Tech Layoffs Caused by Vain Over-Hiring for 'Fake Work', Argues Former PayPal Ex...

Tech Layoffs Caused by Vain Over-Hiring for 'Fake Work', Argues Former PayPal Executive

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  I've been asking out loud for almost a decade what the fuck were 3000 engineers doing at twitter all day? They don't have a consumer hardware division, they're not building unique new products, they're not rolling out really unique new features. They're just baling out water on the existing product keeping it afloat. Number of active users has been steady at ~300 million since 2015, there has been no user growth so presumably whatever growing pains they were having in 2015 have mostly been unwound at this p

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    Probably new methods of data collection and targeting ads, as opposed to working on the core product.

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      There isn't anything new being done. Scientific Advertising [amazon.com], written in 1923 by Claude Hopkins, laid out all the principles of A-B ad splits and statistical analysis. The only thing new about what the tech companies do is that it is "on the Internet."

      Ads are the core product.

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        Ads are the number one industry for tech companies and the number one use for computers. I'd like a time machine so I can poll all the tech workers back in the 70s and 80s and see how many could have predicted this dystopia where you can hold a super computer in the palm of your hand and yet spend all day watching the advertisements on it.

        • Ads are the number one industry for tech companies and the number one use for computers. I'd like a time machine so I can poll all the tech workers back in the 70s and 80s and see how many could have predicted this dystopia where you can hold a super computer in the palm of your hand and yet spend all day watching the advertisements on it.

          You don't need a time machine--many of the tech workers from the 1970s and 1980s are still around. To answer your question, no we did not predict that you would be able to hold a supercomputer in your hand in 2023, and we did not think that the 2023 descendants of cell phones would be used for watching advertisements.

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          In the 70s and 80s, you could set up your own server or own BBS and do whatever you wanted. You had to buy the hardware, set up your own infrastructure and maintain it. You had freedom, but you had to do the work and spend money. The modern internet, everyone wants the same freedom we had in the 80s, but nobody is willing to either (1) pay for it, or (2) do the work to build their own platform. The only sustainable way to pay for online services is through advertisements. The hard lesson Elon Musk is learni

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            And yet we had television supported by ads, it grew quite large, without advertising eclipsing the products it was hyping. It grew large with curated ads, ads that had no malware, and without inflated but meaningless stock valuations.

            The lesson Musk needed to learn is not let his ego get in his way, then he wouldn't have bought Twitter, and he wouldn't have assumed he knew how it all worked. He brags about his hard work, but when he brags that he spent 120 hours a week and slept on the factory floor, that

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            And you couldn't legally do it. That BBS wasn't allowed to plug into your telephone line.
            Your telephone was leased and owned by Bell. The adapters to allow you to connect third party devices to them were contraband.
            We fought hard for the freedom we have. Harder than you know.

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        Really? I was under the impression that Twitter users are the core product, and that the ad(vertiser)s are the purchasers of said product.

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    When you see TikTok videos of people's day at Twitter which seems to involves coffees/yoga/lunch etc but sweet fuck-all work it's pretty clear that there are lot of people who may not perhaps be contributing lots to the business.

    • Re: Is this where...

      A lot of cells in your body don't do much work, you wouldn't miss most of them when they go, but cutting a large fraction of them and making the rest work balls to the wall all the time seems like a stupid idea for some reason.

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        That's just because you can't just make your cells work balls to the wall and when they're wasted, throw them away and get new ones.

        You can do that with workers.

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      That's because people don't make tiktoks videos of sitting in front of a computer for 10 hours straight

    • Re: Is this where...

      I'm guessing those videos aren't 8 hours long. They only show the fun parts.

  • Re: Is this where...

    There's a whole side of Twitter we never see: the one facing advertisers. They have been leaving, and in some cases complaining. It's not all just for "woke" reasons.

    I imagine a lot of those engineers worked at services for advertisers, for the sales people of Twitter, and for various long shots that have a high-risk, high reward profile. For instance, Twitter was a main backer of a little Lua library known as "Torch".

    I don't disagree with the guy in the article who thinks there's a lot of vanity hiring and

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    We can tell. Twitter has had tons of serious problems starting from just a few days after Elno took over. Notably, for about a month it refused to assemble the front page feed for users. You could get notifications, and the site worked in general, except for that. Other times, other features have been broken.

    That doesn't speak to whether Twitter needed that many engineers, but it does prove that you don't know whether Twitter's been having problems. It's had so many they've been reported in the media.

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      A big problem is that Musk did not know which engineers were useful or not. He brought in his automobile engineers to look at code they had never seen before from a business they knew nothing about and took their quick off-the-cuff recommendations. That is sheer cluelessness in leadership on display there.

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    Well, if you don't understand it then surely it must have been a scam./eyeroll.

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    1-2 PRs a week is good. More than that then they're rushing and should slow down and make sure the code is good, design is done before coding, do the developer tests, etc. Musk made the mistake of assuming quantity is quality and measured lines of code like some clueless 90's manager.

    • Clueless 90's manager?

      He literally asked them to print out their code. [cnn.com]

      More like clueless '70s manager.

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        All for a silly company with a fluff product.

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  Well it's difficult to pay people when you are hemorrhaging cash. Like trying to sell the office plants. https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]

  Or your inability to pay rent. https://arstechnica.com/tech-p... [arstechnica.com]

  Even better is this guy. https://i.redd.it/11l4dg5p5nma... [i.redd.it] Nobody knows why he was hired (including himself) but he's still receiving a paycheck. Office Space has become a reality.

  You're telling me all successful companies don't operate this way?

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  Post Musk, where he laid off essential employees so that the company is sputtering? The downtime last week was precisely because the wrong people were laid off. Musk has the same problems as the other CEOS - having no idea how many or few to hire, not knowing who is important or not, and mistakenly thinking that he's a genius.

  • Re: Is this where...

    The previous management didn't know what was going on either, yet kept going blindly. Musk is better because he's aware of those problems, is ferreting out the causes, and is dealing with them. See Mudge's testimony to Congress.

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      Musk is not really aware. He honestly thought there were bots and he'd just spend some billions and remove them. He does not know how Twitter works. Bringing in his automotive engineers provided no clue about how a social media company works. You can't fix a company that size by micromanaging; you can't even fix a small company by micromanaging. You can't have micro-management and teamwork at the same time.

      Musk would have been better off paying the backing-out penalty, or not buying it in the first pla

• • Re:

    How did I know this tripe would be spewed by an "Anonymous Coward"? SMFH

  • Re:

    There's actually some insight in this post: there's a lot of competent female workers but they're all women, a creature that calls itself a womyn is invariably a noisy troublemaker with net negative value for co-workers. Likewise, the overlap between competent employees of any skin color and the crowd that burns trash cans and jumps on cars is precisely zero. Same for the sports jacket wearing "patriots" for that matter.