How can a company such as Twitter survive even after such a huge percentage of its workforce has been fired?
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Work in this type of industry and I’ll try to keep this as high level as possible.
Web Companies (like Twitter) have a lot of operational needs, businesses in general require things like HR / Legal / Accounting / Sales / Marketing / and generally “supportive” roles within the organization that aim to either shield your organization from liability or bolster your revenue stream.
You can often times downsize these groups significantly (you don’t “need” a large sum of employee’s in these positions to keep your product online) you just increase your risks in other areas but when money is tight this might be reasonable.
Software Engineers / Site Reliability Engineers / Database Engineer’s / Designer’s / Quality Assurance / Project Manager’s / Product Owner’s / Business Analysts are the “meat and potatoes” (there are others, but I’ll focus on these) of a software development organization and you can even downsize these roles to some extent once the product is alive and mature (much like Twitter is).
Project Managers / Product Owner’s / Business Analysts help to pave the way for new features and if you don’t need new features you can downsize them or potentially even eliminate some of these roles.
Software Engineers / Database Engineers / Quality Assurance / Designers are your group that work through your SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle, this is effectively your processes to actually do work) they either help to sustain the web platform (fixing bugs, improving performance, increasing compute efficiency, etc.) or they help to implement new features (working closely with “business”)… you “could” downsize these roles if you were careful and likely fairly significantly especially for a platform like Twitter which is largely developed and in sustainment more than anything.
Site Reliability Engineers are perhaps the group you wouldn’t want to downsize, these are the folks that are putting eyes on the application and working WITH sustainment teams to ensure “lights on” (that Twitter is available and accessible). Combined also with the generally unsung heros of System Administrators and “DevOps” these individuals are much like digital janitor’s / butler’s without them… generally speaking you don’t have a place to actually “run” your application.
Since Twitter is OLD (really old in the web dev sphere) there likely exists a LOT of operational automation, monitoring, alerting, and just overall documentation on how things work / operate.
Meaning you don’t need thousands of people to keep the site functional, especially if you are not changing much; a “small” sustainment team, a global SRE team, and strong operational support effectively means the site will remain online so long as bills are paid and laws are followed.
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All the above being said, very experienced Software Engineer’s can often times wear many hats; some might be more product oriented, some may be more focused on devops or site reliability.
“Survive” is also a great word to use in this instance, because survivors rarely if ever truly recover; some become stronger, but most generally become weaker.
Twitter just barely survived a high speed, head-on collision; it’s hard to say for how long they’ll manage and with how much institutional knowledge was lost and it is hard to say how they’ll stay relevant (and funded) when competitors now see blood in the water.
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