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Notes -
Did they ?
Twitter was well known for the being the most do-nothing company in big tech for some time before 2022. My friend (deliberately) joined there in 2021, and did zero work. I mean it. He wanted to start a startup, so he he built his own product full time and free-loaded as a Twitter employee. Yes, he likely would've been laid off even without Elon's interference, but any other org would've kicked him out within the first 2 months.
Twitter at it's first user peak (around 2015) had 3500 employees. In 2022, It had 7500 without any additional user acquisition. In 2024, it has 2800. Twitter was a bloated company in dire need of layoffs. Twitter was totally fine in 2015, and it's only down 20% employees from that period. Twitter's work life balance is well known to have gone to shit. If every employee is working 20% more time, the effective hours worked haven't changed much.
A lot of twitter projects were 'growth projects'. They were trying to expand to other markets, build new products and worked on optimization. All of these people got fired. Some deserved it, but many were already net-positives for the company from a revenue standpoint. Eg: 2% code improvement = $2 million saved for $400k spent on an engineer. That sort of thing.
Elon has separated the AI org out of twitter. XAI already has 100 employees, and will quickly scale up to a few hundred. It may not be counted as part of twitter, but pre-elon twitter was trying to do exactly this under their cortex [1] org.
In 2010, Google had just over 20,000 employees. Its major products were Search and AdSense, with YouTube, Chrome, GMail/Docs and Android following distantly behind.
Today, Google has almost 200,000 employees. Its major products are still Search and AdSense, which are barely better than they were in 2008, and they’re still distantly followed by YouTube, Chrome, GSuite and Android, with a modest cloud business added to the list.
Unlike Twitter, Google makes a lot of money. But it is still extraordinarily inefficient, and its headcount is likely at least 4x where it could be under competent administration. Every big tech business experiences extreme bloat because of a combination of the iron law of bureaucracy and more general fiefdom internal politics.
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I certainly read it stated very confidently dozens of times.
I worked with some people ex-Twitter, and they were pretty competent programmers. No idea what (if anything) they did in Twitter though.
Products like what? Twitter revenue seems to be exclusively ads, isn't it?
Oh yeah, the hiring bar for twitter was still the same as other FANG companies. So, the employees (at least non-DEI programmers) were definitely competent. But it had insane redtape. My friend complained about the amount of redtape at twitter after leaving a team working on highly-sensitive data at Microsoft. So that's saying something.
They never saw the light of day. Most products created at big-tech die before they get too far. Google is infamous for this. But, it's an issue at other FAANGs too.
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