[frontman1988]

Elon showed with Twitter how you don't need hordes of engineers to run a company. He laid off 90% of the staff and still the website is doing alright (at least engineering wise). More engineers lead to more useless bullshit being created(like at Google). A lean mean team seems the way to go.

[thinkingtoilet]

Twitter is facing mounting debt, large quarterly loses, and lost tens of billions of dollars in valuation. I wouldn't use that as a success story.

From the WSJ, so no complaining about liberal bias.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-elon-musks-twitter-faces-mo...

[linuxftw]

All of that is true, but it was true before Elon took over, now they just have fewer employees to pay, so if they can turn the advertising back around, they'll be in a better cashflow situation.

[lhnz]

These issues are caused by (1) the buy-out by Elon Musk involving a large amount of debt, and (2) Elon Musk annoying "woke" advertisers who have subsequently deserted the platform.

The actual engineering hasn't been as affected or rather while it has been affected it hasn't been affected to the magnitude that you might expect given the size of the lay-offs.

[kypro]

You're getting downvoted for this, but factually what you're saying is correct. He did lay of 90% of the staff and although people have claimed Twitter will die any minute, it hasn't.

Whether or not a lean team is the way to go perhaps remains to be seen, but what I'd say is that my anecdotal opinion on this is that the majority of engineers are a liability and assuming that 10x more engineers means 10x more work done is incorrect. Most engineers can build stuff, but they also add complexity and require hand holding. Both suck time from the most productive engineers.

A team of 10 excellent engineers is easily better than a team of 100 good engineers, in my opinion.

[itsoktocry]

>He did lay of 90% of the staff and although people have claimed Twitter will die any minute, it hasn't.

It lost 3/4 of its value, partially because it's losing advertisers, partially because they fired everyone outside of engineering.

I'm an avid Twitter user to this day; do you think it's thriving, just because the website is still up? It has more spam, bots and porn than ever.

[manuelabeledo]

> He laid off 90% of the staff and still the website is doing alright (at least engineering wise).

This is debatable.

Twitter hasn't added any meaningful functionality in recent years, which is fine if you think your product can survive stagnation for the foreseeable future. I wouldn't think so, but who knows.

Also, random Twitter functionality seems to be broken once a month, more or less. Last time I checked, new signups were having trouble following accounts and posting, which is as essential as it could be for Twitter to work.

[syspec]

I think to most people, twitter is fine and was fine with only its core product.

[lesuorac]

> still the website is doing alright (at least engineering wise)

It's not though. I assume you're trying to claim Twitters only problem is the Advertisers leaving and that the platform is fine but that's not the case.

Lets ignore all visible technical problems such as outages or broken features that have happened since the purchase.

You have to compare Twitter to FaceBook. Both of them have had similar outrage by Advertisers for the respective companies actions. However, Advertisers keep coming back to FaceBook because of the engineering. FaceBook has much better targeting and also staff that interacts with the Advertisers. Twitter has absolutely horrendous targeting; Jews don't want their 'buy a Torah' ad next to a pro-gaza post not just because they disagree with the post but also because that somebody isn't their target audience. This is an engineering problem; if Twitter had better engineering the Advertisers wouldn't be leaving.

[HDThoreaun]

Twitter targeting wasnt any better with 10x as many employees. Its ad system has always largely sucked, Elon was just the push advertisers needed to get out.

[ralphc]

The smaller staff may be ok for maintaining an existing Twitter, with feature tweaks, but could you build a Twitter up from scratch with the amount of people they have now?