right, because WhatsApp is a small company that makes very little money and has virtually no users and it mostly does not work nor scale...

We could all write that in a single weekend, if only we had no family to spend time with.

It's interesting how the prospective shifts when people are told "yeah, that's impressive per se, not very impressive compared to what the others are doing"

It's like discounting Sputnik 1 because the Russians did not employ an army of people selling ads, but just the people necessary to launch a satellite in orbit, which is actually the real achievement.

Anyway, from the news: Nearly 1200 software engineers left Twitter last week

Suddenly the Twitter engineering team sounds not so capable, which clearly is not the truth, the truth is that if you have hundreds of managers, you'll end up with hundreds of small teams competing to boost the ego of the manager, usually wasting thousands of man hours on miniscule returns (if not losses) while those power point slides will help someone else to get promoted for the new project that nobody uses.

Been there, done that, I don't know why a demographic so well versed in the dichotomies of the tech industry such us the users of HN is so baffled by the claim that 2,000 engineers for a single company that does what Twitter does is a complete waste of human potential.

Elon Musk is a person I would never work for and I think he's not even a good entrepreneur, but one thing he does right: he calls the shots and then executes them.

He said he would fire people and he did, many helped him by leaving on their own, which left Musk with the responsibility of proving he was right.

If Twitter will still be up and running in a year time, we can be sure that there were 1,200 engineer too many working there.

because, honestly, who really believes that the "influencers" will actually leave for the fediverse, where they'll have to work hard and compete with mere mortals, while they could keep cashing from advertisers to promote shit to their already established audience?

nobody believes that.

Also because the fact that Twitter will sell less ads in the next future doesn't mean that advertisers won't spend that money on Twitter, they will simply not pay Twitter, but the Twitter users. For them it's exactly the same thing, for Twitter celebrities it's a giant opportunity.