So "X" - nothing to see here. Elon's in control - Part XXX **Threadbans in OP**

I do not know where you get thia outrage, most on here ayte giving an analysis of why what Musk is doing will fail and cost him billions.

It purely business analysis and looking at the decisions he is making and why they are failing.

After the scope of the layoffs to date, and seeing that twitter the platform is largely working as is - perhaps the level of staffing at twitter was not actually necessary.

Plenty of stories from people in industry about how working for twitter was a pisstake, you could go months without doing anything of value

The coding is frozen, it is basically running on autopilot.

Now the problem is when things need to changed, upgraded or a problem happens. Because from what I have being reading, a lot of the senior engineers didn't react too well to "click here or else" and have jumped ship.

Well it's not like they were constantly shovelling coal into the fire. But if updates need to be performed, sweeping changes which usher in the features Elon needs to complete this pivot, it will be immensely more difficult to asses the side effects of those changes with such a massive brain drain. Side effects that can break existing functionality

You need the people who know how the system works to evolve and iterate the platform. What's happening here is twitter probably won't fall over overnight, but at the very least it will lose an immense amount of velocity which will smother whatever innovations Elon has in mind here.

That's just when it comes to feature development. But even maintaining a codebase requires work to be performed from time to time, if a module has a security flaw and needs to be updated. New twitter is going to at the very least be facing some profound struggles, everything will move much more slowly

Not out of spite, but for practical reasons: his spending on it didn't end with those 44 billions, it also costs money to keep the lights on. So it's either dim the lights to the bare minimum, or shut it down altogether.

The guy waving the yellow flag at the bike is the best bit.

I would expect the remaining 30% will start to burn out quite quickly and employees will start to quit. They must be outsourcing jobs. You cannot sustain a global platform with so few personnel. I'm sure there was fat that could be trimmed but what he is doing seems insane.

But requirements change. Like right now, the requirements are that something needs done about the fact that twitter is hemorrhaging money from fleeing advertisers and Elon Musk is here to fix all that, with his rethought twitter (whatever form it takes). By his own admission it's not possible for twitter to just thread water because of this, and all his plans so far involve developing new features. Massively ambitious features to turn it into a sort of WeChat thing, based on reports. That the current thing hasn't toppled over overnight does not guarantee that it's current urgent requirements are going to be met. Whatever merit there is to Musk's plan, that is the plan and it needs engineers with knowledge of how to build on what already exists.

Somebody needs to implement the next version of Twitter, but it hasn't been implemented yet. If you just lost a bunch of people who understand how the whole thing operates, why would you not expect that to impact future refurbishment efforts, or maintenance of code quality or its resilience to outside threats?

These are factors which operate on a longer scale than a mere week.

You won't see the impact of the layoffs for a year. Easy to maintain business as usual but when higher traffic or new features or outtage events occur, it will start to unravel. Supporting is a lot easier than developing.

Exactly this. Documentation is all fine and dandy but it doesn't cover all the bases no matter how detailed it is. As an example, I could write a manual on how to ride a bike but without the experience (often painful), it won't teach anyone to replace me as the resident bike rider.