At the beginning of COVID there was a sense that WFH might be a permanent change and that companies might need to start competing on a lot of social distancing features. Look at Clubhouse exploding then, etc. Doubling the size of your workforce (and knowing you can shrink it if you are wrong) is a pretty reasonable bet. It has a known cost (measured in the hundreds of millions to few billions) if you try it and it is unnecessary (which it turned out to be), but a possible "death of the company" result if all the talent is gone just as you need XYZ to be competitive in a new landscape.

> and knowing you can shrink it if you are wrong

You can’t just shrink it. That’s the problem. They still think of it as a factory where everyone is just a robot.

Most places lack enough documentation and processes that shrinking the teams reduce knowledge. There is never an even distribution of skill sets etc. You kill off team dynamics. It’s not the same.

You can’t just slot people in and out without impact in software.

You can shrink it if you plan correctly from the hiring phase. If you hire new people for a new division, and then shutter that division, you minimize the consequences. If you hire a bunch of new low level people for a bunch of teams and then prune those same people out, it's tough but doable.

Heck, if you hire people because you might need them, give them nothing to do (as many people claimed happened to them) and then fire them it is the easiest of all.

If, on the other hand, you hire 100% more people, then fire 50% of the people and try to use that culling to get rid of a lot of older (and more expensive) employees, you can doom your company.

> You can shrink it if you plan correctly from the hiring phase. If you hire new people for a new division, and then shutter that division, you minimize the consequences.

You've just rephrased the exact issue I had differently. It doesn't matter if it's a new division or not unless your organization doesn't interact.

People have to go via onboarding and other steps. It involves HR "people and culture", the internal IT teams, the reception, you might get assigned a mentor, etc. These interactions spread when people socialize.

It's also as people and possibly shareholders how you view the company. Watch any sports and a player in form in the right team can perform 10x better. These so-called minimal disruptions actually have an impact.

Meta was paying a higher salary because less people wanted to work there. I don't see all the negatives as "minimal consequences".

Just to add, you can't increase it that fast either.

If you double the number of employees of some place in a year, you have a really large risk of completely redefining its entire culture. And a software business has basically 2 things, a culture and locked-in people.

> Just to add, you can't increase it that fast either.

Lots of places reported people having nothing to do, don't know what to do and lacked direction. The hiring standards also went down.

When you double in a year, especially in the great resignation, 75% of your company will be new hires at the end of the year.

If you didn't follow conventions, your onboarding wasn't great or reinforced, then very few things in your system will be consistent.

To play devils advocate does Twitter not seem fine now?

> To play devils advocate does Twitter not seem fine now?

Fine in what sense? There's less features, less capacity and more outages. They couldn't even hold someone's presidential announcement fine without it breaking. Is that fine?

As a business they've gained debt and lost a lot of income. Is that fine? With less income, less ads and less of everything it's a different scale. Something that's fine with 1 million users is not the same as 10 million.

I would say it's different - different ownership, different direction etc. Time will tell what the outcome is. Projects have been axed and new 1s will appear.

The changing of staff has definitely hurt Twitter. Whether they can recover is a different question.

So... fine as long as you don't compare it to its past self?

It does not. They have more frequent and longer outages now. Heck, when Musk tried to do a town hall for DeSantis to announce his run, the livestream was buggy specifically because no one had returned one of their vendors phone calls. That's a stupid reason for a major fuckup.

Do you have any source for the part about the vendor? Searching for a bit just gave me a ton of articles about the failed announcement in general.

I read somewhere that it was because they didn't pay a bill to Redis. Maybe throw that in as a search term.

You're getting downvoted, but you're correct. Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019. It then took a bath in 2020 (like almost all advertising-based businesses), and then was projected to recover to profitability in 2022 before Musk announced the takeover, which threw everything into a tailspin.

It wasn’t projected to recover. It was struggling. They had wayyy too many people working there.

Nit, by then it would have been public market investors, not VCs, for the most part.

Twitter was a public company in 2019. VCs has nothing to do with it.