Employing too many people in jobs that aren't productive is bad. Given the allegedly high skill of many of these people, it's much better for them to be reallocated to more productive, more valuable roles.
Twitter was a failing company. Cursing them with too many employees isn't good for anyone.
First off: it seems like the many employees at Twitter did have a positive impact on the company, considering the many issues it has been facing since this was reduced. I know that it was a common refrain that Twitter was completely over-staffed, but how do we actually know?
Second: the issues regarding worker rights go much further than simply laying off many employees.
- Laying employees off while promising severance, then never paying that
- Making employees fly in on extremely short notice just because the owner wants them to
- Reneging on previous contractual agreements (e.g. remote work) just to get them to quit
- Forcing the remaining employees to work way longer than is necessary, even setting up beds in the offices
People deserve stability and normal treatment. A billionaire manchild should not be able to make their lives this bad just because they want to!
Twitter added very few features in the last few years despite having a massive amount of staff. Many belive twitter had too high a headcount for the amount of revenue they made compared to other social media sites, and that those who did work there couldn't possibly have a full day of work on their schedules seeing as how twitter never did anything
You could get to the truth by reading between the lines in the whistleblower report after they fired Mudge, whom Jack brought in as an infosec consultant. I'd suggest reading it, it's quite an eye opener to pre-Musk Twitter. Notably their security culture was described as being 10 years behind industry standards, over half of their nearly 500,000 servers were running unpatched OSes that were EOL and no longer receiving updates, over 25% of employee computers had security updates disabled, etc. Over half their employees had access to prod. It reads like the dumpster fire you would expect from a year 1 startup yet their literal army of essential, irreplaceable, webshit cybergeniuses allowed all this to happen under their watch. Any rational person would read this and conclude, "What were these people doing all day?"
Why do new features need to be added? Like one of the worst obsessions a developer or team can have is to add new features for the sake of it, breaking things that people took for granted or torpedoing other efforts.
A lot of Twitters headcount was specifically devoted to serving certain regions. For example, Twitter had integration with multiple different game services and specific regional functionality. They had a large API that they had to maintain, update and respond to dev requests.
There was that Project Veritas expose that revealed a Senior Engineer at Twitter did 4 hours of work per week and he said everyone else did the same thing.
It makes perfect sense because when Jack was part time CEO of Twitter he was known to spend less than a full work day at the company per week. Productivity tends to trickle down, it's contagious.
Much like a super high performer on a team tends to lift 1x engineers on the team to 1.5x - 2x engineers, I've observed.
Parag Agrawal as a CTO shipped essentially zero features. In fact, Twitter got noticeably worse over the years. Periscope and Vine were genuine innovations, both cast to the side.
He means they were overpaid wankers who went to the office to mostly socialize and take advantage of free gourmet food. This isn't hyperbole, these people proudly documented it on their social media accounts and I've seen the footage.
The fact that Twitter hasn't gone completely offline in a fireball as predicted over and over by these same people itself proves they were redundant.
