I'm pretty curious about how and where Twitter employees were distributed. For a company ostensibly worth $44 billion, having 7,500 staff feels pretty damn lean. It feels like Musk isn't just purging people, he's purging the Twitter culture...
(Although that's just a number from a quick googling. Maybe they outsource a lot of manufacturing etc?)
That said, their FY22 budget is “only” $30B, which is less than Elon just paid for all of Twitter. This number usually surprises people but a lot of other space-related work is within the USAF and NRO budgets.
It may seem to ignorant people that a space program is more advanced than "just a website" but actually running these kind of websites is extremely complex. Especially when you're needing to compete with Facebook and Google at serving ads in a relevant and effective way.
It is really interesting reading through their infrastructure challenges alone:
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
Anyone ever seen a relevant Twitter ad?
Just seems very dumb location based placement. Nowhere near the level of IG.
Facebook and Google are in a completely different league which is why for most brands ~95% of online ad spend is spent there.
Twitter has been slowly getting better until now when Musk's attitude has frightened the brands off i.e. GM, L'Oreal, Pfizer etc.
Musk looks like hes done the classic: "the office is clean why do I need cleaners" dance. I am surprised he can fire that many people that quickly and still expect momentum.
It doesn't help that he appears to be shitting out product ideas that he's just "dreamt" up. Rather than talking to people to see why twitter didn't do it in the first place. He clearly has a low opinion of the entire company.
I don't think so. I see far more hate towards Meta and Amazon.
Designing reusable rockets and launching hundreds of them into space for profit, is more complicated and requires a different caliber of frankly higher IQ worker, than building and maintaining the existing Twitter.
Not that there aren’t some smart web people, obviously.
Tesla is known for fucked up WLB and low compensation compared to FAANG.
I bet Twitter employees have higher average IQ. Especially compared to whoever at Tesla authorized removing radar and parking sensors.
Especially compared to whoever at Tesla authorized removing radar and parking sensors.
rocket science and software engineering are two skills that take years of experience to hone. they come with their own set of challenges.
i feel like this sentiment belongs alongside "isn't netflix just an ftp server and a media player?"
I’m writing from a faang office with a few decades of experience. I know some people in aerospace. They’re on average smarter than 4/5ths of my colleagues (who are also clever).
For one, I anecdotally know people in FAANG who were smart by effectively “studying for the test” by focusing more on leetcode than projects/intellectual exploration. In contrast, the people I know who went into aerospace tended to have a genuine interest in physics (and some with more interest in philosophy), and had more experience with projects (e.g. worked on an aerospace team in university), with many of them having little-to-know experience with software development.
Interestingly, the aerospace people I know anecdotally happened to be better at soft skills/networking for getting into companies, whereas the FAANG people focused on leetcode for admissions. After getting into a company, also from my anecdotal experience, more FAANG people focused on metrics/compensation, whereas more aerospace people tended to focus more on the mastery of the craft. I acknowledge that my anecdotes shouldn’t be generalized, but it aligns with the motivations of many people looking to get into each company (it seems more people go into FAANG for compensation/prestige, whereas more people go into aerospace for the passion).
So, I would say that people from both categories tended to be very smart at learning quickly and solving hard problems, though anecdotally, the aerospace people seemed to be generally more intellectually curious. Then again, perhaps the aerospace people were better at soft skills/presenting themselves so they appeared smarter, whereas the FAANG people didn’t focus on presenting themselves as intelligently. For limitations, note that the people I’m thinking of are at the junior level.
In any case, I don’t think one can conclusively say that people in FAANG have more/less/the same intelligence as people in aerospace companies, though maybe one can tentatively say that people who go into aerospace tend to be more curious and interested in mastery of one’s profession (versus material compensation).
They were responsible for local marketing and news curation.
[1] https://www.theage.com.au/business/companies/musk-starts-mas...
* Meta: 71,970 [2021]
* Apple: 164,000 [2022]
* Amazon: 1,298,000 [2020]
* Netflix: 11,300 [2021]
* Alphabet: 156,500 [2021]
* Microsoft: 221,000 [2021]
* The New York Times: 5000 [2021]
* Fox Corporation: 9000 [2020]
* Reddit: 700 [2021]
(Anyone else I should add?)
I can't really find any trends. I think Reddit is an outlier, and my impression is having only 3750 employees would probably put Twitter on the smaller end of the scale too.
1. https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/9/22274077/reddit-funding-ro...
To get the ratio metric up, they have to increase income or reduce employees.
This rationale, given by Musk (and I imagine VC friends) is all outlined in the discovery documents of the twitter vs musk legal case.
edits, i dug it out and made it a top level comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33467305
Google, for example, has more contractors than full-time employees, bringing the total employee count up to over 300,000
Consider revenue and income (losses) and Twitter doesn't look good at all, they look horrible. They don't have that many employees, but they must be very very highly compensated and concentrated in very high cost areas. Otherwise the company is wasting serious money somewhere else, because to lose money on $5B/yr revenue with 7500 employees year after year in a business that's as high margin as pure software is incredibly terrible performance.
Twitter rinsed Musk on the way out, which I deeply respect considering his behaviour.
That will only be some salve for the employees losing their jobs, but hopefully their packages get some of that.
One of the theories knocking around last week was that these layoffs are just before a stock vesting was to happen, presumably in an attempt to avoid paying them.
I find it very odd that people keep mentioning it despite it not panning out, and not sure what to make of it.
Out of honest curiosity, what was your intent for bringing it up?
Has anyone confirmed that the stock vests actually happened? Or did they get postponed whilst the layoffs where being organised? Haven't seen anything either way.
And I don't think it's that odd to consider that a man well known for flaunting the law would flaunt the law on this as well.
Elsewhere it has been announced that laid off employees are getting quite generous Severance packages, so this would be out of line with that.