Twitter recently fired a majority of its workforce (I’ve seen estimates from 50% to 90%) and seems to be chugging along just fine. This strongly implies that at least that many jobs were bullshit, but it’s unlikely that the new management was able to perfectly identify all bullshitters, so it’s only a lower bound. Sometimes contributions can be illegible, but there are also extremely strong incentives to obfuscate.
If you fire your sales staff your company will chug along just fine, but won’t take in new clients and will eventually decline through attrition of existing accounts.
If you fire your product developers your company will chug along just fine, but you won’t be able to react to customer requests or competitors.
If you fire your legal department your company will chug along just fine, but you’ll do illegal things and lose money in lawsuits.
If your fire your researchers your company will chug along just fine, but you won’t be able to exploit any more research products.
If you fire the people who do safety compliance enforcement your company will chug along just fine, but you’ll lose more money to workplace injuries and deaths (this one doesn’t apply to Twitter but is common in warehouses).
If you outsource a part of your business instead of insourcing (like running a website on the cloud instead of owning your own data centers, or doing customer service through a call center instead of your own reps) then the company will chug along just fine, and maybe not be disadvantaged in any way, but that doesn’t mean the jobs you replaced were bullshit.
In general there are lots of roles at every company that are +EV, but aren’t on the public-facing critical path. This is especially true for ad-based companies like Twitter and Facebook, because most of the customer-facing features aren’t publicly visible (remember: if you are not paying, you’re not the customer).
These statements seem awfully close to being unfalsifiable. The amount of research and development coming from twitter in the 5 years before the acquisition was already pretty much negligible, so there’s no difference there. How long do we need to wait for lawsuits or loss of clients to cause observable consequences?
The amount of research and development coming from twitter in the 5 years before the acquisition was already pretty much negligible
That isn’t true, but I’m making a point that’s broader than just Twitter, here. If you’re a multi-billion dollar company, and you’re paying a team 5 million a year to create 10 million a year in value, then you shouldn’t fire them. Then again, if you do fire them, probably no one outside your company will be able to tell that you made a mistake: you’re only out 5 million dollars on net, and you have billions more where that came from. If you’re an outside observer trying to guess whether it was smart to fire that team or not, then you’re stuck: you don’t know how much they cost or how much value they produced.
How long do we need to wait for lawsuits or loss of clients to cause observable consequences?
In Twitter’s case the lawsuits have already started, and so has the loss of clients. But sometimes bad decisions take a long time to make themselves felt; in a case close to my heart, Digital Equipment Corporation made some bad choices in the mid to late 80s without paying any visible price until 1991 or so. Depending on how you count, that’s a lead time of 3 to 5 years. I appreciate that that’s annoying if you want to have a hot take on Musk Twitter today, but sometimes life is like that. The worlds where the Twitter firings were smart and the worlds where the Twitter firings were dumb look pretty much the same from our perspective, so we don’t get to update much. If your prior was that half or more of Twitter jobs were bullshit then by all means stay with that, but updating to that from somewhere else on the evidence we have just isn’t valid.
Twitter recently fired a majority of its workforce (I’ve seen estimates from 50% to 90%) and seems to be chugging along just fine. This strongly implies that at least that many jobs were bullshit, but it’s unlikely that the new management was able to perfectly identify all bullshitters, so it’s only a lower bound. Sometimes contributions can be illegible, but there are also extremely strong incentives to obfuscate.
If you fire your sales staff your company will chug along just fine, but won’t take in new clients and will eventually decline through attrition of existing accounts.
If you fire your product developers your company will chug along just fine, but you won’t be able to react to customer requests or competitors.
If you fire your legal department your company will chug along just fine, but you’ll do illegal things and lose money in lawsuits.
If your fire your researchers your company will chug along just fine, but you won’t be able to exploit any more research products.
If you fire the people who do safety compliance enforcement your company will chug along just fine, but you’ll lose more money to workplace injuries and deaths (this one doesn’t apply to Twitter but is common in warehouses).
If you outsource a part of your business instead of insourcing (like running a website on the cloud instead of owning your own data centers, or doing customer service through a call center instead of your own reps) then the company will chug along just fine, and maybe not be disadvantaged in any way, but that doesn’t mean the jobs you replaced were bullshit.
In general there are lots of roles at every company that are +EV, but aren’t on the public-facing critical path. This is especially true for ad-based companies like Twitter and Facebook, because most of the customer-facing features aren’t publicly visible (remember: if you are not paying, you’re not the customer).
These statements seem awfully close to being unfalsifiable. The amount of research and development coming from twitter in the 5 years before the acquisition was already pretty much negligible, so there’s no difference there. How long do we need to wait for lawsuits or loss of clients to cause observable consequences?
That isn’t true, but I’m making a point that’s broader than just Twitter, here. If you’re a multi-billion dollar company, and you’re paying a team 5 million a year to create 10 million a year in value, then you shouldn’t fire them. Then again, if you do fire them, probably no one outside your company will be able to tell that you made a mistake: you’re only out 5 million dollars on net, and you have billions more where that came from. If you’re an outside observer trying to guess whether it was smart to fire that team or not, then you’re stuck: you don’t know how much they cost or how much value they produced.
In Twitter’s case the lawsuits have already started, and so has the loss of clients. But sometimes bad decisions take a long time to make themselves felt; in a case close to my heart, Digital Equipment Corporation made some bad choices in the mid to late 80s without paying any visible price until 1991 or so. Depending on how you count, that’s a lead time of 3 to 5 years. I appreciate that that’s annoying if you want to have a hot take on Musk Twitter today, but sometimes life is like that. The worlds where the Twitter firings were smart and the worlds where the Twitter firings were dumb look pretty much the same from our perspective, so we don’t get to update much. If your prior was that half or more of Twitter jobs were bullshit then by all means stay with that, but updating to that from somewhere else on the evidence we have just isn’t valid.