When Elon Musk took over Twitter he reportedly fired 80% of the staff over a few months, including more than half of the programmers. Many people claimed that the platform will inevitably go down in weeks, if not days. It’s just impossible to judge whose role is essential with such huge layoffs. While, of course, there was a lot of quirks in the “transition period”, with time we see that Elon Musk was right. Not in the “did the right thing” sense, but right that the platform can keep operating on such a reduced headcount.

How was that possible? If we look at the Whatsapp team that famously had 35 devs to serve its 200 million active users in 2013 and 50 devs for 900 millions users in 2015, we can see that a (relatively) small number of solid developers who care about what they’re building can deliver a great product at virtually any scale.

That’s the kind of team that Elon is hoping to build and that’s the kind of team we should aspire to a part of. How? A good start is to be a solid developer who cares about what they’re building.

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.