Comment by Workaccount2
3 days ago
There are two freight trains currently smashing into each other:
1.) Elon fired 80% of twitter and 3 years later it still hasn't collapsed or fallen into technical calamity. Every tech board/CEO took note of that.
2.) Every kid and their sister going to college who wants a middle class life with generous working conditions is targeting tech. Every teenage nerd saw those over employed guys making $600k from their couch during the pandemic.
On the other hand while yes it's still running, twitter is mostly not releasing new features, and has completely devolved into the worst place on the internet. Not to mention most accounts now actually are bots like Elon claimed they were 3 years ago.
> twitter is mostly not releasing new features
Were they even releasing new features anyways?
I can't think of any new features that Twitter implemented even the 5 years preceding Musk's buyout.
I dont know; they may well have been on the ads and moderation side. And they did add the hangouts/voice calls stuff, but that may have been an acquisition, I'm not sure.
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I hope the tech boards and CEOs don’t miss the not very subtle point that twitter has very quickly doubled in size in 2 years and is still growing after the big layoff and they had to scramble to fix some notable mistakes they made when firing that many people. 80% is already a hugely misleading marketing number.
Edit: huh, what’s with the downvote, is this wrong? Did I overstate it? Here’s the data: https://www.demandsage.com/twitter-employees/
Also need to add, that a large part of the 80% that got kicked, was moderator staff. So it makes sense that after they removed too many developers, they ended up rehiring them.
Take in account, Twitter their front end, the stuff that people interact with was only like 15% of the actual code base. The rest was analytics for the data (selling data, marketing analytic for advertisers etc).
But as they are not reintroducing moderators, the company is "still down by 63.6% from the numbers before the mass layoffs".
So technically, Twitter is probably back or even bigger on the IT staff then before Musk came.
Looking at your numbers, twitter went from 7,490 employees before Musk's layoffs to 2,840 in 2024. That's still a reduction by 63%.