We're firing 600 people because there were too many meetings

From https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/22/meta-cuts-600-ai-jobs-amid-ongoing-reorganization/ :

"By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact"

- Alexander Wang, internal memo

I've been blogging recently to "practice technical writing." There's a mental model of "technical writing" where you're basically explaining tricky things in novel ways–ideally to expand the audience of people who can understand and engage with technical stuff.

Of course, that's all just a nice way of saying you're "dumbing things down." Picking half-truths carefully. Pointing the uninitiated towards where they can start learning the central concepts that they'll need to actually understand things. "Technical writing" as training wheels for the less technical to engage with technical stuff.

Technical Writing for the galaxy brained?

I have a lot of sympathy for the 600 laid of super-intelligence engineers (what a phrase!). I have some sympathy for Alexander Wang, too. I don't like meetings either.

We seem to be entering an era where it's just...not even questioned that less engineers is better. Is it just the Mythical Man Month problem of maintaining n(n − 1)/2 channels of communication (aka human relationships) for n engineers? I'd welcome pushback but I kinda think so. And this dynamic is perhaps supercharged by:

1: improved tooling from LLM code assistants

2: building a digital god...I wouldn't know but I imagine that's the kind of thing where you'd want informal, permissive communication between teams and individuals.

So 29-year-olds are firing 600 engineers not because there isn't stuff to do, but because there's too many cooks in the kitchen.

What would it take to get to a place where continuing to add the next engineer continues to help, into the thousands? What would it mean to throw resources at that problem?