Comment by bri3d
17 hours ago
Before getting wrapped up in the usual LLM vs anti-LLM narratives, note that like many of these recent layoffs, this is essentially reversing 2020-2022 net headcount growth.
IMO a lot of these layoffs are companies going from an experimental fiscal mindset to a conservative fiscal mindset - ie, rather than acquiring companies and hiring to grow into new markets, a lot of organizations are falling back on what they know works, independent of any productivity impact of LLMs.
So I checked your claim and it is accurate, in 2020 Microsoft had 163,000 while in 2022 it had 221,000.
There is a big HOWEVER. At least 2 in fact.
1. The company had been growing in the previous years, 2019, 2018, 2017 (they shrank somewhat in 2015 or 2016). In 2014 they had 29% workforce increase. So the significant growth in 2021/22 is not an aberration but rather continuation of the growth in previous years.
2. What IS an aberration is the workforce count after 2022. No growth in 2023 or 2025 (as in ZERO YoY change), and measly +7,000/3% growth in 2024. And some YoY loss in 2026 (-5,000, or 2.2%). With 2027 YoY likely showing at least some (and possibly a lot) of these 60,000.
So no, "it's just overhiring due to pandemic" was supposed to die years ago.
2014 was the year they acquired minecraft/mojang and nokia, which may have accounted for a lot of that growth. Also 2022 was the Activision/Blizzard acquisition which would have been well over 10k new employees...
Mojang was tiny, they had all of 40 employees. Nokia, on the other hand, was enormous, with 25,000.
What’s the reason for the stagnation/decline since 2022?
The usual answer for the macro trend is “the end of ZIRP”.
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I believe this number is FTE's and not contractors. That's a whole different story, and I don't think those numbers are public. After a layoff at big tech, you see an influx of contractors. I would not be surprised if it was 50/50 at this point.
60k workers is only ~18 billion. Maybe 36 billion. Maybe even 72.
That's small potatoes vs their new excess capex spend of 100sB/y.
Maybe making the business look more lean/efficient to prep for upcoming bond/debt/whatever mechanism they'll use to get those 100sB/y...
I also believe the Twitter exodus exposed the software engineering headcount sham for what it is. Something like 80% of the company left or was let go, and despite all the smug laughing about how the platform would go under within weeks, it just kept on going.
> Something like 80% of the company left or was let go, and despite all the smug laughing about how the platform would go under within weeks, it just kept on going
I’ve heard this claim many times and is not backed by any more evidence than “it works on my machine”.
If the company really did continue to operate in the same manner, it wouldn’t have been worth 80% less in 2024 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...), nor would it need to be rolled up and financially engineered into being part of an AI company that then gets rolled into a rocket company.
It has been losing users, safety standards have dropped and overall the platform is worse off than before. There’s a reason why no other company has done something similar with their employee counts.
I think Twitter is worth less mainly because Musk removed some kinds of censorship and by doing that, scared advertisers. Not because the layoffs actually caused any significant technical issues. I don't think they did, since from a technical perspective X works just fine right now.
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I want to agree with you. But I cannot.
The matter of the fact is that most governments and newspapers publish on twitter (now X) still. It also serves the purpose of amplifying Musk to a large audience.
If you wanted to transform a public forum into a right -wing echo chamber, then the transformation is a massive success and the platform continues to achieve all relevant objectives.
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> If the company really did continue to operate in the same manner, it wouldn’t have been worth 80% less in 2024 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...), nor would it need to be rolled up and financially engineered into being part of an AI company that then gets rolled into a rocket company.
Musk paid an absurd premium for the company. Far more than it was worth. It was intended to force the board to sell. So an 80% estimated drop (it’s private so it’s a very rough estimate and I won’t go into the various reasons you should not accept it at face value), sounds scary but it’s by design.
Twitter as a company was doing quite poorly leading up to the acquisition. It lost more than $1.3B in the two preceding years. A big downgrade from its previous $1B+ annual reported profits.
As for the 81% headcount reduction, Musk confirmed that, but if you think he’s lying about that for some reason, CNBC investigated it. Journalists examined internal Twitter records and reported approximately 1,300 actively working employees, with another 1,400 still receiving pay but no longer working. CNBC also interviewed two recent employees who corroborated the scale of the reductions. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...
Prior to acquisition, Twitter's SEC filings confirmed more than 7,500 full-time employees.
I don’t see why this claim is so unbelievable. Twitter was famous for its army of social media staff whose entire day comprised two meeting between matcha tea and meditation. https://youtube.com/watch?v=buF4hB5_rFs
Musk just fired everyone who wasn’t an engineer and it turns out the engineers keep the lights on.
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There was also a report saying X is back to its original valuation https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/19/value-elo...
The Financial Times report is behind a paywall so I'm not sure how that evaluation was reached. Also there are a bunch of bizarre financial shenanigans Musk has freely pulled with zero scrutiny. Hard to gauge the full impact of the layoffs when the person at the helm is profoundly amoral and has no scruples about lying.
That hbn user has had these delusions for at least two years. They are not interested in evidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42000121
Users are coming back. These aren't the sort of users to come back to a dying platform
https://x.com/firefox
https://x.com/marcoarment
https://x.com/viticci
https://x.com/CaseyNewton
https://x.com/gruber
they were doing far more than propping up twitter. they were also doing tons of engineering on the side like bootstrap, and shaping fundamental internet technologies.
Musk, in traditional private equity ways, killed anything that wasnt immediately making money. Then he made it pay to play and monetized the hell out of it. All of that BEFORE he opened the far-right floodgates.
Now its a shell of its former self and coasting on the momentum it once enjoyed.
I strongly disagree with this take; do you think all companies are 80% SREs? Did Twitter make money by serving pages to users?
The Twitter exodus does relate to this, kind of; it's an example of the "fall back on existing revenue streams" strategy (you could call it a private equity playbook, but it's more universal than that) exaggerated by the guy acquiring it not needing more revenue and clobbering the revenue part too.
Twitter pre-Musk had an _enormous_ amount of experiments going on. They were building streaming services, clones of every social network you can think of (Spaces etc.), an entire sports brand around MLB, and so on and so on.
They also had an army of sales people who sold ads and an army of engineers building and optimizing an ad platform, which is (or was?) their actual business.
The "platform going down" narrative from both sides was 100% irrelevant to what was actually going on. "We laid off PMs, salespeople, and engineers and the system didn't crash" is a complete non-sequitor that should be obvious to anyone who's involved in software engineering or maintenance. If anything, I'd expect laying off most of any company to make it much more stable; when you don't change things you introduce fewer bugs.
This is so true. Twitter built TikTok three years before TikTok itself launched. (Vine)
If you aren't growing and building, then obviously you don't need the same amount of people only to maintain what you have. It doesn't take that many people to fix bugs, renew SSL certificates and plug security holes.
Game studios knew this since forever. Once you finish building, if you aren't building something new, then you're laying off. It's not a new thing Twitter/Musk has just discovered. Odd that whenever this is discussed, it's framed as if Twitter-then is the same thing as Twitter-now, minus most of its employees and doing just fine.
Exactly. As an SRE I can wrap up my job and leave within the quarter if changes and growth stop.
Laying off all those people didn't tank the site, it tanked the business!
twitter had an enormous trust&safety moderation org and a lot of the headcount reduction was simply automating trust&safety processes and removing humans as much as possible
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Keep in mind that we don't know how many engineers from his other companies have worked or are working on Twitter since it (a) went private, then (b) merged with SpaceX. So the "I fired 80% of my staff and nothing happened" meme is a bit incomplete
It kept on going, but they have been far less stable from a technical OR leadership perspective. They had a user exodus. They had advertisers leave in droves. I suspect it was a net negative change.
Price's Law (more of an observation than a law) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34736936 )
50% of the output is produced by the square root of the team size.
In bloated organizations, there is a lot of fat to cut.
> In bloated organizations, there is a lot of fat to cut.
The problem is that the bigger and more bloated a company is, the harder it becomes to tell what is fat and what isn’t.
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> In bloated organizations, there is a lot of fat to cut.
A tautology, and therefore devoid of information.
If you had claimed "In very large organizations...", you might have been saying something.
Trying to do anything other than posting on the platform is a mess. Advertising dashboards etc were broken for so long that I gave up trying all together.
Also look at their recent account merging efforts and all the problems people have encountered and posted about on the platform itself.
You can see from the replies (highly political responses that are focused on the EM angle rather than particularly caring about the twitter angle) that really don't like this answer. Unfortunately for them it's true. After some initial stumbles after the firings (which journalists were practically cheering from the rooftops), today it seems to be much the same as it was before all that. And that makes reddit types really really mad.
I suspect this is what got Meta and other companies at least considering whether they would benefit from doing this at a much smaller scale, because there were some mass firings the next year at other companies, but this could have just been in the pipes anyway due to overhiring before.
I don't think this is true. Twitter is able to support roughly as many users as before on only 20% of the employees, but those users aren't Twitter's customers. Their customers were the advertisers who paid them money to advertise to those users. And the majority of Twitter's staff before the acquisition were working for those customers- either keeping conversations to be the sorts of things advertisers wanted to be associated with or categorizing and data-mining the messages that had been sent to figure out the ads to show users or building a advertising management platform for those customers to use or maintaining relationships with all of the advertisers.
After the acquisition, advertising revenue dramatically dropped (to a low of about 1/3 in 2025 though it has apparently recovered up to only down about 50%!), because all of those functions were gutted. This is why Twitter tried to switch to "buying a blue-check" and other premium features (e.g. access to Grok), because they had fired all of the people necessary to run a real advertising business and they needed revenue.
And I know that you don't need that many employees to support Twitter's customer facing business because Bluesky does basically the same thing (message storage/search backend+web app+two mobile apps) and they worked for over a year on just 20 million in total raises (and no advertising or any other revenue)- they did a Series B in 2025 that raised over 100 million, but they were operational for over a year on just 20 million in raise. So yeah, it doesn't take that many people to just present the messages of users to other users, but what Twitter did was to cut back on what they did for their customers and accept the big drop in revenue that came with it, and that's not really proof of anything.
>today it seems to be much the same as it was before all that
User numbers are down 20% since the acquisition, ad revenue is halved and the value of the company has collapsed. Where is the politics? The only political thing was the acquisition itself. It ceased to function as a growth and market based company and effectively became a propaganda outlet, EM is highly relevant in that this was the actual point.
As a product the entire platform has stagnated, which is what you'd expect if you let most people go and just use it as an arm for election influence.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-firing-wor...
This is because nobody can say how many people are needed to develop or maintain some body of software. So companies hire however many employees they can afford. When the number they can afford changes they hire more or fire some. The number of staff has pretty much nothing to do with the actual work. AI introduces another factor to the equation: it allows one person to perform N times as much softy-work as before. So even if you have no idea how many people you need (as always, see above) you do know that you can get by with 1/N.
I'm sure their dau decline and actually blocking most usage (non-logged in users) has helped a lot.
Twitter lost 80% of the value for their shareholders so what the heck are you on about man?
True, but there's one very happy shareholder and that's enough. The rest of them are just holding the bag.
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https://www.fastcompany.com/91552571/elon-musk-twitter-x-dea...
Wut?
[dead]
Platform was super unreliable for a while after that - although that might be related to making all the software changes to turn it in to an even worse cesspit.
Edit: Enron Musk apologists will always crack me up.
I've heard this "reversing covid-era headcount growth" for every layoff for the past 4 years, how much headcount growth is there to reverse?
There is enough until the company hits the early 2020 approximate headcount, adjusted for business changes in that time. The exact adjustment is hard to know, but in general, if a company was growing at, say, 10% per year, prior to the covid-craziness, then one would expect something like that natural growth to continue. Very generally speaking.
For example, Google had been growing somewhat quickly for decades prior to 2020, but in 2021 and 2022 it grew by over sixty-thousand people, and the crazy growth actually started in 2020, so even more than that. Sixty thousand!
Undoing that takes a very long time--they should have been much smarter about it. You need four rounds of twelve-thousand person RIFs (whether layoffs or buyouts) to get back to the earlier growth trajectory. Each round generates several stories that hit HN.
Is this MS still dropping back to pre-Covid? I would bet at least some of it is.
> There is enough until the company hits the early 2020 approximate headcount
This is an incorrect way of looking at it. Microsoft was growing at approximately 10-15% headcount year over year prior to COVID. If they reverted to the approximate 2020 headcount that would mean an overall decline in growth in comparison to a situation where COVID did not exist.
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>if a company was growing at, say, 10% per year, prior to the covid-craziness, then one would expect something like that natural growth to continue
A company growing 10% per year would be around 7x larger 20 years later. There's a limit on how big companies can get.
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a lot of places, including Microsoft, drastically cut or are in the process of cutting down on WFH also means what, vast distances between teams, coworkers, buildings, cafeteria, etc (for campus based companies). How many of these places that are "going back to office" (or have already) are doing more in-person and less or no Zoom/Teams meetings now, anyway?
It's probably because of bonds interest rates. And we will probably see more of those on the next few months.
AI investment is also money not spent on salaries. LLM ROI is hotly debated, but it's no secret that companies are diverting money to it regardless.
yes but going back to 2019 staffing with 2026 revenue is a pretty seismic shift
Yes. By and large the talks of LLM as the reason for all the layoffs across big tech are just a marketing spin. Companies are going through rounds of cost reduction for reasons that are as old as the invention of the stock market.
I always think of that line from Doctorow: "If you want to know how Amazon will treat its coders once they can be readily replaced, just look at Amazon warehouse workers and drivers".
it's not just experimental fiscal mindsets, cash was a lot cheaper then. funding was cheaper. now it's less. LLMs don't help but some of these headcounts were taking advantage of the free/cheap debt.
A very small fraction will actually take it. You're wrongly considering the headline number.
With the almost 10x share price run-up of the last few years, an offer of fully-vesting is going to sound pretty good to a lot of people.