You can usually do more with less if the remaining few are up to the challenge. It will come at some cost, like having to "move fast and break things" more. There can even be a positive side if the previous situation had a lot of friction due to "too many cooks," as I've experienced on several teams. What's more worrisome is the alleged 80hr work weeks. Yes, two SWEs on a team aren't as good as one SWE working double hours, since SWE-time is known not to scale that way. But burning people out, aside from being unethical, is risky when nobody is ready to fill the spot.
Musk has a point, but it feels more like he's doing this out of financial desperation.
I'll bet it starts going down a bit more often, nothing too severe. Bigger issue might be inability to roll out new features, especially if they dig a horrible tech debt hole. Maybe someone has more details, I haven't kept up, but it seems like the $8 verification rollout got botched because they cut corners on actually verifying the subscribers.
Feels like one of those "ideas that sounded good in the conference room" that turns out to have unintended consequences.
Hopefully they can fix this and have an effective way to verify identity... or else just give it up and go back to the old, creaky, somewhat effective method since people are used to it.
Musk has a point, but it feels more like he's doing this out of financial desperation.
I'll bet it starts going down a bit more often, nothing too severe. Bigger issue might be inability to roll out new features, especially if they dig a horrible tech debt hole. Maybe someone has more details, I haven't kept up, but it seems like the $8 verification rollout got botched because they cut corners on actually verifying the subscribers.