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Comment on It’s a dark time to be a tech worker right now

The Silicon Valley companies massively over hired.

Using twitter as an example, they used to publicly disclose every site and their entire tech stack.

I have to write proposals and estimates and when Elon decided to axe half the company of 8000 I was curious..

I assigned the biggest functional team I could (e.g. just create units of 10 and plan for 2 teams to compete on everything). I assumed a full 20 person IT department at every site, etc.. Then I added 20% to my total and then 20% again for management.

I came up with an organisation of ~1200, Twitter was at 8000.

I had excluded content moderators and ad sellers because I had no experience in estimating that but it gives a idea of the problem.

I think the idea was to deny competition people but in reality that kind of staff bloat will hurt the big companies

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SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
While you’re right that many tech companies overhired, they overhired into an increasing market. Multiple companies, including Twitter, then over-fired and ended up trying to get employees to boomerang or otherwise hire into positions that they cut. Other companies, like Apple, expanded but did not overhire, and as a result have not done mass layoffs.

I also have no idea how you come up with a 20 person IT department at every site when internet services companies live and breathe on IT services. Everything from data centers costing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to making sure devs can commit code and that backups get made takes IT services. I’m not sure what industry you’re in but you’re vastly under-budgeting and setting yourself up for failure, exactly the same way Elon is doing. Elon managed to crash twitter’s valuation by a whopping 90% inside of a year. If the cuts he made were justified, the line would have gone in the other direction.

Content moderators and ad sellers are literally the entire point of having a company like Twitter. Curation is the product, and the ad buyers - not the users - are the ones paying the bills.

So, yes - companies hired because they needed to hit production targets during Covid that were not sustained by continued market levels post-pandemic. That’s always going to result in cuts.

But a lot of what we’re seeing right now is upper management/c-suite types seeing how close they can cut costs to the bone without it hitting the quarterlies as production falls off and reliability tanks, and just hoping to make it out the door before that happens.

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- stevecrox@kbin.run ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Firstly it was just a bit of fun but from memory...
  
  Twitter was listed as having 2 data centers and a couple dozen satellite offices.
  
  I forgot the data center estimate, but most of those satelites were tiny. Google gave me the floor area for a couple and they were for 20-60 people (assuming a desk consumes 6m2 and dividing the office area by that).
  
  Assuming an IT department of 20 for such an office is rediculous but I was trying to overestimate.
  
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  - SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I am an engineering manager at a FAANG company and I get that it was mostly in fun, but as a professional who does this for a living I just wanted to point out that not only were you wildly wrong, literally Elon Musk’s lived and executed experience proves you wildly wrong.
    
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    stevecrox@kbin.run ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Uhh how?
    
    The rate of new features/changes is far higher, uptime went through a bumpy transition but is back to normal. From an engineering perspective it supports my point.
    
    Twitters issues are Elon scaring away advertisers/annoying governments/content creators through his hard line on free speech allowing an explosion in hate speech.
    
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    stevecrox@kbin.run ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    No it doesn't, it actually makes my point.
    
    My estimate was based was an estimate for how many people you would need for a twitter company.
    
    Twitter had 8000 employees, it will have procedures and approaches assuming all those people exist.
    
    For example
    
    The first step when DevSecOps consulting is to document the processes a team is following. Then you can automate those processes.
    
    Inevitably there will be a step that is very laborious (typically produce a report/metrics). You start asking if it can be adjusted and no one seems to own it.
    
    Eventually you realise the step was for someone who has since left the company or a role that was removed several reorganizations ago.
    
    Firing half your workforce is going to create those sorts of problems everywhere, all at once. The fact everything largely kept working despite that supports my argument.
    
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- rambaroo@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Most of these execs actually believed that covid demand would become permanent. What they did was incredibly stupid and irresponsible, and now workers are paying for it
  
  Most of these people are total followers. They just do whatever Google does because thats what dipshit investors want. There was no reason for my company to overhire to the degree it did, we were already able to meet demand… hiring people doesn’t magically increase your capacity to service more users. So fucking stupid. If I can help it I’ll never work for an idiotic public company again.
  
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