How long could Twitter operate if the remaining staff quit?

I've been through this a few times. It's very bumpy. Work flows will get interrupted and the remaining leadership will learn quickly to prioritize the bare minimum to keep the lights on. Some will fight the situation and they will also be leaving. The remaining individual contributors will feel stunned and dazed for a bit. Some people will be on edge and/or depressed for a while. I would expect in this case that Elon would bring in people that he trusts from his other businesses. Those people will feel awkward and uncomfortable. With time the remaining Twitter staff and the new employees will learn to get along, realizing they are all individual contributors and that this is not their fault. With time, things smooth out and the business evolves. The most bumpy parts are a result of the people that walked out the door with undocumented tribal knowledge.

I greatly over-simplified the answer but this topic is worthy of a book.

I hate to take this side, but I do wonder how it took 7500 people to run twitter. Scott Galloway made this point yesterday in his Prof G podcast. It’s not like they had to pipe data ultimately efficiently like a Netflix, for example. It’s more like a message routing service. Seems do-able with 200 people.

It depends on how Twitter is architected.

Most teams need about 10% of staff for skeleton maintenance. You can last a little bit with one staff to restart things as they go, but you'll have a quick degradation of service. If certain microservices fail, it may be the advertizing not working right or something failing with billing or moderation or some other internal tool, but a user might just notice that something is slightly wonky.

However, you won't be able to change much at that point. Changes become exceedingly difficult because of the maintenance overhead.

They'll figure something out, but my money is on quick fixes will run rampant and tech debt will grow.

When they need someone to fill a specific role, they will no doubt go to the nearest consultancy and spend 5x as much on temporarily filling the role.

Or... rehire the same roles on a lower salary.

I think you'd need a senior SRE specifically at twitter to answer this. I know of a company that fired all of their developers and operations people a year ago and everything still works mostly. They contract out as needed.

I think the real issue is that without heavy content moderation it'll quickly get overrun with spam. A great example is to go find an abandoned subreddit and see what bad shape it's in.

I honestly expect we'll see an increase in errors propogating all the way to users within the next week. If the other half quit, I'd expect a hard downtime within a month

From my experience (I've build and sold 2 companies) there are 2 factors increasing headcount in larger organisations:

1. Layers of management and organizational dynamics push up the number of people. There is a correlation between the number a manager manages and his status in the company. The larger the team - the larger your budgets are - the more important you are. Internal goals (to rise in the organization) override external goals (sell and generate profits). When owners are leaving the company or have already cashed out, their motivation to keep financial discipline is lowered and management quality decreases. Owners differ from the hired managers because they prioritize external goals (sales, profit, long-term company health) not their own personal employee goals.

2. There is a strange fallacy that when you get your VC capital you need to increase your headcount to be perceived as a "serious" company. If you are 10 people working remotely you won't be able to ask for the same valuation in your second or third round as a "looks like a big company" startup with an office and 100 employees. Investors would push (sometimes inadvertenly) founders to grow personel at higher rate, because investors sell the company to other investors. They package the company to exit, they don't care that much about sales and profitability except as a baseline numbers for the next round valuation. I've seen this several times.

The contrapoint is that Instagram had 13 people when it was sold to Facebook and Whatsapp had around 40 people.

Twitter has 7500 employees. There's got to be a lot of layers of management, processes that can be removed from the company. For Elon, fixing cashflow now is more important that keeping everything working smoothly. It works smoothly to generate loss every quarter. It's easier to cut the losses than generate revenue. It makes perfect sense.

If they all left en masse I would expect Twitter to stop working within 48 hours due to the scale at which Twitter operates.

Ironically, I think some of the mudge leaks can cast light on this. One of the allegations he made was that "Twitter faced a non-negligible existential risk of even brief simultaneous, catastrophic data center failure, and had no workable disaster recovery plan."[0] Without more details, it's impossible to say but to me, this speaks to somewhat fragile infrastructure for an organization of this size and importance. I've worked at organizations with and without strong cold start plans, but the fact that Twitter didn't have one suggests it might difficult to do given the maturity of their infra.

[0] https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22186683/twitter-whis... page 28

> Can the company survive that?

Yes, unless the folks in charge are incredibly incompetent.

> what would happen if they all left en mass?

For Twitter, that is an "...if a giant asteroid vaporized San Francisco" fantasy scenario. The remaining workers are not a clone army, and vary in all sorts of ways. Including what it would take to convince them to leave ~immediately. Elan has years of experience leading very large, technology-oriented companies - he is quite aware of the wide, grey optimization zones around "be very demanding of and difficult with your employees".

I suspect you could get enough core devops to stay onboard by just quadrupling their salary, even if it's just for a couple quarters.

It's messy but there are pretty straightforward levers to pull.

I’d guess a long time!

The way we engineers build systems is to have a solid core and then a lot of fancy cruft to handle the constant stream of inevitable changes that bring in new features or update stuff. Take the changes away by removing people who’d roll them out, and you have the core running as it was designed to do.

I believe when the remaining engineers or the new ones(if they will be..) start rolling out changes is when shit will break and make the whole thing wildly unpredictable.

Layoff was probably 50% accounting for another chunk of people leaving soon after, so that staff reduction will be 60-70% in total.

Also, I don’t think the majority of people even work on core products.. for example, did you know Twitter implemented their own OnlyFans competitor? It never launched afaik

Step 1 is to trim as much as possible and consolidate core functionality…

Step 2 is back to profitability.

I understand that, let’s see if it works

Twitter ain't going to collapse even if many left, it's a business. Profitable, and can hire quick

They might slow down but not stop operating

I suspect a large percentage of "surviving" Twitter employees will enjoy working for Musk. I've worked in environments where there was a lot of unproductive, highly paid people and it was very frustrating, especially if you believed in the company. Twitter definitely seems very cushy from what I've heard from my friends that used to work there.

I would be shocked if they actually had a 50% layoff, from the news reports and everything I've seen on social media, it's not that deep otherwise there would be far larger reports of it by now. If it turns out that 50% number is wrong, I think that would really open the eyes of Twitter employees as to how much the media is spreading lies about Musk.

If it turns out the 50% number is true, I'm pretty sure the company won't survive. Having been through layoffs, the rest of the employees of such a huge cut will likely not work or not even care and immediately start looking for a new job because they know they are next. That's not a wise way to run a company, in my opinion.

If every twitter employee collapsed and died right now how long would twitter actually still work for?

regional grocery store chain did a huge IT layoff, it was terribly orchestrated. I knew a bunch of people there. They all left. IIRC their web store went from 50-ish devs to a single intern (this was 9 months ago-ish). Somehow it is still online, it boggles my mind.

Any reasonable, mature company should have a Keep-the-lights-On playbook, especially after 2020…

When things start getting really bad you make retention bonuses widespread. Was at a collapsing company and we all got a years salary paid quarterly for staying, but if you left before a year had to pay it back. Everyone was pleased.