You can fire 80% of software engineers, and the company will survive.

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Nov 21

The Pareto principle is “80% of consequences come from 20% of causes”. And as an extension of this, 80% of results are delivered by 20% of engineers. To be fair, there are a lot of caveats:

This is applicable to big companies (vs. small and lean startups)

It’s not like 80% of engineers sit on their hands. They work, but most of the time, they work on things without immediate impact (projects going nowhere, future-looking things, internal improvements to improve future maintenance, etc.). And to be entirely fair, in the opposite direction, some engineers do nothing, and teams are really dysfunctional.

If the company is left only with 20% of engineers (even the best ones), it will be way deep in survival mode (just barely providing support for an existing product, not building some new exciting things or even improving existing ones).

I look with horror at Twitter, where Elon Musk decided singlehandedly to test this hypothesis. Something like 50% of the staff was fired, and 25% quit on their accord.

However, there is a rub (one damn HUGE rub). You can’t fire random 80% or people who contribute the smallest amount of code or spend the shortest time in the office. None of these metrics realistically will show who is truly the company’s core.

BTW. Figuring it who is the core team is not that complicated. You just ask everybody to name five people who are doing well and who they want to work with again (in the next company). Then, sort employees by votes, and viola, at the top, you will get your true core team (which may not match perfectly to seniority, number of lines of code written, etc.).

This approach obviously wouldn’t work if people knew what would happen next. In such a case, you will find people creating cliques to vote each other up (circumventing the system).

And one last thing. The company that has deep enough pockets can survive tons of shit. If you wave a check big enough, you will find people willing to go through hell and back and who will drag the company forward. I believe this is a very important point. I felt that we (software engineers) sometimes have too big egos believing that if enough software engineers left, the company will fall apart. The reality is that (big money) can help navigate quite dire circumstances for companies.

And getting back to Twitter. Many people bash Musk for doing stupid things or sing praises for a brutal way to shake up a company and change it into something else. I am not smart enough to predict the future here. I can guarantee that what happened in Twitter significantly cut into the core team. Based on the news, the process was/is very blunt. On the other hand, Elon Musk (and Twitter) can dangle a big enough carrot to pursue a reasonable number of workaholics to stick around (and +hire some new ones) to move the company forward.

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Nov 21. The Pareto principle is “80% of consequences come from 20% of causes”. And as an extension of this, 80% of results are delivered by 20% of engineers. To be fair, there are a lot of caveats: This is applicable to big companies (vs. small and lean startups) It’s not like 80% of engineers sit on their hands. They work, but most of the time, they work on things without immediate impact (projects going nowhere, future-looking things, internal improvements to improve future maintenance, etc.). And to be entirely fair, in the opposite direction, some engineers do nothing, and teams are really dysfunctional. If the company is left only with 20% of engineers (even the best ones), it will be way deep in survival mode (just barely providing support for an existing product, not building some new exciting things or even improving existing ones). I look with horror at Twitter, where Elon Musk decided singlehandedly to test this hypothesis. Something like 50% of the staff was fired, and 25% quit on their accord. However, there is a rub (one damn HUGE rub). You can’t fire random 80% or people who contribute the smallest amount of code or spend the shortest time in the office. None of these metrics realistically will show who is truly the company’s core. BTW. Figuring it who is the core team is not that complicated. You just ask everybody to name five people who are doing well and who they want to work with again (in the next company). Then, sort employees by votes, and viola, at the top, you will get your true core team (which may not match perfectly to seniority, number of lines of code written, etc.). This approach obviously wouldn’t work if people knew what would happen next. In such a case, you will find people creating cliques to vote each other up (circumventing the system). And one last thing. The company that has deep enough pockets can survive tons of shit. If you wave a check big enough, you will find people willing to go through hell and back and who will drag the company forward. I believe this is a very important point. I felt that we (software engineers) sometimes have too big egos believing that if enough software engineers left, the company will fall apart. The reality is that (big money) can help navigate quite dire circumstances for companies. And getting back to Twitter. Many people bash Musk for doing stupid things or sing praises for a brutal way to shake up a company and change it into something else. I am not smart enough to predict the future here. I can guarantee that what happened in Twitter significantly cut into the core team. Based on the news, the process was/is very blunt. On the other hand, Elon Musk (and Twitter) can dangle a big enough carrot to pursue a reasonable number of workaholics to stick around (and +hire some new ones) to move the company forward.