alt Hacker NewsAnyone who has worked in the big tech industry knows that probably more than half of the workforce performs tasks that, in essence, are superfluous.
But these things happened: 1) Musk has shown that Twitter can operate with 5% (approximately?) of the workforce he inherited; 2) laying off a lot of people was seen as a sign that the company was in trouble, but not now because; 3) artificial intelligence makes point 2) not a semi-desperate move, but a forward-thinking adjustment to current and future technology development.
I've been out of work for almost a year now, after being laid off, and I think it's very unlikely that I'll ever return (not because of my choice but their choice) to work in the tech industry as a W2 employee. Oh well.
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> Musk has shown that Twitter can operate with 5% (approximately?) of the workforce he inherited
Is X profitable? I don't think the argument was that Twitter couldn't _operate_ with 5% of the workforce (i.e. skeleton sysadmin crew), the issue was whether Twitter could make money and remain a viable business.
It seems that Twitter is no longer a viable business (i.e. less advertising spend, decline in users - especially high-value advertiser targets who now spend more time on LinkedIn, etc).
> laying off a lot of people was seen as a sign that the company was in trouble, but not now
I agree that saying you are laying people off because of AI is a lovely narrative for failing companies!
Excuse me for making some pretty sharp statements. Twitter is objectively a worse product now. Musk is a deeply uncreative person who doesn't seem to actually like people and attracts people to him that are the same way. This shows in his truly uninspired products. Tesla is way behind the Chinese now. xAI is a copy cat. SpaceX seems to be taking old Soviet ideas. Musk I go on?
1) This is by any source I can find, incorrect. Twitter had ~8,000 employees when Musk bought it. After layoffs that was trimmed to a low of around 1,500 employees (19%), and today it has around 2,800 employees.
Also worth mentioning that a lot of Twitter's products are built on X.ai which has 1,200 core employees on Grok with 3,000+ on the Datacenter build-out side.