The following is a somewhat popular meme image that has been circulating in various places online for years:
I’ve always thought of the above image as being grossly exaggerated and very tongue in cheek. Imagine my surprise, then, when more details on the mass layoffs from Twitter came out recently. For starter’s, per the new company owner, Elon Musk’s observation, there appears to be about 10 managers on staff for each single person that does any coding.
Musk started an aggressive campaign where he fired many workers he deemed unnecessary to the company’s operations, and even the coders were not spared from the scrutiny. Apparently, Musk ordered employees to email him a summary of what their software code has “achieved” in the past six months, “along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code.”
After all has been said and done, the demographics of the staff at Twitter now appear to be drastically different:
If one compares the above picture, featuring actual Twitter employees before and after the mass layoffs, with the initial meme picture that was meant to be exaggerated, one can notice that essentially the only people who actually codes and works are left. All the other extraneous types who doesn’t contribute anything are gone.
A few choice comments left by Twitter users regarding the above image:
The picture on the left is full of social engineers. The one on the right is full of actual engineers…
…
Further proof of the 90/10 rule.
90% of the work is accomplished by 10% of the work force.
Very true comments. And comparing the fake meme picture with the actual Twitter employee pictures, it truly feels like a case of life being stranger than fiction.
Good for twitter though, hope they do well in the coming years.
One more relevant screenshot for those truly curious:
Temple of Zagan 