Also not great? The fact that a lot of tech CEOs seem to be watching what Musk is doing at Twitter with great interest. To paraphrase Scott Galloway from the high-profile tech podcast Pivot, if Musk can pull off running a major tech company with about 25% of the staff it had previously, then chances are every other tech CEO will promptly follow suit. From the sidelines, Musk’s shenanigans seem chaotic. However, they may soon become a playbook.
The death of the woke business model that is. Tremendous fun. And also rather the point of capitalism. For if we can do this task with fewer people then that frees up the labour to go assuage some other human need or want. This is also known as increasing labour productivity, the very thing which, in the long term, dictates human living standards. The lust for profit is the very thing which keeps people testing whether this thing can be done at lower cost – with less human labour that is.
Or, as we’ve been known to say around here, jobs are a cost, not a benefit. The aim and purpose of all economic advance is therefore to kill jobs.
It’s a genius move by Musk to get people to believe that chronic over-staffing of a large public internet company is “because woke” rather than standard corporate culture.
It’s particularly encouraged in VC circles where one of the metrics for success is that your headcount is growing. In those cases jobs are how you get more money…
The majority of large online services live in fear of reputational damage from their site going down or performing poorly (or worse, a security breach) – and they hire accordingly. You get the guy who specifies the work to be done, the guy who checks the work looks right, the guy who checks it doesn’t break anything, the guy who checks it doesn’t impact performance, the guy who manages when it’s released into the business, the guy who runs the team, the guy who schedules everything and… oh yes, the guy who actually writes the five lines of code in question. That’s a team of eight. Nothing to do with woke, everything to do with not wanting to be the next LastPass, or having to admit to losing subscribers because your site went down during a major event (no names mentioned).
Musk can quite fairly take the view that eight people doing one person’s job is wildly inefficient – the experiment we’re running here though is how close to the bone can you cut before the patient dies? There are some interesting behind the scenes tales of ‘near misses’ in the Tesla development teams that show none of this is new. Of course a lot of engineers are horrified because they’re simultaneously being hired “to do the best possible job” and being told that every corner possible is being cut. Guess who’s in the firing line if something goes wrong?
But it’s really nothing to do with woke – that’s just marketing bullshit.
Woke is really part of the principal/agent problem. CEOs of many companies will go along with elite opinion just to get an easier life. Maybe it means more access to other elite places. They’ll spin this as something that will make the company more profitable, even though there’s no evidence to support it.
Lots of CEOs just really don’t care that much about what the company does. It’s not their company, it’s not something they’re emotionally invested in. They do things to justify their existence, what stops them getting fired, and in 5 years they’re off doing something else. And no-one will notice the rot they’ve left because the effect can take years.
It’s why most tech CEOs won’t follow Musk. Musk is an entrepreneur and entrepreneurs don’t care much about elite opinion. They got there by going against the norm. The company achieving things matters to them.
Not really ‘elite opinion’ so much as simple level of risk. Musk is a risk taker. Most CEOs are not. Startups are by necessity. Established businesses less so. That’s just how business works and has nothing to do with the current culture wars that are trying to capture what social values those businesses adhere to.
In Musk’s case, of course gamblers look like geniuses so long as their numbers keep coming up…
I saw a vid explaining the tech layoffs as “copycat” nothing to do with business fundamentals but solely explainable by group think. Yeah but its kind of ignoring the bit where erstwhile copyfatcats first wait to see if the reduced cost base leads to the death spiral or avoids it. (of course could still be a bit premature on that i don’t know) It’s also pointedly ignoring the possible group think that got them to that cost structure in the first place.
Lots of CEOs just really don’t care that much about what the company does. It’s not their company, it’s not something they’re emotionally invested in.
That’s exactly what I’ve been saying over ‘everyone seeks to maximise their own personal advantage’. And why NWO conspiracy theories are mostly bollox. Where’s the motivations?
And why the tech companies (& not just just them) got themselves into the overstaffed position in the first place. People in management seeking to maximise their own personal advantage. It doesn’t have to coincide with the advantage of the company they’re employed by. Unlikely to.
Last week Elon Musk continued to drastically reduce the Twitter workforce, laying off another swath of loyal employees. Think other tech bosses won’t follow suit?
No, I don’t think that at all, automation being the entire point of technology.
BiS
“And why NWO conspiracy theories are mostly bollox.”
Correct. Just because most politicians and corporate bosses tend to have the same world view, it doesn’t mean it’s a conspiracy and that they are all waiting for Klaus Schwab’s next instruction. Their views and interests align. Shocking!
Andy T,
“Not really ‘elite opinion’ so much as simple level of risk. Musk is a risk taker. Most CEOs are not. Startups are by necessity. Established businesses less so. That’s just how business works and has nothing to do with the current culture wars that are trying to capture what social values those businesses adhere to.”
I disagree. There are lots of things that organisations do which have nothing to do with risk calculations or making a profit. Risk management in huge places becomes shackles, destroying any innovation, as people just avoid pushing for anything disruptive, and carry on with bad practises. You also get armies of people dicking around in them doing things that add no real value, just because there’s plenty of money and no-one cares. I’ve seen people in large organisations build their own UI frameworks, print engines and programming languages, just because the people above them don’t really care.
What Andy T says. But according to multiple reports of pre-Musk Twitter, it was already a shambles. Five thousand employees had direct access to live servers. Code could be changed without peer review. At one point they had multiple outages and wouldn’t have been able to restart the system if it had gone down entirely.
So Musk can’t have fired the people doing the checks & balances: because those people didn’t exist.
I never understood why a glorified BBS needed so many employees in the first place.
What I find amusing is the insistence of the Journalists that “being radically cut off from”… is somehow Evil Overlording.
IT is notorious for the risk of “throwing a spanner” by employees on the chopping block. Plenty of examples of peeps sabotaging systems to “get revenge”.
And yes, you can sue the employee for damages, but the damage is already done. And what matters is that continuous level of service, for a given level of service the company provides. Disrupting that can kill you off before you get to sue…
So the Cutting Off is sharp and harsh. Details to follow later, here is your contact email with HR, etc. Or the Box Walk, escorted by Security.
People who are actually competent in the business know this, and would demand the same to happen if it were someone else.
Their biggest nightmare is not being fired. It’s someone being fired still having access to Stuff.
“Their biggest nightmare is not being fired. It’s someone being fired still having access to Stuff.”
That’s certainly true.
For decades now I have known that should I be fired, the procedure would be to go to a meeting, where I find there’s an HR rep and a security guard. “Hand over your access card. Here’s my email address and phone number. Your login has been disabled (and all other access cut off). We will arrange a time (after hours) when you will be let back under escort to pick up your stuff.”
Doing anything else would be negligence.
Any company that is fearful of what its employees might do when they leave is in deep trouble..
..because any employee sufficiently dangerous to the company will have made sure they can do damage long before they’re asked to go and have a nice chat with the HR goon.
Jus’ sayin’.
Andy T
Dead Mans Handle