Why would anyone subject themselves to such humiliation? (Well, a fat paycheck is probably an answer). It feels more like a weeding-out process, if I were a giant jerkoff billionaire, I would know anyone who submits to this bullshit will submit to further humiliation...
It's humiliating because printing out code (or more commonly "printing out emails") is literally a meme, and I have read multiple articles alleging that after printing, the employees were instructed to shred the papers, without anyone having looked at them. That sounds a lot like Musk trolling by demanding his underlings print their code.
I think the implication was that they asked everyone to print the code out and then, realizing that nobody actually would be able to evaluate the code, asked everyone to shred the printouts lest they go into a dumpster where the code could be stolen.
That’s kind of like the complaints about Body Mass Index (BMI), “Well it misrepresents body builders and says world-class professional athletes are obese!” Yes, but are you a body builder or world-class professional athlete?
Everybody wants to think they’re Andy Hertzfeld, but generally speaking for a whole lot of people not being able to show their productivity in a very simple way means they’re unproductive.
> for a whole lot of people not being able to show their productivity in a very simple way means they’re unproductive.
No, this is completely nuts! It encourages all sorts of pathological behavior to fake the metric, and throws the thing you might actually care about - business value - under the bus. It's even worse for senior people and those with architectural responsibilities. Spend time helping a junior on your team? Well, that's going to count under his commit metric and not yours, so he can figure it out himself.
My point is that if your productivity can be easily measured by LOC, then don’t tell me that LOC is a bad metric.
If your duties are mentoring, show me the meetings you had, the action items from those meetings, and what changed as a result. Nearly every job’s productivity can be showed in a pretty simple way. It’s the people who argue that their contribution can’t be simply shown that are often not that productive.
> My point is that if your productivity can be easily measured by LOC, then don’t tell me that LOC is a bad metric.
OK, so, I fundamentally disagree with the if condition.
This is in no small because of a previous coworker, in a place that shall not be named, who regularly duplicated entire class files rather than subclassing them, and his given argument when we challenged him on this was that he "couldn't subclass because the access specifiers were set to private" (yes really his defence was that bad).
Worse, I'd already added some "TODO: deduplicate this method" comments to the original, because the original was already a mess of copypasta code, and the new class duplicated all of these too.
So, a lot of new LOC that day, but none of them were good additions.
If anything that guy’s a great example of why to use LOC as a metric because when he shows you a huge number of LOC, you say, “That’s a lot more than I expected, let’s take a look…” and you see that his performance sucks.
I think of metrics like this as a way to guide deeper looks and decision making. You just have to accept that “all models are wrong, but some models are useful.” LOC can be useful when it guides you to the right questions. It’s a starting point not the end of the conversation.
To make the example extreme, if you got hired to be a developer, and your boss asks you to clean the toilets, is it okay because hey, he's paying for you to do whatever he wants?
You'd probably say no, because his request is way over the line; to me having a jerkoff know-nothing telling me "Print your work and I'll judge whether you're worth it or not" is over my line.
It's apprarently fairly common for office workers in Japan to clean toilets of their offices. They see as part of taking care of their surroundings (something they perceive as required for harmonious functioning as a human) and not at all beneath them. It starts in elementary schools, where children clean up the school themselves.
If you interviewed at a company and got told "Every quarter, the know-nothing jerkoff CEO wants to see 50 printed pages of your code", and you accepted the job, hey, you've accepted that this is the norm in that company...
Haven't experienced exactly that but I often did non-coding tasks:
- lunch shopping and preparations, clean up
- transport from one branch to another for Factory Acceptance Testing
- at one point I worked as a consultant for a rather large Norwegian company and one thing I noted was the the most senior leader I ever saw in that company (that I was aware if at least) was also one of those I remember who would make sure to tidy the kitchen and make sure everything went into the dishwasher
The sound of 1000 leetcode warriors printing out 2 pages of tumbleweed, sobbing over their multifunction copiers, then rushing home to record a YT video of why they left their faang dream job
The most productive engineers I've known all crank out a ton of code in any week. It's almost like an addiction for them to push commits on a daily basis.
Yeah, but lots of the debt is actually on company's books - as is the case with LBOs. This is yet another case of barbarians at the gate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarians_at_the_Gate) - corporate raider running a company into the ground.
October 6, 1997: Michael Dell makes an infamously bleak appraisal of Apple’s fortunes. Asked what he would do with the struggling company, the founder of Dell Inc. says he would “shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
That only works when the company has enough cash or assets to buyout the new owner for more than they paid. Twitter was definitely not a case of sitting on a mountain of assets that can be broken up and raided.
For sure, as far as LBOs go, this is probably one of the worst ever. Normally the raider pays a bit of a premium over the assets, then divides them, props them up a bit, and collects a profit. I can't imagine this being possible with Twitter. Nothing to break up. Nothing to prop up. And if he gets his way, he will be competing with Parlor for the niche market it caters to. Or 4chan :)
Not sure how lean do they run their stuff - I'd assume at least lean-ish, considering they have (had?) a lot of good engineering talent working on it. Asking for a large reduction while at the same time culling staff seems like wishful thinking.
I went to visit a team at Twitter that seemed to have very little to do with their core business. They'd bought some company that my company was using (can't even remember, Fabric or some crash profiling thing?) and I got invited to see their fancy building on Market Street.
But my sense was there were many peripheral teams that your average Twitter user would never notice if Twitter were to cut them.
Can you explain how the team added value to shareholders who want to maximize their long term ROI (which is the job of the CEO)?
We're living in a world where voting rights of pensioners have been delegated to big companies like Vanguard and Black Rock. They clearly are not keeping the best interest of the shareholders which would be their duty, and vote politically instead.
That's easy. I work for a company that has a similar body. Its a PITA but they prevent over-zealous POs and engineers from building creepy things that get the brand in trouble. (E.g., "why don't we record our users and predict their sentiment from facial expressions and tone of the voice" - those people will tell you why it's a bad idea). There, hope it helps.
That just sounds like your product owners and legal department have outsourced one of their core competencies to another department, perhaps to reduce their own accountability.
POs have different incentives - they usually get rewarded for features built. A good PO has lots of ideas, some of those may be good for the product ("we will serve more relevant ads if we spy on our users!") and bad for the brand. The ML Ethics teams are usually part of the legal teams and are staffed mainly with lawyers. Not sure how it was with Twitter. It's also entirely possible those teams did not do a very good job, considering what a sh1thole Twitter is, so they may as well do without one.
If you look in the medical industry for example ethical decisions are always managed by a different group than Product/Legal because it's a completely different set of skills and competencies.
Even more so at places like Twitter which are heavily dependent on ML models to make real-time decisions. And so you need a dedicated team that is proactive rather then reactive like a Legal team would be.
Putting the "what will our users think" question in an ethical framing is not obviously (to me) going to benefit users. (Especially when modern fashionable ethics centers around utilitarian normative ethics, but that's besides the point.)
Right. The real point is of course to make sure what gets built is good for the brand. That revealing how something works won't make people mad, disgusted, less likely to use its services, do business with it, etc. Of course hardly anybody really cares about the ethics per se - only for the perception of the company.
Some companies, such as for instance Procter & Gamble or Apple care about their brand equity a lot, since they rely on it to charge above market premiums. Twitter needs to care about that too, since if they get caught doing something unsavoury they will turn toxic to their advertisers, or at least those who care about their brands. I am not a marketing exec but if Twitter now drops the pretense of caring about ethics you will see major advertisers pull out, and make a point of communicating why they do it. Thats the ROI on having functioning ethics teams.
But even that approach does not work for very long. With regulators tightening the laws everywhere, and eying bans on fully automated decision making in some industries (e.g. mine - in HR), you either staff those internal ethics teams with intelligent, well connected lawyers, or you get truly nasty surprises and jeopardize the brand itself -- and lose $$$.
Ideally the society where the companies operate in should provide the safety rails, thus allowing the company to do whatever it legally can to maximize profits.
But that wouldn't be the crony capitalism that we're stuck with now. Also, things have been moving too fast for a long time, making it nearly impossible for governments to keep up.
I consider much of the practices of social media companies designing for dopamine hits to be unethical, but it had been very lucrative for shareholders for more than a decade. It’s still lucrative but shareholders are taking it on the chin for other macro reasons.
Rising political opposition and talk of government intervention in companies like Facebook and Twitter is very much a threat to the future stability and ROI of said companies. Fewer and fewer people buy the argument that "The Algorithm" just does what it does and isn't influenced by its builder.
As political discourse and more elections are swayed by rage-bait and disinformation pumped into voters retinas by these platforms, the political risks to these platforms and their bottom line will increase (and become wildly unpredictable).
ML ethics and accountability is beneficial to both society and to any company which has an interest in self-preservation.
People who talk about regulation of social media should spend 5 minutes reviewing the Supreme Courts’ approach to regulating speech over the last 25 years. Never going to happen.
I guess you have zero understanding on Twitter's business model, which even Elon has some degree of. Advertisers are extremely sensitive on their brand safety and they will simply cut their budget if they see a certain amount of risk on publishers. YT had to implement various brand safety measures after Elsagate to appease advertisers. After Elon took it over, advertisers immediately cut their advertising budgets on Twitter because they see it as an existential threat to the platform. This is a REAL problem, which just you don't appreciate.
Do they often publish transparency reports about their ML systems that cannot identify months-long spam campaigns where scammers post identical messages tens of thousands of times?
I don't see the purpose of this condescending comment, you could have explained why and provide knowledge for the person posting the initial statement.
> Sure, something nobody has heared of and nobody knows why it should be at a company like Twitter.
Actually almost everyone who is in the Data/ML space knows about it.
It's one of the biggest challenges in ML which is making sure that models don't amplify biases in the training datasets and cause harm to users and the company. There have been many stories with TikTok for example recommending accounts which promote unhealthy eating [1] to users with a known eating disorder.
> Sure, something nobody has heared of and nobody knows why it should be at a company like Twitter.
Because Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have gotten under fire multiple times for the shit their artificial "intelligence" did - promoting content harmful to society (antivaxxers, flat-earthers, antisemitism, ...), sending them into outright radicalization spirals (YT autoplay), banning of people by automation based on shoddy input or without context...
If you're running AI that has a direct impact on wide society and you're not running an ethics oversight program, you should be arrested for endangerment of society.
'Ethics, Transparency and Accountability' is a decently important part of any data warehousing company.
If you are going to be hosting petabytes of data and in the business of showing advertisment, a lot of recommendation algorithms work in the background. A lot of times they aren't perfect and end up showing information which could be very high correlated but culturally sensitive, offensive or avoidable. People working in fairness and accountability run a lot of experiments to make sure biases don't get amplified in service offerings.
However, Musk's stated intent when buying twitter, was to make it a non-partisan town square. This comes with a context of the US currently being divided more and more into two competing "tribes" of similar size and power. (Ie. the perfect setup for a civil war.)
If you look at the "ethics" teams kind of like law enforcement, it's important that they are neutral to this partisan divide, and don't have a "My side good, other side evil!" attitude.
If Elon is of the opinion that Twitter has been engaging in a partisan way, it is natural that roles like this are torn down and built from scratch, where the new teams are thoroughly screen to make sure they have as little affiliation with each of the tribes as possible, and to make sure that any affiliation remaining is balanced between the tribes. (Kind of like one does when recruiting a jury for a high profile court case, and also how presidents should select supreme court justices)
Hopefully, Musk goes through with this the way he has stated, by aiming for non-partisanship, and not in a pro-Republican way.
I might be a bit idealistic here but I like the notion of respect. Disabling badges, laptops and email addresses of your employees with no direct communication isn't very respectful in my book.
Regular companies do meetings, shady companies send a pre recorded video to their employees, and then you have Musk, just logging you off. I guess he missed the part were "transhumanism" still contains "humanism"
> I might be a bit idealistic here but I like the notion of respect
Doesn't respect work two ways? You give respect, you get respect?
It's easy to make Elon Musk the bad guy, but people who were let go were freeloaders. Let's not try to make them anything but that, we've all seen plenty of Twitter employees using up work-time to be active on various social media. They didn't show respect to the employer because their work and demeanor did not reflect it.
The "boss bad, worker good" just doesn't apply here. Twitter is a troubled company, I'm surprised Elon bought it in the first place but I'm absolutely not surprised by the wave of layoffs.
You can assume the moral high ground and employ the talent that Twitter has decided to part with and prove your words with actions. Are you ready to do so?
Should we, the IT experts, not be thrilled by so much experienced talent being available for employment?
I'm pretty curious about how and where Twitter employees were distributed. For a company ostensibly worth $44 billion, having 7,500 staff feels pretty damn lean. It feels like Musk isn't just purging people, he's purging the Twitter culture...
For comparison, SpaceX runs an entire private space program on ~12,000 employees. Near-weekly launches. Rocket development+production. Building+deploying Starlink.
(Although that's just a number from a quick googling. Maybe they outsource a lot of manufacturing etc?)
Government typically has a whole ton of contractors, sometimes twice the number of FTEs, but a cursory Google indicates NASA has only about 1000 contractors. Interesting, but the contract money probably goes to acquisition and commercial partnerships (https://www.osbp.nasa.gov/docs/top20_2020_contractors-TAGGED...).
That said, their FY22 budget is “only” $30B, which is less than Elon just paid for all of Twitter. This number usually surprises people but a lot of other space-related work is within the USAF and NRO budgets.
About a decade ago I was working on websites for NASA and just the contractor I worked for had over a thousand contractors. They were far from the largest, too.
That comparison is however completely irrelevant to Twitter.
It may seem to ignorant people that a space program is more advanced than "just a website" but actually running these kind of websites is extremely complex. Especially when you're needing to compete with Facebook and Google at serving ads in a relevant and effective way.
It is really interesting reading through their infrastructure challenges alone:
It's crazy the number of people on HN somehow claiming that Twitter is this well run and well functioning tech company now that bad rocket man took the reigns and decided to lay off everyone... Isn't it a consensus among tech people that Twitter is the absolute worst tech company?
Twitter was a bit shit. But its up and running more or less in real time for millions of users. Thats pretty impressive. Its business is shit, yes.
Musk looks like hes done the classic: "the office is clean why do I need cleaners" dance. I am surprised he can fire that many people that quickly and still expect momentum.
It doesn't help that he appears to be shitting out product ideas that he's just "dreamt" up. Rather than talking to people to see why twitter didn't do it in the first place. He clearly has a low opinion of the entire company.
I think a lot of people viewed Twitter as poorly-monetized and -managed as product and business, but generally competitive as a technical organization.
Over the years in various hiring threads it's been common to describe Twitter as the giant tech comapny you go to when you can't get hired anywhere else. Twitter has definitely had a reputation for a long time for being bloated and filled with less-than-competent employees. It's only earlier this year that I've seen the discussion shift towards this idea of Twitter being a competent group.
Whew - even with your empty caveat against saying what I’m about to say:
Designing reusable rockets and launching hundreds of them into space for profit, is more complicated and requires a different caliber of frankly higher IQ worker, than building and maintaining the existing Twitter.
Not that there aren’t some smart web people, obviously.
I’m writing from a faang office with a few decades of experience. I know some people in aerospace. They’re on average smarter than 4/5ths of my colleagues (who are also clever).
I’m much more junior, but to exchange anecdotes, I think it’s difficult to accurately say that people in FAANG are less, equal, or more intelligent than people in aerospace. To define intelligent, I will use the everyday definition that mixes speed of learning with the ability to solve hard problems (acknowledging that the academic definition of intelligence is different).
For one, I anecdotally know people in FAANG who were smart by effectively “studying for the test” by focusing more on leetcode than projects/intellectual exploration. In contrast, the people I know who went into aerospace tended to have a genuine interest in physics (and some with more interest in philosophy), and had more experience with projects (e.g. worked on an aerospace team in university), with many of them having little-to-know experience with software development.
Interestingly, the aerospace people I know anecdotally happened to be better at soft skills/networking for getting into companies, whereas the FAANG people focused on leetcode for admissions. After getting into a company, also from my anecdotal experience, more FAANG people focused on metrics/compensation, whereas more aerospace people tended to focus more on the mastery of the craft. I acknowledge that my anecdotes shouldn’t be generalized, but it aligns with the motivations of many people looking to get into each company (it seems more people go into FAANG for compensation/prestige, whereas more people go into aerospace for the passion).
So, I would say that people from both categories tended to be very smart at learning quickly and solving hard problems, though anecdotally, the aerospace people seemed to be generally more intellectually curious. Then again, perhaps the aerospace people were better at soft skills/presenting themselves so they appeared smarter, whereas the FAANG people didn’t focus on presenting themselves as intelligently. For limitations, note that the people I’m thinking of are at the junior level.
In any case, I don’t think one can conclusively say that people in FAANG have more/less/the same intelligence as people in aerospace companies, though maybe one can tentatively say that people who go into aerospace tend to be more curious and interested in mastery of one’s profession (versus material compensation).
I've worked on a large scale website everyone knows. There are lots of interesting problems, and lots of super clever people who solve them in clever ways, but it's not literal rocket science.
How many employees would it take to just maintain the status quo? Code freeze, no more features and bug fixes. Just keep the lights on and keep selling ads.
I wonder does this number include moderators or are they contractors who are not included in the headcount. I could see half that number being made of moderators if so.
I was curious about the numbers that other tech companies may employ as a comparison... from some cursory googling:
* Meta: 71,970 [2021]
* Apple: 164,000 [2022]
* Amazon: 1,298,000 [2020]
* Netflix: 11,300 [2021]
* Alphabet: 156,500 [2021]
* Microsoft: 221,000 [2021]
* The New York Times: 5000 [2021]
* Fox Corporation: 9000 [2020]
* Reddit: 700 [2021]
(Anyone else I should add?)
I can't really find any trends. I think Reddit is an outlier, and my impression is having only 3750 employees would probably put Twitter on the smaller end of the scale too.
We'd need to also see the money (income/revenue/profit) of these companies, and then see the ratio of employees to money. Musk saw that list and noticed that Twitter had the lowest ratio.
To get the ratio metric up, they have to increase income or reduce employees.
This rationale, given by Musk (and I imagine VC friends) is all outlined in the discovery documents of the twitter vs musk legal case.
I've been using Reddit daily for a couple of years and have never seen downtime or any weird bugs. I use the mobile app, not sure if that's what you were referring to.
> I imagine the buyout netted most employees with stock hundreds of thousands of dollars.
One of the theories knocking around last week was that these layoffs are just before a stock vesting was to happen, presumably in an attempt to avoid paying them.
> I find it very odd that people keep mentioning it despite it not panning out, and not sure what to make of it.
Has anyone confirmed that the stock vests actually happened? Or did they get postponed whilst the layoffs where being organised? Haven't seen anything either way.
And I don't think it's that odd to consider that a man well known for flaunting the law would flaunt the law on this as well.
I haven't seen any screenshots of pay stubs to verify it. Given that it was a conspiracy theory to begin with and there is no confirmation to follow up, my assumption is that no, it did not happen.
Elsewhere it has been announced that laid off employees are getting quite generous Severance packages, so this would be out of line with that.
Depends on how you value the company. Twitter is very overvalued if you look at accounting & finances more than influence and popularity and hype.
Consider revenue and income (losses) and Twitter doesn't look good at all, they look horrible. They don't have that many employees, but they must be very very highly compensated and concentrated in very high cost areas. Otherwise the company is wasting serious money somewhere else, because to lose money on $5B/yr revenue with 7500 employees year after year in a business that's as high margin as pure software is incredibly terrible performance.
In my view no single medium (the media is the message) has done more to weaken the quality of public discourse in the world than Twitter. But maybe Facebook proves that even if you're allowed to use prose crazies dominate so maybe the issue is deeper
You’re missing the point of their comment. If the medium is the problematic thing being focused on in their comment then who the communicating parties are is not significant.
A lot of people reading this aren't going to understand what you mean by "checkout Postman". I'm guessing you mean "read Neil Postman's books"? If so, I agree - especially Amusing Ourselves to Death.
that's literally the very mechanism that weakens public discourse because it turns discourse into a 280 word soundbite popularity contest.
Productive and democratic discourse consists of people assembling a community of their peers eye-to-eye to solve local issues, not billionaires and dictators addressing a mob like Mussolini on the Palazzo Venezia with a megaphone.
Is that really Twitter's fault? Please go through this thread right here and see how many of the comments would fit in a tweet. Many of them also match (or exceed) the Twitter standard for lack of basic humanity. The appetite was there. If Twitter hadn't provided the outlet, some essentially identical alternative would have. It's quite likely that some other will do the same after Musk finishes driving Twitter into the ground.
The platform isn't the problem. The people using whatever platform they can find to spread an anti-democratic anti-intellectual anti-humanitarian message are. I'm sorry you don't want to see that.
Why is it important to directly communicate with or even "listen to unfiltered" the world's dictators and billionaires? As for communicating directly with politicians it's very unlikely that the vast majority of them manage their own social media accounts. You probably have the same level of direct communication as you do sending their office a letter or an email.
Nonsense. This a big beef with me about Twitter. It purports to be an egalitarian platform where you can "directly communicate" with significant people, but the sheer volume and signal-to-noise ratio of popular accounts means that they will never even see your comment, let alone reply, except in extraordinarily rare examples.
The panopticon they’ve build is bigger and wider (sharing data between Insta, WhatsApp etc). I don’t know what would be the “Cambridge Analytica of Twitter” but time will tell.
I'll go out on a limb and say it's not entirely the specific medium's fault. It's the people.
It did not used to be this bad with the exception of 4chan (of course), and the state of discourse in life has degraded so far, we even see it at the highest levels of government. Every year that goes by I fear we're losing more and more of our common decency and appreciation for our shared humanity. I have seen families torn apart because of this.
I've started going out of my way to meet my neighbors and smile at strangers.
I deleted that because it colored what I said enough for you to miss my message. I have no agenda, but I think your comment proves my point that there's something off about how we're communicating right now.
Fair but I didn't miss what you wrote, you choose to explicitly choose an example that would get eyes rolling. Which, if I read your comment correctly, you accept the responsibility with "there's something off about how we're communicating right now".
Inflammatory language get's more reaction - well documented and your probably aware of that.
> Reddit. Reddit is by far the worst and has the most impact.
I think this may be viewing things through a bubble - my baby boomer parents don't know what reddit is, neither do any of their friends, but you better believe they and all their Facebook friends are all aware of all the latest crazy conspiracy theories. I think Reddit, while popular for certain demographics, is far less wide spread than some of the other social media.
I don’t think that’s true. Twitter is/was the only remaining news medium where experts had a voice. During the pandemic doctors and infectious diseases experts were using it to call or government blow hards. Now that’s going to die as well and we may return to complete darkness.
I saw the opposite. "Experts" being totally wrong and fear mongering without evidence. It was rural governments that said "prove it".
Recall how various studies on covid lethality, vaccination and masks were wildly different. The Israel study is a quick one. This is exactly what happened when influenza was new in the 1920's.
Yet the "experts" made it sound like everyone is going to die if you are not wearing a mask 24/7 and isolating. This is what "do no harm" ideology becomes - causing mass harm to everyone to potentially protect a few.
I see Twitter as possibly working up to the ideal of "crowd sourcing" the truth. If Musk does what he seems to be saying he will do -- and take the training wheels off the moderation, and get the government out of it -- we might be left with a system that really can sort out the truth from fiction. Or, at least, present both sides, and let people decide for themselves, without hiding one side.
What you’re witnessing on HN and elsewhere is politics masquerading as objective and ostensibly, a thoughtful discourse.
None of the articles on HN have much of good faith discussion. I just see it as “progressives are pissed because their platform of power is being seized”. A lot of that relied on platform censorship on places like Twitter.
Just now, the WhiteHouse account is being fact checked. That doesn’t sit well with progressives.
This isn't some conspiracy theory, we have the current Biden Administration working with Big Tech to censor speech. "Public health" is just a trope under far more insiduous political agenda for power: https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...
Isn't White House supposed to keep records? They are not supposed to delete stuff.
The white house press releases have been a total disaster. I thought we had it bad in the previous admin. Lies after lies told to American public. Much of this stuff goes unchallenged on all social media.
If you believe "influenza was new in the 1920's", you have bigger things to worry about than this discussion. I suggest going to check on the paperwork for that bridge you bought.
I’ve been following epidemiology experts and no one implied “everyone dying”, nor recommended “24/7” mask wearing (rather cited lowered transmission rates) and yes isolation lowered transmission rates too.
The flak they had to take for inconveniencing the lifestyle of people in the interest of prioritizing health outcomes for all, is insane.
If anything, we learned that the thought of care for others at a small cost to the self is extremely triggering for many Americans and is easily politicized as a wedge issue to influence voting.
Agreed , the experts showed us that a minor lifestyle change can significantly reduce covid transmission. Instead we as a country did all the wrong things and blamed experts when government officials failed by instituting random non evidence based policies
Complete darkness? O no, not the dark ages before 2006, when we had walk uphill to school and uphill to go back home. Or I could try to more direct and say: that's utter crap.
> Twitter is/was the only remaining news medium
And twitter is an important reason that other, more reliable and informative news outlets went under.
There were still some newspapers left in 2006. By 2022 they are all basically dead.
Also standards of journalism integrity were bad then but they are abysmal now. Very few journalists actually investigate stories, most just re print press release.
That's just blatantly wrong. There is still great journalism out there and the depth and breath of quality news is now reaching farther than ever before.
But of course you are right: who could have foreseen how much bad news people want to read and how little they want to pay for quality news. Why do people watch Fox or read Murdock media rags?
I checked out Twitter again after a few months absence. There is good content, for sure, but by crikey, most of what passes for political discourse amounts to a stream of non sequiturs and ipse dixit (assertion without proof).
During the initial COVID outbreak, it was one of the only decent information sources I could find.
Twitter's nice because it gives you fast and easily available tools to curate your own feed. I could quickly follow a variety of professionals across different disciplines and regions to parse together some useful info.
You have to work at it, but anyone who assumes quality information will passively flow to you is mistaken and being misinformed in some way.
I read this kind of comment all the time on HN, it’s so confusing to me. I only joined twitter 2 years ago because there are a large number of high quality tweet threads on finance, ML, NLP, breaking news etc. A lot of the time I get information earlier on twitter than I do on any other platform. If anything, for me, twitter has strengthened the quality of public discourse.
If some big event happens I can read an expert’s tweet thread on the matter 30 minutes after the event happened instead of reading an editorialized piece with a bunch of random comments. I was reading tweet threads on the recession 1 year ago with deep analysis from experts. When the FOMC meeting happens 1 hour later I get a thread on the financial implications, another on the economic implications and another on the political implications. You don’t get that quality of information at that speed on any other platform.
I strongly suspect most of these comments about the quality of twitter are actually angry that the people you follow post opinions you don’t like. I see political opinions I don’t like all the time from my finance follows, I just scroll away not sure why that is a problem?
If anything Facebook and YouTube’s algorithm were the most damaging in 2010s because they heavily promoted extremist content to random people. I don’t see that from twitter especially not at the same volume as 2010s FB and YT.
As the first paragraph of that article points out, advance notice is required by federal law, if the company is sufficiently large and if sufficiently many people are being laid off at the same time. At-will employment is not relevant.
That probably works in the US but in some jurisdictions (e.g. parts of Europe) -- where I presume Twitter has [or had!] employees -- there are requirements for an actual consultation process before substantial layoffs.
You can give them notice when the decision is yours to make. And the then the termination can be legal at X days beyond that, if the legal requirement is X days notice. I don't see how "I Just bought it" matters?
Yeah, the Warn Act doesn’t require you let them work for 60 days. If it’s triggered, it just means you have to pay them for 60 days. It is very common to not let them work, particularly when concerned about sabotage.
Sure. I haven't seen the actual legal complaint, so I don't know if it's just a publicity stunt, or if they actually have evidence that Musk is planning to not pay out the extra wages that he's (presumably) required to.
The NY Times makes it sound like there might be a legal case for a different reason:
> While federal and California laws require companies to provide advance notice of mass layoffs, it was not clear whether Mr. Musk had done so. A spokesman for California’s Employment Development Department said on Thursday evening that it had received no such notices from Twitter, which is based in San Francisco and is expected to report mass layoffs to the agency.
I just don’t understand that. It is very common to give the layoff notice on the date of termination and to then pay them for 60 days. That complies with the Warn Act. I’m not a California lawyer, it that must be true there too. There’s no way they’d make you bring in hostile workers.
> “To help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data, our offices will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended,” the email reads. “If you are in an office or on your way to an office, please return home.”
Welcome to the dystopian future... I find it a bit galling how companies can force you into home office nowadays if it suits them (you want to avoid your underlings congregating in the office in such a situation), but also force you to come to the office when it suits them.
If anything, this is more akin to the baker calling their employees to say "you'll be baking from home today, I'm firing a lot of people today and need to protect the bakery."
They aren't 'forcing' you to do something - they're offering you money in return for doing it. If you don't like the money they're offering you don't have to accept the deal.
"Really dystopian that they're offering me $300k a year + benefits to be able to ask me to work in one of two locations" doesn't really work does it?
"Really dystopian that I can walk up to a baker and force him to give me a loaf of bread by offering him the agreed price in money."
Did you read the article, or at least the quote that the parent offered? This isn't about Twitter changing work site expectations/status. It's about blocking physical access for employees who were expected to show up at the office, without prior notice or any change in contract terms -- i.e. without their work site actually having formally changed.
This isn't even dystopian, it's just a management clusterfuck. Whoever thought this is the right way to handle this kind of a situation should be the first to go in these layoffs. Wow.
> without prior notice or any change in contract terms
Pretty sure it's within their contractual rights to deny people access to the office for any reason or no reason at all? Did you put a contractual clause in about the right to office access when you signed?
> Pretty sure it's within their contractual rights to deny people access to the office for any reason or no reason at all?
Of course it is. The point I am making is that it's extremely bad management to handle layoffs and firing like that. You have the team leads schedule an appointment with the people who have to be let go. They tell them they are being let go, effective from X, with such and such terms (including access rights if they're in any way more specific than "you can't come to the office after X"). You have them thank them for their work and offer them a recommendation if they need it. This isn't some advanced HR management guru advice, it's common sense that should be standard adult behaviour.
Telling people who you have not yet fired that they can't come to the office anymore, possibly minutes before they come in to work, but also insisting that they go home so they can get the email that they've been fired is just about the worst way to handle it.
There's a potentially infinite set of actions that are within a company's contractual rights to do. Not all of them are okay.
Well, they did a “lockout go away” back in the 90’s when my company died. Fear of ‘rm -rf’ or some other act of digital vandalism or theft. Doesn’t say much about the business I guess,
Had a similar experience back in the early 00’s. Kinda back-fired though - one of the developers had happened to notice that a .com domain name they’d been desperate to buy for some time (because it was the name of their licensed IP) had become available a few days beforehand.
He’d bought it immediately planning to hand it over to the business… wasn’t quite so keen once they laid him off!
I would say less as that requires a bit more skill and risks being found upon code review. Acting in the heat of the moment seems far more expected. Although perhaps this situation points out up that “planning against all eventualities” is a good skill to have?
What do you mean “whoever decided should be the first to go”? Musk decided. He’s pissed he overpaid and he thinks the whole company is a clusterfuck. This isn’t a “management failure”, it’s by design. Elon is cleaning house. Speed, not collateral damage, is his priority.
I mean whoever decided that the proper way to handle a layoff is to tell someone who has not yet been fired that they can no longer access company premises while they're on their way to work, or possibly wondering why their badge doesn't work, and should instead go home and wait to be fired from there. This breaks just about every management rule about how to handle a layoff, not to mention common sense.
So Twitter employees can work at home "forever", but they should work 80 hours a week while under explicit threat of layoffs, and return to the office for 12 hours a day, meanwhile the office is closed, go home if you are in the office now!
This is really what has happened inside of just the last 8 weeks. I can't blame anyone who just can't keep up, especially while that 12 hour a day death march was going on. This is really not how you should treat people, even for a day.
I mean, if you don't like it then quit. I think that's the point. Elon is going to run Twitter like his other companies which means he only wants people who actually want to be there and want to put in the hours to make the business work. Anyone not willing to do so should leave. It's a private company so he can set whatever expectations he wants, if the former employees don't like it they can start their own business.
I can't quit working at Twitter because I already don't, but I am downloading an archive of all my tweets as we speak and I'll be having my finger on the trigger to delete my whole account, which I'm totally sure coming from me, a nobody you never heard of, is, like, an equally serious threat – I mean seriously though, have some solidarity with the workers. Do you want to work under those conditions?
If it paid well then yes I would work under those conditions. I don't have to stay at a job for life, I can put in extra work to earn extra money and then quit when the schedule or environment no longer suits me. I'd much rather have that option than be stuck in some crappy unionized shop where everything moves at a glacial pace, get underpaid, and have it be nearly impossible to find another job because all other workplaces are the same and no one is hiring, firing or growing.
If you want to work there, fine, I hope it pays well! But I'm telling you, I saw a tweet when this all began about how someone once set about $2B on fire to buy Yahoo! and what fun they were looking forward to having (as a Twitter user) helping Elon set the new record for cash bonfire volume and speed-run, and from my perspective we are now watching that play out in real-time. I don't want to work there, I don't even want to be mentioned in the same sentence as there. You can find me on Mastodon from now on.
Some people blame victims aa a defense mechanism. It's so they can justify in their head that it can never happen to them because they are smart, and hardworking and deserving and whatever else.
It usually takes such tragedy happening to them personally for them to gain empathy. Even then, some of them don't. They only end up having empathy for their own tragedies, other people's tragedy is deserved
I've been laid off before and I've lost jobs for a variety of reasons including the company going under. What I've learnt from it is that you just have to keep moving forwards. If you try to cling to the past or hold on to a mental framework or lifestyle that isn't working it'll just drag you down. I get that people want security but in the end the only real security is that which you provide for yourself, if you put blind faith into systems that you don't have any control over at some point they will fail you, most of the time through no fault of their own and you'll be left to fend for yourself. That's why I always start from that position, I make sure I'm able to protect myself first. Everything else is window dressing.
If you go from earning $250k+ at a highly recognizable company to homeless then you fucked up severely somewhere along the way. You'd have to have 0 savings, massive debt, and completely fail at every job interview afterwards.
You could generate all the electricity needed for the next 20 generations by harvesting the energy generated by the eyes rolling of people who live in countries with workers rights who just read that comment
That's just modern technology. I'm not aware of any country where labour laws would prevent logging employees out remotely. There are some where you can't be laid off immediately, but even there you could be denied access to the systems and just get paid for the rest of your tenure I believe?
All our contracts are managed by unions and you can't just fire someone out of the blue, there's notice periods on both sides (unless there's just cause for termination)
Yes, and most of the time the fired employee will be sent home during his notice period, so im not sure what you are talking about?
The thing is, mass layoffs are often discussed widely in Europe since its mostly blue collar employees and the unions and politicians are often trying to prevent the layoffs.
Precisely. Most places in Europe, you're able to find ways to fire individual tech workers with whatever notice period dictated by the contract terms. Mass layoffs of tech workers is quite rare.
Mass layoffs (or some kind of forced unpaid leave) is typically something that happens for blue collared jobs when there is a reduction of demand for their products.
The twitter case is different, though. Twitter was a hostile takeover (even in the end, it was the company that forced the transaction). The takeover was not done for economic reason (or that was what was claimed), but because the new owner wanted to radically change the values of the company.
For employees that base their personal identity on those old values, this makes them natural enemies of the new owner. When Musk carries the sink in, he is like an enemy warlord accepting the surrender of an enemy tribe.
After a short tally, the enemy warlord lets half the prisoners go, after disarming them (takes away access to accounts and buildings), while the other half are allowed to join his forces, if they desire to.
This is probably the way this had to go. Letting everyone keep their access to the infra would be crazy. Now the question that remains, is how much does he have to pay those that got fired.
I would say upper middle class joe has is better in the states. Everyone else is barely clinging on to their lives in perpetual serfdom because of no universal healthcare, extreme housing costs, extremely expensive education, etc…
Statistics about average and median income in the US and EU is widely available. Also the graph linked above about disposable income shows that only in the lowest 10th percentile people in Europe are (marginally) richer that in the US. Starting with lower middle class the gap becomes quite significant already, and what's important is only growing.
So? If they need specific people to come in then they'll probably just call them, I'm guessing they're running with a skeleton crew while they do the lay offs. Most of the people in the office probably won't even be Twitter employees.
No, and workers rights are usually about the amount of compensation for all this. In France, which we cant argue is laissez-faire capitalist, they can burn the company to the ground with all your work stuff for all we care so long as they compensate heavily, financially, for all the surprise unemployment.
People think work is democratic but it s not: it's transactional and worker rights are just here to pay workers more, not give them any sort of novel ownership of the work tools.
That can be done, but it s called communism and never works because workers want money not access to their work pc, and leaders want money not management oversight of every single work tool. So you end up with people pretending to work for people pretending to pay them in a lunatic worker paradise where there are no humans anymore, just workers and their work tool mindlessly fullfilling the glorious work tasks assigned to them by mindless work allocators.
You are so confused I don’t know where to start. There is no country in the world where you have the right to go into a corporate office against the will of the owner. This has absolutely nothing to do with employment status. We’re talking about current employees being told to stay out of a physical office.
In the past such a thing wouldn't have been possible because of the need to keep up day-to-day operations. Now companies can just decide if you should work from home or from the office as they please. And home office was initially promoted as giving more flexibility to the employees - looks like the companies are now exploiting this flexibility to their advantage while restricting the employee's flexibility (x mandatory office days etc.).
Maybe it wouldn't rub me the wrong way if it wouldn't come from the same guy who said that Tesla employees have to come in 40 h per week, the rest they can work from home (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/06/musk-to-tesla-an...). Well, he seems ready to embrace home office when it suits him...
> What about Foxconn China not allowing employees to go home because of ,,zero COVID policy''?
It is a little dystopian, but (assuming you're talking about the Zhengzhou story from a couple of days ago) it's also not Foxconn's decision. The local government mandated that the industrial park be locked down.
It's also worth noting that many workers at places like Foxconn live in on-site dorms anyway.
I don't think you understand how mass layoffs in big companies work. There's nothing new or dystopian about it. You probably haven't heard of garden leave as well?
The not showing up to the office is kind of irrelevant.
Not having a consultation period, whether people are working or on "gardening leave", is illegal in CA, NY, the UK, and many other places for an employer of that size.
Reading the article and not having a stake in twitter (no account, no stocks, don’t use it at all), seems reasonable. It’s basically, we’re closing office tomorrow, exit the premises please.
Not dystopian at all and there was nothing in the article about go home and work, just go home and receive decision information.
I am assuming this is a hint at how large the layoff will be. If are getting rid of 5-10% of your workforce, no issue with using the office but if you are axing some number greater...lets say 25%, it sounds like a security nightmare.
This is quite a curiously Pavlovian response. It assumes so much from that "please return home". The whole comment stands as a window into a life lived under abusive working conditions where the Individual knows only the control of the Company.
Nothing in that 'please return home' is anything to do with forcing anyone to have a home office, to go there and work, to do anything really. The company doesn't control you.
What a contrast in leadership when you compare the way Twitter is doing this (rumor is right before bonus/stock vesting and cold impersonal email) and how Stripe is conducting their layoffs (empathy, 14 weeks severance, bonus payouts, etc.)
Which company is going to have an easier time hiring after the dust settles and they have a growth stage again?
Nah, people do remember what companies do and many avoid shitty companies. I work in HR, and on macro scale this is clearly visible. Some of our clients have a hard time filling roles despite paying competitively or even generously. Sure, for some people thats not an issue, but it is a thing, and it gets more visible with engineering roles, for some reason.
Google does not have reputation for particularly toxic workplace. They are not super clean of course as you mentioned, but their reputation is not bad at all. And while Apple has worst reputation then google, it is still fairly good one.
Sure, my point was that "past behavior" barely matters. Compensation, social status and work expectation is what makes people go for or avoid companies. If Google didn't pay as much, fewer people would bother jumping through hoops. If Apple had an oil-industry level social status, Californians would think twice about working there (or they'd get a cover job to use when talking to neighbors and friends).
How they fire people means very little, because very few people in tech think of themselves as the ones being fired in the near future (most likely also why few people in tech are into unions, they don't feel as replaceable as factory workers).
But that is the thing, I dont think you are right. You picked up companies with good reputation as examples ... they pay well and have good reputation, of course people want to work there.
There are companies with actually bad reputation and they either have problem to find staff or have to pay a lot more while still having issues.
They literally formed an illegal conspiracy to harm their employees by suppressing salaries -- this type of thing apparently simply doesn't matter much if they keep offering some of the highest salaries in the industry. And neither will this behavior at Twitter, I believe.
> They literally formed an illegal conspiracy to harm their employees by suppressing salaries
Yes and that is bad. And still, if you work inside one of those companies, the environment does not have reputation of being toxic. It just dont, in case of google the reputation is that they treat you well most of the time, but it is slower speed then, say facebook. And facebook does not have toxic reputation either.
Their reputation is not bad, actually. People who work there criticize some, but also are generally content and happy. Because, even with that agreement, neither company is overly toxic.
Take for instance booking.com. They unceremoniously dumped lots of their employees at the beginning of the pandemic despite being flush with cash. Then they tried hiring people back. Guess what, lots of people didnt want to even hear how much they are offering. There are other such companies.
But yes, there are people who would not, for instance, work for AWS due to their, shall we say, internal culture.
I have seen multiple people making decision of "this place pays more, but the environment looks toxic" or "this place pays more, but the business seems borderline unethical" and taking lower offer. I think that is why famous toxic places had to have very high salaries - cause the people were not interested otherwise.
People will do this in a good job market. In a bad one, even crappy employers will have their fill of willing employees. Too many in her have never experienced a bad market
Hell I don't like what Elon does most of the times but you have to admit he did built successful companies from ground up in fields no one was even looking into.
Twitter might succeed or it might fail but Twitter in its current form both as a company and social media paltform was bad.
You have to admit that he invested in some companies in fields that no-one was looking into. He's made a few big bets that have paid off extremely well. That's not nothing, and is impressive but it's not building a company. By all accounts he's a bit of a micro-manager, but I suspect there's only so much he could micro-manage or actually contribute directly in ventures like SpaceX or Tesla (he did make a door-handle patent tho).
Twitter on the other hand is another matter - no huge technical barriers stopping him from getting his hands dirty, no lives are at stake or regulatory bodies that are going to tell him "no that is dangerous" - so we're finally seeing what Elon unleashed looks like. So far it can probably be described as "chaotic" at best, it remains to be seen whether this chaos will disperse and Twitter will emerge leaner and better.
My belief is that he doesn't understand Twitter and its users quite as well as he thinks, and that Twitter will slowly get a bit more annoying and less profitable until he loses interest or gets distracted by something else. We will see, I use Twitter a lot so I hope that I'm wrong.
Are you saying musk’s role in SpaceX and Tesla is as an investor? That seems so disingenuous that it’s impossible not to conclude this post is purely emotional.
If you hate Musk, fine, but please just stick to the facts and articulate why you hate him.
I don’t understand why there is so much emotion around Musk. He has done good things and bad things. He has done incredible, near possible things. He works ridiculously hard. He’s rich. He has said and posted things he shouldn’t. I don’t feel that I am in a position to say he is a terrible person. I don’t even know the guy. I wouldn’t want to live in a world without SpaceX and Tesla. I am genuinely fascinated by this hatred.
I’ve tried to compile a list of why people might hate him:
- posted a conspiracy theory on Twitter (which he did then delete)
- childishly insulted a diver
- is a shameless self promoter
- fires staff brutally
- makes huge and sometimes
unreasonable demands on his workforce
- disagreed with covid policy, partly on the argument that the fatality rate is low and there’s not much you can really do about it
Ok, these are bad. But he’s hated as if he is the new Hitler. I don’t get it. I’d really appreciate it if someone could rationally explain why Elon is deserving of such great hatred.
Eh, guess I just don't know enough about SpaceX then. If you read my comment and interpreted it as "hatred" then that is odd. I don't think it's possible to hate someone you don't know. I mean, every time he has popped up in the last 5 years or so he's been saying or doing something dumb or annoying so quite a lot of people have gradually gotten tired of that. But it’s not hatred at all.
He's not treated like the next Hitler by any stretch of the imagination. He's more like a village drunk who just keeps showing up doing stupid things like peeing on your doorstep or passing out in your garden. You don't hate that person, you're just like "[sigh] ok I guess we have to deal with him again..."
He’s also built rockets that land themselves, scaled electric car manufacturing, launched a world-wide low-latency satellite internet service, and made more progress on self-driving vehicles than literally any other company in that same time.
If your town drunk is doing that much good for the world, I think you’d forgive them for pissing on your doorstep once or twice a year.
Well this is the other side of the public opinion on Elon Musk. His companies have done a bunch of things, ranging from impressive to bad. As outsiders all we know is that his involvement with, say, a rocket that can land itself is somewhere between "Elon single-handedly designed, constructed and assembled every part of it" and "Elon told someone the rockets re-usable". There's no way to know, but you and a legion of people seem to be portraying his involvement as closer to the former (literally "He’s also built rockets that land themselves..." - come on)
Honestly this discourse has played out a thousand times over. Some people love him, attribute all his companies' wins to him and memory-hole any of the fuck-ups or gaffes. Some people acknowledge his business acumen, don't quite believe the hype on the company-level achievements that get attributed to him personally and find his personality as portrayed on traditional and social media to be grating.
I'm clearly in the latter group and I think that's a pretty uncontroversial position to take.
Edit: would the drive-by downvoters care to explain?
He does seem to be a lot more hands-on with the technical stuff than most C level execs, and for SpaceX there are reports that he is actually doing the work that comes with his role as Chief Engineer:
>"Elon single-handedly designed, constructed and assembled every part of it" and "Elon told someone the rockets re-usable". There's no way to know, but you and a legion of people
I think that's missing the point, which is the question of whether these innovations (the re usable rockets, scaling e cars) would have happened without his involvement. If the answer is no, then the question of whether 'someone else did it and he took credit' seems irrelevant. That's what leadership is, driving results, not pulling up your sleeves and doing it yourself.
If someone says those words - that he helmed a company and pushed them to deliver re-usable rockets then ok. Saying he built that is an absurd fantasy.
At a meta level, I consider Musk and Trump both to have the same approach to media: say whatever you want to create publicity. Words mean nothing, in the sense that there are no repercussions large enough to outweigh the created buzz/fame. Outrage works extremely well to that end (look at this thread.)
Because he says things helping both extreme sides (lovers and haters,) all they have to do is latch on to whatever fuels their fire, and ignore the other words. And it is well-know that confirmation bias is a thing among humans. This causes polarization that fuels the debates, creating a spiral of even more debates, buzz and fame. Even sparks meta-debates.
Edit: Another side of this is that it seems that everything must be classified as good or bad. Both on HN and elsewhere, commentors go to extraordinary lengths to argue why something has one abstract label or the opposite. Does everything have to have emotions assigned to it? Does everything have to be categorized in the very coarse good and bad buckets? It would be nice to read comments where the author tries to explain both sides, instead of just arguing for one.
I don't think I made any statement here about whether he is good or bad. I've said that I find his public persona to be annoying, justified why I think that, and have said he's probably not as responsible for everything he's credited for than many of his supporters believe. I think that's a really reasonable comment to make - there are people frothing mad about him and there are people who are rabid supporters of him. But I haven't seen either in this thread.
Edit: ok I just saw someone call him “Elongated Muskrat” so now there is someone who is mad at him in the thread :-)
Yepp, it wasn't a reflection on your comment. I just think the good/bad dichotomy ties in to my argument about polarization. It doesn't happen with every comment, but when it does, it adds fuel to the fire.
Sorry if that wasn't clear.
... I wonder if polarization can be seen as a market spread, and that more polarization causes higher volatility, which leads to more "trading" to close the spread. I.e. discussions follow some version of the efficient market hypothesis? Need to do a PhD on this. :)
> , I consider Musk and Trump both to have the same approach to media:
I think you've hit on more here. I think Musk has become associated with Trump. I think that might be because Trump is the champion of the losers of globalisation, and Musk is also a hero to those people because (a) he has created a lot of manufacturing jobs and (b) is creating a sense of patriotic pride in some of his achievements... just see SpaceX staff chanting "USA USA". I'm not criticising anyone, just drawing a connection.
So I think after reading these posts and talking to others, that Musk is hated because he is part of the war between left and right. To praise Musk is to praise Trumpism, and to hate Musk is to show you are against Trump.
IMO - my theory is that 5 years ago Musk was successful enough that regular people in the tech industry admired him, but not so successful that most people who admired him realised he was substantially more successful than they were ever going to be.
These days though, it’s quite clear to the 250k a year tech-guy that, even though they’re making bank, they’re never going to be “Elon rich”, and so the jealousy disguised as virtue has come out in full swing.
Is he perfect? Of course he fucking isn’t… we work in tech, we all work with atleast one “brilliant ass-hole”… they’re the ones that make our days a little bit more painful but also write the fucking insane code that makes most of our workplaces profitable.
Alternatively, 5 years ago the reaction was "oh, the tesla/spacex guy? those are cool companies, guess he must be pretty cool", but since then he's made himself more of a celebrity which comes with much more visibility on those actions. As a result people are now judging based on actions they've heard about rather than the top line of a bio summary
There are a lot of people here very clearly articulating the issues they have with Musk - usually related to some bad tweets, but also more serious things like the sexual harassment - so there's no need to speculate that it's in any way related to his political leaning. Besides, it was only recently that he declared himself to be a supporter of the GOP, long after the tide of public opinion started to turn on him (and even perhaps because of it)
Doesn’t negate, but it is such a huge boost that it is basically playing the tutorial vs on hard mode.
And regardless of wealth, Elon’s only actual contribution was paypal, which is.. well, paypal (I quite literally left some money in that because it was so scammy I couldn’t even rescue it by donation..), and funding tesla (not inventing anything!). The latter is pretty much impossible without some form of privilege.
Whose father _claims_ to own an emerald mine, for which there is no actual proof. Not to mention that it is well established that Musk does not have a good relationship with this father, so whatever wealth Musk Sr. may or may not have, doesn't help Elon. So what's your point other than trying to spread misinformation?
Yep, sure. We all know how humble Elon is and is absolutely not the type of person who would sell this “self-made men” image of himself to the public to look better? “He came to the US with a few hundreds dollars and everything is his accomplishment”…
Even if family wealth only helped him through insanely good relations to other people in the top 1%, it is still all that much more than you will likely ever achieve/get. And I frankly don’t buy this “daddy doesn’t love me” BS.
> they’re the ones that make our days a little bit more painful but also write the fucking insane code that makes most of our workplaces profitable.
People like to think that but in my experience there are far more brilliant nice people than brilliant assholes. This is the mythos antisocial engineers tell themselves to justify their poor social skills.
And it takes some emotional evolution to realize that. I too once upon a time was the former, until I realized that such a person is the most annoying and unremarkable personality ever. I wouldn’t hang out with me 8 years ago, was kind of a grade A douche, and my code wasn’t great. But I made money, so I always thought the ends justified the means.
So the 250k tech guy thought he could level up to the 20B elon musk, but once musk crossed over the 200B mark they got jealous?
Personally, I thought he was a cool guy building a revolutionary car.
But once I saw his hour long talk on how he was going to build a Mars colony, the fact that he was actually a Tesla investor - not a founder(the super fast LI ion lotus had already been demonstrated to him when he invested) and his absurd claims about AGI - I realized he was completely out of his mind. I have been skeptical of his personality since 2014, even as I held TSLA shares.
Yes he is able to manage and productionize probably the best car on the road right now and maximize Tesla shareholder value, but he is a shell of a person beyond that.
This is preposterous, a tech worker is never going to be as wealthy as Elon in 2010, unless they starter thinking of themselves as a founder instead of a worker.
I will admit to having a few feelings of jealousy of the founders I know who have done far far better than o have on the game of building big companies, but that is also mixed with happiness for them.
With Musk, it's different. It's sadness and disappointment, to see someone throw away so much goodwill and be such a horrible person. Some of this is the media becoming adversarial with tech, while at the same time profiting off the hype bubble that the media itself created for Musk. But I view him as a lost man that needs a better support network and a slightly better filter so that he stops looking so foolish all the time.
I don't like Musk, but he's done more for Ukraine than you can dream of. But he also sent a few stupid tweets that he took back, so that's a good enough excuse for virtue signalers to feel superior.
According to Musk, Starlink has spent $80-120 million to subsidize Ukraine. He could be making this up, but this is supported by a letter SpaceX sent to the Pentagon even before Musk's infamous Ukraine tweets.
> SpaceX has said it pays for about 70 percent of the services used by Ukraine, offering all the terminals in that country the best possible option, valued at USD 4,500 per month even though most have contracts signed only for the USD 500-per-month service option.
I don’t think his proposal was pro-Russia as much as it was anti-more-dead-people.
There’s no way Russia loses this war if it doesn’t escalate beyond local conflict. The objective now is (or should be) minimizing casualties and human suffering, not lines on maps from 2015.
Stopping recurring monthly donations of something very expensive is also not “blackmail”.
If you're a spectacularly famous, influential and anti-more-dead-people the message you should be blasting out to your hundred-million followers is: Russia out. That's it.
> I don’t think his proposal was pro-Russia as much as it was anti-more-dead-people.
I believe this topic has been discussed more than enough since February, by people with way more expertise than Musk. Ukraine has made it very clear that they do not intent to let their country be oppressed by the foreign aggressor. It is their decision to make.
Asking Ukraine to bow to Russia now that they are successful in their defense is a pro Russia stance. Claiming otherwise is just dishonest.
Especially since he was attempting to imply that anything close to a proper voting process would even be possible in that region now.
His statement means he is either incredibly stupid, or malicious. Both possibilities are dangerous. And Musk fans will vehemently disagree with the former.
> I don’t think his proposal was pro-Russia as much as it was anti-more-dead-people.
It was anti Ukrainian lives on occupied territories and pro Russian soldiers lives. It was also pro next invasion once Russia recovers at which point Russia will argue that Ukraine is failed stated due to having destroyed infrastructure.
>The objective now is (or should be) minimizing casualties and human suffering,
The causalities are not minimized by rewarding Russia for invasion and letting it continue with genocide.
> not lines on maps from 2015
The issue is not so much lines on the map as actual consequences of those maps. The torture, genocide, suppression of Ukrainian identity and so on. And obviously favorable position for next invasion again and again, until whole of Ukraine is taken.
I hate almost everything Musk does, but I am aligned on his Russia plan. Biden must negotiate with Putin to end the war. Europe is buying more than enough oil from Russia to sustain the war for a decade.
Don’t forget his initial support for Ukraine and then his attempted about face with star link terminals. I’m very curious why all of that intrigue seems to have dried up. How did Musk know the Crimean peninsula was dry and needed water guarantees from Ukraine? It’s weird and i believe the critics, he actually talked to Putin and felt like a big man so he started shilling for russian “peace”.
I thought he was just a lucky cult like futurist before but now I think of him as what he truly is - a billionaire narcissist that craves adulation from the mob.
Major world powers invaded Germany, tore the country in two, and Hitler killed himself. Musk is a complete dick in public and people are right to criticize him, but you are being plainly ridiculous when you say "he’s hated as if he is the new Hitler."
That's a fair criticism of me using a lazy shorthand, but it really is quite difficult to capture the level of vitriol against Musk. It's at a level I've never seen against anyone in my lifetime. People certain express strong hatred towards him than, say, Putin or Xi.
Obviously in reality Musk has done nothing to be compared to Hitler, however as far as how much hate he gets in 2022, I would say he easily surpasses Hitler by at least a factor of a thousand. Very few people even talk about Hitler anymore, so it doesn't really capture the sense of hate either.
I think a good comparison in the US would be Trump and I think more people hate Trump than Musk.
According to whom? His internet comments are sci-fi libertarian mainstream with a dash of NWO.
His business accomplishments are impressive, but he's rather boring, no pun intended.
I think the only argument against Musk's success is that he enjoyed unfair regulatory advantages.
PayPal's KYC was non-existent for years, you could send money with little more than an email. Amazon had similar miraculous regulatory exceptions. No State sales tax until it had a near-monopoly network effect.
I found that time he called a diver who was trying to save those kids a pedophile to be pretty revealing. Also, calling himself "Lorde Edge" was pretty awful. I suppose if you're asking "who has the right to tell him not to say that?" the answer is "no one", but I find it hard to respect the guy when he acts so childishly.
Thanks for posting links, that's the kind of answer I'm interested in.
(Thanks also to whoever un-downed me, as it is from genuinely wanting to understand).
The last link is paywalled, but I doubt that is really his motive. It sounds silly. There was plenty of outspoken criticism against that highspeed rail link without a Musk conspiracy theory. He gave an interview on the BBC where he was similarly bemused by how poor our high speed efforts were, and his criticism was fair.
I'm not sure we can see incidents in very large organisations as indicative of the character of the CEO. For sure he is ultimately to answer for them, and has a responsibility to sort them out, but Tesla employees about 100 000 people and in any sample of people that large you'll have some horrible ones.
Someone else told me about the harassment suit today, now that is directly attributable to Musk and awful. Are there other such incidents?
Still, doesn't seem to explain the sheer hatred for the man. I do have a different theory about that having spoken to others, which I'll post elsewhere...
The hyperloop article is sourced directly from his own statements in text messages turned over during discovery.
I'm always amazed at the double standard where musk is solely responsible for the success of multiple companies, but any fault is attributable to someone else. He claims to have slept in the factory! He's this hands on car-building ubermensch. How can he be completely oblivious to safety and discrimination issues?
At Tesla, Elon is a manager like any other CEO. At Space X, he clearly is not and Gwynne Shotwell with decades of experience in Aerospace engineering runs the show.
As much as people would like to believe that Elon musk, a materials science graduate with his only career experience being online payments with PayPal, is actually responsible for the core founding engineering of SpaceX and Tesla is crazy.
Musk made bank with PayPal and has been an investor in many companies including failures like Neuralink, boring company etc. He has both invested and managed Tesla.
It’s almost like both companies need metric tons of money to do anything remarkable - isn’t that the point of YCombinator as well? That’s just venture capitalism.
He just has the ego of a manchild and bought the title of “founder” as wellz
Musk took over Tesla by firing the founder CEO, and took another 4 years to ship a car to production. The car had already been built when Musk took over. He only needed to build a production pipeline.
>You have to admit that he invested in some companies
Yeah sure, he just invested in Paypal, then invested in Tesla, then invested in SpaceX.
I'm not even sure if I'm answering real people or bots anymore, everyone sounds the same now: "Elon good, because environment and space and he made reusable rockets and tesla cars are so good etc.", (Elon starts saying wrongtalk about the media and other sensitive subjects), "Elon bad, because he called some diver years ago a pedophile, and he just invested in tesla and spacex no biggie easy for anyone".
But hey who cares right? I've been getting insulted by everyone here for saying Youtube censors videos and google censors results etc. yet just a couple days ago some leaked documents showed the DHS with the help of tech giants are planning to push the censorship even harder.
Flagged this. There is a reasonable discussion to be had here, and it was being had. But you're calling me a bot, you're misrepresenting what I've said and launching into an unrelated rant about censorship.
Twitter was a mixed bag, but it was genuinely useful for news, niche interests, and helping under served issues and communities get more prominence. It's where the kind of open source intelligence that helped to expose Russia trying to cover up its role in the MH17 shoot down emerged, coalesced, and achieved prominence, as one example.
I worry much of that will be lost without having a natural new home with the same reach and impact.
Musk might be good at building and running engineering companies, but Twitter is not that. The social aspect is far more important than the underlying technology, and Musk and his advisors are terrible at that. I don't see any way out of this that leaves Twitter better.
> Musk might be good at building and running engineering companies, but Twitter is not that. The social aspect is far more important than the underlying technology, and Musk and his advisors are terrible at that.
I was talking about private space company. I mean who thinks like I'm going to start a private space company that will launch freaking rockets in space. I don't think any private company did that before SpaceX
Like United Launch Alliance, Rocket Lab, Northrop Grumman, Virgin Orbit, etc?
Also, SpaceX would not exist were it not for a US government decision to fund and develop private spaceflight launch capabilities for NASA and the US Air Force. In fact the idea was given to Musk by Mike Griffin who at the time headed up In-Q-Tel, the CIA's investment arm and could also source the right technical experts to form the core engineering group. Shortly after he became NASA's administrator and gave SpaceX a huge development and launch contract before it had flown anything.
The idea that SpaceX emerged from nothing and bootstrapped its way to success has always been false. That doesn't mean they don't deserve praise for doing a ton of things right and having an impressively bold engineering strategy, of course.
Well, lets skip the fact he didn't build those companies. Both companies rely heavily on government subsidies. He's in part 3 of his dependence on big government, demanding they start subsidizing Starlink
Remove those subsidies tomorrow and the companies fold, all of them
Can Elon figure out a way to get the government to subsidize Twitter? Maybe, but it's going to be harder
Don't tell Elon then, because he definitely paid a growth multiple for Twitter. If Twitter never grows beyond its current size then his investment is a giant failure no matter how much he manages to cut costs.
For me, if I were at beginning of my career I would have definitely joined Twitter. Because I have to work harder, compete harder, learn faster just to save my job. I think that sort of culture would make you sharp than others in your field very early in your career.
Then when you go and work at company like stripe, its easy.
And good luck to Twitter if they are looking to implement a Hunger Games style culture. However this type of attitude to work is extremely immature, counter-productive and proven to be harmful to both individuals and the company.
People are most productive over the long term when they feel encouraged, supported, self-motivated etc.
Positive emotions not negative ones like fear, coercion, hostility etc.
While I do rather think that tesla and spacex has an unhealthy work cultural based on the limited things I read about it, these two ideas are just ridiculously dump to the point where a 3 years old wouldn’t have come up with “cars in a tunnel”.. they are ridiculous.
SpaceX and Tesla would have crashed and burned had it not been for government, of all levels, subsidizing them. Something that, now that he has benefited from it, Musk is against others having.
and the established automakers with billion dollar war chests didn't have access to the same subsidies if they had innovated and made electric cars that didn't suck? The established military industrial complex companies like Boeing and Lockheed that have failed in their space endeavors aren't subsidized?
Elon shows all the signs of thinking he can do absolutely no wrong because his fan base keeps telling him so.
Nothing about this acquisition as been impressive or promising. I see no sign of that changing. A mass disrespectful layoff like this is going to backfire, hugely.
I would go to work for Twitter, if only to work for Elon. It would be better than any comparable education. Maybe I last a month, maybe I last my career, but I will probably learn a lot.
You want to learn from an egoistic manchild who managed to make a terrible deal and forced himself to actually go through with it to buy a company that has yet to turn a profit, and I’m almost sure it will never, because he is the owner?
> Because I have to work harder, compete harder, learn faster just to save my job. I think that sort of culture would make you sharp than others in your field very early in your career.
That's a great way to get a bunch of cowboys in their 20s who think they are hot shit after five years in the industry while kicking out the people with deep experience because they actually like spending time with their families. Now you've got hyper-trendy software design everywhere with nothing supporting it.
I dont think it would make you sharp. It would train you for ugly politics, back stabbing and general chaos. But it would not train you for good performance. You can actually hide incompetence very well in chaotic companies if you can talk well and take others credit. And competence without political clout gets punished (because it is easy).
Being sharp as in the positive performance terms requires sharp leadership and decision making. It means leadership that actually knows what is going on and that requires trust. That is not the same as rage layoff after you impulse bought company you dont want while trolling on social medias.
Are there no laws about minimum notice or severance pay?
I’m glad Australia has decent laws to protect workers. It’ll be interesting to see if Australian Twitter staff who are locked out of their accounts have been laid off and what happens next.
Yeah there are laws : https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/termination/plantclosings. Probably state laws as well. These require notice of severance or post payment and protect against discrimination. Twitter can try to claim that they’re all being fired for cause, but that’ll just end up paying a whole lot of lawyers.
In cases like this typically they'd just fire you and pay the salary through the minimum notice period without requiring nor allowing you to show up. I see no reason to think that's not the case here.
> Which company is going to have an easier time hiring after the dust settles and they have a growth stage again?
The one with the better offer, taking a possible layoff payout into account. The comp ranges can be so drastically different between companies that a possibly generous layoff (that is no means guaranteed if Stripe has to do this when circumstances are more dire) is negligible financially.
Are we deluding ourselves here? Why do you think hundreds of thousands of extremely bright people work for horrific/products companies like Facebook, Palantir etc? Money. Money talks and talks very loudly.
Most people have a price at which they will sell out. Those who don’t, are too few to make any significant difference
Because despite you thinking they are horrific companies many other people don't.
Billions of people love and use Meta products every day and their tech stack is one of the world's best with technical challenges almost no other company faces.
Palantir also has many parts of their business that benefit society e.g. combating human trafficking etc.
Also neither of those companies are necessarily known as terrible places to work. I know people who'd be miserable in most 9-5 jobs who are happy in Meta.
Working at Twitter now means a daily grind means being subject to the whims of an increasingly petulant emperor who does not respect anyone's expertise. What good does it for your career if he's just going to drop the ball at a moment's notice anyway?
If that were actually true, why do so many people love working at Tesla/SpaceX? Clearly they don't have the same view of Elon's management style as you do.
The reality is that Twitter as a business (and, imho, as a product) was sorely in need of a course correction. Layoffs, if they need to be done, should be done crisply and thoroughly so that remaining employees don't feel like the other shoe is about to drop.
You rip off the bandaid, it sucks, then you refocus on the work ahead.
I don't know why people work for Tesla/SpaceX. I can take a guess though - there are only a handful of companies that work in space related field and only a few companies that make electric cars. So it is somewhat understandable, if one really wants to work at these places.
Twitter is different - there are other big companies that provide as much tech challenges or more (whether they are better/worse than Twitter is another question). Twitter employees have many more options (relatively speaking) than SpaceX employees
Working at Tesla/SpaceX puts you at the cutting edge of your field. It's probably worth a few trade-offs - and I'm sure it pays a hell of a lot more.
Working at Meta/Google doesn't necessarily do that. I'm almost certain most of these companies' moonshot divisions are not as well-run as many startups, nor are these companies assured success in these areas.
Their main products are already at a "don't fix it if it ain't broke" stage, even though many will claim these are broken. I doubt it's exciting work.
Working at Tesla or SpaceX will be like working on a moonshot that's actually taking off. I'm sure it's a thrill. But increasingly, I don't think Musk is level-headed enough to be trusted with such things.
It takes time to reject nitwitted leaders, so we can't expect employees to abandon ship overnight just to prove my point.
I agree that "good company" and "bad company" are a reflection of personal preferences, but the fact that FAANG comp is much higher than elsewhere tells us that the companies strongly suspect that a lower salary will not be enough to attract such a strong talent pool.
No. The companies feel they can afford to pay top drawer wages so they do so in order to hire what they hope is among the top talent, subject to among other things the randomness of their hiring processes.
> Because despite you thinking they are horrific companies many other people don't.
Thats exactly how a lot of people will view Twitter. You might think its horrible and they are terrible for laying of people, but plenty of good engineers ready to fill those roles for the money without the need of having free snacks, free coffee, rest booths, ping pong area, LED illuminated reading rooms, etc etc etc. Twitter will be fine.
lol. Suppose their salaries reduced to half of what they are making today, how many of them do you still think will continue to work at these places, for the technical challenges and whatever else they have told themselves is the real reason for them to work there in the first place?
I don't doubt the technical excellence of these companies. They are technically very capable because of the talent they hire, and they are able to hire top talent because of the high salaries they pay, not because of some altruistic or egoistic reasons
A workplace can actively kill humans and still treat its employees very good.
You are mixing very different factors together here.
Prestige, to name another example, is very important to a lot of people. Having "worked at FAANG" on your resume opens many opportunities afterwards that don't have anything to do with money.
> extremely bright people work for horrific/products companies like Facebook, Palantir etc
For what it's worth those companies have not brought any real innovation in the last 10 years, give or take, because if they had they would have been on top of the world (quite literally). Which makes me hopeful that some of the real geniuses out there (today's von Neummanns and the like) might still avoid those companies out of principle.
I certainly have a price at which I will sell out, but if they aren't offering "retire decade(s) earlier than normal", it's unlikely to make a long term difference to me compared to the alternatives. Yes, a 20% bump for a few years would be nice, but paying half of my paycheck in therapy bills for a decade cancels that out and then some.
Basically, if they aren't offering "f** you money", pay has a diminishing effect on my employment choices. And if they are offering that kind of money, I'm assuming that'll come with even more consequences. My resume is alright, but it's not enough for an offer of way more money without strings attached.
I can't speak for everybody of course, but I think not heeding the above leads to burnout.
> Which company is going to have an easier time hiring
The one that people want to work for and don't have to "sell out" to do it.
> Most people have a price at which they will sell out.
Sure. Agreed. But now you've tripled your OpEx vs your competitors. And the people that sold out aren't in any way loyal, so will bounce. But if they aren't offering substantially more, the money doesn't matter. It's all basically the same anyways.
And then you have to consider financials and leadership. Twitter financials got substantially worse (20x) from my understanding after Musk took over because of the debt he now has.
And as far as leadership goes: he was forced to buy it. That really doesn't look good.
> The one that people want to work for and don't have to "sell out" to do it.
Nope, this is wrong if the company can afford to pay more. Just look at companies like Jane Street, HRT, etc. The high comp they are willing to pay makes them harder to get into than Twitter, Meta, etc by a long shot. They have a far easier time hiring.
Pornhub, Exxon, Smith and Wesson, all the big tobacco companies, the guys that manufacture fentanyl, infowars, they all have IT staffs. Some have extremely sophisticated IT staffs. Money talks, but there other factors. when you’re working on migrating from .net to cloud native at Exxon and you’re building some kind of new container registry or something you probably don’t spend your days pondering climate change; you get paid every two weeks, you are learning some cool stuff and you’re building some cool stuff. Most people need jobs too.
A pay check and some sort of plausible rationalization is all that is needed. “Twitter is free speech” sounds pretty strong. “Twitter connected Ukrainians during that invasion” sounds strong.
Does the pay by itself mitigates some of the following shitty behavior:
- Timing bathroom breaks
- Requiring lengthy security check prior to entering work location
- Micromanaging and invasive monitoring
Just small things that would drive some people livid regardless of pay. Scratch that, at the higher end of the spectrum it could easily drive them away.
Timesheets, Security and Command and Control management has been a constant at every job I have worked. I have never heard of some one working on a job where these three things where not an issue.
The only time those things haven't been an issue is when I do charity work which isn't really work as I don't get paid for it, which I think is the only reason the charities take what they get and are happy with it as they have no other choice.
I was lucky enough to work in both types of places. Ones where the manager was hovering over me and literally micromanaging my every interaction. It was beyond maddening. But I also worked in places like now, where my output matters, but I have a lot of autonomy on how I get there.
Oddly, my most recent volunteer gig was very.. structured. It may not help that it is sponsored by corporate so maybe they started demanding a lot of data.
> Is the only thing that determines whether you take a job the salary ?
If that ain't a major reason why people relocate from all over the world to SV, then I am missing something. Of course the salary is one of the major factors.
The day to day work life is probably the same level of huge contrast as these layoffs. I think that matters more to people than a few thousand dollars difference in pay, when that pay is likely to be in top 2-3% of all US jobs (over 200k).
Without questioning you specifically, I doubt any substantial number of others would feel the same. Few would pass up a even a 20% pay bump for the same role, so forget about it if it’s a 200% bump.
It genuinely depends on the person. In some places, WFH policy difference can alone amount to 10K difference not spent on childcare or traveling. You might be right on average, but I would assume most people do basic internal calculus of whether the move is worth it.
For me, knowing Musk's reputation for demanding workaholic mentality.. %20 might not be enough and that is before WFH issues.
>> Twitter would have to pay me something like 3 times more than Stripe for me to consider it, if I were back in the market and had those two.
Twitter was a public company with quarterly vests where you could get liquidity on your compensation (and from what i understand you were cashed out at buyout.) Stripe remains private and much of your money remains locked. Not sure if they issue RSUs, options, or what, but quite possibly you lose a lot or your historical compensation 3mo later. They were two different beasts. (Of course, now both are private, so going forward they might be similar.)
If I remember correctly, the rumor about layoffs ahead of vesting said he was going to do it before Nov 1st. That part at least, seems to have just been a rumor.
Twitter's loss in 2020 was over $1,100,000,000. In the last 10 years, twitter has lost almost $4,000,000,000, posting profits in only two years (2018,2019).
Twitters losses in 2021 were over 221MM, and 250MM to 700MM between 2013 and 2017.
So the myth that Twitter was a healthy company is only promulgated by agenda driven opinions, not factual ones.
And this year (and all years here on out), Elon Musk in his brilliance added $1,300,000,000 to that loss, because he took on a $13,000,000,000 loan to buyout the company.
That's all I'm saying. The $1.3 billion/year in interest payments alone is a magnitude more loss than Twitter ever had before.
Isn’t the difference that Slack is profitable while Twitter is not?
I worked for a couple startups and the severance package for companies losing money was pretty bad. The package for profitable was ok. And the package for insolvent was “your last paycheck was your last.”
Add to this, rumor has it Elon fired the 3 executives (CEO, CFO, chief legal counsel) with cause to try and avoid paying out the golden parachutes (eg the CEO would otherwise get $40-60m+). I guarantee that'll end in a lawsuit and probably a settlement for less. But I expect that to impact executive hiring.
As for hiring peons, it's hard to say. A bigger factor (IMHO) is Elon himself. Fans will probably go there. Those who don't like him probably won't. I expect that to have a far bigger impact than firing a bunch of employees right before bonus time several years earlier.
My read of the situation is that Elon never really wanted to buy Twitter. I mean he did try and get out of it but the Twitter board crafted a good contract and I believe Elon realized he was going to get dumpstered by the Delaware Chancery Court.
So what does he do now?? The private equity playbook is my guess. He'll massively cut costs, repackage it somehow, claim victory (for "free speech" or whatever) and then sell off a minority stake or even the whole thing. He may even try and do the tech thing where he sells most of the equity but retains all the voting power.
In such an environment, short term hiring probably isn't on the cards.
Frankly I am pretty sure there is a long list of talented execs who don't care how Parag was fired and would love to work for Musk.
He's too successful now with too many fans for this to have an impact. People know he demands a lot and can do crazy things. That's just part of the package.
Here is one possible outcome: Elon splits up Twitter into two parts:
1. An infrastructure element that creates an open API/protocol for sharing/pushing messages, contacts and media between content/social media platforms. The basic idea is to have a generic interface similar to email.
2. A content company that provides aggregation, search, moderation (possibly based on user preference) and possibly editorial features, as well as a front-end for users. Basically what gmail is to email.
As soon as Republicans gain control of congress (and possibly the presidency), he starts lobbying to make it mandatory for all social media platforms to allow their users to connect through the API/protocol under (1) with a generalized account, similar (or identical, at least in form) to email addresses.
This would kill the monopolies of Facebook, Insta, Tik-Tok, etc, by allowing a user to use only one of them to connect with user on all of them, similar to how they can use an email client of choice.
Twitter could then charge some small fee for communicating over this protocol, or could simply sell the protocol company to the government, who could make the protocol publicly owned, like email/smtp.
Would this make him a huge profit? Not likely. At best he would get his investment back, perhaps. But it could help break down some echo chambers and counteract some of the crazy polarization that's currently going on in the US.
And if I'm reading Musk correctly, profit is no longer his primary motivation, if it ever was. Rather, it seems that he has some Messiah complex where he wants to be seen as the guy that saves the world.
Whether you see that as a sign of genuine altruism, a severe case of Narcissism or just a sign that he's really an insecure nerd that seeks social validation, is up to you.
First, I don't see this kind of split ever working. How do you monetize it? Email is federated and has huge problems because of it. Moving a centralized service to federated would be a massive destruction of value. Let's not forget Elon is on the hook for $44 billion so I expect him to protect his investment first and foremost. Why do you think one of his first actions was to apease advertisers?
In politics corporate interests transcend politics and cross party lines. There is no shot any Congress would destroy the value of all these American companies that way.
> But it could help break down some echo chambers ...
Nobody wants this. The idea that any of this is about free speech is a complete myth. The idea that an "echo chamber" is even a thing is problematic. People are going to engage in content they like and not engage with content they don't like. It affects what websites you go to, what TV you watch, what channels you subscribe to and so on.
The post on HN yesterday from the ex-CEO of Reddit was great in this regard. He put forth a cogent argument that none of this is about content. It's simply a user behaviour problem.
So when Kanye goes on Twitter and launches into an anti-semitic screed he gets banned. Not because of the content per se but because he's annoying and he's making the experiene worse for everyone else. Whenever conservatives (in particular) talk about "free speech", they really mean "hate speech" and wanting to avoid getting silenced even when everyone else just wants them to stop being anti-semitic, homophobic, transphobic, racist or whatever.
> First, I don't see this kind of split ever working. How do you monetize it? Moving a centralized service to federated would be a massive destruction of value.
Maybe Elon can afford to take a loss to achieve this?
Or maybe the platforms ARE able to find ways to split add revenue (and other revenues) in ways that don't really destroy value.
> In politics corporate interests transcend politics and cross party lines.
How much financial support is Meta and Tik-Tok giving to Republicans? In fact, I think it's primarily Meta that has a lot to lose from this, out of the American companies. Alphabet/Youtube may actually benefit, as they are specialists when it comes to video, and if Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram are forced to permit sharing of Youtube videos through their platforms, they may gain traffic at the cost of native video alternatives.
> Nobody wants this.
Well I do, for one.
> The idea that any of this is about free speech is a complete myth.
I'm pretty sure quite a few people care about free speech, and even more are worried about American polarization. Even many non-Americans, like me.
> The idea that an "echo chamber" is even a thing is problematic.
That's an interesting point of view. You're not only saying that they don't exist, but actually that the mere IDEA is problematic? Isn't 4chan an echo chamber?
> People are going to engage in content they like and not engage with content they don't like.
I agree. People should be able to filter content they find problematic, just like we do with email spam or how we can restrict porn in browsers, etc.
> So when Kanye goes on Twitter and launches into an anti-semitic screed he gets banned.
I watched Kanye's appearance on Lex Fridman's podcast/youtube a few days back, and it was mostly sad, tbh. Lex, being Jewish himself, pushed back pretty hard when Kanye started his Anti Semitism. But Kanye WAS allowed to speak, and neither Spotify or YouTube have take it down.
> It's simply a user behaviour problem.
On Twitter, maybe that's what it looks like. But if you sit through the podcast, maybe your conclusion is that this is more of a symptom that Kanye is going through a very rough time than some intent to be evil. Obviously he DOES have racist thoughts when it comes to Jews (or, depending on your definition of Racist, they would be if Blacks had as much power as Jews, or if he were white).
But then again, the basic conspiratorial pattern he's using doesn't seem very different from how BLM talks about "white" people. One could argue that white people have some obligation to avoid Anti Semitism due to the Holocaust. But the left seems to be quite accepting with Anti Semitism that comes from Palestinians, since they're "punching up". Aren't African Americans also "punching up" in this case?
Anyway, Kanye is a lot more than his prejudice against Jews. It IS interesting to hear his story and point of view, even if it did make me quite sad.
So, in conclusion. Let's say social media gets a protocol similar to smtp, they would be able to add optional moderation/spam filters against content like this. But I think users should be able to check their "junk folder" and whitelist content they don't think should be block listed, as long as the content is not illegal.
I've seen no evidence Elon is willing to burn Twitter to the ground to make a political point. to the contrary, he tried to back out the deal he hastily entered into and only went through with it when it became clear he was going to get railed by the Delaware Chancery Court.
Even if he is, it's a massive risk. Another platform that he doesn't own could simply rise and take its place.
> How much financial support is Meta and Tik-Tok giving to Republicans?
The Trump administration tried to block Tiktok (briefly). Many officials and politicans call it a national security risk, most recently the FCC chair just this week. While there are noises made about a break up of Meta, I suspect it's going nowhere.
> You're not only saying that they don't exist, but actually that the mere IDEA is problematic?
I'm saying anywhere people can in any way filter their experience, what they see will differ from the unfiltered view. Even if they see the same things, they will engage with things they like. Basically, this is inevitable. The problematic part is this only tends to get lablled an "echo chamber" when people filter in such a way that the criticizer doesn't like.
> But Kanye WAS allowed to speak, and neither Spotify or YouTube have take it down.
In case you didn't see it, I encourage you to read this HN submission from yesterday [1]. I'll also bring up the Paradox of Tolerance [2]. Free speech absolutism is the extreme view where anything can be posted. Not even 4chan has this. So when I say "nobody wants this", I mean everyone agrees there are and should be limits on speech so it's just a question of what those limits should be.
Any site that has attempted unmoderated free speech descends into a cesspit of Nazis and racists where everyone else leaves. Moreso, advertisers (who still pay for the platform) don't want to be associated with it so they leave too.
As you mentioned, Kanye still got an incredible amount of exposure for his views between various podcasts and the right-wing media (eg Tucker CArlson, Ben Shapiro) so it's not like he's been silenced. There's just one thing out of many he couldn't do because Twitter didn't want to be associated with it.
> But then again, the basic conspiratorial pattern he's using doesn't seem very different from how BLM talks about "white" people.
Free speech is fundamentally a political issue, otherwise I'd try not to get into this topic. I understand your confusion, which I certainly believe to be in good faith. I'll scratch the surface of this as neutrally and briefly as I can.
"Whiteness" and "blackness" as concepts are not equivalent. "Blackness" is an invented concept for various people who were robbed of their heritage, culture and language through chattel slavery. It's why we say "African-American" for black people but "Italian-American" or "Polish-American" or whatever for white people.
"Whiteness" as a concept is defined by two properties: 1) The proximity to power and 2) Not being black. It is a concept rooted in white supremacy. Who counts as "white" also changes. Ben Franklin, for example, didn't count Germans as "white". Now we count Italians as "white". That wasn't alwyas the case.
You are correct in that part of this is "punching up" vs "punching down" but you should also know that this idea of equivalent concepts is used by white supremacists. "White power" was a reaction to "black power" as an emancipating force in the 1960s. "White Lives Matter" (and even "All Lives Matter") are the same response to "Black Lives Matter" (BLM). They're also insidious because they imply that BLM means white lives don't matter. It's more accurate to say "Black Lives Matter Too" even though no one was suggesting whit...
> I've seen no evidence Elon is willing to burn Twitter to the ground to make a political point. to the contrary
Not burn to the ground, simply build something with a lower monetary value today, if he thinks it can lower tribalism. Consider something like linux. It's precicely the fact that it's not monetised that ensures the near monopoly in the server OS space.
> Any site that has attempted unmoderated free speech descends into a cesspit of Nazis and racists where everyone else leaves.
My take is that anything that is within the law should be allowed to be posted, but extremist propaganda (especialy when fueled by hate), whether it's from the left or right, should be supressed hard unless the reader explicitly disables such suppression.
Btw, one sign that someone is close to one of the extremes is that the person stops recognizing that there IS indeed dangerous extremism on both sides.
> "Blackness" is an invented concept for various people who were robbed of their heritage, culture and language through chattel slavery.
I'm not American. I live in a place with a different history and context. Generally, though, it seems that most "normal" people seem to assign identity to themselves and other based on how they appear, and that this happens at an early age.
Precisely how this forms categories tends to vary with time and space, like for almost all other categories. Even basic things as the number of the colors in the rainbow varies between cultures. For instance, in Islam, the rainbow only has four colors. The truth is that colors form a one-dimensional spectrum, while ethnicity forms a multi-dimensional spectrum.
> "Whiteness" as a concept is defined by two properties: 1) The proximity to power and 2) Not being black.
For me, this is not a useful way. When I meet people from around the world, I associate them by origin to some extent, but at a much granular level, even within countries. Hamburg is different from Munich, Manchester different from Brighton, Chongqing is different from Shangahai, And Dehli is different from Bengaluru. Africa is similar. Egypt has a distinct identity, especially in the big cities up north. Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya each have theirs. Together these countries have a lot in common, and also a lot in common with Southern Europe. Nigeria or Mozambique are both quite different from North Africa, but also very different from each other, and so on.
When you meet people from most of these places, they will have a word to label "people of European descent". For instance, in Thailand, the term is "Farrang". When these people speak English, they may use terms such as White, Black or Asian, but in their minds (as in mine) they will keep the same meanings as they assign at home.
Someone of the Chinese elite in Singapore definitely don't think of themselves as "White", nor are they "Black". If their status is high enough, they may not even allow their daughters to marry someone of European descent.
> You are correct in that part of this is "punching up" vs "punching down" but you should also know that this idea of equivalent concepts is used by white supremacists.
It absolutely is. This way of thinking is precisely what leads to much of the most extreme racial hatred. Hitler saw the Jews as oppressors. The Hutus saw the Tutsies as oppressors, just to name a couple.
You mention the Paradox of Tolerance. I definitely do not think we should tolerate racial/ethnic hatred, whether it comes from someone with ancestors from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India or China. "Punching up" should not be a valid excuse. The only way we can coexist in a multi ethnic and multi cultural society is by demanding tolerance of everyone, and be intolerant of those who do not.
I believe that we actually do not have a choice about this, if the culture we live in is to survive. If we tolerate racial prejudice, I belive there will eventual...
I think there are some very rational reasons for hating or at least strongly disapproving of the new owner.
For example, if the new owner of the company I worked for demanded on a Saturday that a new feature needs to be ready for testing by Monday, I'd be pretty upset.
Or, if I was on a team working on the problem of trust and ethics, and the new owner personally and un-ironically posted a completely false and inflammatory "news article" about a current event, and then several days later laid off my entire team, I wouldn't consider it irrational to be quite upset.
I don't see more empathy from Stripe. And since no one has come out of the process of mass layoffs yet, we don't know if Twitter isn't going to provide severance and bonus payouts and etc.
On the other hand, Stripe was much more productive and is workforce wasn't so inflated.
I was thinking it over, and one way Stripe nailed Twitter is communication. Stripe’s severance was clearly communicated up front. Twitter’s leadership is like the proverbial headless chicken.
It’s quite the contrast. I think there’s a lesson here. A well-drafted email could’ve saved twitter a lot of heartache.
Then again, maybe the email drafter got laid off too.
Take this: You take over a company that was full of bad behaving managers and employees. The previous CEO supported this situation. The new CEO who bought the company need to quickly turn the ship around. Severance, bonus payouts? Yes, if the staff you take over was really good and they deserve it. Is it the same case with Twitter? Can we compare Stripe and Twitter on this level?
From a neutral point of view, if the behavior of current employees is the result of the management grooming them to behave like this, is the resulting behavior is employees' fault?
I don't know internals of Twitter. I'm just asking a theoretical question.
> Which company is going to have an easier time hiring after the dust settles and they have a growth stage again?
Not all companies die after massive layoffs. Sometimes all you need is to contract before building a better place again. Whoever is hired next by Twitter is going to be coming for the future potential, not for what happened during the layoffs.
We don't know details yet, so it's hard to contrast anything. The pre stock vesting rumor was before 11/1. That date has passed.
It's also interesting that nearly every tech person I read thought Twitter was over-staffed prior to Musk taking over. Now he's doing something about it, and people are pearl clutching.
I honestly hope this forces twitter to crash and burn. I feel sorry for those who would lose their jobs. That said, twitter is utter garbage and is nothing but a place for people to complain
Feel for the workers being laid off and those that remain. I've been in teams that got decimated and the aftermath is rough. Although it's just a job, you can't help forming a bond with those that you work together with.
Hope that those looking for new challenge find it and those that remain can grow into new things without doing the work of 3 people.
Everywhere I worked access to systems was revoked before people received their termination communication from HR. This is standard practice in industry to prevent last minute IP theft, or destructive revenge actions at an emotional time.
I think it means that they feel that they can do it safely without it. It also saves them from having journalists taking photos.
Your security team and HR team must be really good lay-off some many people without causing violence, law suits, data leaks.
I can easily imagine that if 50% of people present in a office were laid off some would start a protest within the office which could degrade into some violence, damages and law suits. Also, having the HR systems automation must be really on par to revoke access correctly to so many people.
> "Twitter’s newsletter service Revue will be shut down by the end of the year. Revue was acquired by Twitter in January 2021 for an undisclosed amount. The report also says that Notes, a longform posting feature, is on hold, as is Twitter’s plan to build crypto wallets."
All these are look so distant to Twitter's core value.
Some say it's the world's town square. Fine, but how do you support (pay for) that? Town squares are generally funded and maintained by public organisations and tax money. Twitter is a private company and I don't think there's much enthousiasm for giving Twitter public funding in order to run it.
Why do you think that? Twitter has tonnes of journalists who are running a substack or patreon, Revue would have let Twitter get in on that revenue stream. Building a tool for longer form content seems like a totally reasonable leap for twitter, and crypto - whilst a bit bullshitty - would be a fine way of moving payments into twitter which is another great monetization strategy. All of those projects seem reasonable extensions of Twitters core business.
I don't think the decision to lay off the teams is odd. It is quite clear that Elon Musk's plan is "We're going to fix this by firing 90% of you and expect the remaining 10% to work 10x harder". They're not dumping any of these ideas, they're just expecting to deliver them with far fewer engineers (who, btw, will not be earning 10x salaries).
It wasn't the decision to layoff teams, it was the fact that he did tell them to stop working on the longform product. Maybe he'll take it back once they're done with paid verification.
It's interesting how the firing process presented in the movie Up in the Air (2009) was supposed be inhumane and insulting. Well, look where we are now.
Either you or I, and I suspect you, have misunderstood the film's intention if you think that we the viewer are meant to agree with any of the options used by Clooney's character's company, that they were the humane option.
Humane would be telling the person who works for you that you can no longer employ them, not hiring some stranger to come and tell them.
I don't think that either the direct or remote methods presented in the film were humane. Certainly not what I meant. I do think though, that checking your e-mail at 9AM to see if you're fired is considerably worse.
In four years Musk will be bored to death with Twitter and will sell it to private equity and the Saudis for $5 billion. At that point it will be mostly a platform for porn creators and crypto pumping, the only two verticals where Twitter seems to be actually growing lately.
Meh, Morgan Stanley has had bigger losses. How much of it is actually their money anyway? My guess is the losses will be passed down to the individuals who gave MS the $$$. Morgan probably bundled it all up, made a nice fee, and passed it on to Musk.
> Morgan probably bundled it all up, made a nice fee, and passed it on to Musk.
It has not. The debt was conditional on the acquisition of Twitter by Musk, so Morgan Stanley could not sell it before the acquisition was completed. But the debt was necessary for the acquisition, so the acquisition could not be completed without the debt money. Therefore, they had to happen at the same time, with M&S fronting the money.
Of course the terms of the debt, and the price of the acquisition, had to be both defined for everything to move forward, so they were finalized months ago.
When Musk signed a contract with Morgan Stanley, money was cheap, so the debt has very low interest. When the debt has actually been issued, a few days ago, money had become more expensive; Morgan Stanley won't find anyone to buy it as-is. To sell it they will have to discount it quite deeply, losing a bunch of money; otherwise they'll be stuck with it.
The crown prince already owned a large stake of twitter, and decided to maintain ownership stake after the buyout. They are still a shareholder, like before, not a loan holder.
If you click the link to the actual SEC filing, it says otherwise. Alwaleed put stock, not cash towards the purchase and will "retain an equity investment in Twitter following completion of the Merger"
No it doesn't, that table (from [0]) lists equity investors, not lenders.
> Each Equity Investor listed in the following table has committed to contribute to Parent, at or immediately prior to the closing of the Merger and subject to the conditions set forth in the Co-Investor Equity Commitment Letters, cash in the amount set forth opposite such Equity Investor’s name in the following table in order to fund a portion of the Merger Consideration contemplated by the Merger Agreement. Certain Equity Investors have retained an option to satisfy such Equity Investor’s equity commitment with shares of Common Stock held by such Equity Investor (valued at $54.20 per share).
Do you really think it will be four years? Considering his attention span, and the rapidity with which Twitter is already deteriorating, I suspect it will be much less than that.
Yeah he’s only seen like a handful of new space rocket designs through from conception to profitability, and he only created one major car company before moving onto other things. He can never stick to anything.
I agree that "short attention span" doesn't seem like it belongs on Musk's very long list of negative qualities, but a reminder: he was not an initial founder of Tesla, he bought in a year later and claimed to be a founder until he was sued and reached an agreement[0].
That is a fair point. I just am not sure his recent behaviour actually suggests he’s got a short attention span. I suspect he’s wanted to take over Twitter for a long time and is now rushing to carry out changes that he’s long planned. He might be acting too excitedly, he might screw it up by going too fast and rough with the changes, but I don’t see that as indicating a short attention span. Maybe impatience.
I know this is cliche to say... but I have been reading this comment for the past 10 years. Maybe one year it will be true but it has a terrible track record.
I was assured Tesla would be "dead" by 2018 and in the 2000s you would get comments about how re-usable rockets were just impossible.
For the record, I think twitter is a different beast but at the end of the day, I think life will go on.
> At that point it will be mostly a platform for porn creators and crypto pumping, the only two verticals where Twitter seems to be actually growing lately.
Like justin.tv/twitch, they might do well to identify the pivot.
temperamentally he is mercurial and polarizing which is the opposite of what Twitter needs.
maybe he can turn Twitter into a super-app on the console of every Tesla. a plan is not in evidence other than throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. 'move fast and break things' might really unlock opportunities, or destroy trust.
Zuck was unusually good at fake apologies while continuing to data-rape and strip-mine users, but trust is a problem for Facebook and will be exponentially worse for Musk.
it could indeed turn into MuskChan. if he is really going to turn a blue check into something anyone can buy without providing ID it's just a matter of time before impersonation scams multiply.
it will be an incredible distraction from challenges at his other ventures. Saudis and pedophiles are going to use it to abduct people. what is he going to do when people/nations go nuts about something on Twitter and take it out on Tesla?
I'm also skeptical of the weird turnabout between 'get me out of this deal at any cost' and rushing to pay up in full. either a side deal with e.g. Saudis or there was something existential about to come out in discovery.
Musk is capricious, cruel, and clueless. Whether or not you liked Twitter, it's a culturally significant platform, and Musk has almost certainly destroyed any hope it had of surviving. In barely a week. Hopefully it destroys him, too.
does that mean anything? (especially "mention" seems to carry no predictive value here.) were layoffs mentioned for years and nothing happened? were they put on hold because the ex-CEO wanted Musk to take the blame?
Sure, but I imagine the pre-Musk layoffs would have been similar to what we're seeing in Twitter's peer companies (~10-15%, generous severance payouts, etc.) as opposed to what's happening now. To throw your hands in the air and claim that layoffs were an inevitability is a weird way to shield a dude that is just being cruel because he thinks he's God.
Twitter’s cultural significance is almost net negative. It has been a vehicle for divisiveness and culture wars and not only a vehicle but a self driving one if you catch my drift.
That depends on which aspects of Twitter you focus on. It has added a ton of value for niche interest areas, open source intelligence and reporting, news from underserved areas or issues, and so many others.
The value isn't in the loudest and most active accounts, but the long tail of expertise that was previously either not widely visible or connected in the way Twitter enabled.
I disagree. The internet has increased the reach of individuals by many orders of magnitude: we (humanity) are experiencing the consequences of something we're not equipped for, but that isn't the fault of Twitter or Facebook, it's a consequence of the internet connecting us all.
What, specifically, has Twitter done, that has been a negative influence on the culture? If you look at, say, Donald Trump, he was across the internet being divisive in every venue he could get his hands on, from Facebook to Reddit... and outside of the internet too, on Fox News and the like.
If we went back 2 decades and put all of humanity on a bbs or newsgroup instead, you'd have the same outcome.
Twitter is a cesspool. The three times I've created an account I have deleted it in less than 24 hours because I couldn't figure a way to filter good content from all the noise, toxicity and low quality content. Reddit is not much different but at least you can reduce the scope by staying in small niche subreddits. I'm following this with curiosity to see if all these changes improve the situation or drive Twitter to the ground, but both seem to me like they would be an improvement.
I only tried following a few people that posted programming related stuff, but more then half their posts were completely off-topic, so I had no way to filter all the noise. Everything else Twitter suggested was rubbish.
I think you are out of touch with how poor Twitter is as a medium currently. Either Musk brings it back to some validity or he puts the final nail in the coffin and creates a space for some new better technology to fill the void (that last bit is a bit sarcastic about the new tech).
2,212 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 418 ms ] threadAren't all employees, in all companies on this planet, submitting to some form of dominance in exchange for money?
He usually has very accurate inside information.
Everybody wants to think they’re Andy Hertzfeld, but generally speaking for a whole lot of people not being able to show their productivity in a very simple way means they’re unproductive.
No, this is completely nuts! It encourages all sorts of pathological behavior to fake the metric, and throws the thing you might actually care about - business value - under the bus. It's even worse for senior people and those with architectural responsibilities. Spend time helping a junior on your team? Well, that's going to count under his commit metric and not yours, so he can figure it out himself.
My point is that if your productivity can be easily measured by LOC, then don’t tell me that LOC is a bad metric.
If your duties are mentoring, show me the meetings you had, the action items from those meetings, and what changed as a result. Nearly every job’s productivity can be showed in a pretty simple way. It’s the people who argue that their contribution can’t be simply shown that are often not that productive.
OK, so, I fundamentally disagree with the if condition.
This is in no small because of a previous coworker, in a place that shall not be named, who regularly duplicated entire class files rather than subclassing them, and his given argument when we challenged him on this was that he "couldn't subclass because the access specifiers were set to private" (yes really his defence was that bad).
Worse, I'd already added some "TODO: deduplicate this method" comments to the original, because the original was already a mess of copypasta code, and the new class duplicated all of these too.
So, a lot of new LOC that day, but none of them were good additions.
I think of metrics like this as a way to guide deeper looks and decision making. You just have to accept that “all models are wrong, but some models are useful.” LOC can be useful when it guides you to the right questions. It’s a starting point not the end of the conversation.
I think what's being criticised is when its used as a direct scoring system (e.g. bonus = k * LOC).
You'd probably say no, because his request is way over the line; to me having a jerkoff know-nothing telling me "Print your work and I'll judge whether you're worth it or not" is over my line.
If you interviewed at a company and got told "Every quarter, the know-nothing jerkoff CEO wants to see 50 printed pages of your code", and you accepted the job, hey, you've accepted that this is the norm in that company...
0) It keeps me (the CEO) humble 1) It weeds out the prima-donnas 3) It develops respect, everyone leaves the toilet better than they found it
- lunch shopping and preparations, clean up
- transport from one branch to another for Factory Acceptance Testing
- at one point I worked as a consultant for a rather large Norwegian company and one thing I noted was the the most senior leader I ever saw in that company (that I was aware if at least) was also one of those I remember who would make sure to tidy the kitchen and make sure everything went into the dishwasher
> Equal service at the end of the day
> But I know what you think, you thought
> 'Cause you've got the Ps, the ball's in your court, but it ain't
JME - The Money
You shouldn't be paid more than folks with 10K GitHub stars on big projects just because you reinflicted DSA hazing on yourself.
The person with 10K GitHub stars is overwhelmingly more likely to be a massive contributor than the leetcode warrior.
I hope this recession kills or at least hurts leetcode warriors.
all sound and fury, signifying nothing
Dell went private loaded with debts then add more debts by buying EMC and now Dell is public again.
October 6, 1997: Michael Dell makes an infamously bleak appraisal of Apple’s fortunes. Asked what he would do with the struggling company, the founder of Dell Inc. says he would “shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
But my sense was there were many peripheral teams that your average Twitter user would never notice if Twitter were to cut them.
Sure, something nobody has heared of and nobody knows why it should be at a company like Twitter.
If you don't know you're the problem tbh
We're living in a world where voting rights of pensioners have been delegated to big companies like Vanguard and Black Rock. They clearly are not keeping the best interest of the shareholders which would be their duty, and vote politically instead.
If you look in the medical industry for example ethical decisions are always managed by a different group than Product/Legal because it's a completely different set of skills and competencies.
Even more so at places like Twitter which are heavily dependent on ML models to make real-time decisions. And so you need a dedicated team that is proactive rather then reactive like a Legal team would be.
Putting the "what will our users think" question in an ethical framing is not obviously (to me) going to benefit users. (Especially when modern fashionable ethics centers around utilitarian normative ethics, but that's besides the point.)
Some companies, such as for instance Procter & Gamble or Apple care about their brand equity a lot, since they rely on it to charge above market premiums. Twitter needs to care about that too, since if they get caught doing something unsavoury they will turn toxic to their advertisers, or at least those who care about their brands. I am not a marketing exec but if Twitter now drops the pretense of caring about ethics you will see major advertisers pull out, and make a point of communicating why they do it. Thats the ROI on having functioning ethics teams.
But that wouldn't be the crony capitalism that we're stuck with now. Also, things have been moving too fast for a long time, making it nearly impossible for governments to keep up.
I consider much of the practices of social media companies designing for dopamine hits to be unethical, but it had been very lucrative for shareholders for more than a decade. It’s still lucrative but shareholders are taking it on the chin for other macro reasons.
As political discourse and more elections are swayed by rage-bait and disinformation pumped into voters retinas by these platforms, the political risks to these platforms and their bottom line will increase (and become wildly unpredictable).
ML ethics and accountability is beneficial to both society and to any company which has an interest in self-preservation.
[Stephan Livera Podcast] SLP421 Vivek Ramaswamy - The Antidote to Corporate Woke-ism https://podcastaddict.com/episode/146353684
My reply was,
"you're a global sentiment barometer"
Actually almost everyone who is in the Data/ML space knows about it.
It's one of the biggest challenges in ML which is making sure that models don't amplify biases in the training datasets and cause harm to users and the company. There have been many stories with TikTok for example recommending accounts which promote unhealthy eating [1] to users with a known eating disorder.
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Because Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have gotten under fire multiple times for the shit their artificial "intelligence" did - promoting content harmful to society (antivaxxers, flat-earthers, antisemitism, ...), sending them into outright radicalization spirals (YT autoplay), banning of people by automation based on shoddy input or without context...
If you're running AI that has a direct impact on wide society and you're not running an ethics oversight program, you should be arrested for endangerment of society.
If you are going to be hosting petabytes of data and in the business of showing advertisment, a lot of recommendation algorithms work in the background. A lot of times they aren't perfect and end up showing information which could be very high correlated but culturally sensitive, offensive or avoidable. People working in fairness and accountability run a lot of experiments to make sure biases don't get amplified in service offerings.
Social networks like Twitter use ML to boost engagement.
It turns out this tends to lead to ML amplifying pretty destructive patterns... racism, conspiracy theories, ideological bubbles, anti-semitism, etc.
A company might wonder how to boost engagement without promoting these things.
Good points. I agree with all you write.
However, Musk's stated intent when buying twitter, was to make it a non-partisan town square. This comes with a context of the US currently being divided more and more into two competing "tribes" of similar size and power. (Ie. the perfect setup for a civil war.)
If you look at the "ethics" teams kind of like law enforcement, it's important that they are neutral to this partisan divide, and don't have a "My side good, other side evil!" attitude.
If Elon is of the opinion that Twitter has been engaging in a partisan way, it is natural that roles like this are torn down and built from scratch, where the new teams are thoroughly screen to make sure they have as little affiliation with each of the tribes as possible, and to make sure that any affiliation remaining is balanced between the tribes. (Kind of like one does when recruiting a jury for a high profile court case, and also how presidents should select supreme court justices)
Hopefully, Musk goes through with this the way he has stated, by aiming for non-partisanship, and not in a pro-Republican way.
Regular companies do meetings, shady companies send a pre recorded video to their employees, and then you have Musk, just logging you off. I guess he missed the part were "transhumanism" still contains "humanism"
Even Stripe’s layoff was far less than 50% but it got pretty impersonal. They just paid severance better from what we know so far.
Doesn't respect work two ways? You give respect, you get respect?
It's easy to make Elon Musk the bad guy, but people who were let go were freeloaders. Let's not try to make them anything but that, we've all seen plenty of Twitter employees using up work-time to be active on various social media. They didn't show respect to the employer because their work and demeanor did not reflect it.
The "boss bad, worker good" just doesn't apply here. Twitter is a troubled company, I'm surprised Elon bought it in the first place but I'm absolutely not surprised by the wave of layoffs.
You can assume the moral high ground and employ the talent that Twitter has decided to part with and prove your words with actions. Are you ready to do so?
Should we, the IT experts, not be thrilled by so much experienced talent being available for employment?
(Although that's just a number from a quick googling. Maybe they outsource a lot of manufacturing etc?)
That said, their FY22 budget is “only” $30B, which is less than Elon just paid for all of Twitter. This number usually surprises people but a lot of other space-related work is within the USAF and NRO budgets.
It may seem to ignorant people that a space program is more advanced than "just a website" but actually running these kind of websites is extremely complex. Especially when you're needing to compete with Facebook and Google at serving ads in a relevant and effective way.
It is really interesting reading through their infrastructure challenges alone:
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
Anyone ever seen a relevant Twitter ad?
Just seems very dumb location based placement. Nowhere near the level of IG.
Facebook and Google are in a completely different league which is why for most brands ~95% of online ad spend is spent there.
Twitter has been slowly getting better until now when Musk's attitude has frightened the brands off i.e. GM, L'Oreal, Pfizer etc.
Musk looks like hes done the classic: "the office is clean why do I need cleaners" dance. I am surprised he can fire that many people that quickly and still expect momentum.
It doesn't help that he appears to be shitting out product ideas that he's just "dreamt" up. Rather than talking to people to see why twitter didn't do it in the first place. He clearly has a low opinion of the entire company.
I don't think so. I see far more hate towards Meta and Amazon.
Designing reusable rockets and launching hundreds of them into space for profit, is more complicated and requires a different caliber of frankly higher IQ worker, than building and maintaining the existing Twitter.
Not that there aren’t some smart web people, obviously.
Tesla is known for fucked up WLB and low compensation compared to FAANG.
I bet Twitter employees have higher average IQ. Especially compared to whoever at Tesla authorized removing radar and parking sensors.
rocket science and software engineering are two skills that take years of experience to hone. they come with their own set of challenges.
i feel like this sentiment belongs alongside "isn't netflix just an ftp server and a media player?"
I’m writing from a faang office with a few decades of experience. I know some people in aerospace. They’re on average smarter than 4/5ths of my colleagues (who are also clever).
For one, I anecdotally know people in FAANG who were smart by effectively “studying for the test” by focusing more on leetcode than projects/intellectual exploration. In contrast, the people I know who went into aerospace tended to have a genuine interest in physics (and some with more interest in philosophy), and had more experience with projects (e.g. worked on an aerospace team in university), with many of them having little-to-know experience with software development.
Interestingly, the aerospace people I know anecdotally happened to be better at soft skills/networking for getting into companies, whereas the FAANG people focused on leetcode for admissions. After getting into a company, also from my anecdotal experience, more FAANG people focused on metrics/compensation, whereas more aerospace people tended to focus more on the mastery of the craft. I acknowledge that my anecdotes shouldn’t be generalized, but it aligns with the motivations of many people looking to get into each company (it seems more people go into FAANG for compensation/prestige, whereas more people go into aerospace for the passion).
So, I would say that people from both categories tended to be very smart at learning quickly and solving hard problems, though anecdotally, the aerospace people seemed to be generally more intellectually curious. Then again, perhaps the aerospace people were better at soft skills/presenting themselves so they appeared smarter, whereas the FAANG people didn’t focus on presenting themselves as intelligently. For limitations, note that the people I’m thinking of are at the junior level.
In any case, I don’t think one can conclusively say that people in FAANG have more/less/the same intelligence as people in aerospace companies, though maybe one can tentatively say that people who go into aerospace tend to be more curious and interested in mastery of one’s profession (versus material compensation).
* Meta: 71,970 [2021]
* Apple: 164,000 [2022]
* Amazon: 1,298,000 [2020]
* Netflix: 11,300 [2021]
* Alphabet: 156,500 [2021]
* Microsoft: 221,000 [2021]
* The New York Times: 5000 [2021]
* Fox Corporation: 9000 [2020]
* Reddit: 700 [2021]
(Anyone else I should add?)
I can't really find any trends. I think Reddit is an outlier, and my impression is having only 3750 employees would probably put Twitter on the smaller end of the scale too.
1. https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/9/22274077/reddit-funding-ro...
To get the ratio metric up, they have to increase income or reduce employees.
This rationale, given by Musk (and I imagine VC friends) is all outlined in the discovery documents of the twitter vs musk legal case.
edits, i dug it out and made it a top level comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33467305
Google, for example, has more contractors than full-time employees, bringing the total employee count up to over 300,000
They were responsible for local marketing and news curation.
[1] https://www.theage.com.au/business/companies/musk-starts-mas...
Twitter rinsed Musk on the way out, which I deeply respect considering his behaviour.
That will only be some salve for the employees losing their jobs, but hopefully their packages get some of that.
One of the theories knocking around last week was that these layoffs are just before a stock vesting was to happen, presumably in an attempt to avoid paying them.
I find it very odd that people keep mentioning it despite it not panning out, and not sure what to make of it.
Out of honest curiosity, what was your intent for bringing it up?
Has anyone confirmed that the stock vests actually happened? Or did they get postponed whilst the layoffs where being organised? Haven't seen anything either way.
And I don't think it's that odd to consider that a man well known for flaunting the law would flaunt the law on this as well.
Elsewhere it has been announced that laid off employees are getting quite generous Severance packages, so this would be out of line with that.
https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/labor/wrongful-termination/warn...
Consider revenue and income (losses) and Twitter doesn't look good at all, they look horrible. They don't have that many employees, but they must be very very highly compensated and concentrated in very high cost areas. Otherwise the company is wasting serious money somewhere else, because to lose money on $5B/yr revenue with 7500 employees year after year in a business that's as high margin as pure software is incredibly terrible performance.
On which other platform can you directly communicate (or at least listen to, unfiltered) to the worlds dictators, political leaders, and billionaires?
Checkout Postman and McLuhan.
Productive and democratic discourse consists of people assembling a community of their peers eye-to-eye to solve local issues, not billionaires and dictators addressing a mob like Mussolini on the Palazzo Venezia with a megaphone.
Rage, on the other hand, can be perfectly encapsulated in a few characters.
I’m sorry you don’t see that.
You can find a lot of very deep, long-form content. I'd recommend following Samo Burja or Doomberg for example.
The platform isn't the problem. The people using whatever platform they can find to spread an anti-democratic anti-intellectual anti-humanitarian message are. I'm sorry you don't want to see that.
The panopticon they’ve build is bigger and wider (sharing data between Insta, WhatsApp etc). I don’t know what would be the “Cambridge Analytica of Twitter” but time will tell.
Twitter’s catching up though.
It did not used to be this bad with the exception of 4chan (of course), and the state of discourse in life has degraded so far, we even see it at the highest levels of government. Every year that goes by I fear we're losing more and more of our common decency and appreciation for our shared humanity. I have seen families torn apart because of this.
I've started going out of my way to meet my neighbors and smile at strangers.
Inflammatory language get's more reaction - well documented and your probably aware of that.
I think this may be viewing things through a bubble - my baby boomer parents don't know what reddit is, neither do any of their friends, but you better believe they and all their Facebook friends are all aware of all the latest crazy conspiracy theories. I think Reddit, while popular for certain demographics, is far less wide spread than some of the other social media.
Recall how various studies on covid lethality, vaccination and masks were wildly different. The Israel study is a quick one. This is exactly what happened when influenza was new in the 1920's.
Yet the "experts" made it sound like everyone is going to die if you are not wearing a mask 24/7 and isolating. This is what "do no harm" ideology becomes - causing mass harm to everyone to potentially protect a few.
None of the articles on HN have much of good faith discussion. I just see it as “progressives are pissed because their platform of power is being seized”. A lot of that relied on platform censorship on places like Twitter.
Just now, the WhiteHouse account is being fact checked. That doesn’t sit well with progressives.
This isn't some conspiracy theory, we have the current Biden Administration working with Big Tech to censor speech. "Public health" is just a trope under far more insiduous political agenda for power: https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...
And the WH deleted some of those tweets after being fact checked.
White House Deletes Misleading Tweet Giving Biden Credit For Social Security Check Raise:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2022/11/02/whit...
The white house press releases have been a total disaster. I thought we had it bad in the previous admin. Lies after lies told to American public. Much of this stuff goes unchallenged on all social media.
I’ve been following epidemiology experts and no one implied “everyone dying”, nor recommended “24/7” mask wearing (rather cited lowered transmission rates) and yes isolation lowered transmission rates too.
The flak they had to take for inconveniencing the lifestyle of people in the interest of prioritizing health outcomes for all, is insane.
If anything, we learned that the thought of care for others at a small cost to the self is extremely triggering for many Americans and is easily politicized as a wedge issue to influence voting.
> Twitter is/was the only remaining news medium
And twitter is an important reason that other, more reliable and informative news outlets went under.
Also standards of journalism integrity were bad then but they are abysmal now. Very few journalists actually investigate stories, most just re print press release.
But of course you are right: who could have foreseen how much bad news people want to read and how little they want to pay for quality news. Why do people watch Fox or read Murdock media rags?
That’s just to say everyone is in a bubble and people are the problem.
Twitter's nice because it gives you fast and easily available tools to curate your own feed. I could quickly follow a variety of professionals across different disciplines and regions to parse together some useful info.
You have to work at it, but anyone who assumes quality information will passively flow to you is mistaken and being misinformed in some way.
If some big event happens I can read an expert’s tweet thread on the matter 30 minutes after the event happened instead of reading an editorialized piece with a bunch of random comments. I was reading tweet threads on the recession 1 year ago with deep analysis from experts. When the FOMC meeting happens 1 hour later I get a thread on the financial implications, another on the economic implications and another on the political implications. You don’t get that quality of information at that speed on any other platform.
I strongly suspect most of these comments about the quality of twitter are actually angry that the people you follow post opinions you don’t like. I see political opinions I don’t like all the time from my finance follows, I just scroll away not sure why that is a problem?
If anything Facebook and YouTube’s algorithm were the most damaging in 2010s because they heavily promoted extremist content to random people. I don’t see that from twitter especially not at the same volume as 2010s FB and YT.
- https://twitter.com/saxomarketcall and their podcast
- https://twitter.com/macroalf
- https://twitter.com/unusual_whales
Then you’ll see their retweets and likes in your feed and thats how you can build a good list.
I would stay away from anyone whose primary focus is crypto, biotech or tech stocks unless you are a critical reader.
Companies usually fire people on Friday, and show you the door the same moment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...
> While federal and California laws require companies to provide advance notice of mass layoffs, it was not clear whether Mr. Musk had done so. A spokesman for California’s Employment Development Department said on Thursday evening that it had received no such notices from Twitter, which is based in San Francisco and is expected to report mass layoffs to the agency.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/technology/twitter-layoff...
Welcome to the dystopian future... I find it a bit galling how companies can force you into home office nowadays if it suits them (you want to avoid your underlings congregating in the office in such a situation), but also force you to come to the office when it suits them.
Unless you think every time I buy some bread from my baker I'm stealing it from him?
If anything, this is more akin to the baker calling their employees to say "you'll be baking from home today, I'm firing a lot of people today and need to protect the bakery."
They aren't 'forcing' you to do something - they're offering you money in return for doing it. If you don't like the money they're offering you don't have to accept the deal.
"Really dystopian that they're offering me $300k a year + benefits to be able to ask me to work in one of two locations" doesn't really work does it?
"Really dystopian that I can walk up to a baker and force him to give me a loaf of bread by offering him the agreed price in money."
This isn't even dystopian, it's just a management clusterfuck. Whoever thought this is the right way to handle this kind of a situation should be the first to go in these layoffs. Wow.
Pretty sure it's within their contractual rights to deny people access to the office for any reason or no reason at all? Did you put a contractual clause in about the right to office access when you signed?
> This isn't even dystopian
Well yeah my comment agrees.
Of course it is. The point I am making is that it's extremely bad management to handle layoffs and firing like that. You have the team leads schedule an appointment with the people who have to be let go. They tell them they are being let go, effective from X, with such and such terms (including access rights if they're in any way more specific than "you can't come to the office after X"). You have them thank them for their work and offer them a recommendation if they need it. This isn't some advanced HR management guru advice, it's common sense that should be standard adult behaviour.
Telling people who you have not yet fired that they can't come to the office anymore, possibly minutes before they come in to work, but also insisting that they go home so they can get the email that they've been fired is just about the worst way to handle it.
There's a potentially infinite set of actions that are within a company's contractual rights to do. Not all of them are okay.
He’d bought it immediately planning to hand it over to the business… wasn’t quite so keen once they laid him off!
For 1 day, maybe a week or so by the sounds of it. It's not like they're suddenly closing all the offices permanently
This is really what has happened inside of just the last 8 weeks. I can't blame anyone who just can't keep up, especially while that 12 hour a day death march was going on. This is really not how you should treat people, even for a day.
And if you refuse to work you are not 'forced' to become homeless and have no healthcare?
'Professional footballer forced to play football game!'
'Teacher forced to speak to children!'
You could generate all the electricity needed for the next 20 generations by harvesting the energy generated by the eyes rolling of people who live in countries with workers rights who just read that comment
There is nothing dystopian about denying people that are no longer employed office access.
That conveniently leaves out the dystopian parts. Being logged off remotely, no personal communication, no delay, &c.
All our contracts are managed by unions and you can't just fire someone out of the blue, there's notice periods on both sides (unless there's just cause for termination)
Yes, and most of the time the fired employee will be sent home during his notice period, so im not sure what you are talking about?
The thing is, mass layoffs are often discussed widely in Europe since its mostly blue collar employees and the unions and politicians are often trying to prevent the layoffs.
Mass layoffs (or some kind of forced unpaid leave) is typically something that happens for blue collared jobs when there is a reduction of demand for their products.
The twitter case is different, though. Twitter was a hostile takeover (even in the end, it was the company that forced the transaction). The takeover was not done for economic reason (or that was what was claimed), but because the new owner wanted to radically change the values of the company.
For employees that base their personal identity on those old values, this makes them natural enemies of the new owner. When Musk carries the sink in, he is like an enemy warlord accepting the surrender of an enemy tribe.
After a short tally, the enemy warlord lets half the prisoners go, after disarming them (takes away access to accounts and buildings), while the other half are allowed to join his forces, if they desire to.
This is probably the way this had to go. Letting everyone keep their access to the infra would be crazy. Now the question that remains, is how much does he have to pay those that got fired.
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/xgoouz/americans_ha...
Also we can have a heart surgery here without going bankrupt.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/poverty-r...
People think work is democratic but it s not: it's transactional and worker rights are just here to pay workers more, not give them any sort of novel ownership of the work tools.
That can be done, but it s called communism and never works because workers want money not access to their work pc, and leaders want money not management oversight of every single work tool. So you end up with people pretending to work for people pretending to pay them in a lunatic worker paradise where there are no humans anymore, just workers and their work tool mindlessly fullfilling the glorious work tasks assigned to them by mindless work allocators.
Working from h for a day hardly seems dystopian.
For me that is dystopian.
Yes. It's much worse.
It is a little dystopian, but (assuming you're talking about the Zhengzhou story from a couple of days ago) it's also not Foxconn's decision. The local government mandated that the industrial park be locked down.
It's also worth noting that many workers at places like Foxconn live in on-site dorms anyway.
Not having a consultation period, whether people are working or on "gardening leave", is illegal in CA, NY, the UK, and many other places for an employer of that size.
Not dystopian at all and there was nothing in the article about go home and work, just go home and receive decision information.
Nothing in that 'please return home' is anything to do with forcing anyone to have a home office, to go there and work, to do anything really. The company doesn't control you.
Which company is going to have an easier time hiring after the dust settles and they have a growth stage again?
How they fire people means very little, because very few people in tech think of themselves as the ones being fired in the near future (most likely also why few people in tech are into unions, they don't feel as replaceable as factory workers).
There are companies with actually bad reputation and they either have problem to find staff or have to pay a lot more while still having issues.
Yes and that is bad. And still, if you work inside one of those companies, the environment does not have reputation of being toxic. It just dont, in case of google the reputation is that they treat you well most of the time, but it is slower speed then, say facebook. And facebook does not have toxic reputation either.
Their reputation is not bad, actually. People who work there criticize some, but also are generally content and happy. Because, even with that agreement, neither company is overly toxic.
Take for instance booking.com. They unceremoniously dumped lots of their employees at the beginning of the pandemic despite being flush with cash. Then they tried hiring people back. Guess what, lots of people didnt want to even hear how much they are offering. There are other such companies.
But yes, there are people who would not, for instance, work for AWS due to their, shall we say, internal culture.
By definition, if they were having a hard time filling roles, they were not paying competitively enough to offset their bad reputation.
I bet they could have easily filled the role if they added a zero or two to the compensation offer.
Twitter might succeed or it might fail but Twitter in its current form both as a company and social media paltform was bad.
Twitter on the other hand is another matter - no huge technical barriers stopping him from getting his hands dirty, no lives are at stake or regulatory bodies that are going to tell him "no that is dangerous" - so we're finally seeing what Elon unleashed looks like. So far it can probably be described as "chaotic" at best, it remains to be seen whether this chaos will disperse and Twitter will emerge leaner and better.
My belief is that he doesn't understand Twitter and its users quite as well as he thinks, and that Twitter will slowly get a bit more annoying and less profitable until he loses interest or gets distracted by something else. We will see, I use Twitter a lot so I hope that I'm wrong.
If you hate Musk, fine, but please just stick to the facts and articulate why you hate him.
I don’t understand why there is so much emotion around Musk. He has done good things and bad things. He has done incredible, near possible things. He works ridiculously hard. He’s rich. He has said and posted things he shouldn’t. I don’t feel that I am in a position to say he is a terrible person. I don’t even know the guy. I wouldn’t want to live in a world without SpaceX and Tesla. I am genuinely fascinated by this hatred.
I’ve tried to compile a list of why people might hate him:
- posted a conspiracy theory on Twitter (which he did then delete)
- childishly insulted a diver
- is a shameless self promoter
- fires staff brutally
- makes huge and sometimes unreasonable demands on his workforce
- disagreed with covid policy, partly on the argument that the fatality rate is low and there’s not much you can really do about it
Ok, these are bad. But he’s hated as if he is the new Hitler. I don’t get it. I’d really appreciate it if someone could rationally explain why Elon is deserving of such great hatred.
He's not treated like the next Hitler by any stretch of the imagination. He's more like a village drunk who just keeps showing up doing stupid things like peeing on your doorstep or passing out in your garden. You don't hate that person, you're just like "[sigh] ok I guess we have to deal with him again..."
If your town drunk is doing that much good for the world, I think you’d forgive them for pissing on your doorstep once or twice a year.
Honestly this discourse has played out a thousand times over. Some people love him, attribute all his companies' wins to him and memory-hole any of the fuck-ups or gaffes. Some people acknowledge his business acumen, don't quite believe the hype on the company-level achievements that get attributed to him personally and find his personality as portrayed on traditional and social media to be grating.
I'm clearly in the latter group and I think that's a pretty uncontroversial position to take.
Edit: would the drive-by downvoters care to explain?
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
I think that's missing the point, which is the question of whether these innovations (the re usable rockets, scaling e cars) would have happened without his involvement. If the answer is no, then the question of whether 'someone else did it and he took credit' seems irrelevant. That's what leadership is, driving results, not pulling up your sleeves and doing it yourself.
At a meta level, I consider Musk and Trump both to have the same approach to media: say whatever you want to create publicity. Words mean nothing, in the sense that there are no repercussions large enough to outweigh the created buzz/fame. Outrage works extremely well to that end (look at this thread.)
Because he says things helping both extreme sides (lovers and haters,) all they have to do is latch on to whatever fuels their fire, and ignore the other words. And it is well-know that confirmation bias is a thing among humans. This causes polarization that fuels the debates, creating a spiral of even more debates, buzz and fame. Even sparks meta-debates.
Edit: Another side of this is that it seems that everything must be classified as good or bad. Both on HN and elsewhere, commentors go to extraordinary lengths to argue why something has one abstract label or the opposite. Does everything have to have emotions assigned to it? Does everything have to be categorized in the very coarse good and bad buckets? It would be nice to read comments where the author tries to explain both sides, instead of just arguing for one.
Edit: ok I just saw someone call him “Elongated Muskrat” so now there is someone who is mad at him in the thread :-)
Sorry if that wasn't clear.
... I wonder if polarization can be seen as a market spread, and that more polarization causes higher volatility, which leads to more "trading" to close the spread. I.e. discussions follow some version of the efficient market hypothesis? Need to do a PhD on this. :)
I think you've hit on more here. I think Musk has become associated with Trump. I think that might be because Trump is the champion of the losers of globalisation, and Musk is also a hero to those people because (a) he has created a lot of manufacturing jobs and (b) is creating a sense of patriotic pride in some of his achievements... just see SpaceX staff chanting "USA USA". I'm not criticising anyone, just drawing a connection.
So I think after reading these posts and talking to others, that Musk is hated because he is part of the war between left and right. To praise Musk is to praise Trumpism, and to hate Musk is to show you are against Trump.
These days though, it’s quite clear to the 250k a year tech-guy that, even though they’re making bank, they’re never going to be “Elon rich”, and so the jealousy disguised as virtue has come out in full swing.
Is he perfect? Of course he fucking isn’t… we work in tech, we all work with atleast one “brilliant ass-hole”… they’re the ones that make our days a little bit more painful but also write the fucking insane code that makes most of our workplaces profitable.
Elon is just the end of that bell-curve.
It’s pretty clear he leans right so that makes him an enemy of a lot of people automatically.
If he leaned left, nobody would care. Hell, they’d probably encourage it.
Yeah, no. He was that much richer even at birth, whose father owns an emerald mine?!
And regardless of wealth, Elon’s only actual contribution was paypal, which is.. well, paypal (I quite literally left some money in that because it was so scammy I couldn’t even rescue it by donation..), and funding tesla (not inventing anything!). The latter is pretty much impossible without some form of privilege.
Even if family wealth only helped him through insanely good relations to other people in the top 1%, it is still all that much more than you will likely ever achieve/get. And I frankly don’t buy this “daddy doesn’t love me” BS.
People like to think that but in my experience there are far more brilliant nice people than brilliant assholes. This is the mythos antisocial engineers tell themselves to justify their poor social skills.
Yep 100%, this has been my experience too
A "bell end", if you will.
Personally, I thought he was a cool guy building a revolutionary car.
But once I saw his hour long talk on how he was going to build a Mars colony, the fact that he was actually a Tesla investor - not a founder(the super fast LI ion lotus had already been demonstrated to him when he invested) and his absurd claims about AGI - I realized he was completely out of his mind. I have been skeptical of his personality since 2014, even as I held TSLA shares.
Yes he is able to manage and productionize probably the best car on the road right now and maximize Tesla shareholder value, but he is a shell of a person beyond that.
I will admit to having a few feelings of jealousy of the founders I know who have done far far better than o have on the game of building big companies, but that is also mixed with happiness for them.
With Musk, it's different. It's sadness and disappointment, to see someone throw away so much goodwill and be such a horrible person. Some of this is the media becoming adversarial with tech, while at the same time profiting off the hype bubble that the media itself created for Musk. But I view him as a lost man that needs a better support network and a slightly better filter so that he stops looking so foolish all the time.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/politics/elon-musk-spacex-sta...
https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/ukraine-uses-over-11000...
> SpaceX has said it pays for about 70 percent of the services used by Ukraine, offering all the terminals in that country the best possible option, valued at USD 4,500 per month even though most have contracts signed only for the USD 500-per-month service option.
There’s no way Russia loses this war if it doesn’t escalate beyond local conflict. The objective now is (or should be) minimizing casualties and human suffering, not lines on maps from 2015.
Stopping recurring monthly donations of something very expensive is also not “blackmail”.
I believe this topic has been discussed more than enough since February, by people with way more expertise than Musk. Ukraine has made it very clear that they do not intent to let their country be oppressed by the foreign aggressor. It is their decision to make.
Asking Ukraine to bow to Russia now that they are successful in their defense is a pro Russia stance. Claiming otherwise is just dishonest.
Especially since he was attempting to imply that anything close to a proper voting process would even be possible in that region now.
His statement means he is either incredibly stupid, or malicious. Both possibilities are dangerous. And Musk fans will vehemently disagree with the former.
It was anti Ukrainian lives on occupied territories and pro Russian soldiers lives. It was also pro next invasion once Russia recovers at which point Russia will argue that Ukraine is failed stated due to having destroyed infrastructure.
>The objective now is (or should be) minimizing casualties and human suffering,
The causalities are not minimized by rewarding Russia for invasion and letting it continue with genocide.
> not lines on maps from 2015
The issue is not so much lines on the map as actual consequences of those maps. The torture, genocide, suppression of Ukrainian identity and so on. And obviously favorable position for next invasion again and again, until whole of Ukraine is taken.
I thought he was just a lucky cult like futurist before but now I think of him as what he truly is - a billionaire narcissist that craves adulation from the mob.
I think a good comparison in the US would be Trump and I think more people hate Trump than Musk.
Weird way to spell serial labor law violator
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/02/tesla-factory-is...
According to whom? His internet comments are sci-fi libertarian mainstream with a dash of NWO.
His business accomplishments are impressive, but he's rather boring, no pun intended.
I think the only argument against Musk's success is that he enjoyed unfair regulatory advantages.
PayPal's KYC was non-existent for years, you could send money with little more than an email. Amazon had similar miraculous regulatory exceptions. No State sales tax until it had a near-monopoly network effect.
>According to whom?
I found that time he called a diver who was trying to save those kids a pedophile to be pretty revealing. Also, calling himself "Lorde Edge" was pretty awful. I suppose if you're asking "who has the right to tell him not to say that?" the answer is "no one", but I find it hard to respect the guy when he acts so childishly.
His factories have a history of complaints about racial abuse: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
Elon Musk hates the color yellow so hazards in the factory aren't properly identified: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/tesla-workers-gettin...
Elon Musk made up the hyperloop just to kill high speed rail and sell more cars: https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/editorials/article26445107...
(Thanks also to whoever un-downed me, as it is from genuinely wanting to understand).
The last link is paywalled, but I doubt that is really his motive. It sounds silly. There was plenty of outspoken criticism against that highspeed rail link without a Musk conspiracy theory. He gave an interview on the BBC where he was similarly bemused by how poor our high speed efforts were, and his criticism was fair.
I'm not sure we can see incidents in very large organisations as indicative of the character of the CEO. For sure he is ultimately to answer for them, and has a responsibility to sort them out, but Tesla employees about 100 000 people and in any sample of people that large you'll have some horrible ones.
Someone else told me about the harassment suit today, now that is directly attributable to Musk and awful. Are there other such incidents?
Still, doesn't seem to explain the sheer hatred for the man. I do have a different theory about that having spoken to others, which I'll post elsewhere...
I'm always amazed at the double standard where musk is solely responsible for the success of multiple companies, but any fault is attributable to someone else. He claims to have slept in the factory! He's this hands on car-building ubermensch. How can he be completely oblivious to safety and discrimination issues?
As much as people would like to believe that Elon musk, a materials science graduate with his only career experience being online payments with PayPal, is actually responsible for the core founding engineering of SpaceX and Tesla is crazy.
Musk made bank with PayPal and has been an investor in many companies including failures like Neuralink, boring company etc. He has both invested and managed Tesla.
He just has the ego of a manchild and bought the title of “founder” as wellz
Yeah sure, he just invested in Paypal, then invested in Tesla, then invested in SpaceX.
I'm not even sure if I'm answering real people or bots anymore, everyone sounds the same now: "Elon good, because environment and space and he made reusable rockets and tesla cars are so good etc.", (Elon starts saying wrongtalk about the media and other sensitive subjects), "Elon bad, because he called some diver years ago a pedophile, and he just invested in tesla and spacex no biggie easy for anyone".
But hey who cares right? I've been getting insulted by everyone here for saying Youtube censors videos and google censors results etc. yet just a couple days ago some leaked documents showed the DHS with the help of tech giants are planning to push the censorship even harder.
This is flamebait, plain and simple.
I worry much of that will be lost without having a natural new home with the same reach and impact.
Musk might be good at building and running engineering companies, but Twitter is not that. The social aspect is far more important than the underlying technology, and Musk and his advisors are terrible at that. I don't see any way out of this that leaves Twitter better.
Agree
NASA, ESA, and all the other space agencies might disagree with you here.
Also, SpaceX would not exist were it not for a US government decision to fund and develop private spaceflight launch capabilities for NASA and the US Air Force. In fact the idea was given to Musk by Mike Griffin who at the time headed up In-Q-Tel, the CIA's investment arm and could also source the right technical experts to form the core engineering group. Shortly after he became NASA's administrator and gave SpaceX a huge development and launch contract before it had flown anything.
The idea that SpaceX emerged from nothing and bootstrapped its way to success has always been false. That doesn't mean they don't deserve praise for doing a ton of things right and having an impressively bold engineering strategy, of course.
Remove those subsidies tomorrow and the companies fold, all of them
Can Elon figure out a way to get the government to subsidize Twitter? Maybe, but it's going to be harder
You want stability? Join stripe
You want to be sharp? Join Twitter
Then when you go and work at company like stripe, its easy.
People are most productive over the long term when they feel encouraged, supported, self-motivated etc.
Positive emotions not negative ones like fear, coercion, hostility etc.
Because SpaceX and Tesla totally crashed and burned and are doing so much worse than Boeing and Volkswagen?
Legacy car brands had electric cars (Toyota, BMW definitely). Boeing could have created landing rockets. Market wanted those products from anyone.
Why didn't they? Because they're dinosaurs, asleep at the wheel. Bad corporate culture.
and the established automakers with billion dollar war chests didn't have access to the same subsidies if they had innovated and made electric cars that didn't suck? The established military industrial complex companies like Boeing and Lockheed that have failed in their space endeavors aren't subsidized?
Nothing about this acquisition as been impressive or promising. I see no sign of that changing. A mass disrespectful layoff like this is going to backfire, hugely.
That's a great way to get a bunch of cowboys in their 20s who think they are hot shit after five years in the industry while kicking out the people with deep experience because they actually like spending time with their families. Now you've got hyper-trendy software design everywhere with nothing supporting it.
Didn't Stripe just announce their own set of layoffs because they over-hired? That doesn't seem that stable.
You want actual stability, join a fortune 500 company.
Being sharp as in the positive performance terms requires sharp leadership and decision making. It means leadership that actually knows what is going on and that requires trust. That is not the same as rage layoff after you impulse bought company you dont want while trolling on social medias.
I’m glad Australia has decent laws to protect workers. It’ll be interesting to see if Australian Twitter staff who are locked out of their accounts have been laid off and what happens next.
https://www.fairwork.gov.au/tools-and-resources/fact-sheets/...
The one with the better offer, taking a possible layoff payout into account. The comp ranges can be so drastically different between companies that a possibly generous layoff (that is no means guaranteed if Stripe has to do this when circumstances are more dire) is negligible financially.
Is the only thing that determines whether you take a job the salary ?
Because for many people how much you get paid is important but far from the only factor.
Most people have a price at which they will sell out. Those who don’t, are too few to make any significant difference
Billions of people love and use Meta products every day and their tech stack is one of the world's best with technical challenges almost no other company faces.
Palantir also has many parts of their business that benefit society e.g. combating human trafficking etc.
The same goes for twitter.
Working at Twitter now means a daily grind means being subject to the whims of an increasingly petulant emperor who does not respect anyone's expertise. What good does it for your career if he's just going to drop the ball at a moment's notice anyway?
The reality is that Twitter as a business (and, imho, as a product) was sorely in need of a course correction. Layoffs, if they need to be done, should be done crisply and thoroughly so that remaining employees don't feel like the other shoe is about to drop.
You rip off the bandaid, it sucks, then you refocus on the work ahead.
Twitter is different - there are other big companies that provide as much tech challenges or more (whether they are better/worse than Twitter is another question). Twitter employees have many more options (relatively speaking) than SpaceX employees
Working at Meta/Google doesn't necessarily do that. I'm almost certain most of these companies' moonshot divisions are not as well-run as many startups, nor are these companies assured success in these areas.
Their main products are already at a "don't fix it if it ain't broke" stage, even though many will claim these are broken. I doubt it's exciting work.
Working at Tesla or SpaceX will be like working on a moonshot that's actually taking off. I'm sure it's a thrill. But increasingly, I don't think Musk is level-headed enough to be trusted with such things.
It takes time to reject nitwitted leaders, so we can't expect employees to abandon ship overnight just to prove my point.
Thats exactly how a lot of people will view Twitter. You might think its horrible and they are terrible for laying of people, but plenty of good engineers ready to fill those roles for the money without the need of having free snacks, free coffee, rest booths, ping pong area, LED illuminated reading rooms, etc etc etc. Twitter will be fine.
I don't doubt the technical excellence of these companies. They are technically very capable because of the talent they hire, and they are able to hire top talent because of the high salaries they pay, not because of some altruistic or egoistic reasons
A workplace can actively kill humans and still treat its employees very good.
You are mixing very different factors together here.
Prestige, to name another example, is very important to a lot of people. Having "worked at FAANG" on your resume opens many opportunities afterwards that don't have anything to do with money.
For what it's worth those companies have not brought any real innovation in the last 10 years, give or take, because if they had they would have been on top of the world (quite literally). Which makes me hopeful that some of the real geniuses out there (today's von Neummanns and the like) might still avoid those companies out of principle.
Basically, if they aren't offering "f** you money", pay has a diminishing effect on my employment choices. And if they are offering that kind of money, I'm assuming that'll come with even more consequences. My resume is alright, but it's not enough for an offer of way more money without strings attached.
I can't speak for everybody of course, but I think not heeding the above leads to burnout.
> Which company is going to have an easier time hiring
The one that people want to work for and don't have to "sell out" to do it.
> Most people have a price at which they will sell out.
Sure. Agreed. But now you've tripled your OpEx vs your competitors. And the people that sold out aren't in any way loyal, so will bounce. But if they aren't offering substantially more, the money doesn't matter. It's all basically the same anyways.
And then you have to consider financials and leadership. Twitter financials got substantially worse (20x) from my understanding after Musk took over because of the debt he now has.
And as far as leadership goes: he was forced to buy it. That really doesn't look good.
Nope, this is wrong if the company can afford to pay more. Just look at companies like Jane Street, HRT, etc. The high comp they are willing to pay makes them harder to get into than Twitter, Meta, etc by a long shot. They have a far easier time hiring.
Yes.
Pornhub, Exxon, Smith and Wesson, all the big tobacco companies, the guys that manufacture fentanyl, infowars, they all have IT staffs. Some have extremely sophisticated IT staffs. Money talks, but there other factors. when you’re working on migrating from .net to cloud native at Exxon and you’re building some kind of new container registry or something you probably don’t spend your days pondering climate change; you get paid every two weeks, you are learning some cool stuff and you’re building some cool stuff. Most people need jobs too.
A pay check and some sort of plausible rationalization is all that is needed. “Twitter is free speech” sounds pretty strong. “Twitter connected Ukrainians during that invasion” sounds strong.
I mean yea I work for pay.
Does the pay by itself mitigates some of the following shitty behavior:
- Timing bathroom breaks - Requiring lengthy security check prior to entering work location - Micromanaging and invasive monitoring
Just small things that would drive some people livid regardless of pay. Scratch that, at the higher end of the spectrum it could easily drive them away.
The only time those things haven't been an issue is when I do charity work which isn't really work as I don't get paid for it, which I think is the only reason the charities take what they get and are happy with it as they have no other choice.
Oddly, my most recent volunteer gig was very.. structured. It may not help that it is sponsored by corporate so maybe they started demanding a lot of data.
If that ain't a major reason why people relocate from all over the world to SV, then I am missing something. Of course the salary is one of the major factors.
For me, knowing Musk's reputation for demanding workaholic mentality.. %20 might not be enough and that is before WFH issues.
Twitter was a public company with quarterly vests where you could get liquidity on your compensation (and from what i understand you were cashed out at buyout.) Stripe remains private and much of your money remains locked. Not sure if they issue RSUs, options, or what, but quite possibly you lose a lot or your historical compensation 3mo later. They were two different beasts. (Of course, now both are private, so going forward they might be similar.)
There are laws that take care of it in my country
The new owner of Twitter took on $13 Billion in debt, which probably costs $1.3 Billion+ in interest payments alone.
Twitter has gone from a hundred-million loss / year into a Billion+ per year loss in the past week, because of the decisions related to this buyout.
That is the problem. $200 million loss per year is manageable. $1500 million loss/year is not.
Twitters losses in 2021 were over 221MM, and 250MM to 700MM between 2013 and 2017.
So the myth that Twitter was a healthy company is only promulgated by agenda driven opinions, not factual ones.
That's all I'm saying. The $1.3 billion/year in interest payments alone is a magnitude more loss than Twitter ever had before.
I worked for a couple startups and the severance package for companies losing money was pretty bad. The package for profitable was ok. And the package for insolvent was “your last paycheck was your last.”
As for hiring peons, it's hard to say. A bigger factor (IMHO) is Elon himself. Fans will probably go there. Those who don't like him probably won't. I expect that to have a far bigger impact than firing a bunch of employees right before bonus time several years earlier.
My read of the situation is that Elon never really wanted to buy Twitter. I mean he did try and get out of it but the Twitter board crafted a good contract and I believe Elon realized he was going to get dumpstered by the Delaware Chancery Court.
So what does he do now?? The private equity playbook is my guess. He'll massively cut costs, repackage it somehow, claim victory (for "free speech" or whatever) and then sell off a minority stake or even the whole thing. He may even try and do the tech thing where he sells most of the equity but retains all the voting power.
In such an environment, short term hiring probably isn't on the cards.
He's too successful now with too many fans for this to have an impact. People know he demands a lot and can do crazy things. That's just part of the package.
1. An infrastructure element that creates an open API/protocol for sharing/pushing messages, contacts and media between content/social media platforms. The basic idea is to have a generic interface similar to email.
2. A content company that provides aggregation, search, moderation (possibly based on user preference) and possibly editorial features, as well as a front-end for users. Basically what gmail is to email.
As soon as Republicans gain control of congress (and possibly the presidency), he starts lobbying to make it mandatory for all social media platforms to allow their users to connect through the API/protocol under (1) with a generalized account, similar (or identical, at least in form) to email addresses.
This would kill the monopolies of Facebook, Insta, Tik-Tok, etc, by allowing a user to use only one of them to connect with user on all of them, similar to how they can use an email client of choice.
Twitter could then charge some small fee for communicating over this protocol, or could simply sell the protocol company to the government, who could make the protocol publicly owned, like email/smtp.
Would this make him a huge profit? Not likely. At best he would get his investment back, perhaps. But it could help break down some echo chambers and counteract some of the crazy polarization that's currently going on in the US.
And if I'm reading Musk correctly, profit is no longer his primary motivation, if it ever was. Rather, it seems that he has some Messiah complex where he wants to be seen as the guy that saves the world.
Whether you see that as a sign of genuine altruism, a severe case of Narcissism or just a sign that he's really an insecure nerd that seeks social validation, is up to you.
In politics corporate interests transcend politics and cross party lines. There is no shot any Congress would destroy the value of all these American companies that way.
> But it could help break down some echo chambers ...
Nobody wants this. The idea that any of this is about free speech is a complete myth. The idea that an "echo chamber" is even a thing is problematic. People are going to engage in content they like and not engage with content they don't like. It affects what websites you go to, what TV you watch, what channels you subscribe to and so on.
The post on HN yesterday from the ex-CEO of Reddit was great in this regard. He put forth a cogent argument that none of this is about content. It's simply a user behaviour problem.
So when Kanye goes on Twitter and launches into an anti-semitic screed he gets banned. Not because of the content per se but because he's annoying and he's making the experiene worse for everyone else. Whenever conservatives (in particular) talk about "free speech", they really mean "hate speech" and wanting to avoid getting silenced even when everyone else just wants them to stop being anti-semitic, homophobic, transphobic, racist or whatever.
Maybe Elon can afford to take a loss to achieve this?
Or maybe the platforms ARE able to find ways to split add revenue (and other revenues) in ways that don't really destroy value.
> In politics corporate interests transcend politics and cross party lines.
How much financial support is Meta and Tik-Tok giving to Republicans? In fact, I think it's primarily Meta that has a lot to lose from this, out of the American companies. Alphabet/Youtube may actually benefit, as they are specialists when it comes to video, and if Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram are forced to permit sharing of Youtube videos through their platforms, they may gain traffic at the cost of native video alternatives.
> Nobody wants this.
Well I do, for one.
> The idea that any of this is about free speech is a complete myth.
I'm pretty sure quite a few people care about free speech, and even more are worried about American polarization. Even many non-Americans, like me.
> The idea that an "echo chamber" is even a thing is problematic.
That's an interesting point of view. You're not only saying that they don't exist, but actually that the mere IDEA is problematic? Isn't 4chan an echo chamber?
> People are going to engage in content they like and not engage with content they don't like.
I agree. People should be able to filter content they find problematic, just like we do with email spam or how we can restrict porn in browsers, etc.
> So when Kanye goes on Twitter and launches into an anti-semitic screed he gets banned.
I watched Kanye's appearance on Lex Fridman's podcast/youtube a few days back, and it was mostly sad, tbh. Lex, being Jewish himself, pushed back pretty hard when Kanye started his Anti Semitism. But Kanye WAS allowed to speak, and neither Spotify or YouTube have take it down.
> It's simply a user behaviour problem.
On Twitter, maybe that's what it looks like. But if you sit through the podcast, maybe your conclusion is that this is more of a symptom that Kanye is going through a very rough time than some intent to be evil. Obviously he DOES have racist thoughts when it comes to Jews (or, depending on your definition of Racist, they would be if Blacks had as much power as Jews, or if he were white).
But then again, the basic conspiratorial pattern he's using doesn't seem very different from how BLM talks about "white" people. One could argue that white people have some obligation to avoid Anti Semitism due to the Holocaust. But the left seems to be quite accepting with Anti Semitism that comes from Palestinians, since they're "punching up". Aren't African Americans also "punching up" in this case?
Anyway, Kanye is a lot more than his prejudice against Jews. It IS interesting to hear his story and point of view, even if it did make me quite sad.
So, in conclusion. Let's say social media gets a protocol similar to smtp, they would be able to add optional moderation/spam filters against content like this. But I think users should be able to check their "junk folder" and whitelist content they don't think should be block listed, as long as the content is not illegal.
Even if he is, it's a massive risk. Another platform that he doesn't own could simply rise and take its place.
> How much financial support is Meta and Tik-Tok giving to Republicans?
The Trump administration tried to block Tiktok (briefly). Many officials and politicans call it a national security risk, most recently the FCC chair just this week. While there are noises made about a break up of Meta, I suspect it's going nowhere.
> You're not only saying that they don't exist, but actually that the mere IDEA is problematic?
I'm saying anywhere people can in any way filter their experience, what they see will differ from the unfiltered view. Even if they see the same things, they will engage with things they like. Basically, this is inevitable. The problematic part is this only tends to get lablled an "echo chamber" when people filter in such a way that the criticizer doesn't like.
> But Kanye WAS allowed to speak, and neither Spotify or YouTube have take it down.
In case you didn't see it, I encourage you to read this HN submission from yesterday [1]. I'll also bring up the Paradox of Tolerance [2]. Free speech absolutism is the extreme view where anything can be posted. Not even 4chan has this. So when I say "nobody wants this", I mean everyone agrees there are and should be limits on speech so it's just a question of what those limits should be.
Any site that has attempted unmoderated free speech descends into a cesspit of Nazis and racists where everyone else leaves. Moreso, advertisers (who still pay for the platform) don't want to be associated with it so they leave too.
As you mentioned, Kanye still got an incredible amount of exposure for his views between various podcasts and the right-wing media (eg Tucker CArlson, Ben Shapiro) so it's not like he's been silenced. There's just one thing out of many he couldn't do because Twitter didn't want to be associated with it.
> But then again, the basic conspiratorial pattern he's using doesn't seem very different from how BLM talks about "white" people.
Free speech is fundamentally a political issue, otherwise I'd try not to get into this topic. I understand your confusion, which I certainly believe to be in good faith. I'll scratch the surface of this as neutrally and briefly as I can.
"Whiteness" and "blackness" as concepts are not equivalent. "Blackness" is an invented concept for various people who were robbed of their heritage, culture and language through chattel slavery. It's why we say "African-American" for black people but "Italian-American" or "Polish-American" or whatever for white people.
"Whiteness" as a concept is defined by two properties: 1) The proximity to power and 2) Not being black. It is a concept rooted in white supremacy. Who counts as "white" also changes. Ben Franklin, for example, didn't count Germans as "white". Now we count Italians as "white". That wasn't alwyas the case.
You are correct in that part of this is "punching up" vs "punching down" but you should also know that this idea of equivalent concepts is used by white supremacists. "White power" was a reaction to "black power" as an emancipating force in the 1960s. "White Lives Matter" (and even "All Lives Matter") are the same response to "Black Lives Matter" (BLM). They're also insidious because they imply that BLM means white lives don't matter. It's more accurate to say "Black Lives Matter Too" even though no one was suggesting whit...
Not burn to the ground, simply build something with a lower monetary value today, if he thinks it can lower tribalism. Consider something like linux. It's precicely the fact that it's not monetised that ensures the near monopoly in the server OS space.
> Any site that has attempted unmoderated free speech descends into a cesspit of Nazis and racists where everyone else leaves.
My take is that anything that is within the law should be allowed to be posted, but extremist propaganda (especialy when fueled by hate), whether it's from the left or right, should be supressed hard unless the reader explicitly disables such suppression.
Btw, one sign that someone is close to one of the extremes is that the person stops recognizing that there IS indeed dangerous extremism on both sides.
> "Blackness" is an invented concept for various people who were robbed of their heritage, culture and language through chattel slavery.
I'm not American. I live in a place with a different history and context. Generally, though, it seems that most "normal" people seem to assign identity to themselves and other based on how they appear, and that this happens at an early age.
Precisely how this forms categories tends to vary with time and space, like for almost all other categories. Even basic things as the number of the colors in the rainbow varies between cultures. For instance, in Islam, the rainbow only has four colors. The truth is that colors form a one-dimensional spectrum, while ethnicity forms a multi-dimensional spectrum.
> "Whiteness" as a concept is defined by two properties: 1) The proximity to power and 2) Not being black.
For me, this is not a useful way. When I meet people from around the world, I associate them by origin to some extent, but at a much granular level, even within countries. Hamburg is different from Munich, Manchester different from Brighton, Chongqing is different from Shangahai, And Dehli is different from Bengaluru. Africa is similar. Egypt has a distinct identity, especially in the big cities up north. Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya each have theirs. Together these countries have a lot in common, and also a lot in common with Southern Europe. Nigeria or Mozambique are both quite different from North Africa, but also very different from each other, and so on.
When you meet people from most of these places, they will have a word to label "people of European descent". For instance, in Thailand, the term is "Farrang". When these people speak English, they may use terms such as White, Black or Asian, but in their minds (as in mine) they will keep the same meanings as they assign at home.
Someone of the Chinese elite in Singapore definitely don't think of themselves as "White", nor are they "Black". If their status is high enough, they may not even allow their daughters to marry someone of European descent.
> You are correct in that part of this is "punching up" vs "punching down" but you should also know that this idea of equivalent concepts is used by white supremacists.
It absolutely is. This way of thinking is precisely what leads to much of the most extreme racial hatred. Hitler saw the Jews as oppressors. The Hutus saw the Tutsies as oppressors, just to name a couple.
You mention the Paradox of Tolerance. I definitely do not think we should tolerate racial/ethnic hatred, whether it comes from someone with ancestors from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India or China. "Punching up" should not be a valid excuse. The only way we can coexist in a multi ethnic and multi cultural society is by demanding tolerance of everyone, and be intolerant of those who do not.
I believe that we actually do not have a choice about this, if the culture we live in is to survive. If we tolerate racial prejudice, I belive there will eventual...
For example, if the new owner of the company I worked for demanded on a Saturday that a new feature needs to be ready for testing by Monday, I'd be pretty upset.
Or, if I was on a team working on the problem of trust and ethics, and the new owner personally and un-ironically posted a completely false and inflammatory "news article" about a current event, and then several days later laid off my entire team, I wouldn't consider it irrational to be quite upset.
On the other hand, Stripe was much more productive and is workforce wasn't so inflated.
It’s quite the contrast. I think there’s a lesson here. A well-drafted email could’ve saved twitter a lot of heartache.
Then again, maybe the email drafter got laid off too.
Would never consider Twitter as a possible employeer after what just went down.
I don't know internals of Twitter. I'm just asking a theoretical question.
Is one week of ownership enough to actually understand this and identify those people?
It seems they had a preconceived notion of how much revenue the business should have per employee, and that’s a key driver of this: https://mobile.twitter.com/sf_mills/status/15758387853712220...
Not all companies die after massive layoffs. Sometimes all you need is to contract before building a better place again. Whoever is hired next by Twitter is going to be coming for the future potential, not for what happened during the layoffs.
Truth is we don’t know. I see it as someone is finally taking action to turn Twitter around. They’ve been floundering for years.
It's also interesting that nearly every tech person I read thought Twitter was over-staffed prior to Musk taking over. Now he's doing something about it, and people are pearl clutching.
Is there such a thing as a warm personable firing email? You think HR drones are your buddies whose role is to make you feel good? Egads.
Stripe gave one more month of severance, but twitter employees get to cash out of company stock.
Hope that those looking for new challenge find it and those that remain can grow into new things without doing the work of 3 people.
(That doesn't mean it hasn't happened!)
Your security team and HR team must be really good lay-off some many people without causing violence, law suits, data leaks.
I can easily imagine that if 50% of people present in a office were laid off some would start a protest within the office which could degrade into some violence, damages and law suits. Also, having the HR systems automation must be really on par to revoke access correctly to so many people.
> The exact reason Elon Musk is laying these people off.
Still not sure what you're talking about. Are you saying that you're being downvoted because Twitter is reducing costs?
All these are look so distant to Twitter's core value.
Some say it's the world's town square. Fine, but how do you support (pay for) that? Town squares are generally funded and maintained by public organisations and tax money. Twitter is a private company and I don't think there's much enthousiasm for giving Twitter public funding in order to run it.
https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1515094823337832448
Humane would be telling the person who works for you that you can no longer employ them, not hiring some stranger to come and tell them.
It has not. The debt was conditional on the acquisition of Twitter by Musk, so Morgan Stanley could not sell it before the acquisition was completed. But the debt was necessary for the acquisition, so the acquisition could not be completed without the debt money. Therefore, they had to happen at the same time, with M&S fronting the money.
Of course the terms of the debt, and the price of the acquisition, had to be both defined for everything to move forward, so they were finalized months ago.
When Musk signed a contract with Morgan Stanley, money was cheap, so the debt has very low interest. When the debt has actually been issued, a few days ago, money had become more expensive; Morgan Stanley won't find anyone to buy it as-is. To sell it they will have to discount it quite deeply, losing a bunch of money; otherwise they'll be stuck with it.
(Edit: typo)
The crown prince already owned a large stake of twitter, and decided to maintain ownership stake after the buyout. They are still a shareholder, like before, not a loan holder.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2022/10/31/saudi-prin...
If you click the link to the actual SEC filing, it says otherwise. Alwaleed put stock, not cash towards the purchase and will "retain an equity investment in Twitter following completion of the Merger"
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000110465922...
> Each Equity Investor listed in the following table has committed to contribute to Parent, at or immediately prior to the closing of the Merger and subject to the conditions set forth in the Co-Investor Equity Commitment Letters, cash in the amount set forth opposite such Equity Investor’s name in the following table in order to fund a portion of the Merger Consideration contemplated by the Merger Agreement. Certain Equity Investors have retained an option to satisfy such Equity Investor’s equity commitment with shares of Common Stock held by such Equity Investor (valued at $54.20 per share).
[0]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000110465922...
0. https://www.cnet.com/culture/tesla-motors-founders-now-there...
I was assured Tesla would be "dead" by 2018 and in the 2000s you would get comments about how re-usable rockets were just impossible.
For the record, I think twitter is a different beast but at the end of the day, I think life will go on.
You win some, you lose some, I guess.
https://twitter.com/boringcompany/status/1588685426088628225
I honestly don't know much about those ventures at all. Seems they just started testing though?
Like justin.tv/twitch, they might do well to identify the pivot.
maybe he can turn Twitter into a super-app on the console of every Tesla. a plan is not in evidence other than throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. 'move fast and break things' might really unlock opportunities, or destroy trust.
Zuck was unusually good at fake apologies while continuing to data-rape and strip-mine users, but trust is a problem for Facebook and will be exponentially worse for Musk.
it could indeed turn into MuskChan. if he is really going to turn a blue check into something anyone can buy without providing ID it's just a matter of time before impersonation scams multiply.
it will be an incredible distraction from challenges at his other ventures. Saudis and pedophiles are going to use it to abduct people. what is he going to do when people/nations go nuts about something on Twitter and take it out on Tesla?
I'm also skeptical of the weird turnabout between 'get me out of this deal at any cost' and rushing to pay up in full. either a side deal with e.g. Saudis or there was something existential about to come out in discovery.
does that mean anything? (especially "mention" seems to carry no predictive value here.) were layoffs mentioned for years and nothing happened? were they put on hold because the ex-CEO wanted Musk to take the blame?
The value isn't in the loudest and most active accounts, but the long tail of expertise that was previously either not widely visible or connected in the way Twitter enabled.
All that will be lost.
but yeah it’s going to sting r badly…
What, specifically, has Twitter done, that has been a negative influence on the culture? If you look at, say, Donald Trump, he was across the internet being divisive in every venue he could get his hands on, from Facebook to Reddit... and outside of the internet too, on Fox News and the like.
If we went back 2 decades and put all of humanity on a bbs or newsgroup instead, you'd have the same outcome.
It's great to see it getting shaken up
Hoping that other people will be destroyed, is pretty dark...