No it doesn’t, it actually makes my point.

My estimate was for how many people you would need to run/develop a company to do everything twitter does.

Twitter had 8000 employees, it will have procedures and approaches assuming all those people exist.

For example

The first step when DevSecOps consulting is to document the processes a team is following. Then you can automate those processes.

Inevitably there will be a step that is very laborious (typically produce a report/metrics). The team will spend huge amounts of time on it but won’t question it. You start asking if it can be adjusted and no one seems to own it.

Eventually you realise the step was for someone who has since left the company or a role that was removed several reorganizations ago. You build a case to remove it and walk all stakeholders through it.

Firing half your workforce is going to create that sort of problem everywhere, all at once. It will cause all sorts of instabilities within the company as people stop to CYA, others just do their best, etc…

The fact everything largely kept working despite that shows 4000 is probably excessive.

Elon actually has a speech about automating a step in model 3 production. After spending weeks getting it automated, he chased why it was needed, to discover no one in Tesla knew.

Personally I think firing half the workforce at once is dumb, but I am guessing there was so much Byzantine process/requirements he figured it was the fastest way to work put what was actually important. Still dumb