I doubt you'll find many people arguing that the value of employee output is evenly distributed across all people in a company: regardless of discipline, there's always a minority who are delivering the most value. There's always the most valuable software engineers, the most valuable sales people, the most valuable executives. The problem with Elon's specific brand of this take is that it's ignorant of the real-world human aspect: Elon could pick the best software engineer he has ever worked with, and helicopter them into a dysfunctional environment, and they would struggle to deliver value.
If Elon had joined Twitter, and spent time understanding the business and environment and then excised the people he felt weren't contributing towards his vision, that would be one thing... but he has made arbitrary judgements based on absurd metrics like lines of code or willingness to show up at 1am to draw on a whiteboard, he has not made judgements based on the quality of the work or the value people have delivered.
Likewise, to suggest that a software engineer is bad because they were a part of a team that built a "...slow-as-molasses JavaScript-heavy microservices Rube Goldberg machine..." is absurd: what if that person was the only reason that it wasn't 10x slower? What if, they were the lynchpin in that team ensuring that brought everyone else up to a much higher standard which ensured that what they built was usable (even if it was bad)? You cannot judge the contribution of an individual without considering the wider context.
I have no problem with a company cutting most of their software engineers (I encourage clients to minimise their exposure to software engineers, I encourage careful hiring over volume) but what Elon is doing is... not that.
> ...spent time understanding the business and environment...
You're probably right, but there's a decent chance that Elon's heavy-handed approach was necessary.
I've seen the "gentle" approach fail.
For example, at $dayjob a bunch of on-prem stuff is being slowly modernised into the cloud. Very slowly. Slow enough to give the dinosaurs time to play politics and protect their turf.
For example, the networks teams that are used to legacy in-line firewalls will cozy up to some non-technical senior manager with a budget and get them to approve a project to roll out this legacy technology in the cloud. That way they don't have to retrain or -- worse -- risk being made redundant.
If instead some team comes in and simply bulk-migrates workloads from on-prem to the cloud... breaking a handful in the process and just fixing forward, then it appears to be messy and crazy, but the effect is that the legacy data centre teams are made redundant virtually overnight. Now they've got no clout, no time, and no pull. They're simply walked, and will find jobs elsewhere.
I've seen both approaches, and the latter style worked better long-term.
If Elon had joined Twitter, and spent time understanding the business and environment and then excised the people he felt weren't contributing towards his vision, that would be one thing... but he has made arbitrary judgements based on absurd metrics like lines of code or willingness to show up at 1am to draw on a whiteboard, he has not made judgements based on the quality of the work or the value people have delivered.
Likewise, to suggest that a software engineer is bad because they were a part of a team that built a "...slow-as-molasses JavaScript-heavy microservices Rube Goldberg machine..." is absurd: what if that person was the only reason that it wasn't 10x slower? What if, they were the lynchpin in that team ensuring that brought everyone else up to a much higher standard which ensured that what they built was usable (even if it was bad)? You cannot judge the contribution of an individual without considering the wider context.
I have no problem with a company cutting most of their software engineers (I encourage clients to minimise their exposure to software engineers, I encourage careful hiring over volume) but what Elon is doing is... not that.