How can a company such as Twitter survive even after such a huge percentage of its workforce has been fired?
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Twitter is not really surviving right now. The thing about large and complex websites is that they take a lot of work to keep running reliably. And they take a lot of work to adhere to whatever laws in every country in the world that they operate in. Twitter is facing problems on all of these fronts, they just haven’t completely destroyed the company… Yet.
1. Site reliability went down the toilet. Twitter has had more outages in just one or two months under Musk than they have had in any given year in their recent history. The staff cannot keep up with the work and a lot of knowledge of how the systems work are no longer at the company.
2. Security is a huge question mark now. Musk fired many of the people responsible for security and everyone else is swamped just trying to keep the ship afloat. In any large web site, this is a huge red flag and means it’s practically inevitable for them to see a major security incident soon. Even worse is that these teams are responsible for actually detecting a breach. Which means it’s entirely possible that they’ve already been breached and no one knows. The security guard that’s supposed to be on the lookout basically got publicly clubbed over the head by the building’s owner.
3. Musk basically fired the people responsible for managing all the business relationships with their suppliers. These are companies that Twitter may have purchased software from to keep things working. Or the people that own the buildings they rent. Or the datacenters they work with. There have been a number of stories where the contracts with these entities have been violated through non-payment or unilateral ending of contracts (Contracts usually include a penalty for doing this). This leaves Twitter extremely vulnerable to lawsuits that they are pretty much guaranteed to lose.
4. A number of countries, particularly in the EU, are citing Twitter for breach of past agreements and currently being in breach of a number of regulations. This is a very bad sign for Twitter since it seems like the reason they’re in breach is because Musk fired the people responsible for keeping Twitter compliant. This means that they are now open to law suits or simply getting forced to stop operating in some of these countries until they are brought back into compliance.
I can go on. But simply put, what’s happening to Twitter now is basically unprecedented in the business world, not just the tech world. Yes, Twitter had more employees than what they needed to just keep things running because tech companies maintain staff to do new development. But what Musk did was not a well-informed layoff. He was literally the bull in the china shop that essentially arbitrarily fired people. People vital for the ongoing operation of the business itself, not just the site. The cost to Twitter, and Musk, is going to be much higher than whatever he saved by firing so many people. The only reason we haven’t seen a full collapse yet is because it takes time for things like lawsuits to work their way through the system. Or for hackers to get into the numerous holes that have been opened in the last few months.
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.
—-
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.
Let’s say I own a lemonade stand.
I’m going to have a core group of employees that procures lemons, makes the lemonade, sells the lemonade, handles the cash.
But then I’m going to have employees hired to make the stand look better, someone to improve the lemonade recipe, someone to walk around the neighborhood and hand out flyers to get people to come to the lemonade stand, maybe I have someone who talks to parents around the neighborhood to ask for investment to buy more lemons, or open up a new lemonade stand, someone to do quality control on the lemons and lemonade, someone to work with the city to ensure we have all the right permits, analysts to figure out when the best times to stay open are and which corners have the most traffic, people to manage all these extra employees to make sure their doing their jobs, HR to ensure that the employees are happy, maybe I have a division of employees trying out an orange juice stand to see if that’s profitable.
Just like in any company, there are anywhere from 25-75% more employees than you need to run your core business. However, things will start breaking, you’ll miss problems that you could have anticipated previously, and you won’t be able to expand when you’re running on a skeleton crew.
Twitter is not really surviving right now. The thing about large and complex websites is that they take a lot of work to keep running reliably. And they take a lot of work to adhere to whatever laws in every country in the world that they operate in. Twitter is facing problems on all of these fronts, they just haven’t completely destroyed the company… Yet.
1. Site reliability went down the toilet. Twitter has had more outages in just one or two months under Musk than they have had in any given year in their recent history. The staff cannot keep up with the work and a lot of knowledge of how the systems work are no longer at the company.
2. Security is a huge question mark now. Musk fired many of the people responsible for security and everyone else is swamped just trying to keep the ship afloat. In any large web site, this is a huge red flag and means it’s practically inevitable for them to see a major security incident soon. Even worse is that these teams are responsible for actually detecting a breach. Which means it’s entirely possible that they’ve already been breached and no one knows. The security guard that’s supposed to be on the lookout basically got publicly clubbed over the head by the building’s owner.
3. Musk basically fired the people responsible for managing all the business relationships with their suppliers. These are companies that Twitter may have purchased software from to keep things working. Or the people that own the buildings they rent. Or the datacenters they work with. There have been a number of stories where the contracts with these entities have been violated through non-payment or unilateral ending of contracts (Contracts usually include a penalty for doing this). This leaves Twitter extremely vulnerable to lawsuits that they are pretty much guaranteed to lose.
4. A number of countries, particularly in the EU, are citing Twitter for breach of past agreements and currently being in breach of a number of regulations. This is a very bad sign for Twitter since it seems like the reason they’re in breach is because Musk fired the people responsible for keeping Twitter compliant. This means that they are now open to law suits or simply getting forced to stop operating in some of these countries until they are brought back into compliance.
I can go on. But simply put, what’s happening to Twitter now is basically unprecedented in the business world, not just the tech world. Yes, Twitter had more employees than what they needed to just keep things running because tech companies maintain staff to do new development. But what Musk did was not a well-informed layoff. He was literally the bull in the china shop that essentially arbitrarily fired people. People vital for the ongoing operation of the business itself, not just the site. The cost to Twitter, and Musk, is going to be much higher than whatever he saved by firing so many people. The only reason we haven’t seen a full collapse yet is because it takes time for things like lawsuits to work their way through the system. Or for hackers to get into the numerous holes that have been opened in the last few months.
Let’s say I own a lemonade stand.
I’m going to have a core group of employees that procures lemons, makes the lemonade, sells the lemonade, handles the cash.
But then I’m going to have employees hired to make the stand look better, someone to improve the lemonade recipe, someone to walk around the neighborhood and hand out flyers to get people to come to the lemonade stand, maybe I have someone who talks to parents around the neighborhood to ask for investment to buy more lemons, or open up a new lemonade stand, someone to do quality control on the lemons and lemonade, someone to work with the city to ensure we have all the right permits, analysts to figure out when the best times to stay open are and which corners have the most traffic, people to manage all these extra employees to make sure their doing their jobs, HR to ensure that the employees are happy, maybe I have a division of employees trying out an orange juice stand to see if that’s profitable.
Just like in any company, there are anywhere from 25-75% more employees than you need to run your core business. However, things will start breaking, you’ll miss problems that you could have anticipated previously, and you won’t be able to expand when you’re running on a skeleton crew.
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.
—-
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.
Twitter had a lot of people in upper and middle management, and a lot of people working to support those people. That’s pretty standard in a mature tech company. It seems that a lot of them weren’t actually doing much work at all (which is also pretty common in tech), so when they and their support staffs were fired, it didn’t change much, except that the actual programmers had fewer bosses.
Let’s say I own a lemonade stand.
I’m going to have a core group of employees that procures lemons, makes the lemonade, sells the lemonade, handles the cash.
But then I’m going to have employees hired to make the stand look better, someone to improve the lemonade recipe, someone to walk around the neighborhood and hand out flyers to get people to come to the lemonade stand, maybe I have someone who talks to parents around the neighborhood to ask for investment to buy more lemons, or open up a new lemonade stand, someone to do quality control on the lemons and lemonade, someone to work with the city to ensure we have all the right permits, analysts to figure out when the best times to stay open are and which corners have the most traffic, people to manage all these extra employees to make sure their doing their jobs, HR to ensure that the employees are happy, maybe I have a division of employees trying out an orange juice stand to see if that’s profitable.
Just like in any company, there are anywhere from 25-75% more employees than you need to run your core business. However, things will start breaking, you’ll miss problems that you could have anticipated previously, and you won’t be able to expand when you’re running on a skeleton crew.
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Twitter had a lot of people in upper and middle management, and a lot of people working to support those people. That’s pretty standard in a mature tech company. It seems that a lot of them weren’t actually doing much work at all (which is also pretty common in tech), so when they and their support staffs were fired, it didn’t change much, except that the actual programmers had fewer bosses.
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