Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

March 2: since Elon Elon Musk took over Twitter, the company's headcount has been declining. Musk is trying to keep the platform running with a small number of employees, and while users complain about repeated glitches and company employees say they are busy, the Twitter platform continues to run, and the whole Silicon Valley is waiting to see if Musk succeeds.

Across the technology industry, companies want to do more work at a lower cost, such as cutting jobs to alleviate problems caused by excessive recruitment or cutting projects with bleak prospects.

Mr Musk has cut costs differently than other companies. He said in December that Twitter employees had fallen to about 2000 from nearly 8000 before he bought the company in October last year, and that he was "on a cost-cutting spree".

Twitter employees revealed that Musk launched a new round of layoffs over the weekend, and Twitter declined to disclose the number of layoffs. Musk's big move also raises the question: how many employees can a company lay off while keeping it running?

"the answer to this question may give other companies an idea to look at the internal structure of the organization and ask themselves, 'how much more efficiency can it improve?'" said Thuan Pham, a former chief technology officer of Uber, a ride-hailing service, who now advises companies.

There was another outage on the Twitter platform on Wednesday, local time, and users were unable to access Twitter for about two hours, putting the issue back in the spotlight. Three weeks ago, Twitter malfunctioned during the Super Bowl halftime show and many users were unable to post tweets.

'it 's hard to judge how Musk's strategy works from outside the company, 'Mr. Pan said. He referred to a recent glitch when Twitter users were temporarily unable to tweet or send messages directly.

According to internal Twitter documents, Musk then emailed employees asking "especially in the case of the coming Super Bowl, please temporarily stop the development of new features to maximize the stability and robustness of the system." The theme of this email is "focus".

"when you get there and have to choose between the two, it means you're already thin, if not too thin," Pan said. "

Musk has previously revealed that Twitter is developing new features. Twitter stressed that it is not uncommon to suspend the development of new features before a major event.

Twitter suffered at least four worldwide failures in February, according to NetBlocks, an Internet monitoring group. By contrast, Twitter experienced nine outages in 2022, NetBlocks said.

Twitter had a technical glitch before Musk took over. About three years ago, the platform was attacked by hackers who stole the personal accounts of many stars, politicians and billionaires, including Musk.

A year ago, the account of Jack Dorsey, Twitter's co-founder and then chief executive, was hacked and sent tweets with undesirable content.

Both current and former Twitter engineers say the ongoing operation of the platform at least partly confirms that years of engineering work has not been wasted. Former Twitter employees said the platform experienced outages during major events such as the 2010 World Cup, and the company's engineers focused on resilience.

Jason Goldman, an executive who served on Twitter's board from 2007 to 2010, said that using 2000 people to manage the platform today is different from running Twitter with 2000 people in 2013 or earlier. The reason, he said, is that "Twitter is not in a stage of rapid growth at the moment." He later added, "if you just want to keep going, it's very different."

Recent layoffs at technology companies include Alphabet, the parent company of Google, Meta and Salesforce, the parent company of Facebook. Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg) called 2023 the "year of efficiency", and other industry executives talked about similar cost-cutting issues. Meta recently laid off about 11000 employees, or 13% of its workforce.

Although there are more layoffs at some big technology companies in terms of total, the proportion of layoffs on Twitter is high. Twitter now has the lowest number of employees in a decade, less than the 2712 when the company went public in 2013.

In November, venture capitalist Bill Gurley predicted that "everyone who thinks Twitter is' dysfunctional 'will be disappointed." Gurley said that companies are always worried about too many layoffs, usually multiple rounds of layoffs, "but they greatly underestimate the actual resilience of the company."

Some Twitter employees welcomed the changes brought about by Musk since he took office. "Super exciting technical iteration," said Keith Coleman, head of Twitter products, on Monday, referring to changes in Musk's publicly supported fact-checking program, Community Notes.

Other employees say they are rushing to fill the vacancies of laid-off colleagues and take on platform work they have never done before. Because colleagues who are familiar with the work are no longer in the company, these employees complain that when there is a technical failure, it becomes more difficult to solve the problem.

Last week's action on Twitter also confused many Twitter employees. At the time, employees said their workplace instant messaging tool, Slack, had been cancelled. The company emailed Twitter employees that Slack was under maintenance. This surprised them deeply.

One of the employees said it was frustrating. Because in the case of a large number of engineers leaving and unable to help, picking up the old news in Slack is a way to find the answer to the technical question. Another employee said the loss of Slack was "a major blow to productivity".

Twitter told employees on Monday that maintenance work had been completed and Slack would be restored, according to another email. But the email also said that because there are too many channels to manage, most of the large Slack channels will be closed.

Twitter has a history of operating losses. In 2021, the company reported a net loss of $221.4 million, the last full year for Twitter to report financial results before it was privatized. Musk has said he thinks Twitter will break even this year.

The question is, with 70% of employees leaving, does that mean Twitter is already 70% cumbersome? "I definitely don't think that's true," said Brian Brian McCullough, a general partner at Ride Home Fund, an early-stage investment fund.

But he said: "if Musk can prove that Twitter still works in most cases, I think many management in the technology industry will doubt whether their core products really need that many people."

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