors. The market for talent is being cornered here, just as a commodity trader might seek to corner the market to drive prices upward (or occasionally downward, to the detriment of a weak competitor).
This seems like a prima facie case for regulatory intervention to require divestment or breakup.
* I know, I know, 'how can we say it's bad, what if the resultant competition created environmental destruction or led to the invention of a basilisk.'
I mean this is true in that large organizations are internally wasteful - a lot of people are just there to shuffle resources around and a lot of the decisions are bad, entire teams are working on worthless projects, etc.
But what people forget is that small organizations are also quite wasteful, it's just that some of this waste is only visible at a higher level. For example, most startups, just like many internal teams at large organizations, are building things that no one will use. So while your work might be less wasteful from the standpoint of the company, this is offset by the fact that your entire company might be a complete waste.
Likewise, middle managers vying for resources and funding useless projects are surely wasteful and hurt the bottom line, but this is no different from mediocre VCs becoming good at convincing wealthy clients and other money managers that they are good at investing, then doing a poor job of actually allocating that capital.
This is consistent with my bias that FAANG salaries are where they are to discourage developers from accepting equity stakes at start-ups that could eventually disrupt the FAANG companies - that these salaries exist to starve the start-up ecosystem.
I have no evidence of this, and I have no reason for my priors to be set like this, but I do love bias confirmation.
I can't think of anything more demoralizing than being hired simply to warehouse my talent to keep me out of competitors' shops while feeding me bullshit go-nowhere projects or leaving me to twiddle my thumbs.
let's see all the FAANG people rise up in HN and defend their bullshit jobs.
I'm a FAANG-er with a (partially) bullshit job too and I've been tired of all these engineers with fake jobs living of the teat of their money-printing corp and pretending that their little over-engineering is so essential.
It's not a defense. If you want to fix the fact that a lot of tech jobs are bullshit, FAANG or otherwise. You have to fix that phenomenon in all work sectors, because it's not a uniquely big tech created problem.
Allow me this question: what % of the tech world do you think it truly is essential? I’m asking in the broader sense. Essential to modern society not essential within the scope of a company.
One might argue that the role of tech is to help society fulfill the higher rungs of the Maslow hierarchy rather than the lower ones. In that case, whether it is essential is the wrong question.
But then most of tech arguably doesn't serve the higher rungs very well, or is outright counterproductive with what evidence we have about Instagram[1] and Facebook's[2] effects on mental health, and so on.
Second part of your answer is the reason why I was posing the question.
I’m not of the idea that all tech is unnecessary. We need information systems for things like banking, healthcare, government and so on.
But as you pointed out there are also tech products that are definitely not essential or even counter productive to society that employ a lot of people.
I think that if you try to answer the question "what % of the tech world is truly essential", you ALSO have to consider that everyone is on a career path.
People don't end where they start. Sometimes you get lucky and have an opportunity to do something really worthwhile.
The thing is, when that happens, it's often the result of series of career "stepping stones" which are often not very worthwhile when looked at in isolation.
Many of the folks who were terminated from Google, I think, will use the connections and experiences gained at Google to do really essential work. Maybe not this week, maybe in years or decades. It's not wasted, if the individual makes the best of it.
I remember as an undergrad realizing that the software that I wrote, that I enjoyed writing, was largely about making computers easier to use, and didn’t provide any value outside the computer. I think I’m mostly ok with that 30-some-odd years later, but when I’m looking for a new job, there’s a part of me that always hopes for something that’s at least a little socially redeemable.
I struggle with that feeling constantly and I can definitely relate. It can be challenging because plenty of times what we do doesn’t really feel that meaningful when we look at the bigger picture.
Good lord. Almost none of it, if by "tech" you mean "software". Most of it's pushing consumerism via invasive advertising, spreading lies on purpose, or chasing marginal improvements in entertainment. I also suspect the majority of B2B activity is neutral or negative in actual delivered value over whatever it's replacing.
[EDIT] I think this is true even for extremely generous values of "essential", in fact. I think the vast majority of software effort delivers marginal gains at best, with a net effect that is overall harmful in the median case, which harm is masked by the occasional huge improvement it delivers.
Well, software is not just the web. Software that runs medical equipment is valuable and essential for example. And I think the same is true for all sorts of digital infrastructure. I’m thinking about software to run the power grid or running street lights or controlling a dam. There’s countless examples of useful to society pieces of software. But there are also countless other that are example of the opposite.
I think "fake work" seems a reasonable phrase to describe what a lot of the mouse-moving class do, or at least it's difficult to connect it to real world value - and I wouldn't necessarily exclude the digital workers looking in here at a remove from the redundancies.
When you consider the mental and physical energy and time it takes to produce the life of relevant comfort and safety of the average Western digital worker against the raw materials and environment that life is extracted and fashioned from (compared, say, to the prospect of surviving against nature on your wits and bodily power alone or the plight of a penniless war refugee), can you honestly say with a straight face: "yes, I deserve that"?
We - most of us - live off the value provided us from the great good fortune of having been born in to a society fashioned and built over hundreds of years; it seems to me that provides the bulk of what we "earn" as individuals, and particularly so in the digital economies.
