We mentioned last time the 80% layoffs at Twitter and the main question still remains: what did all those people actually do? A lot of meta-work. That's the work that you need to do in order to get "real" work done.

(Of course, it wasn't literally 80% of the people doing meta-work 100% of the time, but probably more like 100% of people spending 80% of their time on meta-work.)

For example, if you're on a team that handles tweet replies and you want to make a change that hides the replies from people with fresh accounts (let's say there's a high chance they're bots), in the pre-Elon Twitter you'd probably have to make a presentation why this change, probably convince five other teams, present a rollback scenario in case something goes bad, get new design approved and then you can start writing the code. In new Twitter the CEO can make any decision - however dumb - and things get shipped.

New Twitter shows (the chaos) what happens when this goes away - you can have a much smaller team delivering things faster. Of course, Twitter's downward spiral into hate-speech, conspiracy theories and irrelevance shows that simply delivering changes faster is not enough. You still need to make the RIGHT changes.

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Have a good one,

Wojciech

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PS. I have lovingly crafted this email using only the best artisanal keystrokes. If you find come across any typos, feel free to fix them yourself and enjoy this new, unique, kintsugi version.