Linked List: October 22, 2022

Saturday, 22 October 2022

More on Twitter’s Absurd Headcount 

Lots of pushback from readers on my post yesterday on Twitter’s 7,500-employee headcount, and my basic agreement with David Heinemeier Hansson that their soup is spoiled many times over due to far too many chefs. The pushback is primarily along the following line: It’s unfair if not ridiculous to compare Twitter to WhatsApp circa 2014 because WhatsApp is a private messaging service and Twitter is a public microblogging service, and thus Twitter has enormous content-moderation / trust-and-safety problems that WhatsApp didn’t (and doesn’t).

Sure. No one claimed otherwise. No one is arguing that WhatsApp’s 50-employee headcount in 2014 means Twitter only needs 50 employees today. That’s a straw man argument. I’m talking mostly about software engineers and designers. Twitter has thousands of them. Everyone I know who has (or still does) work there has told me the same thing: the company is lousy with do-nothing employees and layers of bureaucracy to support their preposterously high headcount and needless managerial fiefdoms. For the sake of argument, let’s just concede for the moment that every single person currently employed at Twitter working on content moderation is necessary, doing a good job, and ought to be retained. Hell, let’s say they all ought to get a raise. Twitter still has way too many employees in other areas of the company.

Another angle of pushback is that Twitter needs thousands of employees because their business model is different from WhatsApp’s. Twitter’s business model sucks. I mean it doesn’t just suck, it infamously sucks. Twitter arguably has the worst ratio of revenue to user attention of any media company in history. And again, even if I concede that Twitter needs a massive ad sales staff — and I won’t concede that point — that’s irrelevant to their massive engineering and design headcount.

In Praise of Apple’s Unmagical Smart Keyboard Folio 

Yours truly, yesterday:

In an ideal world, all 11-ish-inch iPads would support the same keyboard accessories. But here we are, with the new 10th-gen iPad only supporting the new Magic Keyboard Folio and the iPad Pro and iPad Air only supporting the Magic Keyboard. (Those latter two iPads also support the no-trackpad Smart Keyboard Folio, but I honestly have no idea who buys that thing other than people who’ve never tried iPadOS with a trackpad and thus have no idea how fun and useful it is.)

I’ve heard from a few friends who swear by the Smart Keyboard Folio already. Said one: “It’s about weight and ruggedness.” Said another: “This may come as a shock, but I use my daily driver iPad Pro 12.9-inch with a Smart Keyboard Folio. It’s lighter. I also have Magic Keyboards but my go to is the Folio.”

For the 12.9-inch models, the Smart Keyboard Folio weighs 407g; the Magic Keyboard 710g. 300 grams is two-thirds of a pound — a notable difference.

Another comment, from the first friend quoted above: “I think Magic Keyboard makes it more MacBook-like, Keyboard Folio is more iPad-esque.” I agree — and it explains my strong preference for the Magic Keyboard, extra weight be damned. It’s certainly easier to rotate the iPad to portrait — for, say, marking up a document with a Pencil — while it’s in a Keyboard Folio than a Magic Keyboard — if only because the keyboard half can be folded behind the iPad like that of a non-keyboard cover.