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Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

I feel like it is not perfectly functional as a business but is rather hanging on by a thread?

Yea, I keep saying that Twitter is in the "Wile E Coyote already ran off the edge of the cliff" phase and they are still moving forward on momentum alone. But, that gets harder and harder to argue the longer Twitter survives. What if some portion of that 80% really were not necessary? It sounds shocking, but the longer Twitter lives, the truer it becomes.

For about two years, I was an engineering company's only technical employee and I had little else to do besides answering customer support questions. The business was clearly on its last legs and had been so for years. This was just its last gasp.

As another poster mentioned, it requires very little technical staff to just keep the lights on if you're not doing anything to move the business forward.

I am in the same camp of thinking that Musk overestimated how many people he could lay off while keeping Twitter going. But it seems plausible to me that Twitter was somewhat overstaffed.

How many employees are “not necessary” depends on your priorities. If you mostly want to keep a site up and running, the requirements are relatively slim. Musk also laid off a large part of the Trust and Safety team, who don’t have much to do with keeping the site running technically but were responsible for moderation. Whether their jobs were “not necessary” depends on your assessment of how much moderation Twitter needs.

Is that because it doesn't have enough employees or because it has one who won't keep his mouth shut when he should?

It definitely involves doing a bad job at scale. But also perhaps some of those employees were keeping it stable. Many of them were things presumable, like, account managers and stuff for advertisers.

That said, yeah, I agree that it sounded like most of Twitter was bullshit. Actually I'm confused why the OP said "let's not pretend like bullshit jobs are real". Twitter seems to be pretty clear evidence that they are.

(I happen to think they're everywhere and that this article is just terrible. but even worse than bullshit jobs are the bullshit grift economy. After all lots of tech does make money, by doing stupid misanthropic shit. It's bullshit, but not because it's unproductive: just because it's productive at making the world worse for everyone else. Different problem.)

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