Revenue/employee at Twitter is about $600k while it’s over $1.2M at Meta and Google [0]. Elon is winding up for a layoff with comments like this. Not sure if the accuracy of his comment is relevant.

[0] https://twitter.com/RyanReeves_/status/1423013707190206464?l...

Considering they did lay off 50% of their staff, your analysis was spot-on.

Is it more to do with revenue size, or inflated headcount? How do these things compare to some other measure, like say market cap?

Given the number of posts we see here on HN from FAANG employees who say they're barely even working and getting away with it is easy, is anyone surprised there is a lot of cruft at Twitter?

Well there is normally some misguided attempt to justify how much more productive they are in those two hours. If there's one thing they're not short of it's hubris.

Well, the average office worker pretty much only does 3 hours of effective work in 8 hours. And that’s more than OK. Anyone claiming that they are productive during the whole day are just lying to themselves, we are not machines.

I don't know when the word "cruft" started being applied to people, but I don't like it and think it should be prohibited.

The reporting cruft isn't overwhelmingly managers.

An exaggeration but there probably is some truth to this.

Ten or so years ago even my director wrote code (at google). Now it's rare to see a first line manager code something.

Managers should not be coding - they are there to grow their people. That's why they are called "people managers".

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.

Even McDonalds managers can flip burgers. You cannot manage a system unless you are at least partially involved in its operation. Managers should not be writing code all the time, but they should have a basic understanding of what the people under them are doing, otherwise they are completely dependent on other people to make decisions for them (in the best case, in the worst case they ignore everybody else and use their gut instinct).

I think it's both disrespectful towards engineers and managers to think that every manager should write code. Why not treat both as two separate valuable skills?

I agree they shouldn't be writing code, but they should probably have a fair degree of knowledge about writing code. Otherwise, how do they decide which people to hire to write the code?

They tell their engineers to interview those people, then make hiring decisions based on aggregated and distilled feedbacks from those engineers.

Anecdotally, this is basically always worse than having someone with significant coding experience. Two thoughts come to mind immediately:

1. Making key hiring decisions is hard: coding experience lets you better see how a potential hire's technical strengths, weaknesses, and opinions intersect with personality traits to produce value or dysfunction.

2.Coding experience helps you understand different kinds of value - it's very hard to explain to non-technical folks that while a developer is brilliant and productive, he's not careful enough and six months down the line we're going to be buried in tech debt if he's allowed to keep going.

So now they have to adjudicate the technical opinions of their engineers. Engineer #1 says they should hire person X for various technical reasons. Engineer #2 says they should hire person Y for various other technical reasons. How does a non-technical manager decide which opinion is 'better'?

they don't. you ask the team to come to a consensus on their own and if they don't just pick someone to make the decision and then pick someone else the next time you have to pick

managers thinking they know better than their reports is the source of basically all team dysfunction in tech

This always sounds good in theory but in practice is a disaster. At least in my experience.

And a technical manager is either one of engineer #1 and #2 and can hire X or Y depending on their own biases without consulting anyone else. Is this 'better'?

> Managers unblock their team and get out of the way.

You're talking as if Devs are brainless outside of programming, let's babysit them.

The best development managers/directors I've worked with were hands on, and they knew significantly more than me, they knew their stuff really well.

It has absolutely nothing to do with capability of one person vs the other, it is about what is part of one job vs the other.

As a developer I’m very ”thankful” to a good manager shielding me from all the bullshit customers come up with — if they do their work well they indeed help productivity big time.

I wouldn't draw such a distinct line. People should write code if it serves their purposes and absolve the criticality that if they don't write it, the product will fail as a whole due to lack of the correct expertise.

Also this proposal does create a divide and ends up in factionalism. In this world no one leads by example.

Except that more often than not it's people who only have "people skills" and no coding skills under the hood.

Glad that google fixed that anti-pattern.

Hmmm if you're the same srj that I think I know at Google, then it's interesting you would say that. At least amongst the managers that you and I jointly interact with (especially my own), managers seem to code plenty, maybe too much.

I'm pretty sure I've seen that srj go by at some point (probably should have chosen that as my ldap!) but mine is different :).

I wish my manager wrote less code.

If your manager was never a programmer, I would agree, but ideally they would have been previously.

A VP fixed a bug I filed recently and I had to wonder what he was doing looking at it.

I feel bad for Twitter employees learning about their future from realtime memes.

Poor overpaid FAANG enginners who had 1 year to prepare for this. So sad

At my previous startup, more than 50% were good for nothing. they did not even know about indexes. As soon as i grasped their stupidity i ran away as fast i could.

Half of my job is teaching devs about indexes

I’m guessing this is just a way for Elon to double down on his signaling of “cost cutting” to help hold the stock price right?

Id suspect there are lots of managers involved in things other than managing devs at Twitter but love to see the commentary from the HN twitter engs here

There is no stock price, it's a private company now.

it will still be valued based on revenue and profit.

This guys is just super fucking dumb. The absolute most generous reading of this would be that he looked at some org chart and saw there were devs with ten layers of management between them and the ceo. Only the stupidest fucking guy would then read that and make this inane claim.

Clearly an exaggeration, but anyone have real numbers?

I know it's nice to gripe about management being dumb, but my managers at Facebook and Amazon were the opposite. I often ran into managers who, after a 10 minute discussion would make key insights that I had not noticed.

my anecdote, i dealt with 2 managers, 2 tech leads, an architect type person that would jump in randomly, the skip level that would jump in, plus if i got embedded on a project, i had more leads, a pm, more managers to deal with. when i first started at twitter i was 3 people removed from jack, when i left, i couldn't even tell you what the chain was anymore.

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.

To get real numbers first we have to parse if he meant meant product manager, program manager, ux manager, and account manager, or just engineering manager.

He didn't mean anything. He doesn't know what he's talking about. He called their PhD turned engineer turned turned CTO turned CEO a "MBA type" and was too embarrassed to ask him any technical questions.

They have people skills; they're good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?

Appreciate the reference. Tom was an engineering liaison, not manager though

Of course he meant every employee with a "manager" title. And take "seems" to mean "I doubled the real number for effect".

I assume it's a way of saying engineering is a tiny part of the organization.

I think Musk is a master of tapping into public sentiment.

Griping about the uselessness of management is precisely the kind of folk wisdom that gets passed around. It's fun to divide the world into do-ers and managers, both because it rights the uncomfortable social hierarchy and encourages action over in-action.

I'm sure he'll work hard to make that 100:1.

Also, here's your daily reminder to check out Mastodon. https://joinmastodon.org/servers

Now that there will be more free speech on Twitter I will gladly use it.

What makes you think there will be?

The owner of the website pledging to reverse bans made for dubious reasons, for one. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586105918143406080

Do we know how he defines "dubious reasons" there?

So the way to solve it is to give the very few engineers you have sudden unrealistic deadlines? And ask them to print their code for a quick judgement session????

Sounds like par for the course for big tech companies. Hire a ton of HR people with no real skills beyond "people skills" because you MUST grow at all costs, those people in turn hire more people like themselves with no real skills, next thing you know you have hundreds of people sitting around collecting a paycheck for doing nothing.

Bullshit. No faang company has 10 managers per dev. Not even close. At best, you could point to oracle and call lawyers "managers" but only the dumbest would listen.

I don't think the numbers are meant to be literal.

> for doing nothing

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

just very little product output. often even negative output.

Now this is some fresh horseshoe theory.

I think I might have the lost it somehow over the years but I remember writing a short “fiction” thing about basically this “turned pro”… corporate driven socialism, natural humans are restricted to owning at most one personal share in the company, every share has the right to vote but the elected “board of directors” have term limits enforced by the articles of incorporation which require unanimous consent to modify, you don’t have social welfare, you have a “dividend” payed out from the collective “contractually obligated payments” required of shareholders who operate addition businesses with permits (business license, individual tax registration etc) which are basically just your Taxes … it was a pretty funny exercise in torturing the definitions of words around to take the most capitalist thing I could think of “the government is just the biggest company and basically owns you” and slowly twist it round till it was for all intents and purposes socialism, if not actually “communism”.

If every employee own a share of the company (voting share), this is communism. If only investors do, its capitalism.

If you have both, its a mixed?

It’s been quite a while since I re read it in full, but all up it was a couple pages and I definitely tried to make the effort to claim it wasn’t a “mix” which I would normally think of as something on the scale between capitalism and communism representing the ends of the scale, and that the hypothetical “government” structure was in fact “both” simultaneously and now I’ve had more time to try and remember it, I remember it was sort of a fake wiki entry or mockumentary style article, right now I want to call it “mocumentatation” but I’m not sure if that’s an establishment term of one I’m accidentally coining right now for mock non-fiction style documentation about topics.

Wish I still had it, since my summary here really doesn’t do as good a job facetiously arguing that something could be both fully communist and capitalist at the same time.

So true! As they say, workers of the world, unite, and submit your quarterly OKRs!

Was there not a desktop app for Sun employees which showed the value of their stock vesting? And microsoft? And I am talking about deep time here, not "in the last 5 years" but back into the dotcom boom and before.

Maybe there is one good trend that will come out of this - sack managers throughout the industry. Promote tech people where necessary, and have devs work directly with stakeholders. Also trim pdf certified scrum masters. Time to lean things out.

I'm not confident this will lead to industry-wide trends, at least not immediately, because Twitter is specifically a massive company making negative profit. If Twitter was profitable, then this entire thing wouldn't have happened; they need to get lean because they're losing $$.

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.

> If Twitter was profitable, then this entire thing wouldn't have happened; they need to get lean because they're losing $$.

Exactly. It seems that EM overpaid for a dud, and now wants to compensate any way possible.

But could he please let us know what percentage of users is bots?

Twitter old managements are not that commercial savvy. They only introduced blue mark like a couple years back even though Twitter has been more than a decade old. Also, almost every governments and celebrities in the world has twitter. That are gold mines. Imagine USA defence department or IRA being forced to pay 1 K usd a month (this is already consider low ), if not the twit handles given to North Korea or Putin to mess with. The old twit mgmnts are rather incompetent with their pursuit of affirmative, diversity, race theory type of agenda in the last 3 years. You can see those with conservatives view largely will get suspended while liberals and lefties (some questionable middle east groups) are allowed. I doubt that attracts ads money.

Twitter verification was introduced over 13 years ago, a little over 3 years after Twitter was founded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_verification

I thought we were all in clear agreement that promoting engineers into managers creates poor managers? Engineers are good engineers, management is an entirely different skill set.

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.

I am not sure who’s in agreement with that. Being technical or a manager are not genetic traits, but acquired skills. I love working with people and tech, always have. Forcing people to do either against their will wont work, indeed, but what you describe sounds like what a manager would say to justify their position of doing nothing, really. Also part of a good technical person’s skillset is self management. If you cant manage your own time then i am sorry, you are not an experienced engineer.

The problem I see is that even though managers have a different skillset, they have out-sized influence on technical or technically related decisions. And a lot of times it's more than just influence; They just make the decision themselves.

This is on the spot for me. I went this route so I could make actual decisions. Otherwise in most cases I'm just a glorified ticket closer in an assembly line with the design given to me on a platter.

"Promoted" should not necessarily mean "became a manager". Tech companies need to embrace the concept of very high-level, very high-paid Individual Contributors.

Raise your hand if you're a "Senior Software Engineer" or "Staff Software Engineer" and there is no other next level for your career to go besides management. It's a common problem.

I've been really proud of Amazon for recognizing this a while ago and creating a path to Distinguished Engineer for ICs, which is VP-level (and then actively promoting ppl to that level, it's not just a special role for hiring externally).

No, almost no one agrees with that except for entrenched MBAs and capital allocators.

Almost no one agrees with the idea that you shouldn’t promote people into jobs they don’t want and aren’t good at? I’m as anti-MBA dictatorship as the next person, but c’mon.

C’mon no one is saying people should be “promoted” against their will. There are those who like managing and those who dont and thats fine. By managing in this context i mean organising and coordinating. Motivating people with “fun” stuff and jira tickets is not management, thats supervising. A manufacturing concept forced upon scientists and engineers that everyone frowns upon.

variant of Peter principle

See, thats what incompetent management doesnt understand. Management is not about status or power or rising among ranks just to score points, its about who can best organise and coordinate. Power hungry managers dont belong in tech or science jobs.

Not even organise / coordinate, that's not the most important thing that I get from the best manager, actually that's the easy part.

The best managers I had were helping me debug things when I get stuck. When there's a seg fault in a multithreaded program, or the project just doesn't seem to go anywhere for some time because I don't really know what to do or I'm going in a bad direction with my local improvements, somebody more mature than me / person with more experience just knows what to do.

In my experience, most developers hate interacting with stakeholders. They start complaining about having too many meetings, etc. Also I think it's difficult to handle both roles simultaneously. There's a lot of context-switching involved. Hence the existence of scrum masters.

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

Zappos' experiment with holacracy was not a success https://www.yahoo.com/now/zappos-quietly-backed-away-holacra...

Reading through the responses here there seem to be 2 kinds of ways to look at things:

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.

I have seen this kind of call throughout my career. Developers say useless people who aren't devs should just get out of their way.

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.

God I really hope we get the Good Ending: Musk kills Twitter and loses $44B in the process.

Or he makes Twitter better (it sucks so much worse now) and everyone gets to enjoy it for free.

What other Musk project ever went like that?

It's possible the way a galaxy in the exact shape and colors of a neon "Eat at Joe's" sign is.

How likely is it to be free when Elon plans to have people pay for a verified account?

Seems unlikely based on the evidence so far.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/n-word-jumps-500-elon-20...

Not sure what I’m more surprised about HN, the amount of Musk believers or how many people do not work for tech/MAANG. I can’t believe how many people here are spewing bullshit like “oh, Google is heading this direction too” or “Good, fire these lazy fucks!”. Anecdotally, there are no tech companies with even 1:5 manager to IC ratio, let alone anything greater than 1:1. And why is there wine on tap for workers at Twitter? Because they want talent. Most major tech companies, each engineer makes more than 1M per year on NET revenue.

I don't think he's talking about engineering managers. It seems to be common practice to make "manager" part of the title for many non-technical roles (not just product managers but also content managers, customer success managers, etc.).

I think it's more like 1 employee makes 10M net revenue, and 9 employees coast on their success.

The theory is that the superstar employee needs the support form 9 others to achieve the success.

As an example, a super star programmer, requires support from DevOps, QA, PM, EM, UX, Docs to deliver the great results. Alone not a super star anymore.

To reuse and refocus an old quote: 50% of those people are probably useless. The problem is figuring out which ones.

You can find out easily - when an employee leaves and you see a huge productivity drop, you'll know. (Also the opposite happens: you fire a bad manager and productivity goes up.)

I coin the long paid vacation hack

> The problem is figuring out which ones.

To be more precise: figuring out which ones are useless may cost more time/money/effort than you would save by removing them.

Even 1:5 PM ratio (not engineering manager, where the engineer can write programs as well) is bad when PMs are fighting for engineer attention instead of having a complementary role of communiating in a way that engineers with deep technical knowledge are unable to because of their closeness to the technical details of the product.

There have been a lot of people cheering twitters downfall because they feel personally or politically vindicated. But it’s especially bewildering to see how many people here on Hn completely cheer on the absolute disrespect and humiliation of twitter employees as a good thing.

To me it's entirely believable because I've been in a similar situation.

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.

To be honest your message is literally "musk is wrong" while there is probably some better take to have either

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

I'd say about tree fiddy.

This man almost sounds reasonable, but then I remember he posted some Q-anon dribble earlier today and I realize this sage wisdom might be coming out of the wrong hole.

People can hold both reasonable and unreasonable opinions at the same time - especially across domains where they may be more or less knowledgeable.

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.

Wait, you think spreading crazy conspiracy theories is “politics”??

I'm interested in talking about changes to twitter that might make it more profitable, and not derailing into another politics thread.

But what does any of this have to do politics? Why are you bringing up politics?

The owner of twitter pushing crazy conspiracy theories on twitter is directly relevant to the topic you claim to be interested in talking about, it can significantly affect advertiser relationships (i.e profit).

But I guess you have some bizarre political agenda that conflicts with the idea that Twitters owner may be self-sabotaging?

> But I guess you have some bizarre political agenda

You got all that from "If you remove politics, and focus on twitter."? :)

I agree that Musk's behavior is a serious detriment to the future of twitter.

Not sure what else you want me to say, I'm interested in twitter (the business) and what a drastic change in their business model might look like more than I am in Musk.

> You got all that from "If you remove politics, and focus on twitter."? :)

So far you’re the only one bringing up politics in a thread that has next to nothing to do with politics. So yeah, perhaps that’s a fair assumption?

I don't mean to be rude, but you were the one who brought up QAnon

First, I wasn’t.

Second, QAnon really has nothing to do with politics. It’s an utterly insane conspiracy theory spread by delusional, mentally deranged people.

You think this ego-driven manchild will better the platform, when he managed to drive himself into a stupid-ass overpriced buy, firing many of the existing talent and simultaneously driving Tesla shares down?

Oh, and don’t forget his very questionable “morals” starting with pro-Russian fiddlings to one of his first tweets post-acquisition spreading fake news.

Contrary to what many people would like to believe, the same person can do both bad and good things, have great ideas and terrible ones, be fantastic to some and terrible to others. Most people are like that, with varying intensity.

There seems to be 1 asshole for every Elon Musk on earth.

And on Mars...