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Comment by dahart

3 days ago

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%.