“There Seem to be 10 managers for every one dev at Twitter” – Elon

Managers help organize their teams to be effective by hiring people with complimentary strengths, insulating them from distractions, and representing their team's work and achievements to leadership.

Managers unblock their team and get out of the way.

If a manager is writing code, they are not managing - they are developing. If there's not enough developers, they should be hiring.

And directors...they should definitely not be writing code.

The only valid example I've seen for leadership writing code is when they are acting as a customer and consuming their team's product (e.g. their team owns a service) with toy applications so they can understand the customer experience.

to the second point, i dont think i had a single good manager the entire time, i had a lot. the only one that wasnt terrible was the one that phoned it in and didn't bother me and just let me work. i never reached out to a manager there for technical advice.

nope. plenty of stress, long hours, tons of work.

just very little product output. often even negative output.

That is socialism and it's no wonder why some leftists love corporations. It's because many corporations are examples of applied socialism.

In my eyes, this is not TOO much different than the kind of radical reorg that might take place at a company like Twitter anyway (although ofc I've never seen it first-hand), just weird that it's playing out entirely in public.

That said, I think the public strategy is potentially interesting, as the engineers who remain at the company will probably feel like they're a part of a very exciting moment, will feel more aligned with leadership, etc.

Promoting engineers into managers loses you a good engineer and creates a poor (and unhappy) manager.

If the person wants to be a manager, great! But otherwise, don't do it.

1. Manager needs to be the most knowledgeable, and steer the team with the correct decisions.

2. Manager cannot be close to the code due to other responsibilities, and so needs to trust their team for the technical things.

Personally I have the following opinion: a lot of companies can follow 1, since once you know how to flip burgers, you know. The smarter people rise and can have more influence. However in knowledge work, the people most knowledgeable are close to the code. When you move up, you will know less and less (code evolves quickly).

I'm 20 years in the software development business, and I only work for managers that understand they don't know, and trust & empower their team to take the right technical decisions. It really surprises me that some developers here think differently.

Where before there were teams of QA people, project managers, IT administrators and support personnel, it has all been subsumed into the various "agile" DevOps methodologies. I now hear devs complain that they have to do everything.

Promoting devs to do all the things that devs don't do is not the solution. It shows a deep lack of awareness of all the boring things (to devs anyway) that have to happen so that devs can get on with writing code.

This is not to say that all managers are great; there are many bad or mediocre managers, just as there are many bad or mediocre devs. They are different skill sets though.

Perhaps it's different when you have the resources to attract top-tier talent.

This is dated. More like 1.25 or 1.5 million.

When hired it was my original manager to 2 employees; but it was obvious there would be some hiring. Which did happen.

Eventually it was 'too much' for said manager to be dealing with us on a daily. So he found a marketing person to be our new manager. He was lazy as well, so his contribution was more or less creating salesforce reports to track and grade each of us. I was constantly #1 so I didn't care but if someone went on vacation, they showed up in last place and would be chastised for poor numbers. Generally the team didn't like him.

Then comes the snitch sales person who becomes our manager, not above or below this other manager, but below the original. She tried to keep educated on the ongoing work, I dont blame her. Except about 1/3rd of the team refused to talk to her; they realized a pattern of her talking to them and them getting in shit an hour or 2 later. Personally I outright went to the original manager and asserted she's not managing me and if she is, please tell me right away. Because I was planning to instant quit. He of course said she's not and that I seem to manage myself fine enough, these other managers were to keep the team going.

So the team was getting a little angry with 3 layers of managers. What happens? A junior on the team proposes he becomes the manager and reports to the managers so they dont have to interact with the team. I had mostly excluded myself from this team by this point. It was a sinking ship and I wanted to be just far enough to watch what happened.

Now what happens? This junior basically was turned into the snitch on her behalf. He started getting hated by the team and decides he doesn't want the position anymore. So he orchestrates to be out of the office all day.

So then an outside management team was hired to figure out why this team was so dysfunctional. I was apparently uninvolved and never the subject of the meeting. But guess who is in the meetings? All the managers and none of the team. All of the problems of the team... obviously the team and not the managers.

I specifically again went to the original manager and asked about the meetings. He reassured me they weren't about me at all. That one of the primary discoveries is they need at least 1 more manager to manage the managers.

Elon has definetely a different "style" of building compagnies, more technical, and it might just also be partizlly true in absolute terms

Best to ignore the cult of personality altogether and focus on the merit of the argument.

If you remove politics, and focus on twitter. Then it takes someone a little wild to make the drastic changes discussed. If he makes the blue tick a paid option, promotes free speech from all sides, trims the fat, and explores new product ideas, then I think twitter could be in an interesting place in a year or two.