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

[peterth3]

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...

[Railander]

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

[rich_sasha]

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

[grecy]

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?

[tjpnz]

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.

[kaba0]

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.

[vba616]

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.

[lupire]

The reporting cruft isn't overwhelmingly managers.

[chris_wot]

I don't recall seeing those posts.

[srj]

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.

[jasonpeacock]

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.

[sdf4j]

Glad that google fixed that anti-pattern.

[mgraczyk]

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.

[ok_dad]

I wish my manager wrote less code.

[astrange]

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

[kichik]

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

[davidguetta]

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

[throwawayo2022]

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.

[winrid]

Half of my job is teaching devs about indexes

[greybeardednyc]

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

[kenny11]

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

[ahahahahah]

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.

[Gunax]

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.

[vegai_]

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

[DeathArrow]

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

[amrocha]

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????

[bakugo]

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.

[ahahahahah]

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.

[netjiro]

> for doing nothing

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

just very little product output. often even negative output.

[DeathArrow]

>next thing you know you have hundreds of people sitting around collecting a paycheck for doing nothing.

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

[ggm]

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.

[yrgulation]

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.

[ForHackernews]

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

[s_ting765]

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

[syntaxing]

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.

[ummonk]

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.).

[thruway516]

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

[xiphias2]

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.

[prions]

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.

[incomingpain]

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.

[davidguetta]

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

[DeathArrow]

I wonder if the managers manage each other or if they are all managing the developer.

[LarsDu88]

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.

[ramblerman]

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.

[hdjjhhvvhga]

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.

[russdill]

Yup, the same guy saying how important it is to avoid echo chambers and always interacting with and retweeting the same right wing characters over and over again.