Elon Musk had fired 80 percent of Twitter’s staff with seemingly no ill-effects on the platform, and it’s beginning to emerge why.
A former Twitter employee, who goes by @halli on X, has described how it took the company 8 months to implement an ”edit tweet” feature before Musk had taken over the company. He described Twitter as the “worst-managed company” he’d ever experienced.
“About 2 weeks after I joined Twitter as an employee I was asked to put together a team to create the edit button,” he said. “It had been the most requested feature on the platform for a long time. The design process was simple. I think we did that in about a day. But then the hard work began,” he said.
“Twitter was not built to make things. At times it felt like anyone at the company could say no to an idea and it would be killed. It took 4 months to get an estimate on how long it would take to build the edit button. 4 months of basically begging people to tell us how long it would take to build this thing. The estimate finally came back. The engineers estimated it would take 18 months to build the edit button. 18 months to build a simple feature. After a lot of wheeling and dealing that was cut down to I think 8 months,” he added.
And it wasn’t as though the engineers had done a great job after taking all this time. “The solution was extremely flawed and limited. When the edit button finally launched, the head of design and product that had asked me to take on the project had both been fired. The new head of product announced the launch and my team got none of the credit. When I asked for the designer who had been on the project since day one to be mentioned I got an angry phone call. This was all pre-Elon. Twitter was the worst managed company I have ever experienced,” he added.
It appears that Twitter had ended up being mired in bureaucratic quicksand, much like many other companies when they reach a certain scale — no product innovation was happening, and simple features were taking years to develop. When Musk took over, he quickly realized the state the company was in, and after sending out some warnings, ended up letting 80 percent of the staff go. This had led to shocked reaction from parts of the tech world, with many claiming that the platform would find it hard to survive after losing most of its workforce. But on the contrary, Twitter — rebranded as X — seems to suffer from far fewer outages than before, and has also added a slew of new features including a Community Fact Checker, in-video ads, longer posts, and newer formats like articles and vertical videos. Its traffic is higher than ever, and after a boycott, even advertisers seem to be returning to the platform. And Twitter’s turnaround shows that extreme measures, such as mass layoffs, can sometimes work if a company’s culture is beyond repair.