How much of your company do you think is needed to function?

Question

With the recent Elon interview where he stats that he's cut "about 80% of Twitter's staff" (1) I was curious about waste and unnecessary labor overhead in the tech industry.Anecdotally I work for a fairly large (~4k employee) company that has a laughable amount of "cargo cult" positions (I'd even say departments). I often find myself replaying the scene from Office Space "What would you say...you do here?"So HN, how much of your company do you think is actually needed to function? (1) https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/12/tech/elon-musk-bbc-interview-twitter-intl-hnk/index.html

Zigurd · Accepted Answer

If everyone at Facebook stopped doing everything they do, it would continue running for a good long time. The content quality would decline. Big advertisers who need individually tailored relationships would leave, but expenses are low enough that would not kill it. The EU would impose fines for hateful content, but failing to pay would take a long time to adjudicate.The same effects happen in failed LBOs all the time. Big companies crash slowly, and their ghosts linger.

pedrosbmartins · Answer

It depends on what you mean by function. I did an internship at Coca-Cola in Brazil a decade ago. They had ~500 employees country-wide, mainly marketing and operation strategy folks. The production of the actual beverages and other products was in great part delegated to partner bottlers. My boss there used to joke that if all the 500 employees were fired at once, the amount of Coca-Cola cans and bottles sold wouldn't drop at all for months. And I do believe he was right. In the long-run, of course, things would be different - that's where marketing and strategy pays off.

ta1243 · Answer

There's an old joke -- "how many people work in this company -- about half"It's probably true. Certainly feels that way sometimes. The problem is how do you determine the right half to get rid of, at scale, without getting rid of the wrong people.

JoeAltmaier · Answer

Function for how long? That's the entire issue.