In an effort to reduce operating costs, presumably, Musk lobotomized Twitter.

Whenever a company has to let go of an employee, the main concern is losing their company-related insider knowledge. All employees of a company usually form a sort of ecosystem. People learn whom to ask which question, relationships form that speed up work on an individual level, and a kind of “root system” forms. In that ecosystem, everybody knows that Jerald will fix the printer with the snap of his fingers, and Jenny is an absolute wizard debugging the rendering engine.

The literal analogy to a forest works quite well, where the roots of trees all share a common space, connected by fungi growing throughout the dirt, connecting every last plant that grows in the forest and spreading nutrients and chemical signals. If a company lets go of a person, it‘s like uprooting a tree. A blow to the ecosystem, but the forest will recover, and new connections will form. Even the analogy of more light shining on the forest floor, helping the lover levels to get a boost, may hold true.

Now imagine layoffs. Smartly managed layoffs will thin the forest without disrupting it. They will reduce the number of people but always keep people connected. If a company lets an entire team or department go at once, it leaves a scar in the organizational tissue and disrupts the ecosystem. Imagine a clearcut of large pieces of the forest, but not just that, one that includes the roots and leaves the ground a barren wasteland. Such layoffs disconnect parts of the company from others. The loss of networking and the brain drain from the company can hurt it badly. Shrinking a company is hard, and besides the organizational hazards to circumnavigate, morale is also a factor, but I will deliberately ignore it in this article.

Modern technology offers ways to reduce this problem of brain drain and disconnect. Many modern companies use asynchronous communication. What does that mean? It means the employees use a software platform to send chat messages in public channels anybody in the company can read. Often channels connect all people in a department, team, or entire branch of an organization. Instead of using email, which is inaccessible to anybody not in the email thread and hard to search, moving a company‘s communication to a modern communications platform, will instantly transform any conversation into a knowledge base available in the future via search.

A well-organized Slack can answer 99% of all questions an employee might have.

This platform is a super-brain, archive, and root system all in one. Employees can type their questions into the search bar and find replies to similar questions for as long as the company keeps the platform around. And for many companies, this software is Slack.

In my experience, a well-organized Slack can answer 99% of all questions an employee might have for the first few months. And after that, especially when troubleshooting technical problems, such a searchable company-wide super-memory will answer most questions. Even long-standing employees and experts will benefit from this well of knowledge regularly.

Losing this knowledge base, losing access to this well of information would be terrible! It stands to reason that companies consider their Slack a very valuable asset and are willing to pay a lot to keep it around. Deliberately cutting this well of knowledge off would be an act of self-sabotage that could leave the company crippled for quite some time, assuming the people who wrote into this knowledge base were still around to document their knowledge elsewhere. With those people unavailable, the damage may be irreversible. I believe you‘d agree with me that cutting a company off its knowledge base deliberately is the last thing you should do if you want it to thrive, right?

In November 2022, Twitter had about 7,500 employees. Since then, it laid off about 3,400 people, followed by about 4,400 contractors shortly after that. This brain drain caused a wave of reports that Twitter had lost access to parts of its source code. Some remaining employees lost all their in-company contacts they would approach when solving complicated problems. But Twitter kept Slack around, and with it, it kept the knowledge of those laid-off people until now:

Platformer reports in its newsletter from February 24, 2023:

On Wednesday, Twitter employees had the tech equivalent of a snow day: the company’s Slack instance was down […].

Twitter hasn’t paid its Slack bill. But that’s not why Slack went down: someone at Twitter manually shut off access, we’re told.

[…]

For Twitter employees, Slack is more than a way to message colleagues: it’s also a store of institutional memory, preserved in documents that workers have had to rely on more and more since Musk purged thousands of employees since taking over.

After everyone was gone, I had no one to ask questions when stuck, an employee who stayed on past the first round of layoffs wrote in Blind [an anonymous communications platform]. I used to search for the error [messages] on Slack and got help 99 percent of the time.

Slack remained down at the company on Thursday. While some employees communicated over email, others essentially took a second day off.

Source: (link: https://www.platformer.news/p/new-cracks-emerge-in-elon-musks-twitter?utm_source=beachball.tech&utm_medium=quote text: Platformer newsletter, February 24, 2023. target: _blank)

In an effort to reduce operating costs, presumably, Musk lobotomized Twitter.

On a personal note

I noticed a significant slowdown of Twitter‘s services towards the end of this week, especially this morning (it‘s Friday as I write this). I also noticed yesterday that my Twitter profile shows I have 4,794 likes, but it can‘t load a single one of them:

Twitter is still running and still partially works for many people. It still works well enough that some people keep using it and still think it will remain in service for the foreseeable future. But service is spotty, and now that Twitter employees seem to have lost their knowledge base and the colleagues they could ask for that information, I‘m not optimistic about Twitter‘s future anymore. And on that note: (link: /blog/2023/February/how-to-mastodon text: How to Mastodon, a technical guide.)

Update, February 28

It seems Twitter continues to lobotomize itself in an effort to reduce operating costs. Just a few months after Elon Musk says Twitter is done with layoffs and ready to hire^[1] Platformer reports Steve Davis seems to have evaluated further employees to lay off and might be headed for the CEO position.^[2]

What a surprise! We shouldn‘t put faith in Musk‘s words? Who would have guessed that his promise of being done firing Twitter employees and starting with hiring were just words? Shocking… It reminds me of the promise of self-driving cars, which were supposed to arrive “next year” for years.^[3]

⌞w⌝