How can a company such as Twitter survive even after such a huge percentage of its workforce has been fired?
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Most of a company like Twitter’s workforce doesn’t have the job keep the the existing site up and running, most of them are developing new features for the site, marketing the site to new and existing users, and other jobs that are important but not directly related to keeping the existing site running.
If a new owner doesn’t want to add features or market the site, they can keep the people directly involved in maintaining the site while letting everyone else go and keep the existing site running with a much smaller team.
It remains to be seen whether they will survive longer term, but at Twitter (and many other tech companies) only a small portion of the staff are actually busy “operating” the business.
Software companies spend a lot of time and effort building automated systems. So, in the short term, it doesn’t actually take that many people to run Twitter.com.
What we’re all those people who got fired doing? Some were developing new things, some were trying to reduce the operational effort even further, and some were working on making Twitter safer from misinformation and harassment.
Without being a Twitter insider, it’s hard to say whether the cuts will work out long term. Twitter was much smaller only a few years ago. Maybe the cuts will harm Twitter’s ability to innovate and keep ahead of rivals, or maybe they will refocus the business on the core value proposition.
There’s a difference between surviving and thriving. There are plenty of issues that the service is going through that affect user experience in a negative way (mentions, curation, for you tab, security issues, fail whale, etc). You may notice some or all of the issues. While the experience is negative, as long as it’s not too negative they will retain users which (outside of the tech) is what keeps the service alive.
Think of the tech infrastructure to run a company of that size like a big cruise ship. In the hull (the bottom part), there used to be lots of people that completed a task that prevented or fixed specific holes, but now they aren’t there. Other people now have to plug those holes and they may not be as familiar as the past employees and/or have less time, so they take longer to fix (which is why you have seen more downtime/issues if you are a heavy user). As of now the users (or in this analogy the guests of the ship) seemingly don’t mind the inconveniences caused by the holes enough to get off. Overall the service is seemingly sinking, but that doesn’t mean it will sink. If the guests of the ship start getting off though that’s where the worry really starts.
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