How can a company such as Twitter survive even after such a huge percentage of its workforce has been fired?
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I’ll use an analogy.
A city or state hires a lot of people to maintain bridges. But lets say you want to save some money because, well frankly bridges don’t fall apart that quickly. So instead of hiring 1000 people, you cut that to 200 and just do less frequent maintenance.
Doing so will not cause all the bridges in the state to just collapse. So you can get away with maybe even a few years with your cuts.
But then, cracks start showing up and suddenly you have bridges left and right that are starting to become unsafe. And you don’t have the people to restore them in good time so more and more you need to close them to traffic while you use your limited work force to play rescue worker.
Twitter like all the FAANGs is actually very well made and a robust site. Their systems being well built means that the issues with not maintaining them won’t be immediately apparent. But what happens when the leftover workers try to add things? Well, it breaks.
What happens when the systems need updates, once again, there’s no one to do it, so it breaks.
Sooner or later, the cracks will show.
You just keep to stable code running. Keeping things running as-is is possible for quite some time, the code written over the years will still function mostly and a much smaller team can handle the occasional problem. As long as you keep the code the same and don’t push anything radical, you can keep things running.
However, it is going to become an increasingly jenga-escque state where your employees maintain systems and code that they don’t know how it works (even if they have documentation, it takes time to figure out exactly how it works exactly, code is confusing to everyone). There is a reason that software developer companies have far more programmers, engineers and specialists than they strictly need for day-to-day operation. Especially if you want to change things, make updates or fix bugs. Or worse, add new features.
It also helps when you are a billionaire that can bring experts in from his other tech company (or worse comes to worse, outside consultants) that you brought for ideological reasons (or whatever reason Musk brought it, it was certainly not because Twitter was raking in money beforehand). As long as Musk is willing to pour in the money, he can keep Twitter working *somehow*.
[removed]
I’ll use an analogy.
A city or state hires a lot of people to maintain bridges. But lets say you want to save some money because, well frankly bridges don’t fall apart that quickly. So instead of hiring 1000 people, you cut that to 200 and just do less frequent maintenance.
Doing so will not cause all the bridges in the state to just collapse. So you can get away with maybe even a few years with your cuts.
But then, cracks start showing up and suddenly you have bridges left and right that are starting to become unsafe. And you don’t have the people to restore them in good time so more and more you need to close them to traffic while you use your limited work force to play rescue worker.
Twitter like all the FAANGs is actually very well made and a robust site. Their systems being well built means that the issues with not maintaining them won’t be immediately apparent. But what happens when the leftover workers try to add things? Well, it breaks.
What happens when the systems need updates, once again, there’s no one to do it, so it breaks.
Sooner or later, the cracks will show.
I’ll use an analogy.
A city or state hires a lot of people to maintain bridges. But lets say you want to save some money because, well frankly bridges don’t fall apart that quickly. So instead of hiring 1000 people, you cut that to 200 and just do less frequent maintenance.
Doing so will not cause all the bridges in the state to just collapse. So you can get away with maybe even a few years with your cuts.
But then, cracks start showing up and suddenly you have bridges left and right that are starting to become unsafe. And you don’t have the people to restore them in good time so more and more you need to close them to traffic while you use your limited work force to play rescue worker.
Twitter like all the FAANGs is actually very well made and a robust site. Their systems being well built means that the issues with not maintaining them won’t be immediately apparent. But what happens when the leftover workers try to add things? Well, it breaks.
What happens when the systems need updates, once again, there’s no one to do it, so it breaks.
Sooner or later, the cracks will show.
You just keep to stable code running. Keeping things running as-is is possible for quite some time, the code written over the years will still function mostly and a much smaller team can handle the occasional problem. As long as you keep the code the same and don’t push anything radical, you can keep things running.
However, it is going to become an increasingly jenga-escque state where your employees maintain systems and code that they don’t know how it works (even if they have documentation, it takes time to figure out exactly how it works exactly, code is confusing to everyone). There is a reason that software developer companies have far more programmers, engineers and specialists than they strictly need for day-to-day operation. Especially if you want to change things, make updates or fix bugs. Or worse, add new features.
It also helps when you are a billionaire that can bring experts in from his other tech company (or worse comes to worse, outside consultants) that you brought for ideological reasons (or whatever reason Musk brought it, it was certainly not because Twitter was raking in money beforehand). As long as Musk is willing to pour in the money, he can keep Twitter working *somehow*.
There is a lot of momentium in big companies. They make money due to deals which were signed maybe a year before even if the deal might not be renewed. Most of their systems are running perfectly fine, the only problem is when things change either due to errors or due to new business requirements and nobody knows how these systems is supposed to work. And even with all the issues the company have there are still lots of users who use their services because that is what they have always done and because they are still the largest provider and therefore provide the most value. There will be some time until the users fail and the income stops flowing.
What is happening at Twitter is close to a theoretical scenario used in the financial world to value companies. A lot of companies, especially startups, do not make any profits and in fact have negative results year after year. But this is because they are growing and expanding. So to value the company you may look at a theoretical scenario where you stop any new development, fire “all” employees, and increase prices so you lose half your paying customer base. Due to the momentum the company will still continue operating but now make a lot of profit. The profit you can make in this scenario until the last paying customer have left is the value of the company. There are of course other ways of valuing companies but these kinds of analysis have been used as part of the evaluation of Twitter at around $10B.
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