Twitter is collapsing so quickly and in such spectacular fashion that it would probably be better to have some sort of permathread that consolidates the latest updates on Twitter.
At the rate it's going, Twitter may be spared all of the lawsuits coming its way simply by virtue of not existing by the time the lawsuits can come to fruition.
Have to agree. I’m bewildered by the (social) media reaction so far. People, the app still works. Over a thousand employees will continue to work for Twitter.
As far as I understand, Twitter is financially in a terrible state. Huge changes have to happen. Let’s all just wait and see how it will turn out.
Sure, but the "collapse" is terrible management here lol. Terrible, by the metric of his own inconsistent actions. To suddenly reverse the decision of accidentally laying off 80% of your workforce is hilarious.
People aren't saying the app isn't working. If you lay off all of HR will your company still run tomorrow? Of course. Lay off all of engineering will the app still run tomorrow? Of course (most likely lol).
The collapse is the implied result of all these terrible decisions. Terrible decisions which imply terrible leadership. And companies can only survive terrible leadership for so long.
Yes, but as has been brought up multiple times, for how long? Are those that remain the right people to fix hardware or software failures, which are inevitable?
I put in the request to download my data last night -- not because I'm leaving Twitter, but just as a precaution -- and I wonder if it will be fulfilled. I'm sure it's an automated process, but will the systems be running by the time it gets to my request?
Musk himself has said multiple times Twitter might go bankrupt. They were already losing money and it wasn't really a sustainable business when he bought it given economic trends; something had to change.
The particular melodrama aimed at Musk right now is just cope amongst the milieu he is purging from Twitter and/or hurt feelings and ressentiment of the media class over Musks stance on free speech. They want him to fail and will go overboard at every little attempt he makes to change direction of the company.
This is a good take here. It's all performative outrage:
This both entirely misses the point of my own comment and negates your own previous statement. Contrast "it wasn't really a sustainable business" with "Don't really see this 'spectacular collapse'".
Your comments lack both coherence and consistency.
Apparently Hacker news have some kind of anti-flamewar protection that automatically downwheighs threads with a lot of activity. I don't know how it works or if it's true, but I've seen high activity posts drop like a stone in their rating and quickly go from front page to several pages down.
I had the same thought, but as noahtallen pointed out there's been two on the front page in the last 24 hours, including one with over a thousand points.
I'd be interested to hear dang explain how the ranking mechanics are at work in these posts, but I hunch it may simply be because there's not actually much there to engage community interest for very long. The downspiral has been very rapid but it's essentially just been one headline after another. There's only so much speculation to be made about how and why this is happening and only so many jokes to crack about it. And if the discussions are mostly cruft I wouldn't be surprised if they're being downranked.
I look forward to seeing some in depth post-mortems and discussions about them here when the dust has settled, but for now it feels more like we're standing around a bonfire and nodding at one another.
I've always wanted to work for Musk, but never felt like I was skilled enough to work on spaceships or cars... But Twitter? I am thinking about applying, so go ahead and quit.
I suspect the challenges in running a scalable distributed realtime system like Twitter are fairly significant. And while I don't know how much of Twitter's operating expenses are attributable to the efficiency of that platform, if the new CEO wants to keep expenses lower than revenue, they would potentially be very concerned about how to make that platform efficient, which probably has some really interesting systems engineering challenges.
Twitter already changed the world a decade ago, all someone would be doing at this point is maybe helping them not file for bankruptcy. But if someone really wants a job with zero security in this economy they should go for it!
What part would be changing the world? Seems like at the most hes going to eventually do a lap and twitter will end up where it started, just saddled with 900 million dollar a year debt fees. At worst just a place where saying the N word is more acceptable.
Also maybe don't say your employer is a "petulant man child" in Slack or otherwise undermine them and you'll be fine. The idea that an employer should keep people that actively dislike like him or her is insane.
Doesn't mean there is no stock. The stock isn't publicly traded, which makes it harder to sell, but Twitter has a bunch of shareholders (Saudi Prince and Jack Dorsey are known ones) and could give out shares to employees.
Having illiquid shares in a company that has already gone through most of its growth is completely unappealing.
What is the value prop for a talented, high productivity employee to work at Twitter? The management hates its employees, seemingly hated the product, and doesn't even understand the business that he bought.
What's the upside for employees? There's a reason people were hanging up exactly at 5pm as Musk was giving his pitch to try to keep employees from bailing. He's offering a shit sandwich and he's not even good at selling it.
However if you believe in Musk's vision (is there one!?) and he's desperate he might throw stocks around and then a pivot unexpectedly might work out and a IPO might be lucrative ... but I wouldn't bet on it. All I said: stock exists and can be distributed.
Of course, but it's not binary. It's not a choice of people who hate you or love you unquestionably. There's a middle ground between those.
I don't buy into the notion that the chief engineer of SpaceX, which puts rockets in space, and CEO of Tesla, which efficiently produces electric cars, doesn't know how to stay in touch with reality. The evidence is in direct conflict.
i mean, he owns SpaceX, he can put whatever title under his name as he wants to. Elon Musk has an excessive desire to make it look like he is a technical genius and a genius engineer/scientist, but he most likely is technically very competent but his true strengths lie in his long term vision, manic energy, great PR skills and work ethic. He is more akin to Edison than he is to Tesla.
If you are a leading developer on Twitter's Android app and the company's new CEO is making verifiably untrue, denigrating public statements about the architecture of the Android app that make you look incompetent, what do you do? Accept the damage to your professional reputation and roll over? Or "undermine" the CEO by explaining your app does not in fact make >1000 poorly batched RPC calls to render the timeline in front of the community of your peers?
That's the example I'm thinking of, and I would guess that even if that dev fully expected to be terminated for making that correction they viewed it as a price worth paying to spare their professional reputation.
I don't think it's that Musk denigrated your work. It's that Musk claims Twitter has a horribly designed product on the specific thing you specialize in. People then spread this around that Twitter has a horribly designed thing that you specialized in building. Now there's not an off-chance that without anyone actually knowing the source, people in tech just "know" that Twitter has a horribly designed X. You, in charge of X, are now collectively understood on your resume as a horrible designer.
Think of it like this: I cannot name probably more than a handful of Google abandoned projects. But whenever Google announces a new project I'm happy to meme about how it will be inevitably abandoned. It's just something I "know" despite not hunting down some weird statistic of exactly what percentage of Google products to market survive after X years.
Reputation isn't a science. It isn't even that well correlated with truth.
Twitter is a private company now. Not sure if you missed the news that this guy named Elon Musk bought the whole company.
> Also maybe don't say your employer is a "petulant man child" in Slack or otherwise undermine them and you'll be fine. The idea that an employer should keep people that actively dislike like him or her is insane.
I think the issue most people are taking with this is that the same standards aren't being applied. Elon is publicly deriding his employees, and then firing them when they respond in kind.
If you already have no respect for the new boss, calling him a petulant man child to his face and getting 3 months severance isnt the worst thing that could happen.
That is true and supports my statement. If you're chasing technology over people, from whose weaknesses and mistakes could you learn from, apart from your own?
Looks like you're probably going to be working with a lot of entry level people. If you're desperate and ok with eating shit for a year or two, maybe it's a good place to start.
I could see working for an unstable egomaniac if it meant working on something big and meaningful like space travel or green energy or ending ICE cars. But to work on a glorified comment section? Hard pass.
if you look at it as a highly influential media platform with infinitely hard right-brain challenges around every corner ... many would be drawn to that.
I could not agree more. If I were single I could see giving most of my time to SpaceX because I believe in what they're doing and what they want to accomplish. Twitter? omfg no.
Go for it. It's rare to see such a high alpha opportunity. It's like getting in an early stage startup but in this case they already have network effects.
Yea, I have friends who work at SpaceX and seems to be doing just fine. The zeitgeist on HN is basically if you ever do anything challenging, don't even think about it, it is bad for your mental health. You probably should just concede in life, don't work hard, regress into resentment for "rich people" and make sure no one else succeeds.
What kind of a shitty place has this become? Supposed to be "Hacker News". Not a whole lot of hackers here.
It's says something when the greatest living hacker, George Hotz, now wants to work at Twitter. But so many of the readers of "hacker news" can't even imagine why.
There's literally an Ask HN on the front page right now about the most impactful thing readers have built with like 300 comments. Hard to believe that such a thread isn't celebrating hard work and perseverance.
Perhaps people are tired of being told "hard work is its own reward" from people who are extremely rewarded with money and a suspicious lack of hard work.
I think Musk played people who quit this week, he used some trigger words in his email to sus out people who are not committed to the company. And the heard mentality kicked in and more people quit.
If you step back from the trainwreck and look around, the job market is not good anywhere. Some definitely will find fast employment, but > or = quality & remuneration is not a given. For the rest, 3 months may cover on-boarding time, if they strike an offer quickly. This just sucks all the way around. I wonder if EM has a master plan or a brain tumor.
What does "committed" look like to you? The promise of working more for the same or less? What upside is there for folks who "commit"? Besides personal gratification, is it even remotely likely that Twitter will do something at this point to pull untold riches from thin air that would somehow benefit these people? From the sound of it, no.
The engineers (don't care about non-engineers) who quit need to face the fact that were part of "company" which gave negative returns to both public and private investors for almost a decade.
I think "committed" will still be 8 hours/day, like I said he sussed out people who are "triggered" by words or don't love what they do.
Rather he kept people who don't feel like they have other options. Either due to immigration or feel they can't easily find another job or have financial obligation that don't allow the risk.
Most people don't like these sorts of ultimatums, especially those with the most options and flexibility.
Why would an engineer care about that? I see this kind of sentiment expressed here frequently and it's so bizarre. Engineers make products, they don't design them, they don't make the determination that they are marketable or profitable, that is all on the business end of things. Why would an engineer care? Why do people impart an absurd obligation onto twitter engineers?
Do you work at Twitter? Do you have any reason to really believe this?
If significantly more than half of your coworkers left (fired, laid off, quit), it's very reasonable to assume that you now have twice the work to do. Moreover, we've seen in just the last two weeks people sleeping on the floor of the Twitter office(s), working more than 8hr/day, to urgently ship features that Elon personally nixed hours after launching. The language that Elon used repeatedly over the last week is "hardcore", implying that Old Twitter's way of working is "not hardcore"; if you were working 8hr/day before, what does "hardcore" mean beyond that?
> people who are "triggered" by words or don't love what they do
I love what I do, but I'm not about to start working harder without being compensated for that work. If you sign an agreement to work somewhere for a certain amount and the other party demands you work more without more compensation, no amount of "loving what you do" makes that equitable or fair. Loving what you do doesn't mean sacrificing the worth of your craft because someone said to.
Sussing out people who are "triggered" isn't a business move, it's a loyalty test. Loyalty is uncorrelated with skill or motivation. "Loving what you do" is uncorrelated with loyalty. There's a lot of companies out there doing amazing work that are hiring. Twitter isn't somehow special. If you love what you do and have been given an ultimatum by your new boss who has gotten rid of half of your coworkers and wants you to do more work, how is the logical move to _stay_ at the company?
Maintaining services that no one knows anything about, management afraid to let anyone touch anything because no one understands what may break. Everyone griping about the systems they don't know, wanting to re-implement from scratch but not having the time to do so.
Seeing Elon flail about so publicly like this is just hilarious to me.
I feel like we're way off track right now from his original purpose of buying twitter (more free speech or something??? then it was bots then 8$ checkmarks and I can't even keep up anymore)
Those are all fairly related. If you want real free opinions, armies of bots running amok trying to create narratives is bad. And advertisers tend not to like some real opinions(and get weaponized fairly frequently when people see some opinions) so you need to reduce your reliance on them as well. Not that I think that a real free opinion forum would be very interesting, we already have 4chan.
This is what happens when you habitually work hundred plus hour weeks and perhaps get only five hours sleep a night. There's little to no method to his madness at this point.
Is he working though?? It seems to me that he just spends all day on twitter. Not all that different from myself actually, except no one is writing books and stories about me and my mythical 100 hour work weeks.
There is no way a person in his position has any time for focus. CEOs of big companies (especially in case they manage multiple companies!) usually act as firefighters and mainly mentors to top-management. They need to be able to quickly jump between calls, board meetings, press, Q&A, in matter of minutes.
Something very similar is also written in Cal Newport's Deep Work book, where Jack Dorsey's typical day is outlined just as a series of interruptions.
I guess that tweeting between these interactions is not that time-consuming for him, + he actually sleeps at the workplace and is 100% focused on work.
Nah, he is just yet another incompetent person who became rich mostly due this parents. He cultivated an image in f being a genius and it worked for a long while, but with Twitter he showed his true capabilities because he had no one who did the actual work.
There’s an interesting dive into his educational and work background floating around Twitter right now; it sounds like he lied about his college degree and was working in the U.S. illegally for a while as a young adult.
Cocaine addict may be behind long hours for medical doctors: "Fledgling residents had to suffer long, consecutive work shifts, day and night. To Halsted, sleep was a dispensable luxury that detracted from the ability to work and learn. Halsted’s mentality was difficult to argue with, since he himself practiced what he preached, being renowned for a seemingly superhuman ability to stay awake for apparently days on end without any fatigue.
Only after Halsted’s death did a secret come to light that explained
the maniacal structure of his residency program and his ability to forgo sleep. Halsted was a cocaine addict" https://medicaljustice.com/a-century-of-brutal-call-schedule...
It's only 9am and he's already tweeted several times this morning about random nonsense - including a complaint about congress ignoring the FTX fiasco overlaid over an image of two Rhinos having intercourse. Which is another misleading claim as FTX is being actively investigated by DoJ and SEC lol:
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2022/11/17/the-failure-of...
It’s bizarre that his tweeting pattern these days is blatant misinformation (mostly Republican propaganda) interspersed with the occasional “twitter is the best source of news, better than all the fake journalists”.
Anyone like Musk who has enough time to delve into and write posts about Pelosi hammer attack conspiracy theories is spending way too much time on social media.
I wish I could upvote you twice. Totally incompetent fraud. I mean SpaceX was a total stroke of luck. Sometimes you just get the right mixture of methane and oxygen by accident and the rocket just blasts off by itself. And we definitely wouldn't have to go grovel to the Russians had SpaceX not been the only company in US capable of delivering astronauts to ISS.
Same with Tesla and his other previous companies - just an accidental stroke of luck for an incompetent fraud.
Elon enjoys a massive following for his moonshots. And people have dedicated their life to his vision. Outside of it many investors and customers have supported him to be part of his grand vision.
But last week has shown his true colors. He's no visionary. Just your neighborhood slavedriver with mastery in storytelling. At this stage I am willing to use deceptive to describe Elon. On a public square he broke his persona. He's weak and dangerous as far as I am concerned.
From my perspective, something seemed to happen with Musk roughly around 2015 or so. It seems like prior to that time, Musk was really indeed investing in some visionary tech that actually injected a kick in the pants to some industries (electric cars, space). Nothing wrong IMHO with Tesla and SpaceX. I think the super-detractors miss just what an out-of-nowhere big deal the Roadster was.
Since then, though, Musk has focused on a lot of misses that have spectacularly over-promised and/or undelivered. Neuralink seems to be based on over the top futurism and a lot of questionable promises considering current technology state (particularly considering the current overpromise of AI, with self-driving cars still way far out). Same with his Hyperloop concept. The Boring Company has so far been quite unimpressive, cars in a small one lane tunnel is not very innovative and does not seem to bring anything that existing AGT systems cover already. Then there's Twitter, where it seems there was no vision at all, and you half get the impression that he only bought it because he was miffed at the content moderation.
Tesla in particular seems to be a missed opportunity with New Musk at the helm. It seems to me that to get to the next level, Tesla could use some care to iron out the QC issues... they are not known as super reliable cars at this point on certain aspects, but it does not seem like it is insurmountable to bring quality standards up to the top brands. Were I a Tesla investor, my concern would be that Musk's constant distractions with things like Twitter are truly going to hamper the efforts of his primary companies... and looking at the post-Twitter stock price of Tesla, it seems I'm not the only one with such a concern.
How so? If anything, things that he promised had an over-optimistic timeline. He promised a reusable rocket that can land itself - and it did, late, but so far it's the only one that can do so.
> his Hyperloop concept
It's a concept - something he specifically said none of his companies would be implementing.
> current overpromise of AI, with self-driving cars still way far out
I was quite skeptical, however, the current state of self-driving is quite good. The vehicle requires practically no intervention. Still a long way to go, but I am super impressed by how far they've come. Check it out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbYuuu0G9Ko
> Tesla could use some care to iron out the QC issues
I am sure, there is always room for improvement. So far, my wife's 2020 Model 3 has been reliable. No issues as yet.
>From my perspective, something seemed to happen with Musk roughly around 2015 or so.
Maybe he's always been this way but his profile was lower? The first thing that sticks out to me is the the submarine pedo-guy incident of 2018. Somehow he went from an eccentric inventor who I honestly believe was genuinely making a real effort on a longshot solution to "How dare you joke about my submarine!" a few days later. So weird.
I've been eating sooo much popcorn, watching this. No, I am not at all happy for the people directly affected by this, or even for my own enjoyment of the platform, but because seeing what Musk is doing to himself is such a spectacle.
At this point, I'm kinda wondering if Musk's deal to finance the Twitter acquisition included some Brewster's Millions-style clause where he gets to keep the company and the $44B if the company goes bankrupt within 90 days.
This prince ran afoul of the prince you are thinking off and spent some time in a hotel in KSA pondering what is more important: his health or his money. And let history record he was sensibly more concerned with his health.
It's obvious why the despots of Arabia and Russia—both pals with Musk—would prefer if Twitter disappeared. Unlike Mastodon, Twitter is capable of hosting a revolution. Putin and MBS and the rest of them know they can pwn or DoS any distributed, federated piece of crap, and they can't successfully do that to Twitter.
What are you talking about? Iran's revolution is in part unfolding because of Twitter and Saudi Arabia wants nothing more than for that regime to fall.
For anyone not familiar, this movie is worth checking out:
> Monty Brewster is a Minor League Baseball pitcher with the Hackensack Bulls. He and his best friend, Spike Nolan, the Bulls' catcher, are arrested after a post-game bar fight. A man offers to post their bail if they will come to New York City with him. At the Manhattan law office of Granville & Baxter, Brewster is told that his recently deceased great-uncle Rupert Horn, whom he has never met, has left him his entire $300 million fortune but only if he can complete a challenge with several conditions.
> Brewster can choose to receive $1 million upfront or attempt to inherit the whole estate by spending $30 million in 30 days. In the former case, the law firm becomes the executor of the estate, collecting a fee for performing this service and dividing the remainder among several charities. In the latter case, Brewster may not own any assets that are not already his at the end of the 30 days. He must get value for the services of anyone he hires, he may not give it away (except for 5% in gambling losses and 5% to charity) nor may he willfully damage anything bought with the money. Finally, he must keep it secret. If he fails to meet all terms, he forfeits any remaining balance and inherits nothing. Brewster decides to take the $30 million challenge, and Angela Drake, a paralegal from the law firm, is assigned to accompany him and keep track of his spending.
start a charity. donate 5% to it. charities only have to give 20% to do good. (at least in UK)
you end up with 1.2m
easy 200k.
then buy everything through the charity, reclaim the 20% on purchases.
please post improvements if there's easier ways... ;)
Looking this up, there's an older 1945 version of it too... and that's based on a book written in 1902... and there have been a lot of adaptations of it since.
I had a similar thought - perhaps Elon was visited by a time traveler from the future who convinced him that the only way to stave off some impending disaster is for someone to drive Twitter into bankruptcy as quickly as possible, and he heroically offered to ruin his fortune and reputation to save humanity. That's a stupid idea, but it would elegantly explain his recent behavior...
Alternative explanation, things aren't that deep, he's just someone who is almost never held to account because of his wealth. He regularly displays appalling judgement but rarely has to suffer the consequences, which are bourne by those around him or the public at large. But in this particular case, he really stepped in it, and there was a group of people - Twitter employees - able to hold him accountable, and because he thoroughly burned his own bridges and denied himself any avenue of escape, he has to take it on the chin this time.
It isn't a difference in kind from calling a rescue diver a pedophile, or pretending he's going to take Tesla private, or any of the million bad decisions he's made over the years. It's just a difference in outcome.
> That's a stupid idea, but it would elegantly explain his recent behavior...
I think Elon Musk's character as we've publicly known him last few years explains this behavior elegantly and comprehensively enough. As someone else in this thread said, he's a "techno-feudalist", he gives the orders and peasants comply. He's been operating on this mode for a decade now.
Trump highlighted this program in his 2024 announcement yesterday,
We will again have peace through strength. We will protect our people from the unthinkable threat of nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles, the United States must also build a state of the art next generation missile defense shield, we need it, the power of these missiles and the power of a word that I refuse to say, nuclear, we have to have it, we need a defense shield. And we have to do it and we actually have the technology and we're gonna build it. Just as I rebuilt our military, I will get this done.
We will plant our beautiful American flag very soon on the surface of Mars, which I got started. But we need everyone involved. We need everyone's help. We need to look out for one another. We need to be friends. And we need every Patriot on board. Because this is not just a campaign, this is a quest to save our country, talking about saving our country. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
Most Republicans including DeSantis also support the program. I think Elon believed the Senate would go Republican last week and he could be called a kingmaker.
If "most Republicans including DeSantis also support the program," why did Musk supposedly have to spend $44 billion to buy Twitter to influence them? This story makes no sense.
There are other aerospace contractors. Musk spent $44 billion to influence the public, whose consent needs to be manufactured for the train of existing institutions to keep rolling. Enough public discourse happens on Twitter to make it territory worth capturing.
Or a payroll department. Good luck retaining any remaining employees if you can't pay them. And good luck hiring new payroll employees who will want to deal with the inevitable lawsuits in multiple countries about the firings, layoffs, and unpaid severance.
They previously had a team whose sole job was to respond to requests like this. If they no longer exist and the company relies solely on Musk being interested enough to respond, media outlets will never get a response before the article runs. It's bad for Twitter, bad for the article, bad for the readers. Even if it's just PR speak, it's still a response that can be analyzed by the other two parties in the story (the author and the reader).
The primary purpose of communications departments is to coordinate a uniform corporate messaging. Particularly when there's a negative story coming out, the communications department is going to be the one trying to explain away the negativity, and is likely to be more competent at talking its way out of situation than an individual is likely to be (see also the former CEO of FTX, who has more or less been confessing to fraud online in trying to explain his way out of the situation).
Given that a social media company is almost invariably going to be caught in complicated negative stories like "$PLATFORM was found being used to coordinate genocide against Rohingyas in Myanmar" or "$TERRORIST posted manifesto on $PLATFORM before $TERRORIST_EVENT", not having anyone available to officially comment on those kinds of stories is... not a good idea. Even worse would be if you decide to let a shitposter be the point man...
The "media middlemen" still are writing their articles. With a working communications department, you get ahead info on articles (maybe not all details from the article, but a heads up) and a chance to incluence the articles by providing input to the author. Without a communication department article authors rely stronger on other sources.
But they're not, which is why this information is being reported by the media. And the media has questions which Twitter hasn't addressed, and those questions are going unanswered because Twitter no longer employs the people that answer those questions.
Moreover, the "media middlemen" that you're describing are also looking at this from the perspective of the Twitter employees (and former employees). Do you really expect Twitter (the nebulous entity which communicates directly to people, as you imply) to reflect accurately on what their employees have to say? Of course not. If it was up to Twitter, none of this would be reported on and the public would be no wiser. These journalists are reporting information that wouldn't be reported otherwise; they _obviously_ add value beyond being middlemen, because there seems to be nobody to be a middleman _for_.
I haven't met a single defender of Musk that has the slightest inkling of business or tech, and this is a great example.
You want to have random engineers talking to the press through their Twitter accounts? Sounds great! Especially if there's no way to tell who actually even works at Twitter because verification is now purchased for a tiny amount of money, rather than reflecting any sort of trust based verification.
Who is doing the growing when there's no one left to make stuff and/or those that remain don't know how the current stuff works? If he's going to rehire new people, who is going to want to work in an organization where you are deemed essentially the enemy of growth and are easily expendable?
You're assuming that (1) Tesla and SpaceX's missions compare to that of Twitter and (2) the people at those companies like Elon and want to work specifically for him.
Many people working at Tesla and SpaceX view Elon as a distraction to the mission, not an accelerant other than putting the pieces in place for the companies to exist.
If you're a current Twitter employee and you dislike Musk, do no quit. Job market is super-tight and recession is coming like a freight train. So many companies are doing mass layoffs and hiring freezes. You will have hard time finding another job paying similar salary. No matter how hard things get at Twitter, at least you'll be able to pay the rent and pay for your food.
It doesn't matter how good you are, even if you find another job in today's market, you will have to take a haircut.
The people quitting are highly tenured and are n-xers. The job market is tight for the 95th percentile who don't fit in the long tail. They'll all be fine.
The layoffs are so far confined mostly to "big tech" and other high-profile tech companies like Twitter and Stripe.
After the Meta layoff news my linkedin was absolutely flooded by recruiters from smaller-mid size companies and non-tech companies looking for devs. As others have pointed out the laid off twitter employees have a good resume and will have no trouble getting interviews.
Harder thing would be getting same or better pay maybe.
If I was in that situation I would quit. I would take the risk to make him suffer. He's a complete pile of garbage and I'm sick of shitty people who never get punished.
Also he sent a letter that people had to sign about intensive work, if you didn't you get three months severance.
I know of at least one company local to me who is actively trying to recruit ex-twitter staff. They'll be fine. We'll all be alright - we're in for a bit of a bumpy patch, but the industry over-hired, we let too many people hang out on the roof, and we need to redistribute. This is a perfect example of why having many employers of different industries and sizes is better for the ecosystem than having 10 mega employers.
He is ingeniously driving up engagement with Twitter by using Twitter itself. Many people want him to fail, expect him to fail, are willing him to fail. Past evidence of his failures had yet to be found.
I haven't seen any indicators of Twitter failing besides 2FA failures; but every time I read anything on HN, it is doomed to fail. I feel like some of the resentful people here will try to hack into Twitter possibly get caught and see jail time? May be they will do something bad because this kind kind of irrational hate for a billionaire is not normal. Hell, even Peter Thiel doesn't get this vitroil. It reminds me of hate for Bill Gates by far-right nutjobs.
Why do you guys hate Elon with your guts with such an intense passion?
1. Supporting the Republican party who I hate for lying about or supporting people who lied/are lying about election fraud.
2. Linking to an article that claimed Paul Pelosi's attacker was involved in a gay love triangle and it was a lover's quarrel.
3. Pedo guy
4. Making blue check marks paid leading to many parody accounts mimicking companies making offensive tweets. Then when those companies cut advertising claiming without evidence activist groups are conspiring against him.
I switched to Republican party since 2020 election, I wouldn't vote for election deniers [1] but plenty of people are doing the right thing. Rationality and reason seems to have shifted from liberals to conservatives. We can't even say biological facts. Many others are leaving the woke non-sense, I want my damn liberal party back from the 90's that was pro free speech and had a kernel of reason. Not this CCP-like authoritarianism path that we're heading towards.
That said, party preference shouldn't be the reason to hate someone with passion like this. I admire plenty of progressive leaders and conservatives alike.
Regarding 2/3/4, these are not the reasons to pick up pitchforks and hate someone with guts. He has done so many positive things for the world that completely outweight these quibbles.
"Rationality and reason seems to have shifted from liberals to conservatives. We can't even say biological facts. Many others are leaving the woke non-sense,"
Isn't it the Republicans that are still saying homosexuality is a choice? Aren't they the ones aligned with QAnon woke-conspiracies? Aren't they ones that pushed that Obama was born in Africa?
What biological facts do Democrats say you can't say? At worst, Dems maybe bend over too much to be inclusive to those that historically haven't been included.
At this risk of sounding like a "BUT BOTH SIDES" argument - both sides of the major two parties have elements of undesirability. I register as an independent. I vote for representatives that I feel best convey my hope, dreams, and views into the halls of power. Often, those candidates self-identify as liberals. Sometimes, they identify as Republican. Either way, the faster we can get away from having politics be a team sport and have people think for themselves, the better off we'll all be.
I know how crooked some of the Republicans are and some of the conspiracy shit that's going around. But, it's not like Democrats are clean, this is what is cooking in the progressive circles, especially in colleges and academia:
What would be helpful is if you try to, with good faith, head over to r/conservatives and see what the discussion is like. They will welcome progressives and disagreeing views. They'll upvote you. The same cannot be said about the reverse. Conservative opinions here are completely unwelcome, not even downvoted but flagged. Turn on the show-flagged filter on HN and I'd wager atleast half of them are totally legit, not rude and not bigoted. They're just offering a different perspective.
Both sides are equally consumed and spineless. Republicans caved into Trumpism and the liberals caved into woke ideology. Both sides instead of rejecting extremism, adopted it and dug their heels in. We lost truth and rationality in the process. At this time in history, centrist republicans are the most rational.
and...instantly downvoted. Care to please comment below? What do you disagree with what I just said here?
I think that there are fringe elements on both sides. I do think there is a legit difference though in that the mass of the conservatives hold views that are to me far worse.
For example, there might be a fringe of liberals that think that women and men are the same height on average -- or think there are no physical differences. But the VAST majority believe there are differences. But I think a far higher percentage of conservatives think that homosexuality is a choice. That's a very mainstream belief I've seen -- even in my own family.
I think what liberals struggle with, IMO, aligns with my values, even if the positions that arise I disagree with. For example, trans athletes. I think its unfair to women to compete against people who were born men. At the same time, I sympathize with people who really feel like they were born the wrong gender and are doing everything they can to change genders. I don't have a satisfactory solution, but I empathize with the liberal response. The conservative response doesn't even seem to recognize that trans people have any struggle at all.
Centrist Republicans today might be the most rational. But they are even getting run out of the party. I never thought I'd say, "Wow, I miss George Bush".
> For example, trans athletes. I think its unfair to women to compete against people who were born men. At the same time, I sympathize with people who really feel like they were born the wrong gender and are doing everything they can to change genders. I don't have a satisfactory solution, but I empathize with the liberal response. The conservative response doesn't even seem to recognize that trans people have any struggle at all.
There is a more balanced take than the standard conservative and liberal positions: the left-wing feminist response.
With this, trans-identifying people are supported with regards to universal rights, i.e. ones that everyone should have, according to left-wing viewpoints. For example, it should not be permitted for someone to be fired from their job for revealing their transness (or for being otherwise gender non-conforming). Same for access to housing, health care, and other public services, no prejudice must be imposed.
However, they should not be treated as if the opposite sex in law and policy. This is particularly important in areas where we have sex segregation for a good reason. You mentioned athletes, another example is the safeguarding of women in prisons - women's prisons should be female-only, and no males should be incarcerated there, no matter how they identify.
This overall approach helps to protect gender non-conforming people (including trans-identifying), while maintaining sex-based rights, particularly those that protect women.
This reminds me of "mike pence is a hero" you know for not helping trump steal the election
George Bush started a war based on the lie of WMD that resulted in a massive cost of lives and money for the US. Even base level Republicans are horrible
>head over to r/conservatives and see what the discussion is like. They will welcome progressives and disagreeing views
This is absolutely untrue. I generally do not engage in political discussion on hackernews so politics entirely aside, from a reddit content moderation standpoint this is just a falsehood. It is one of the most tightly moderated subreddits on the website and users are banned rapidly and constantly for posting dissenting views or sharing information contradicting the prevailing narrative for any given issue. Anyone who attempts the exercise you suggest will learn that right away. There are certainly subreddits on both sides of the political aisle moderated in that manner but you are just making an absolute fabrication to say /r/conservative is not, and I'm assuming that's why you were downvoted. That and because you bring this falsehood up instead of answering the direct questions the user you're replying to asked you, and it doesn't address their questions at all.
So you're accusing me of making it up? malice? I am just stating what I've experienced for over a year of browsing and participating on r/conservative.
And to add to the accusation, I've found the opposite on Reddit and HN. Stating conservative opinions are not welcomed at all. It's not even slightly off. The situation is completely lop-sided.
Next time you accuse some of "absolute fabrication", consider the best interpretation of their experience.
I'm not accusing you of malice or of intentionally making it up from whole cloth, you could really believe you're seeing a lightly moderated balanced exchange of opinions in that community. But the truth is anyone who does follow that link and attempt to share "progressive and disagreeing views" will quickly discover that is not the case, so your characterization is just wrong. My best interpretation of your experience is just that you are just mistaken in your perception that you see open discussion of progressive and disagreeing views on /r/conservative. Just read the sidebar on the sub:
>a place on Reddit for conservatives, both fiscal and social, to read and discuss political and cultural issues from a distinctly conservative point of view.
And the further explanation linked in the sidebar:
>We are not a debate forum for left wing people. Conservatives can debate one another...We are not a place for explanation. /r/Conservative is for conservatives to discuss and share news with other conservatives
>We are not fair and balanced. We don't pretend to be unbiased. We don't pretend to give all commenters equal time. This is by conservatives and for conservatives.
I think that description contradicts the characterization you made of this community in your earlier reply as "welcoming progressive and disagreeing viewpoints." That's why I think you may just be mistaken about what you see being discussed, because by its own definition that community is not actually exposing you to equitable discussion of progressive or contradictory viewpoints.
I would agree Reddit and HN do skew to the left overall but that's entirely beside the point of whether or not /r/conservative is a community openly welcoming discussion from both sides of the aisle. I agree people can and should reach their own decision but in my opinion the subreddit's sidebar makes its purpose readily apparent and anyone's experience participating in discussion will likely line up to it. And again, this is all really tangential to that commenter's original reply to you, and I'm going to bow out now with the postscript that I would have liked to read your answer to their question.
You're comparing liberal people who vote democrat to republican politicians.
The people who create the laws have the power. What laws they create and their policies is what matters. They are also voted in, meaning people support their views.
Anyone can just say ,"I'm a Democrat and all kittens should be killed" hell, someone could lie to make a particular side look bad. However a person who has support behind them, like a politician, pundits, etc, those people matter and define what represents a political ideology.
For example Biden doesn't support defunding the police nor has that happened I believe anywhere (there might be 1 or 2 exceptions). Republicans, by that I mean politicans, on the other hand have enacted their views into law
What laws have the Democrats pushed or enacted for woke ideology?
"Not this CCP-like authoritarianism path that we're heading towards."
The Republican party is moving us towards Facism.
You are complaining about woke culture but that's something people do. What laws have Democrats proposed that has to do with being "woke". Let me ask that in another way. How does voting for Republicans change woke culture?
The election deniers are being supported by the Republican party,including financially. They could kick them out at anytime. It's a two way relationship, a person has to be a republican and they must accept that person. By allowing people like MGT to be in the party it's a tacit approval of their views
As for free speech , the Republican party had put into law multiple restrictions on freedom of speech in the last four years, give me an example of one law the Democrats created that restricted speech?
> I haven't seen any indicators of Twitter failing besides 2FA failures;
If you ignore everything we are hearing about mass employee exodus and critical teams having no engineers left.
> Why do you guys hate Elon with your guts with such an intense passion?
To put it bluntly, because he is an asshole.
I honestly don’t know how anyone likes him after he called a cave diver who helped save a bunch of children a pedo just because he said that Musks proposed submarine rescue wouldn’t work.
His ego is immense and he lacks the emotional maturity to not lash out at people when he is wrong.
On top of all that he is a billionaire, which is an inherently immoral thing to be IMO.
A good person cannot amass that much wealth and not give away 99% of it to help people who need it.
The whole pie has gotten larger since the industrial revolution and has lifted people out of poverty at an unprecendented rate through Capitalism.
The current zeitgeist in places like HN and in progressive circles is worrying. There was just a recent thread about how India lifted people out of poverty and people were downvoting pro-Capitalist comments even though that's the truth no matter how you twist it.
I am pro capitalism and I don't think that the creation of value by billionaires is immoral.
The immoral part comes after that when they sit on their horde of money, far too much for anyone to spend in 10 lifetimes, while they should be giving it to people and causes that need it.
The only one of the "mainstream", household name billionaires that gets it seems to be MacKenzie Scott.
He hasn't not given it away yet...and since most of it is tied up in illiquid stock (space x, twitter) and liquid stock (tesla) he probably can't do so easily. When you and me are billionaires we might have a different perspective.
This is true, it is not liquid, but some basic googling shows me that he donated $6 billion in stock and sold $10-12 billion so far in 2022.
I commend him for donating $6 billion, that is an objectively good thing, but what the hell is he going to do with $10 billion in cash? He can live a life of lavish luxury with 1% of that.
Their wealth is not sitting in cash and they are not "hording it". They built the company through free enterprise and their wealth is in the very thing that they built from scratch.
This is just elementary misunderstanding of "billionaires".
> His ego is immense and he lacks the emotional maturity to not lash out at people when he is wrong.
> To put it bluntly, because he is an asshole.
A few years ago some data/articles made the rounds showing that most billionaires and high-powered executives are "psychopaths" according to the criteria for "psychopathy".
It isn't necessarily Elon specific but his public outbursts certainly put him in the spotlight, others lay low.
An alternate read on the situation- these strong reactions aren't indications of hatred, they're indications of irritation. Elon Musk, like his friend Kanye West, like the previous POTUS, like Charlie Sheen back in 2011, has become one of those hugely polarizing, hugely attention-seeking celebrity figures. The way he currently injects himself into controversy and actively courts it, the way he actively trolls everyone, the way he tries to steal limelight with initiatives that go nowhere like the Thai cave submarine or Starlink to Ukraine - there isn't really a partisan angle to why this public behavior can seem annoying. Over the last few years, Musk went from a typical technologist CEO to a social media celebrity, and a particularly obnoxious one at that. Even he and Grimes' child has a name that is inscrutable and pretentious, which is something Hollywood celebs are known for. So that's one reason why he elicits such strong responses.
Compare him to some similar cases. Larry Ellison is a cutthroat executive, huge Republican donor, and is known to make abrasive and belligerent public statements. He was even temporarily the richest man in the world (there was a week in the early 2000s where Microsoft's stock dipped, putting Gates at #2). But he doesn't get the irritation that Musk gets because he stays off Twitter. He doesn't try to stick himself and his brand everywhere. Brian Armstrong banned activism at Coinbase and that also attracted backlash, but he's not seen as a hugely toxic figure. That's because that announcement was in the form of a long dry company policy statement, not by declaring himself to be a free speech absolutist or some sort of protector of not being political in the workplace.
So long story short is, beyond Musk's corporate actions and political stances, he has made himself to be a public irritant. People who don't like his actions and stances are going to be extra-aggrieved by it. I think in some ways there is a certain strategy to it, as we've seen since 2015, to use the negative emotions stirred up in social media to bolster one's aims. Musk has embraced the mantle of a universal celebrity, one who can produce infinite amounts of admiration from his devotees... and infinite amounts of annoyance from those who disagree strongly.
It's the tall poppy syndrome. Truth is, all we know about Elon is his public persona and he uses that to talk up his own book. Much like a16z invest in Adam Neumann's latest venture, not because they think it is a good idea but because their investment will get so much publicity that it might give enough momentum to a bad idea and turn it into a good idea. Most forums have become conformist around a specific set of values, whether they are right-leaning or left-leaning. As soon as you present a different opinion you face the wrath of the community. The net-net is that people coalesce around like minded people. This leads to the creation of echo-chambers comprised of people who won't change their mind. Conversations would never get as heated or barbed in person.
> past evidence of his failures have yet to be found
It’s right there on his Wikipedia page, he was fired from the CEO job at x.com and again after it became PayPal.
Not to mention the boring company, hyperloop, that time he called a hero cave diver a pedo for no reason, his relationship with his many children, etc.
Unless your goal was to be unemployed, I think it is.
It's not like he was laid off or the company floundered afterwards, they fired him because they thought he was incompetent and then the company was acquired for $1.5 billion like 1.5 years later.
Of course, he still netted like $175 million or something from his stock so I don't think he cares much that he failed.
Working for one of Elon Musk's companies sounds brutal, but I can understand the appeal of burning hot and bright on something truly innovative. I would feel proud and motivated to work like crazy on something like Starship, but this is Twitter. I suspect Musk's strategy of appealing to people who want to change the world and be on the bleeding edge of technology won't hold up the same way as it did for his other companies.
This is Elon Musk MO. He invents nothing, just repackages and markets - the electric car (the very first kind of car invented over a hundred years ago) and going to space in a rocket? These are his big things and people eat it up. Why?
WeChat succeeds because it caters to a less mature market with a simple integrated product. American network service users have demonstrated repeatedly that they are OK with bundling products but less enthusiastic about bundled services.
WeChat succeeds because it's a state sponsored monopoly. It would not have existed in a free and mature market in any western capitalist style economy.
I just gave 3 examples of products that succeeded brilliantly in a less mature market in western capitalist economies. WeChat might be an anachronism in 15 years just as AOL is today, although it continues to exist as a brand.
Incidentally I just glanced at the AOL website to remind myself how it's doing, and their ad banner offers a service to reduce the amount of paper junk mail you receive by signing up for AOL's managed unsubscription service. Less Information Age and more Irony Age.
He was also offering them a chance to have options in clear growth companies that would make you financially secure after you put some time in. Twitter has no such promise, he is saying it might go into chapter 11, and he added all that debt. Why would you sign on to that, when on the backside you'll have options in a private company riddled with debt and no clear exit or growth path.
I suspect Elon wildly overestimates the attraction of working on Twitter.
For Tesla, it was one of a handful of places in the world where you could work on electric cars. SpaceX was one of what -- maybe 3 places in the world? -- where you really could work on rockets. If either of those inspired you, Tesla and SpaceX are premier employers.
If your interests are building large distributed systems, that has lots of choices.
No such vision exists. “Twitter 2.0” is still vaguely about free speech, somehow making lots of money from verified users, and also WeChat-of-the-West style payments (as if anyone would trust their money to this company).
> as if anyone would trust their money to this company
Of all the problems I see with what's going on, this isn't one of them. Most of the current internet (and beyond that as well) exists solely on the premise that we give away power freely, with no expectations of proportional responsibilities in return.
If Twitter survives and, somehow, flourishes, all it takes for people to forget and sign up is a benefit to them, and blaring you opinions into a bigger void may just be enough already.
Funnily enough that's the one stupid idea he isn't into, SBF tried to get into the twitter buyout on the idea of putting on the block chain and Elon shot it down.
yeah if there's no roadmap or direction then what are they doing differently than before? heh just spending the extra 40hrs twiddling their thumbs in the office in the middle of the night? like what exactly does Musk plan to do with that extra effort? I've said it before, Twitter is a cancer and no one is immune. It certainly got a hold of Musk, I hope it's not his downfall but it's not out of the realm of possibility.
He's a techno-feudalist. The lord doesn't need to explain to his serfs why his demands are required.
Elon's previous companies are populated by true believers (albeit because of a shared vision ie: colonizing Mars) who behave more like serfs when pushed. With Twitter, it's like Elon started governing a democracy and didn't realize that almost everyone (except H1B holders) can just leave and do something else.
And the thing is, if you're increasing the hours I need to work by 1.5 or 2x -- then you better increase my pay. Otherwise, saying you're reducing bloat seems like a lie. If you're reducing bloat then I expect my hours to stay flat -- or heck maybe even go down by reducing internal comms. I'd expect more vacation time and shorter hours!
He wanted to add payments and digital identity and whatnot to the mobile app. Maybe cool if adoption is universal for some reason. Not exactly revolutionizing energy and transportation or colonizing Mars.
It would be interesting to know what portion of Twitter employees are on work visas and can’t easily take the offer to quit.
I’d guess an international company like Twitter had several hundred people on H-1B, L1 and similar visas. After these voluntary layoffs it seems like there might be 2,000 employees left, so at least 10% of them would be on work visas by this napkin math.
i won't link to them, but this is public information, at least for the H1-B. you can find the number for a given company and their respective positions.
Seems the # of employees left is close to or under 1000. About 230 of those are on H1-Bs, I didn't look up others. There's additional information per table entry or you can download the data.
On the other hand, he hasn't stopped giving signals to his best talent that they're going to have a miserable time, and they should just quit. They would have a better time literally anywhere else.
Even if we agree that company is 80% bloated, you probably want the best 20% to stay.
---
In referring to a bunch of employees laid off, he said "I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses. Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere"[1]. About another specific employee he said "A tragic case of adult onset Tourette’s"[2].
Why would talent ever want to work for a CEO who will fire you on the spot for whatever reason, turn around and say this about them publicly (or privately!). If I was still working at twitter, this would make me quit.
I think it's unlikely to just crash, but you're going to see more downtime, more security breaches, less effective moderation and they're probably going to lose revenue. Also, you'll just see more and worse ads. Unclear if they're actually saving more money than they're going to stop earning.
I was thinking the same thing with regards to security. If anyone wanted to attack Twitter, there probably won't come a better time than right now. I suspect there's a ton of disgruntled employees with some leftover access, and I doubt anyone has any idea who is responsible for patching servers and services at the moment.
I very much doubt that. Twitter must have had some bloat, but there's no way that 80% of the workforce was bloat. I'd be extremely surprised if Twitter(as in, the website/app, not the registered legal entity) still exists and works by the end of this year.
I understand why cowards will proclaim both the death of twitter and bitcoin and not back it up with their wallet. However, you are neither thanks for the link.
I mean, it's possible, but the organisation would need to be extremely disfunctional for that to be the case - that's the level of bloat I'd expect out of a government agency not a private corporation. If you have teams where 8 out of 10 people do literally nothing or pretend, it should be obvious.
That's not what the Pareto Principle says, when reasonably applied to the engineering department [or employees in general] at Twitter.
It says that 80% of the results come from 20% of the sources. That's not 8/10 people are doing nothing, but rather 8/10 people are doing things that only contribute to 20% of what makes Twitter Twitter.
On any given team of ten, it's likely that the entire team is in either the 80 or the 20 bucket, by virtue of what they're working on, not by virtue of how hard they're working or how talented they are.
> Derek de Solla Price, a British physicist, historian of science, and information scientist, discovered something about his peers in academia. He noticed that there were always a handful of people who dominated the publications within a subject. Price recognized a pattern which was later named after him.
> What is Price’s Law?
> 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.
They’re getting at two different things: Pareto is getting at whether the work should be done at all; Price is getting at who does the work that gets done. Both are reasonable lenses to consider.
These sorts of massive cuts, coupled with massively decreasing workplace quality, and with removing any chance of financial reward (no more liquidity in shares of the company!!), are going to cause the most talented people to go to greener pastures.
The people who stay will be those with the least options.
Musk has made employment at Twitter hugely risky, with no possibility of reward. Really boneheaded business, completely incompetent cutting off the workforce, honestly. Hard to imagine a worse way of pruning the workforce.
> are going to cause the most talented people to go to greener pastures.
People keep repeating this trope as if Twitter is some paragon of technical excellence and innovation. It is no such thing. It is a popular website with a textbox for user input.
You don't need "talent", you simply need to people who get the job done.
Saying something like this just demonstrates that you have extremely limited technical knowledge, and are willing to say anything to defend Musk.
And defenses like this go a looooong ways towards destructing the myth that Musk had technical acumen, because the only people defending him are those that can't do the work.
John Carmack, "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."
80% imo could so very easily be bloat. Features/services that are underutilized and haemorrhaging money don't need to be upkept, teams dedicated to curating content like twitter headlines and moderating content don't need to be there (at the scale it's currently at). Staffing for hospitality services at Twitter HQ and all the ancillary services that are unnecessary or under-utilized.
As long as the servers are running, people will be able to post 240 chars of content and some rich media images, the Twitter platform is not ground breaking tech
Well ok sure, but then I can't imagine that the cuts Musk has done would accurately get rid of the bloat and not just a random selection of 80% of their employees. If you were one of the 20% of people doing actual work, why the hell would you stay if the only future promise is working longer hours and "being more hardcore"? Frankly I'd only agree to that if I was already doing nothing, because zero multiplied by anything is still zero. If you already are doing your job and the company asks you to work even more than before, then get your severance and go.
There no way in hell that this 80% of workforce was actual bloat.
The problem is he's getting rid of the solid workforce and keeping the bloat. No decent engineer would work 80 hours a week in the office over 40 in the home.
A lot of the teams support advertisers (the actual customer, not the users). They would be either a) keeping conversations such that advertisers want to have their brands next to them b) keeping relationships with advertisers or c) running machine learning to match ads with users.
If your advertisers go away, then a whole lot of the iceberg of complexity underneath the bird app goes away.
A leaner organization could reduce reliance on advertising as payrolls go down, and if traffic increases (as Elon is claiming, who knows if true) than advertisers would pay more for greater exposure. Also FB using AI or target marketing to the extreme for their ads just ended up turning people away from the platform by sterilizing it of any actual content you’d like to see.
That's one thing I fully believe Musk on. Twitter is the hottest news in the industry right now. There's no better place to read about it than Twitter itself. Thing of it is... most of the traffic I've seen is rubberneckers. He can only crash his gigayacht so many times before it's no longer a spectacle.
Advertising is basically their whole business, right? Technically I guess most companies can employ fewer people and do less of their core business but that isn’t a great trajectory to be on…
Elon said "At its heart, Twitter is a software and servers company, so I think this makes sense."
But Twitter is not a software and servers company -- it's a media company. It has more in common with Hulu than Microsoft. The ability to post 240 chars of content is not a business. The users aren't the customers. As you say, the Twitter platform is not ground breaking tech -- that was never where the value was.
> Teams dedicated to curating content like twitter headlines and moderating content don't need to be there
This is where I think you and Elon are wrong. The "content" is the product and the advertisers are the customers. The assumption is that that these teams are not helping bring in advertisers but you and I don't know that. Elon didn't even care to find out because he fundamentally misunderstands the business he's in.
For comparison, Reddit has only 700 employees. How does Reddit handle scale and moderation with only 10% of the number of employees Twitter had in 2021?
By shifting moderation responsibilities to the individual mods on each subreddit. Reddit employees do very little moderation on their own - mostly reviewing entire subreddits once they get reported enough times - and banning them entirely if they are unsavoury enough. They basically outsourced it to volunteers in exchange for a platform to have your community on(interestingly, Discord works in the exact same way - discord employees only review servers once they get bad enough and ban them, general reports go to server mods and only to them)
Reddit effectively farms out moderation to volunteers. It's a lot like feudalism. Subreddit mods put in the labor of the day to day moderation of the sub in exchange for the ability to wield power over the subreddit. When a subreddit is shirking in it's moderation duties, or otherwise doing something the central power doesn't like the subreddit is deleted.
Current SSL cert is valid through 23:59 on Monday, December 12. If there's a big binary even to bet on causing quick failure, this would seem to be it - just inside the testing window. Now... if twitter can't report the outage because twitter is out, does Yes or No pay out?
> Twitter must had some bloat, but there's no way that 80% of the workforce was bloat.
I firmly believe, lets say 80%, of Twitter is bloat. But sacking them like this wont prove anything due to practicalities. You just can't unwind a mess like Musk is doing. If some employees sole productive task in a week is to reset a server that still has to be done and it will take a lot of work to figure out which button to press when the site falls over.
I completely agree. But, stirring the pot like this often encourages the best employees to leave, so there is still considerable risk of his plan not working out.
If the audience is there, advertisers won't leave. Some of the ad pauses right now are mostly performative art. Every ad business is suffering right now with people cutting ad budgets, so pausing Twitter ads as a PR move was free advertising and also covered for the fact that advertisers needed to cut budgets anyhow.
People that claim "brand safety" honestly kind of make me laugh, look at all the World Cup sponsors...don't you think Qatar using slaves (some of which have died) to build the stadiums would be...not safe for your brand to associate with? I would, but they still are advertising, because the audience is massive. I think people dying from something you're helping to fund through advertising is probably worse to be associated with than a tweet saying "own the libs" is 3 pegs down from your ad. Call me crazy.
No they wont. Its corporate virtue signalling. As one example, I remember back in 2020 1000+ vowed to leave Facebook [1], but guess what...they came back.
The sad thing is that people are suckers who actually believe alot of this corporate PR.
How many companies advertise on Tumblr or Digg? They continue to exist but are not seen as the next bastion of advertising. How will they target well when the platform is a cesspool? Sure they'll get impressions but not the clicks. Fewer celebrities will want to hang out on Twitter if anyone can easily impersonate them or if they don't have people at Twitter to give them white glove service.
Why would this happen? From the outside, it seems like Elon is absolutely decimating employee morale. See for example this thread from an engineer who has no beef with Elon and wants to see Twitter succeed, but still took the severance: https://twitter.com/peterclowes/status/1593458225533313025
If you burn everything to the ground and then basically hire a whole new team to work on a whole new app and platform, then your productivity has nowhere to go but up.
Nobody in their right mind would publicly support Elon right now because he's acting like a lunatic and therefore undeserving of support.
Regardless of what you think of Twitter's future prospects, none of these destructive antics make it stronger. Twitter could still be saved, but it could have been saved even easier without all of this pointless and public display of arrogance and incompetence.
At this point, the company was hemorrhaging cash. He had no choice but to stop the bleeding. It is a messy process and time works against you; mistakes will be made.
I’m not convinced, was the determination of what employees to keep and what employees to get rid of sound enough for that? Will quality employees to fill the gaps that exist in the future be willing to sign on with the company after all this? Was the way employees determined whether to leave conducive to keeping the best employees twitter had, or just the ones who didn’t have other good options?
I ultimately feel like Musk went too hardball too fast. Twitter can definitely recover of course, but I think the road to doing so is going to be much longer and harder than it had to be.
Issue that I see that it might be that workforce losses are not uniform. But there might be a few critical teams entirely lost. And what ever they are doing might be mission critical.
Now chance of such teams having fully out is anyone's guess.
Tell me you have never worked in a large enterprise without telling me that you haven't. Elon seems completely out of his depth in handling Twitter. And so does many people endorsing him. For them, Twitter is a glorified website.
Twitter is undoubtedly overstaffed. Their website is a trash fire that fails in spectacular ways to deliver the most basic funcionality inherent in the browser: show some text and some pictures. And it's been this way for years while they are patting themselves on the back for "creating the best PWA app in the world".
However, what Musk is doing is absolutely hillarious, and is a much bigger trash fire that has nothing to do with optimizing the head count, or figuring out how to correctly reduce staffing etc.
Steve Jobs returning to a flailing Apple he is not.
What are you talking about? Twitter’s resiliency program is widely known to be one of the best in the world. They’ve been around so long that they’ve literally had to invent a lot of what we consider basic modern distributed computing from scratch. It will become a trash fire with everyone who maintained these massive systems gone, but don’t imply that they created bad systems, or failed at ‘just displaying text’, because they clearly haven’t.
It's far more likely that Elon consulted Twitter when they were having issues and just didn't take the credit. The distributed work of SpaceX and Tesla is far more important and hardened than what Twitter has achieved.
I would not underestimate the challenges they face operating on the scale they do. I would expect problems in databases, servers, message queues propagate pretty quickly all over the system. Then you need a specific expertise to locate and fix such problems.
I don’t believe workers are this expendable. Something is sure to go wrong at some point and there won’t be a worker with the correct knowledge to fix it. This can happen anywhere within the company. It can be an infrastructure problem (e.g. database failure), a software problem (i.e. a bug that could be fixed in minutes lingers for months), administrative problem, a payroll problem (and you’ll loose even more workers because payroll is flaky), PR problem, legal issue, etc.
With only 20% of your workers, there is no way these problems will be addressed with equal ease.
Many tech companies are over-staffed: R+D pet projects, full time OSS devs, dev rel, etc. Some companies probably have staff who literally do one task like managing webpack config. I disagree with Musk about A LOT, but most companies have opportunities to trim fat before they even touch the core product.
As long as you're willing to accept a company that is not growing in revenue due to new value created, you can build a system entirely dedicated to maintenance of existing features with a small group.
In Twitter's case, however, how long is it until they're sued for child porn (lack of moderation) or get 50 million euro fines for running afoul of Germany's Network Enforcement Act?
I'd consider staff in those areas core to the product. Many of the dozens of projects at https://opensource.twitter.dev/projects/, not so much. Staff whose job revolves around standing at booths at conferences and handing out swag, ditto.
How many of those are active? How many of those were created for the purposes of twitter infrastructure and released as a side effect?
I'm sure that you can stop supporting the open source section. However, how much of their platform team is core to the product? How much is still required?
I'm sure many of those projects are out of date. Either way, they could probably make them all private for their purposes and stop accepting PRs (probably just turn them lose on the greater OSS community for those that still rely on them)
This is the essence of vulture capital LBOs —- load the company with debt, fire everyone that doesn’t contribute directly to the bottom line, cut all perks, close many offices, and then float an IPO to cash out.
For all of the high-minded free speech town square rhetoric from his camp, this looks much more like the game plan from worst PE actors from the 1980s. I guess it’s good there isn’t a pension fund to raid?
You're assuming that someone leaving immediately causes things to break down. A lot of things will take some time to see the effects of people leaving.
Fire your entire payroll department. No one will notice... until the biweekly paychecks don't go out, and now your employees aren't getting paid.
Fire badge security. No one will notice... until you need someone to make a new badge for a new employee.
Fire your IT staff. No one will notice... until the server crashes and no one can reboot it.
Fire your system reliability engineers. No one will notice... until the World Cup is on and you have 10x regular traffic and now the site is crashing under the load.
Fire your lawyers. No one will notice... until you're now being sued for violating all the laws in all the countries for posting child porn (because you previously fired all the content moderators who were preventing that from being posted).
Ignoring Elon for sake of discussion, it would be a big a big boon for my career to work at Twitter.. but when 80% of the staff left? I'd be worried onboarding would be a mess. That i'd be handed several projects that no one knows how they work or what the ramifications are.
Ignoring all the red flags and focusing solely on onboarding sounds like misery.. not sure i'd want to take that job.
> it would be a big a big boon for my career to work at Twitter..
And I'm not even sure it would be a big career boost to join twitter at this point. The way things are going there you'd probably be burned out pretty quickly which would mean a shortish tenure.
Just one brand name on your resume can entirely change the trajectory of your career compensation. I see so many people working as SWEs at these small businesses or even fortune 500 companies. Sure they make 6 figures usually but their compensation is not in the same stratosphere as even entry level big tech SWE since so much of big tech pay is in equity.
Yup, that's where i was thinking. My career is smaller startups and smaller businesses. I make enough, but a bigger name on my resume would help a lot. Especially since i'm not someone who enjoys or expects to do well in the classical interviews.
I think there's actually some risk of too much time at Elon twitter making your resume toxic. It's no secret what kind of environment he's fostering there, and many companies simply don't want to hire the type of person who thrives in that situation, regardless of how technically skilled they are.
The risk is large, but so are the opportunities. I don't do "hardcore" anymore but younger me would be tempted by the challenge of it. Plus, I imagine there would be giant buckets of money to go along with it. A short tenure with a big payout will be worth it to some people.
For any budding Douglas Couplands out there, I think there's going to be at least a few chapters, if not a whole novel's worth of stories in being at Twitter the next six months to a year. (To say nothing of the last month!)
It probably would be an absolute hell-scape as you imagine, but for someone looking to make a name for themselves, it's an incredible opportunity to jump in, carve out a solid niche and then use that leverage to push your career forward. I can understand those who are leaving as that not what they signed on for, but there's a lot of people who would gladly roll the dice for that opportunity, I would've 5 years ago.
This is essentially what happens to a startup that scales rapidly. It goes from fire to fire as it grows, scrambling to deal with each new issue that arises and hiring new people as needed. It's not pretty, but is generally accepted as far more effective than attempting to hire and build way ahead of your immediate needs (the YAGNI principle).
Musk's approach is drastic and will probably include a lot of turbulence as you say, but it's probably also the fastest way to find the minimum number of employees required to run Twitter.
You couldn't use this strategy with any kind of critical service, but ultimately nobody is really hurt that much if things break at Twitter, so there is more latitude to take risks.
I'm not saying I like or agree with Musk's approach, but I see the logic.
That's true but there's some missing attraction that's present in fast-growing startups but not here - there's little room for big stock / options growth (unless Musk provides options at less than the $44b price, or a high all cash comp) and the product is already mature so lots of interesting engineering challenges are already solved (and your challenge will rather be to figure out the existing codebase and how to work with it). There's also less of a promise of lots of fast hiring and moving up the chain as I imagine Twitter wants to remain fairly lean.
Of course there's plusses too including working a large impact product with little bureaucracy and being on a even playing field versus your peers with little institution knowledge.
I guess what I'm trying to say is it's dissimilar to a fast-growing start up in important ways that attract people wanting to work for you.
I think there are plenty of engineers who would find the challenge of running a massive global service with a very small team to be inherently interesting in itself, regardless of the specific tasks involved. Some folks also enjoy high stakes rescue operations--the team that saved healthcare.gov comes to mind as one example.
He fired badge security, deactivated all badges & then asked that guy to come back just so workers could get out of the parking garage which required a badge to do so. You can see the tweet about it. It happened YESTERDAY.
Reminds me of a cleaners strike were after 2 weeks everyone suddenly realised that those invisible men and women do important work.
A corporation is a machine in which even the tiniest cog matters.
I have no doubt Twitter and most companies could be run in maintenance mode with 20% of the current staff. However figuring out which 20% is the tricky part.
Typically I only need 20% of the lights in my house to do what I need, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea for Elon Musk to come into my house and just randomly remove 80% of my lightbulbs.
To successfully pull off such a major change in staffing in such a short window would require knowing the ins and outs of the company extremely well.
5 days is good enough time to find a better mechanic that does a high quality job, for less, and doesn't want to collude with federal agencies [1] about where you can drive and where you cannot: https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...
I bet 20% of their workforce was support + inside sales reps for advertisers.
I'd further guess that 10-20% of their workforce was staying on top of regulations. If twitter works, but does not comply with the FTC consent order and gets fined out of business, that is not a technical failure but still is failure.
Large enterprises, especially those under consent orders, spend a TON of effort in compliance. Given that environment is constantly changing, there is net new work needed in almost a Red Queen effect.
Facebook was fined $5 billion dollars in 2019-ish, that would put most companies out of business. If Twitter doesn't have people actively working to keep up with new privacy directives in every jurisdiction they are in (every country in the world, every region/state in each country has different requirements), they will get hit with fines all day every day.
Highly doubtful. Will it go down immediately? No. Will the bitrot accelerate and things start breaking/deteriorating with no one around to fix them? Yes.
It's hard to argue that Twitter wasn't incredibly overstaffed. Maybe even 80% overstaffed. But ripping 80% of the humans out of the equation basically overnight is not a recipe for a successful transition.
Every well built tech product will continue to “work” indefinitely with a small maintenance crew if no one touches or changes anything. Not changing anything, however, is not exactly what Elon has planned for Twitter. The company will only start to get tested when the current code and deploy freezes are lifted and new features start to ship.
Good thing there's not a peak event like the world cup starting in a few days that will possibly stress test all their services that no longer have any devs owning them.
> Wild prediction: Twitter will continue to work as it did even after that ~80% workforce haircut.
Not only that.
If Elon succeeds that opens a new era in Sillicon Valley. An era where programmers are like steelworkers and coalminers in 1980s. You can raid large tech company (think Google or Apple), make workers redundant, cut costs mercilesly and return value to shareholders.
If George Hotz joins Twitter, as he recently offered [1], you may be right.
I think people may be underestimating Elon's ability to bring in folks from the "secret guild of silicon valley" [2] to help him in this task. Of course, some of the Twitter employees who left are probably already part of it, but George coming on, even temporarily, might help bring in replacements.
I seriously doubt that. The dynamics play out completely different.
Let's look at the admin/security teams. These are the people that literally keep things running. If a significant percentage of people from those teams quit, the others have to immediately pick up the slack (much longer on calls...) the added workload then leads to an avalanche where more and mor epeople quit. And it is always in the most business critical teams where these dynamics play out.
There are many people who could lose half their bodyweight and end up even healthier than they were before. But they won't get there by doing it with an axe.
Twitter certainly had bloat, but separating the fat from the critical healthy connective tissue requires care, which has clearly not been spent here.
In my opinion Elon miscalculated the type of people at Twitter. These aren’t people like the ones in Tesla or SpaceX where there is some sort of idealization of Elon. The number of fan boys he has at Twitter must be super low. None of the Twitter employees signed up to work for him, it’s pretty obvious from the public tweets that most of the staff has posted that they don’t have much respect for him. On top of that, as others have mentioned, Twitter as a product doesn’t comprare to SpaceX and Tesla and just saying “we’re gonna build Twitter 2.0 the bestest thing ever!” Isn’t particularly motivating enough to give up your work-life balance. Elon came in to a place that already has a culture established… and the people that are there that know how much they’re worth don’t really feel the need to put up with his bullying “my way or the high way”. Props to the people at Twitter for sticking to their beliefs. I think Elon also miscalculated the importance of work from home. I assume a lot of the engineers have the “millennial” mentality of “I work not live, I don’t live to work”.
Anecdote time: I have an acquaintance who’s an engineer who works on nuclear power plant technology. They’ve wanted out of their current employer for over a decade now.
Why have they stuck around? Because their current employer is the only one in a several thousand kilometer radius with any use for their expertise, one of only a couple they could work for without leaving the country, and one of only a handful whose primary language of business is one that they speak.
Tesla, SpaceX, and perhaps even the Boring Company have much more in common with that situation than they do with Twitter.
Exactly. I don’t think people realize that a below average software engineer or product manager at Twitter has way better career prospects than a top rocket scientist at SpaceX.
Eh, I'd be willing to wager that a skilled and experienced physicist at SpaceX could probably leave whenever they wanted and go to any other space rocketry company owned and run by an insecure, egotistical, self-centred, human-exploiting, planet-destroying billionaire.
While true, engineers ae SpaceX are much much harder to replace that web devs/engineers at Twitter, which are a dime a dozen. With so many in the Valley cutting jobs, if Twitter needs to hire new engineers, I don't think they'll have issues finding them.
For me it's not so certain; I think that most of the devs/engineers at Meta, Twitter, et. al., might get a bit of cold feet with the biggest tech companies and with Silicon Valley in general.
I think smaller companies and upstarts have a chance to get some great talent that will be strongly considering their living situation and looking for something more stable, but I'm not so sure that Twitter is going to have its pick of the litter for a long time until it demonstrates a stable and mature environment to work in.
I have no doubts some persons will be very nervous and take the opportunity, and I wish them luck. I'm not so sure others will be as eager.
An other component is that if you're working on rockets or EVs you might consider that rewarding in and of itself, and accept lower comp or worse conditions.
Twitter? I'm sure twitter employees were proud of their work and doing things they believed meaningful, but not "halve your effective comp', in a company with all the joy of an abattoir, for a narcissistic egomaniac.
And if you're a rocket engineer, the field is way smaller. That means less competitors, but also less places to work at.
My kids are out of college and working. I'd totally consider going to space-x as a fun-tirement if I had that option, work hard do cool shit, have low downside if I burn out or quit. But twitter, that just isn't as fun as space and explodey bits. Games and Space... that's where I'd take the cool part as compensation.
As I understand it, nobody holds stock anymore, because he took the company private. He bought everybody's shares. So whatever portion of employee's comp was equity, that's now zero. Elsewhere, I saw somebody estimate that to be around half of twitter employees' comp -- I have zero confidence in that estimate, but it doesn't sound unreasonable.
And while they might get a lump sum for whatever equity they held, that's money in the bank and no longer a carrot.
Existing equity was converted to cash at $54.20/share, but will still be paid out on the existing vesting schedule. It's a carrot, insofar as it is promised future money, but it's a decaying carrot.
Edit:
Yes, the proportion of total comp that was equity hit about 50% at L7 (Twitter's Staff). L6 (Twitter's Senior) was usually around 40%.
There's also no clarity on what the upside is "stock like spacex and tesla"... rockets are Long on investing and the future. Twitter isn't even close to on that time horizon. If I was asked to stay to build 2.0 I'd want to know what the plan was and how my equity compensation was going to work in real terms. Especially since months prior I would get equity and could sell it in immediate compensation and now I'm back to an early stage startup.
Even more materially, many of those employees are likely spending over their base on their lifestyle and investments. So say they were making $300k all told and they're now down to $150k base, If they were spending even near the base they've just massively changed their income trajectory even to the point of obvious insolvency. Eg "I can't afford this house anymore". I've talked to some people that are smart on investing and I've talked to others who say they're spending 67% post tax on their "lifestyle" of total comp which is insane to me. Stock moves any which way and you are eating into savings which likely also just dropped.
Anyone in that situation would be out like the rats.
Taking an $80k/year pay cut for a SWEII ($70k stock, $10k bonus - I'm assuming no bonuses for a while) is, well, that's a lot.
With no future stock or the ability to sell it... and there are certainly other places that pay at least as much as Twitter's base alone, there are options out there.
They still have their equity grants that will vest each quarter as they would before. The difference is they are vesting a cash value equal to the price-per-share of when it was bought.
If you happen to be hitting your cliff soon, that is the only case you might be going down to base only.
I think that you are saying that if you had future vests that will turn into shares at the aquisition price ($53/share or somthing). But only your remaining outstanding vests exist.
I have no idea how far out twitter gave shares. Amazon does them to 3 years. So everyone who remains at twitter has some amount of time till they run out of all veests, depending on comp the latter vests may be big or small.
They all still go to base only and my point still stands tho they'd have till near when my final vests were coming up to tell me WTF my comp looked like.
I think the crux of the situation is that Tesla and Twitter are completely different companies. And Elon seems to be going for Twitter based on his learnings at Tesla. Manufacturing a car at scale that requires well defined components, supply chain management and production is so very different from Twitter which is a global platform where anyone can add anything.
The people who worked on SpaceX and Tesla were probably incredibly ideologically aligned with Elon genuinely believing they were changing the world for the better. Its really easy to pitch someone to work long hours when you are making one of the worlds first mass market electric car and honest to god rocket ships.
Meanwhile we are a years into total disenfranchisement with entire concept of social media. The sell just isn't there like his earlier ventures.
An addicted twitter toll with 100m followers starts talking shit about the place you work, purchases a lot of shares, decides to join the board, decides to not join the board, talks more shit, decides to just buy the company, changes his mind and backs out of the deal, talks more shit, changes his mind and buys the company, introduces new features without much thought, releases new features without much thought, turns off new features almost immediately, fires half the staff, complains about advertisers, complains about needing advertising dollars, has an idea to introduce payments and banking, continues to talk shit about his own company, fires people for speaking up, threatens everyone with an ultimatum, and then...
Edit: I don't use twitter but this is what I've been able to parse from HN articles being posted.
Judging by other things discussed on HN that I do understand well, it is likely highly inaccurate picture.
It reminds me of Knoll’s law of media accuracy: “everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true, except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge” and especially The Gell-Mann amnesia effect https://effectiviology.com/knolls-law/#The_Gell-Mann_amnesia...
Hundreds (thousands?) of engineers opting for the severance package despite all the gloomy news about layoffs suggests this negative picture is fairly accurate.
This was just a description of independently observable facts. It even matches the timeline of the events. If anything, it may be missing a few items - it didn't even mention the court case at all.
I have several ex-SpaceX coworkers. All have said, basically, "I want off this rock, Elon has the money to make it affordable, but the biggest threat to that happening is Elon and his ideology. If he doesn't become the first murder in space, I'd be surprised".
On the contrary, I think Elon knows the type of person at Twitter and is getting rid of them as fast as possible, the only bad side being that he doesn't (maybe) realize the harm that will do when the knowledge of the systems walks out the door.
He hasn't had time to know them. He doesn't even know who does what and who's already been fired. It's only been a few weeks. He's only now wanting to "understand the tech stack"!
He might think he knows the employees, based on his prejudices and clichés. Nothing more.
To what future employer? The culling seems almost entirely arbitrary. Are future employers going to see someone with exceptional talent, or a high tolerance for further abuse?
Kinda weird. He spent half a year convincing his followers that everybody at twitter was a lazy liberal who would rather woke than code. From his perspective, now he's "right". Congrats on the win!
Not just that. Elon forgot the basic rule of modern management "Treat your workers with respect". Moreover, Engineers are knowledge workers and need to treated with respect.
What's most amusing to me is Elon takes the advice from Youtubers & Influenceers but won't listen to his own engineers.
I would guess, though I don't know for sure, that having your hero buy your company and then fire a bunch of your friends and valued colleagues seemingly arbitrarily, including entire teams that exist for actual reasons, probably would dampen your opinion of him somewhat.
Like, I like Steve Jobs, he could be a dick sometimes but I think he had the right idea and the right vision overall, but if he came in and bought my employer and then just started firing whole teams and fucking up the product while taking away perks and demanding more work, I would have soured on him pretty fast.
> if [Steve Jobs] came in and bought my employer and then just started firing whole teams and fucking up the product while taking away perks and demanding more work
Isn't that pretty much what Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple as CEO?
"Ultimately, Jobs axed more than 70 percent of Apple’s hardware and software products."
"His product cuts resulted in the layoffs of over 3000 employees"
"Jobs managed to force the resignation of most of Apple’s board members"
Twitter still seems to work as well as ever, so it's too early to claim Musk fucked up the product. And far too early to claim he won't introduce a better product.
> He did do the firing whole teams bit, but not the fucking up the product bit.
He kinda did in that he slashed entire product lines, but Apple was not a single-product company.
Apple was also going very very badly, Amelio had already done a lot of cutting (reduced headcount by a third), and the company was still sinking (because it had nothing to float).
Elon's internal memos read as if Twitter engineers were below his standards. I don't doubt that there are some truths in it, but there are also many great engineers who want to build great stuff, who make progress despite the infighting culture of Twitter, and who have built pretty scalable and autonomous systems in the past years. They may feel dignified by Elon's policies and memos, for good or for bad, and then chose to leave - a net loss for Twitter.
And what's so hardcore about Payroll system? Shouldn't we demand quality instead and I'm not sure if working 80 hours a week would lead to better quality of the system.
What most of us want out of a payroll system is accuracy. I would be deeply alarmed if I found out the payroll department at my employer was putting in 80 hour weeks to get the checks out.
> None of the Twitter employees signed up to work for him, it’s pretty obvious from the public tweets that most of the staff has posted that they don’t have much respect for him.
I do wonder has his idea of how people think about him been skewed by a decade or so of really only working with people who are really into him. Like, this mostly felt absolutely inevitable to me (though I'm surprised how far he pushed it so quickly), but then I never thought much of him.
> I assume a lot of the engineers have the “millennial” mentality of “I work not live, I don’t live to work”.
Not sure what's _particularly_ millennial about that. Hours worked in the US per year now is pretty similar to the period from 1970 to 1990, when there were no millennials working. There was a spike peak between 1990 and the early noughties, but not a huge one; to find big increases you're going back before 1970.
I disagree. I think he exactly calculated the kind of people at twitter, which is why he's trying so hard to get as many of them as possible to quit. He wants to make money off this purchase and to do that he needs to dramatically increase employee productivity, reduce headcounts to bare minimums to keep the current system running and then innovate something more on top of it to really make money. Work life balance people have no place in that kind of plan.
In a situation you have to make choices as to what is important and, I don't think transferring knowledge is as important as everyone thinks in this case. The users don't directly make twitter money so there's no direct losses from downtime, plus advertisers are being scared away so the indirect losses from downtime from not being able to show ads is also minimized at the moment. The biggest cost is tipping the exodus numbers so far that what is left of twitter loses it's network effects to attract new users onces the next version is launched and the exodus is really far from that level right now. So, what's the expected value of a 12-48 hour outage on the small chance that something totally breaks and it takes your team of really smart people that long to figure it out without the knowledge transfer? I would say it's pretty small. On the other hand what is the benefit of using a decent chunk of the remaining six billion in cash in the company to pay off and push out all the people that will work life balance the plan into not working (and the smaller subset of wokes that will actively sabotage it)? I would say pretty high, given what the plan apparently is. There is also a time value to getting this done because the faster they do it the faster it can fade from collective consciousness and the faster things die down enough for Elon to step back from the CEO role, put a kinder, gentler but competent face in that role, rebuild advertiser relationships and make this thing print money.
I know if I was in his position I would be trying to fire more people than I actually think I need to right now just to make sure I don't have to prolong the bad press with later layoffs and to ensure there are roles to fill in three to six months when I get a full handle on the business and know what I actually need. This would accomplish both generating good press and ensure I can fill positions with people aligned with my vision and work ethic.
I don't know if you can compare SpaceX or Tesla to running a CRUD app. Engineering rockets is probably 100x harder than building twitter, but there is something very reassuring when all of the complexity of your product is embodied in a physical object you can touch and see, compared to an information context where you don't even know how many layers of abstractions you are working with.
It depends on how you view the product. The raw engineering of building a rocket is certainly a lot harder than running a "CRUD" app...but it's also pretty reductive to call Twitter that.
Twitter is a huge social network with a huge advertising network intertwined. The problems and challenges with that are very real, very difficult, and they are social problems rather than engineering problems. It seems like Elon overestimated how much his knowledge of building cars and rockets would transfer over to social networks.
Depth vs Breadth. A Tesla is much harder to engineer, but only needs to work for 4-5 people at any given moment. Twitter is a CRUD app, but needs to work for hundreds of millions (billions?) of people.
A Tesla has to work for the driver, passengers, the others on the road, pedestrians, the road itself - these are new problems never encountered before that Elon is tackling head-on. If you consider every person on the world to be connected (if they are physically touching the ground), a Tesla has to literally work for those billions of people.
If the Tesla in LA works fine and runs perfectly, the market will coalesce around that fact and accept it as a major player on the road, giving the pedestrian the necessary confidence they need to be safe around a Tesla.
Again, these are brand new problems that Elon is solving, so they may be hard to parse due to how forward-looking he is.
I think there are a lot of people that would. Are they the people that twitter actually needs? I’m not sure. But there are people that would. Some of them are in this thread.
Just weeks ago these few thousand employees collectively generated $44 billion worth of value for their shareholders, but now suddenly they are all useless and spoiled and don’t deserve a penny. Funny how that works.
Well if you were to diagnose most companies there are probably 30-40 engineers that make the most value, like billions of dollars each. From there it starts dropping off like a long tail in search results. There's value, but a lot less than others. Cutting the long tail may still break huge areas of functionality - but the rest will patch and fix it over time.
Heck there might be a team of 50 that has the sole responsibility to figure out the code/algorithms that puts something on the main page automatically. Instead that can temporarily be a small team of 3 people that rotate news articles or tweets.
We tend to think "each employee generates $44B / 14000" but that's far from the truth.
Following along your theory, do you expect that Twitter will achieve meteoric profit successes once this damage is patched, and that there will be an epic staffing contraction across tech afterwards? If you are correct then Twitter is about to demonstrate to the entire tech market that their staff headcounts are factors of ten beyond what is necessary to achieve equal success, and we should expect a massive course correction in the industry as a result.
>there are probably 30-40 engineers that make the most value, like billions of dollars each. From there it starts dropping off like a long tail in search results. There's value, but a lot less than others. Cutting the long tail may still break huge areas of functionality - but the rest will patch and fix it over time.
If this is true, then have companies like Microsoft, Apple, all just missed the big insight Elon has caught onto first? If the best engineers are generating a few billion in value each and can completely patch up the long tail, then Microsoft ought to be able to cut its staff down to about 200 such engineers, 300 if they want a lot of extra margin. 1.8T / 3bn per high performer. There's over 100k SWEs currently employed there, needless to say that's a big reduction in salary overhead.
I do believe the theory. Most people working are head nodders and fix some widget. It only takes them 10 minutes a week to fix or tweak. The only reason the widget exists is so that the company can claim X feature exists in their portfolio. The fear of firing them is that the feature will eventually break and that person is no longer there. But at some point they'll realize it's super simple and can fix it. - But the fear of cutting endless departments like that is so powerful. Any yes, the top performers don't want to work on widget X even if it's 10 minutes of their day.
Here's the analogy - lots of startups with 50 employees have sold for billions right. Once the company sells the payout potential is OVER which at that point those 30 of those 50 leave (within a year) and are replaced with 1000 people to take over and slowly add new features. Now remember the codebase still exists that has revenue potential that can feed 1000 or more people, but they did it with 50.
So the code is paying for the product, it's just stable and maybe making a little profit per year. That's enough to justify it.
But startups prove all the value is in those 50 people. The other 1000? they're all replaceable but in a union. The union is that idea that ANY headcount reduction is bad press. Why'd you fire Zak, I'm leaving too!
No, alot SW devs (the type that work at FAANG-like companies) are actually spoiled, relative to most other industries of the world. Perhaps, they have gotten so used to is that they don't recognize it. You can absolutely make an argument that the rest of the world's workforce is being abused, but that is speaking from place of privilege and its easy to be a "champion for the worker" from your ivory tower.
> Elon is spoiled though, in thinking he can treat folks as fungible.
That is because they are fungible, though. Twitter is not some paragon of technical excellence and innovation. Its a website.
Well let's imagine that programming was like railroad work. Hammering in railroad spikes, getting called at 3am to prevent a possible collision. But it's not. I can't believe we need someone to define spoiled in this context.
Railroad work is destructive to the human body and the industry is constantly developing new machines and techniques to reduce the amount of human involvement. Why would hammering rail spikes be the yardstick for defining work by the non-spoiled? Should we have some puritan aspiration to that kind of work?
>Hammering in railroad spikes
Today hammering in railroad spikes is typically done by big machines like this one made by Unimog.[0] So do you think the SWEs are generating less value than the people operating the Unimog machines? And/Or that SWE jobs rely on less skill and effort than operating the Unimog machine? Should SWEs unionize like railroad workers so that a leader like Elon couldn't unilaterally declare changes to their working condition requirements and tell them to hit the curb if they disagree?
Are the Unimog operators too lazy and cozy in the machines? Should they be paid less than they would be to hammer the spikes, because hammering the spikes is harder work?
>I can't believe we need someone to define spoiled
Well, we do. I've walked through my attempt to grok your point above, and I can't. So if you can overcome your disbelief and post that definition, it might clarify what you are trying to say.
The benefits and salaries that Twitter employees get are just the free market at work. Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple don't pay big bucks and give huge perks because they're liberal, they do it because it's the only way to retain talented employees.
The take is hypocritical at it's core. Musk himself is an extremely privileged billionaire. Under the same principle that Musk deserves his wealth, Twitter employees deserve every penny of compensation and every hour of time off that they get.
Musk doesn't get that. He's going to utterly fail because the engineers at Twitter have other options. They don't have to work there. They worked there because they were getting competitive benefits and salary. Musk is cutting that just because he doesn't like the rate. Ok, fine, but don't be surprised when your company falls apart and you can't hire anyone as a result.
worst part of this whole thing is how musk's attitude of how work should be done contributes to toxic work culture. rhetoric like "mission driven work", "long hours are the only way to change the world and get ahead", and "my way or the highway" as a successful businessman preys on people's (especially young people's) desire for social status, meaningful work, and money while in reality just enables overwork, underpay, shitty bosses, and every other aspect for a bad workplace
Putting aside how this was handled, Elon is looking at a business which is losing money and doesn't have a clear path to make money, and acting accordingly.
His priority is not to preserve the business - the business is broken as defined by cash flows.
Can it be more 'broken'? Sure. Elon is taking that risk in exchange for increasing the probability (in his opinion) of reinventing Twitter as a sustainable business. That is a risk that each Twitter employee needs to decide if makes sense for their situation.
So this unfortunate in many regards, but I don't think the core of this is materially different in scope than the type of situations which could develop at just about any one of our employer's (albeit it at a much larger scale than most).
I noticed yesterday on one website that was quoting a tweet that it looked all funny, like the service that places a tweet on another site wasn't working.
457 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 359 ms ] threadAnother way to look at it is: Too many are making it.
You do realize you're commenting on a story about Twitter that made it, right?
Which is proof by counterexample that the statement is false.
Yet, I only made mine after clicking at the story in the front page.
At the rate it's going, Twitter may be spared all of the lawsuits coming its way simply by virtue of not existing by the time the lawsuits can come to fruition.
As far as I understand, Twitter is financially in a terrible state. Huge changes have to happen. Let’s all just wait and see how it will turn out.
People aren't saying the app isn't working. If you lay off all of HR will your company still run tomorrow? Of course. Lay off all of engineering will the app still run tomorrow? Of course (most likely lol).
The collapse is the implied result of all these terrible decisions. Terrible decisions which imply terrible leadership. And companies can only survive terrible leadership for so long.
I put in the request to download my data last night -- not because I'm leaving Twitter, but just as a precaution -- and I wonder if it will be fulfilled. I'm sure it's an automated process, but will the systems be running by the time it gets to my request?
<https://how.complexsystems.fail/>
It's also:
- Twitter, the advertising-driven business model, which advertisers are fleeing.
- Twitter, the institutional knowledge, technical and otherwise, which is now fleeing.
- Twitter, a government-regulated (FTC and possibly other consent decrees / orders) enterprise. See for example: <https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/05/...>
- Twitter, the contributors community, now rather noisily debarking for other pastures.
On all these counts, Twitter is in the process of collapsing, and/or approaching a state where such collapse is inevitable.
Pedantic limited-scope literal reading would be a flawed assessment.
The particular melodrama aimed at Musk right now is just cope amongst the milieu he is purging from Twitter and/or hurt feelings and ressentiment of the media class over Musks stance on free speech. They want him to fail and will go overboard at every little attempt he makes to change direction of the company.
This is a good take here. It's all performative outrage:
https://twitter.com/ShantMM/status/1593649293927202816
Your comments lack both coherence and consistency.
A certain cohort of the tech and media industry is in chaos because they fear Musk will get away with it.
That is not a universally accepted assertion, by any stretch.
Again, you're now ignoring my initial response in this thread.
I doubt further engagement will be fruitful for either of us.
Edit, links:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33647882
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33651048
I'd be interested to hear dang explain how the ranking mechanics are at work in these posts, but I hunch it may simply be because there's not actually much there to engage community interest for very long. The downspiral has been very rapid but it's essentially just been one headline after another. There's only so much speculation to be made about how and why this is happening and only so many jokes to crack about it. And if the discussions are mostly cruft I wouldn't be surprised if they're being downranked.
I look forward to seeing some in depth post-mortems and discussions about them here when the dust has settled, but for now it feels more like we're standing around a bonfire and nodding at one another.
It's mostly schadenfreude and naysaying. Which may even be justified, but it kinda makes for dull reading after a short while.
If you want to change the world, are ready to push yourself, work with the most dedicated people, it is.
It’s a place for very few. I would really like to work in one of his company, but I don’t think I have the stamina for it.
Stop drinking the kool-aid.
- Break up the cartel that is mass media + tech giants + democrats
- The control on the narrative determine what people think, how they votes, where the world goes.
- Making this open and transparent will disrupt many entrenched interests.
Huge potential
What get promoted, what get shut down.
It’s clear for most people moderately conservative.
We can agree to disagree. For my part I think we will see massive changes for the better, time will tell either way.
Nah.
1. Work long "hardcore" hours for no increase in pay merely to dig Musk out of the financial hole he put himself in.
2. Clone existing services. Musk's grand ideas for Twitter 2.0 are simply to clone WeChat/TikTok/YouTube/Instagram/OnlyFans.
Yikes.
Maybe for SpaceX.
For Tesla 5 years ago.
For Twitter 10 years ago.
But now "change the world" is only true for SpaceX.
Also maybe don't say your employer is a "petulant man child" in Slack or otherwise undermine them and you'll be fine. The idea that an employer should keep people that actively dislike like him or her is insane.
They're a private company now.
What is the value prop for a talented, high productivity employee to work at Twitter? The management hates its employees, seemingly hated the product, and doesn't even understand the business that he bought.
What's the upside for employees? There's a reason people were hanging up exactly at 5pm as Musk was giving his pitch to try to keep employees from bailing. He's offering a shit sandwich and he's not even good at selling it.
However if you believe in Musk's vision (is there one!?) and he's desperate he might throw stocks around and then a pivot unexpectedly might work out and a IPO might be lucrative ... but I wouldn't bet on it. All I said: stock exists and can be distributed.
There are lots of reason to own stock besides speculative growth. Taking part of profit as dividend is the most obvious reason.
It's not insane. Only keeping people that kiss your ass is how you get echo chambers and lose touch with reality.
I don't buy into the notion that the chief engineer of SpaceX, which puts rockets in space, and CEO of Tesla, which efficiently produces electric cars, doesn't know how to stay in touch with reality. The evidence is in direct conflict.
That's the example I'm thinking of, and I would guess that even if that dev fully expected to be terminated for making that correction they viewed it as a price worth paying to spare their professional reputation.
Think of it like this: I cannot name probably more than a handful of Google abandoned projects. But whenever Google announces a new project I'm happy to meme about how it will be inevitably abandoned. It's just something I "know" despite not hunting down some weird statistic of exactly what percentage of Google products to market survive after X years.
Reputation isn't a science. It isn't even that well correlated with truth.
Also don't factually and politely correct your CEO in a reply on Twitter when he lies.
Twitter is a private company now. Not sure if you missed the news that this guy named Elon Musk bought the whole company.
> Also maybe don't say your employer is a "petulant man child" in Slack or otherwise undermine them and you'll be fine. The idea that an employer should keep people that actively dislike like him or her is insane.
I think the issue most people are taking with this is that the same standards aren't being applied. Elon is publicly deriding his employees, and then firing them when they respond in kind.
One should let go of idols past their teenage years.
Are they still giving equity in the chance that it goes public again someday?
Other than a good salary, where’s the financial upside?
What kind of a shitty place has this become? Supposed to be "Hacker News". Not a whole lot of hackers here.
I can't see this going well on HN if he said the same thing, verbatim, but posted it as an anonymous comment.
I've been searching for last few years, I read HN every day and haven't found anyone pro-hard work and celebrating perseverence.
I think "committed" will still be 8 hours/day, like I said he sussed out people who are "triggered" by words or don't love what they do.
Most people don't like these sorts of ultimatums, especially those with the most options and flexibility.
Do you work at Twitter? Do you have any reason to really believe this?
If significantly more than half of your coworkers left (fired, laid off, quit), it's very reasonable to assume that you now have twice the work to do. Moreover, we've seen in just the last two weeks people sleeping on the floor of the Twitter office(s), working more than 8hr/day, to urgently ship features that Elon personally nixed hours after launching. The language that Elon used repeatedly over the last week is "hardcore", implying that Old Twitter's way of working is "not hardcore"; if you were working 8hr/day before, what does "hardcore" mean beyond that?
> people who are "triggered" by words or don't love what they do
I love what I do, but I'm not about to start working harder without being compensated for that work. If you sign an agreement to work somewhere for a certain amount and the other party demands you work more without more compensation, no amount of "loving what you do" makes that equitable or fair. Loving what you do doesn't mean sacrificing the worth of your craft because someone said to.
Sussing out people who are "triggered" isn't a business move, it's a loyalty test. Loyalty is uncorrelated with skill or motivation. "Loving what you do" is uncorrelated with loyalty. There's a lot of companies out there doing amazing work that are hiring. Twitter isn't somehow special. If you love what you do and have been given an ultimatum by your new boss who has gotten rid of half of your coworkers and wants you to do more work, how is the logical move to _stay_ at the company?
Sounds like a blast.
Something very similar is also written in Cal Newport's Deep Work book, where Jack Dorsey's typical day is outlined just as a series of interruptions.
I guess that tweeting between these interactions is not that time-consuming for him, + he actually sleeps at the workplace and is 100% focused on work.
Edit: actually less vindicated but more happy that I don't have to hear from people how great Elon is any more.
Same with Tesla and his other previous companies - just an accidental stroke of luck for an incompetent fraud.
But last week has shown his true colors. He's no visionary. Just your neighborhood slavedriver with mastery in storytelling. At this stage I am willing to use deceptive to describe Elon. On a public square he broke his persona. He's weak and dangerous as far as I am concerned.
Since then, though, Musk has focused on a lot of misses that have spectacularly over-promised and/or undelivered. Neuralink seems to be based on over the top futurism and a lot of questionable promises considering current technology state (particularly considering the current overpromise of AI, with self-driving cars still way far out). Same with his Hyperloop concept. The Boring Company has so far been quite unimpressive, cars in a small one lane tunnel is not very innovative and does not seem to bring anything that existing AGT systems cover already. Then there's Twitter, where it seems there was no vision at all, and you half get the impression that he only bought it because he was miffed at the content moderation.
Tesla in particular seems to be a missed opportunity with New Musk at the helm. It seems to me that to get to the next level, Tesla could use some care to iron out the QC issues... they are not known as super reliable cars at this point on certain aspects, but it does not seem like it is insurmountable to bring quality standards up to the top brands. Were I a Tesla investor, my concern would be that Musk's constant distractions with things like Twitter are truly going to hamper the efforts of his primary companies... and looking at the post-Twitter stock price of Tesla, it seems I'm not the only one with such a concern.
How so? If anything, things that he promised had an over-optimistic timeline. He promised a reusable rocket that can land itself - and it did, late, but so far it's the only one that can do so.
> his Hyperloop concept
It's a concept - something he specifically said none of his companies would be implementing.
> current overpromise of AI, with self-driving cars still way far out
I was quite skeptical, however, the current state of self-driving is quite good. The vehicle requires practically no intervention. Still a long way to go, but I am super impressed by how far they've come. Check it out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbYuuu0G9Ko
> Tesla could use some care to iron out the QC issues
I am sure, there is always room for improvement. So far, my wife's 2020 Model 3 has been reliable. No issues as yet.
Maybe he's always been this way but his profile was lower? The first thing that sticks out to me is the the submarine pedo-guy incident of 2018. Somehow he went from an eccentric inventor who I honestly believe was genuinely making a real effort on a longshot solution to "How dare you joke about my submarine!" a few days later. So weird.
https://www.arabianbusiness.com/public/images/2014/09/03/alw...
https://www.businessinsider.com/prince-alwaleed-supports-dor...
This prince ran afoul of the prince you are thinking off and spent some time in a hotel in KSA pondering what is more important: his health or his money. And let history record he was sensibly more concerned with his health.
https://peakoil.com/publicpolicy/prince-alwaleed-finally-rel...
> Monty Brewster is a Minor League Baseball pitcher with the Hackensack Bulls. He and his best friend, Spike Nolan, the Bulls' catcher, are arrested after a post-game bar fight. A man offers to post their bail if they will come to New York City with him. At the Manhattan law office of Granville & Baxter, Brewster is told that his recently deceased great-uncle Rupert Horn, whom he has never met, has left him his entire $300 million fortune but only if he can complete a challenge with several conditions.
> Brewster can choose to receive $1 million upfront or attempt to inherit the whole estate by spending $30 million in 30 days. In the former case, the law firm becomes the executor of the estate, collecting a fee for performing this service and dividing the remainder among several charities. In the latter case, Brewster may not own any assets that are not already his at the end of the 30 days. He must get value for the services of anyone he hires, he may not give it away (except for 5% in gambling losses and 5% to charity) nor may he willfully damage anything bought with the money. Finally, he must keep it secret. If he fails to meet all terms, he forfeits any remaining balance and inherits nothing. Brewster decides to take the $30 million challenge, and Angela Drake, a paralegal from the law firm, is assigned to accompany him and keep track of his spending.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster%27s_Millions_(1985_fi...
Richard Pryor stars, along with John Candy playing his best friend.
Have a nice weekend!
please post improvements if there's easier ways... ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster%27s_Millions
Most recently it appears to be a popular theme in China and India.
And that goes back further to the The Million Pound Bank Note by Mark Twain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Pound_Bank_Note
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZahYy6c5_E
It isn't a difference in kind from calling a rescue diver a pedophile, or pretending he's going to take Tesla private, or any of the million bad decisions he's made over the years. It's just a difference in outcome.
I think Elon Musk's character as we've publicly known him last few years explains this behavior elegantly and comprehensively enough. As someone else in this thread said, he's a "techno-feudalist", he gives the orders and peasants comply. He's been operating on this mode for a decade now.
We will again have peace through strength. We will protect our people from the unthinkable threat of nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles, the United States must also build a state of the art next generation missile defense shield, we need it, the power of these missiles and the power of a word that I refuse to say, nuclear, we have to have it, we need a defense shield. And we have to do it and we actually have the technology and we're gonna build it. Just as I rebuilt our military, I will get this done.
We will plant our beautiful American flag very soon on the surface of Mars, which I got started. But we need everyone involved. We need everyone's help. We need to look out for one another. We need to be friends. And we need every Patriot on board. Because this is not just a campaign, this is a quest to save our country, talking about saving our country. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
Most Republicans including DeSantis also support the program. I think Elon believed the Senate would go Republican last week and he could be called a kingmaker.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
Also your intro doesn't match your refs.
You may need to read some background to get a clear picture.
Doesn’t look good.
Given that a social media company is almost invariably going to be caught in complicated negative stories like "$PLATFORM was found being used to coordinate genocide against Rohingyas in Myanmar" or "$TERRORIST posted manifesto on $PLATFORM before $TERRORIST_EVENT", not having anyone available to officially comment on those kinds of stories is... not a good idea. Even worse would be if you decide to let a shitposter be the point man...
But they're not, which is why this information is being reported by the media. And the media has questions which Twitter hasn't addressed, and those questions are going unanswered because Twitter no longer employs the people that answer those questions.
Moreover, the "media middlemen" that you're describing are also looking at this from the perspective of the Twitter employees (and former employees). Do you really expect Twitter (the nebulous entity which communicates directly to people, as you imply) to reflect accurately on what their employees have to say? Of course not. If it was up to Twitter, none of this would be reported on and the public would be no wiser. These journalists are reporting information that wouldn't be reported otherwise; they _obviously_ add value beyond being middlemen, because there seems to be nobody to be a middleman _for_.
Who is Twitter?
I haven't met a single defender of Musk that has the slightest inkling of business or tech, and this is a great example.
You want to have random engineers talking to the press through their Twitter accounts? Sounds great! Especially if there's no way to tell who actually even works at Twitter because verification is now purchased for a tiny amount of money, rather than reflecting any sort of trust based verification.
There will be some hiccups, attacks and slanders pieces in the news.
It will become the place where corruption get exposed if the government don’t manage to close it down.
Quite a show for sure.
Tesla and SpaceX fight for #1 and #2 spot for place to work.
Is changing the auto industry, he is overpassing Nasa with a fraction of the budget. How much proof do you need?
Many people working at Tesla and SpaceX view Elon as a distraction to the mission, not an accelerant other than putting the pieces in place for the companies to exist.
It doesn't matter how good you are, even if you find another job in today's market, you will have to take a haircut.
Harder thing would be getting same or better pay maybe.
Also he sent a letter that people had to sign about intensive work, if you didn't you get three months severance.
Why do you guys hate Elon with your guts with such an intense passion?
2. Linking to an article that claimed Paul Pelosi's attacker was involved in a gay love triangle and it was a lover's quarrel.
3. Pedo guy
4. Making blue check marks paid leading to many parody accounts mimicking companies making offensive tweets. Then when those companies cut advertising claiming without evidence activist groups are conspiring against him.
Etc
I switched to Republican party since 2020 election, I wouldn't vote for election deniers [1] but plenty of people are doing the right thing. Rationality and reason seems to have shifted from liberals to conservatives. We can't even say biological facts. Many others are leaving the woke non-sense, I want my damn liberal party back from the 90's that was pro free speech and had a kernel of reason. Not this CCP-like authoritarianism path that we're heading towards.
That said, party preference shouldn't be the reason to hate someone with passion like this. I admire plenty of progressive leaders and conservatives alike.
Regarding 2/3/4, these are not the reasons to pick up pitchforks and hate someone with guts. He has done so many positive things for the world that completely outweight these quibbles.
[1] That includes democrats:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjnX4IUt_eo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX2Ejqjz6TA
Isn't it the Republicans that are still saying homosexuality is a choice? Aren't they the ones aligned with QAnon woke-conspiracies? Aren't they ones that pushed that Obama was born in Africa?
What biological facts do Democrats say you can't say? At worst, Dems maybe bend over too much to be inclusive to those that historically haven't been included.
I'll just hold my breath for that moment.
<dies>
https://twitter.com/LPofDelaware/status/1583078489430798336
What would be helpful is if you try to, with good faith, head over to r/conservatives and see what the discussion is like. They will welcome progressives and disagreeing views. They'll upvote you. The same cannot be said about the reverse. Conservative opinions here are completely unwelcome, not even downvoted but flagged. Turn on the show-flagged filter on HN and I'd wager atleast half of them are totally legit, not rude and not bigoted. They're just offering a different perspective.
Both sides are equally consumed and spineless. Republicans caved into Trumpism and the liberals caved into woke ideology. Both sides instead of rejecting extremism, adopted it and dug their heels in. We lost truth and rationality in the process. At this time in history, centrist republicans are the most rational.
and...instantly downvoted. Care to please comment below? What do you disagree with what I just said here?
I think that there are fringe elements on both sides. I do think there is a legit difference though in that the mass of the conservatives hold views that are to me far worse.
For example, there might be a fringe of liberals that think that women and men are the same height on average -- or think there are no physical differences. But the VAST majority believe there are differences. But I think a far higher percentage of conservatives think that homosexuality is a choice. That's a very mainstream belief I've seen -- even in my own family.
I think what liberals struggle with, IMO, aligns with my values, even if the positions that arise I disagree with. For example, trans athletes. I think its unfair to women to compete against people who were born men. At the same time, I sympathize with people who really feel like they were born the wrong gender and are doing everything they can to change genders. I don't have a satisfactory solution, but I empathize with the liberal response. The conservative response doesn't even seem to recognize that trans people have any struggle at all.
Centrist Republicans today might be the most rational. But they are even getting run out of the party. I never thought I'd say, "Wow, I miss George Bush".
There is a more balanced take than the standard conservative and liberal positions: the left-wing feminist response.
With this, trans-identifying people are supported with regards to universal rights, i.e. ones that everyone should have, according to left-wing viewpoints. For example, it should not be permitted for someone to be fired from their job for revealing their transness (or for being otherwise gender non-conforming). Same for access to housing, health care, and other public services, no prejudice must be imposed.
However, they should not be treated as if the opposite sex in law and policy. This is particularly important in areas where we have sex segregation for a good reason. You mentioned athletes, another example is the safeguarding of women in prisons - women's prisons should be female-only, and no males should be incarcerated there, no matter how they identify.
This overall approach helps to protect gender non-conforming people (including trans-identifying), while maintaining sex-based rights, particularly those that protect women.
George Bush started a war based on the lie of WMD that resulted in a massive cost of lives and money for the US. Even base level Republicans are horrible
This is absolutely untrue. I generally do not engage in political discussion on hackernews so politics entirely aside, from a reddit content moderation standpoint this is just a falsehood. It is one of the most tightly moderated subreddits on the website and users are banned rapidly and constantly for posting dissenting views or sharing information contradicting the prevailing narrative for any given issue. Anyone who attempts the exercise you suggest will learn that right away. There are certainly subreddits on both sides of the political aisle moderated in that manner but you are just making an absolute fabrication to say /r/conservative is not, and I'm assuming that's why you were downvoted. That and because you bring this falsehood up instead of answering the direct questions the user you're replying to asked you, and it doesn't address their questions at all.
For what it's worth, I didn't downvote you.
So you're accusing me of making it up? malice? I am just stating what I've experienced for over a year of browsing and participating on r/conservative.
Instead of trusting me or you, I'll just leave the link here for people to decide: https://www.reddit.com/r/conservative
And to add to the accusation, I've found the opposite on Reddit and HN. Stating conservative opinions are not welcomed at all. It's not even slightly off. The situation is completely lop-sided.
Next time you accuse some of "absolute fabrication", consider the best interpretation of their experience.
>a place on Reddit for conservatives, both fiscal and social, to read and discuss political and cultural issues from a distinctly conservative point of view.
And the further explanation linked in the sidebar:
>We are not a debate forum for left wing people. Conservatives can debate one another...We are not a place for explanation. /r/Conservative is for conservatives to discuss and share news with other conservatives
>We are not fair and balanced. We don't pretend to be unbiased. We don't pretend to give all commenters equal time. This is by conservatives and for conservatives.
I think that description contradicts the characterization you made of this community in your earlier reply as "welcoming progressive and disagreeing viewpoints." That's why I think you may just be mistaken about what you see being discussed, because by its own definition that community is not actually exposing you to equitable discussion of progressive or contradictory viewpoints.
I would agree Reddit and HN do skew to the left overall but that's entirely beside the point of whether or not /r/conservative is a community openly welcoming discussion from both sides of the aisle. I agree people can and should reach their own decision but in my opinion the subreddit's sidebar makes its purpose readily apparent and anyone's experience participating in discussion will likely line up to it. And again, this is all really tangential to that commenter's original reply to you, and I'm going to bow out now with the postscript that I would have liked to read your answer to their question.
The people who create the laws have the power. What laws they create and their policies is what matters. They are also voted in, meaning people support their views.
Anyone can just say ,"I'm a Democrat and all kittens should be killed" hell, someone could lie to make a particular side look bad. However a person who has support behind them, like a politician, pundits, etc, those people matter and define what represents a political ideology.
For example Biden doesn't support defunding the police nor has that happened I believe anywhere (there might be 1 or 2 exceptions). Republicans, by that I mean politicans, on the other hand have enacted their views into law
What laws have the Democrats pushed or enacted for woke ideology?
The Republican party is moving us towards Facism.
You are complaining about woke culture but that's something people do. What laws have Democrats proposed that has to do with being "woke". Let me ask that in another way. How does voting for Republicans change woke culture?
The election deniers are being supported by the Republican party,including financially. They could kick them out at anytime. It's a two way relationship, a person has to be a republican and they must accept that person. By allowing people like MGT to be in the party it's a tacit approval of their views
As for free speech , the Republican party had put into law multiple restrictions on freedom of speech in the last four years, give me an example of one law the Democrats created that restricted speech?
If you need sources from me let me know
If you ignore everything we are hearing about mass employee exodus and critical teams having no engineers left.
> Why do you guys hate Elon with your guts with such an intense passion?
To put it bluntly, because he is an asshole.
I honestly don’t know how anyone likes him after he called a cave diver who helped save a bunch of children a pedo just because he said that Musks proposed submarine rescue wouldn’t work.
His ego is immense and he lacks the emotional maturity to not lash out at people when he is wrong.
On top of all that he is a billionaire, which is an inherently immoral thing to be IMO.
A good person cannot amass that much wealth and not give away 99% of it to help people who need it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtJwAYJ9B08
The whole pie has gotten larger since the industrial revolution and has lifted people out of poverty at an unprecendented rate through Capitalism.
The current zeitgeist in places like HN and in progressive circles is worrying. There was just a recent thread about how India lifted people out of poverty and people were downvoting pro-Capitalist comments even though that's the truth no matter how you twist it.
The immoral part comes after that when they sit on their horde of money, far too much for anyone to spend in 10 lifetimes, while they should be giving it to people and causes that need it.
The only one of the "mainstream", household name billionaires that gets it seems to be MacKenzie Scott.
I commend him for donating $6 billion, that is an objectively good thing, but what the hell is he going to do with $10 billion in cash? He can live a life of lavish luxury with 1% of that.
This is just elementary misunderstanding of "billionaires".
> To put it bluntly, because he is an asshole.
A few years ago some data/articles made the rounds showing that most billionaires and high-powered executives are "psychopaths" according to the criteria for "psychopathy".
It isn't necessarily Elon specific but his public outbursts certainly put him in the spotlight, others lay low.
Compare him to some similar cases. Larry Ellison is a cutthroat executive, huge Republican donor, and is known to make abrasive and belligerent public statements. He was even temporarily the richest man in the world (there was a week in the early 2000s where Microsoft's stock dipped, putting Gates at #2). But he doesn't get the irritation that Musk gets because he stays off Twitter. He doesn't try to stick himself and his brand everywhere. Brian Armstrong banned activism at Coinbase and that also attracted backlash, but he's not seen as a hugely toxic figure. That's because that announcement was in the form of a long dry company policy statement, not by declaring himself to be a free speech absolutist or some sort of protector of not being political in the workplace.
So long story short is, beyond Musk's corporate actions and political stances, he has made himself to be a public irritant. People who don't like his actions and stances are going to be extra-aggrieved by it. I think in some ways there is a certain strategy to it, as we've seen since 2015, to use the negative emotions stirred up in social media to bolster one's aims. Musk has embraced the mantle of a universal celebrity, one who can produce infinite amounts of admiration from his devotees... and infinite amounts of annoyance from those who disagree strongly.
A pretty good video likening that public style to magician's tricks here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkvvAQxxo_0
It’s right there on his Wikipedia page, he was fired from the CEO job at x.com and again after it became PayPal.
Not to mention the boring company, hyperloop, that time he called a hero cave diver a pedo for no reason, his relationship with his many children, etc.
It's not like he was laid off or the company floundered afterwards, they fired him because they thought he was incompetent and then the company was acquired for $1.5 billion like 1.5 years later.
Of course, he still netted like $175 million or something from his stock so I don't think he cares much that he failed.
If only all failure was so lucrative.
"Stay at Twitter because we're moving to 80 hour work weeks and cancelling Christmas" can't be the argument by itself, right?
It's got to be something like "Stay at Twitter because we're building exciting new project X, but we'll need 80 hour work weeks to pull this off..."
like twitter?
apparently elon's master plan is 2000s-era blogspot citizen journalism?
What's wrong with 2000s-era blogspot citizen journalism.
But doing what happened 20 years ago is hardly "truly innovative"
That's not a terrible idea if he can pull it off and make it profitable even despite the massive debt he loaded Twitter with to purchase it.
WeChat succeeds because it caters to a less mature market with a simple integrated product. American network service users have demonstrated repeatedly that they are OK with bundling products but less enthusiastic about bundled services.
Incidentally I just glanced at the AOL website to remind myself how it's doing, and their ad banner offers a service to reduce the amount of paper junk mail you receive by signing up for AOL's managed unsubscription service. Less Information Age and more Irony Age.
For Tesla, it was one of a handful of places in the world where you could work on electric cars. SpaceX was one of what -- maybe 3 places in the world? -- where you really could work on rockets. If either of those inspired you, Tesla and SpaceX are premier employers.
If your interests are building large distributed systems, that has lots of choices.
Of all the problems I see with what's going on, this isn't one of them. Most of the current internet (and beyond that as well) exists solely on the premise that we give away power freely, with no expectations of proportional responsibilities in return.
If Twitter survives and, somehow, flourishes, all it takes for people to forget and sign up is a benefit to them, and blaring you opinions into a bigger void may just be enough already.
Not sure that even Mr. Musk can fix that.
Not only that, but "... and they'll receive larger compensation and/or share of the company."
The company has no vision, no real captain, nor is it public.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221112000701/https://www.nytim...
Elon's previous companies are populated by true believers (albeit because of a shared vision ie: colonizing Mars) who behave more like serfs when pushed. With Twitter, it's like Elon started governing a democracy and didn't realize that almost everyone (except H1B holders) can just leave and do something else.
I’d guess an international company like Twitter had several hundred people on H-1B, L1 and similar visas. After these voluntary layoffs it seems like there might be 2,000 employees left, so at least 10% of them would be on work visas by this napkin math.
https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...
Even if we agree that company is 80% bloated, you probably want the best 20% to stay.
---
In referring to a bunch of employees laid off, he said "I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses. Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere"[1]. About another specific employee he said "A tragic case of adult onset Tourette’s"[2].
Why would talent ever want to work for a CEO who will fire you on the spot for whatever reason, turn around and say this about them publicly (or privately!). If I was still working at twitter, this would make me quit.
[1]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592569305941807104
[2]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592582828499570688
And no, I don't gamble on events or crypto.
It says that 80% of the results come from 20% of the sources. That's not 8/10 people are doing nothing, but rather 8/10 people are doing things that only contribute to 20% of what makes Twitter Twitter.
On any given team of ten, it's likely that the entire team is in either the 80 or the 20 bucket, by virtue of what they're working on, not by virtue of how hard they're working or how talented they are.
> Derek de Solla Price, a British physicist, historian of science, and information scientist, discovered something about his peers in academia. He noticed that there were always a handful of people who dominated the publications within a subject. Price recognized a pattern which was later named after him.
> What is Price’s Law?
> 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.
https://expressingthegeniuswithin.com/prices-law-and-how-it-...
https://entreresource.com/prices-law/
The people who stay will be those with the least options.
Musk has made employment at Twitter hugely risky, with no possibility of reward. Really boneheaded business, completely incompetent cutting off the workforce, honestly. Hard to imagine a worse way of pruning the workforce.
People keep repeating this trope as if Twitter is some paragon of technical excellence and innovation. It is no such thing. It is a popular website with a textbox for user input.
You don't need "talent", you simply need to people who get the job done.
And defenses like this go a looooong ways towards destructing the myth that Musk had technical acumen, because the only people defending him are those that can't do the work.
John Carmack, "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."
And discounting the scale of Twitter is also quite cartoonish projection.
There no way in hell that this 80% of workforce was actual bloat.
If your advertisers go away, then a whole lot of the iceberg of complexity underneath the bird app goes away.
But Twitter is not a software and servers company -- it's a media company. It has more in common with Hulu than Microsoft. The ability to post 240 chars of content is not a business. The users aren't the customers. As you say, the Twitter platform is not ground breaking tech -- that was never where the value was.
> Teams dedicated to curating content like twitter headlines and moderating content don't need to be there
This is where I think you and Elon are wrong. The "content" is the product and the advertisers are the customers. The assumption is that that these teams are not helping bring in advertisers but you and I don't know that. Elon didn't even care to find out because he fundamentally misunderstands the business he's in.
https://polymarket.com/market/will-twitter-report-any-outage...
I firmly believe, lets say 80%, of Twitter is bloat. But sacking them like this wont prove anything due to practicalities. You just can't unwind a mess like Musk is doing. If some employees sole productive task in a week is to reset a server that still has to be done and it will take a lot of work to figure out which button to press when the site falls over.
People that claim "brand safety" honestly kind of make me laugh, look at all the World Cup sponsors...don't you think Qatar using slaves (some of which have died) to build the stadiums would be...not safe for your brand to associate with? I would, but they still are advertising, because the audience is massive. I think people dying from something you're helping to fund through advertising is probably worse to be associated with than a tweet saying "own the libs" is 3 pegs down from your ad. Call me crazy.
The sad thing is that people are suckers who actually believe alot of this corporate PR.
[1]:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/business/media/facebook-b...
Regardless of what you think of Twitter's future prospects, none of these destructive antics make it stronger. Twitter could still be saved, but it could have been saved even easier without all of this pointless and public display of arrogance and incompetence.
Once he gets to stabilize the cash flow, Twitter can provide a comp model to attract talent. About that, let's just say Geohot would not have worked for Parag, as an example. https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159295542717976576...
I ultimately feel like Musk went too hardball too fast. Twitter can definitely recover of course, but I think the road to doing so is going to be much longer and harder than it had to be.
Now chance of such teams having fully out is anyone's guess.
However, what Musk is doing is absolutely hillarious, and is a much bigger trash fire that has nothing to do with optimizing the head count, or figuring out how to correctly reduce staffing etc.
Steve Jobs returning to a flailing Apple he is not.
With only 20% of your workers, there is no way these problems will be addressed with equal ease.
In Twitter's case, however, how long is it until they're sued for child porn (lack of moderation) or get 50 million euro fines for running afoul of Germany's Network Enforcement Act?
I'm sure that you can stop supporting the open source section. However, how much of their platform team is core to the product? How much is still required?
For all of the high-minded free speech town square rhetoric from his camp, this looks much more like the game plan from worst PE actors from the 1980s. I guess it’s good there isn’t a pension fund to raid?
Fire your entire payroll department. No one will notice... until the biweekly paychecks don't go out, and now your employees aren't getting paid.
Fire badge security. No one will notice... until you need someone to make a new badge for a new employee.
Fire your IT staff. No one will notice... until the server crashes and no one can reboot it.
Fire your system reliability engineers. No one will notice... until the World Cup is on and you have 10x regular traffic and now the site is crashing under the load.
Fire your lawyers. No one will notice... until you're now being sued for violating all the laws in all the countries for posting child porn (because you previously fired all the content moderators who were preventing that from being posted).
Ignoring Elon for sake of discussion, it would be a big a big boon for my career to work at Twitter.. but when 80% of the staff left? I'd be worried onboarding would be a mess. That i'd be handed several projects that no one knows how they work or what the ramifications are.
Ignoring all the red flags and focusing solely on onboarding sounds like misery.. not sure i'd want to take that job.
I imagine many will.. but .. oof.
And I'm not even sure it would be a big career boost to join twitter at this point. The way things are going there you'd probably be burned out pretty quickly which would mean a shortish tenure.
Musk's approach is drastic and will probably include a lot of turbulence as you say, but it's probably also the fastest way to find the minimum number of employees required to run Twitter.
You couldn't use this strategy with any kind of critical service, but ultimately nobody is really hurt that much if things break at Twitter, so there is more latitude to take risks.
I'm not saying I like or agree with Musk's approach, but I see the logic.
Of course there's plusses too including working a large impact product with little bureaucracy and being on a even playing field versus your peers with little institution knowledge.
I guess what I'm trying to say is it's dissimilar to a fast-growing start up in important ways that attract people wanting to work for you.
Reminds me of a cleaners strike were after 2 weeks everyone suddenly realised that those invisible men and women do important work. A corporation is a machine in which even the tiniest cog matters.
I have no doubt Twitter and most companies could be run in maintenance mode with 20% of the current staff. However figuring out which 20% is the tricky part.
Typically I only need 20% of the lights in my house to do what I need, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea for Elon Musk to come into my house and just randomly remove 80% of my lightbulbs.
To successfully pull off such a major change in staffing in such a short window would require knowing the ins and outs of the company extremely well.
I'd further guess that 10-20% of their workforce was staying on top of regulations. If twitter works, but does not comply with the FTC consent order and gets fined out of business, that is not a technical failure but still is failure.
Large enterprises, especially those under consent orders, spend a TON of effort in compliance. Given that environment is constantly changing, there is net new work needed in almost a Red Queen effect.
But, if not, absolutely no harm will come of it. What would be the worst part of losing twitter entirely?
It's hard to argue that Twitter wasn't incredibly overstaffed. Maybe even 80% overstaffed. But ripping 80% of the humans out of the equation basically overnight is not a recipe for a successful transition.
Not only that.
If Elon succeeds that opens a new era in Sillicon Valley. An era where programmers are like steelworkers and coalminers in 1980s. You can raid large tech company (think Google or Apple), make workers redundant, cut costs mercilesly and return value to shareholders.
I think people may be underestimating Elon's ability to bring in folks from the "secret guild of silicon valley" [2] to help him in this task. Of course, some of the Twitter employees who left are probably already part of it, but George coming on, even temporarily, might help bring in replacements.
[1]:https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159339146698169139...
[2]:https://medriscoll.com/2011/08/19/the-guild-of-silicon-valle...
Often done in the game dev world.
Let's look at the admin/security teams. These are the people that literally keep things running. If a significant percentage of people from those teams quit, the others have to immediately pick up the slack (much longer on calls...) the added workload then leads to an avalanche where more and mor epeople quit. And it is always in the most business critical teams where these dynamics play out.
Twitter certainly had bloat, but separating the fat from the critical healthy connective tissue requires care, which has clearly not been spent here.
People are leaving or algorithms are failing to promote tweets.
Anecdote time: I have an acquaintance who’s an engineer who works on nuclear power plant technology. They’ve wanted out of their current employer for over a decade now.
Why have they stuck around? Because their current employer is the only one in a several thousand kilometer radius with any use for their expertise, one of only a couple they could work for without leaving the country, and one of only a handful whose primary language of business is one that they speak.
Tesla, SpaceX, and perhaps even the Boring Company have much more in common with that situation than they do with Twitter.
I think smaller companies and upstarts have a chance to get some great talent that will be strongly considering their living situation and looking for something more stable, but I'm not so sure that Twitter is going to have its pick of the litter for a long time until it demonstrates a stable and mature environment to work in.
I have no doubts some persons will be very nervous and take the opportunity, and I wish them luck. I'm not so sure others will be as eager.
But replacing all of the random but critical bits of knowledge in the heads of the people walking out the door is much harder.
Twitter? I'm sure twitter employees were proud of their work and doing things they believed meaningful, but not "halve your effective comp', in a company with all the joy of an abattoir, for a narcissistic egomaniac.
And if you're a rocket engineer, the field is way smaller. That means less competitors, but also less places to work at.
Software?
And also work double time for the indefinite future. So effective comp is quartered, by my accounting.
And while they might get a lump sum for whatever equity they held, that's money in the bank and no longer a carrot.
Edit:
Yes, the proportion of total comp that was equity hit about 50% at L7 (Twitter's Staff). L6 (Twitter's Senior) was usually around 40%.
Even more materially, many of those employees are likely spending over their base on their lifestyle and investments. So say they were making $300k all told and they're now down to $150k base, If they were spending even near the base they've just massively changed their income trajectory even to the point of obvious insolvency. Eg "I can't afford this house anymore". I've talked to some people that are smart on investing and I've talked to others who say they're spending 67% post tax on their "lifestyle" of total comp which is insane to me. Stock moves any which way and you are eating into savings which likely also just dropped.
Anyone in that situation would be out like the rats.
Taking an $80k/year pay cut for a SWEII ($70k stock, $10k bonus - I'm assuming no bonuses for a while) is, well, that's a lot.
With no future stock or the ability to sell it... and there are certainly other places that pay at least as much as Twitter's base alone, there are options out there.
If you happen to be hitting your cliff soon, that is the only case you might be going down to base only.
I think that you are saying that if you had future vests that will turn into shares at the aquisition price ($53/share or somthing). But only your remaining outstanding vests exist.
I have no idea how far out twitter gave shares. Amazon does them to 3 years. So everyone who remains at twitter has some amount of time till they run out of all veests, depending on comp the latter vests may be big or small.
They all still go to base only and my point still stands tho they'd have till near when my final vests were coming up to tell me WTF my comp looked like.
I think this is largely why he fired everyone. He wants all his employees to be musk sycophants so he pushed everyone else out.
I wonder how many of them are still fanboys.
Meanwhile we are a years into total disenfranchisement with entire concept of social media. The sell just isn't there like his earlier ventures.
Edit: I don't use twitter but this is what I've been able to parse from HN articles being posted.
Judging by other things discussed on HN that I do understand well, it is likely highly inaccurate picture.
It reminds me of Knoll’s law of media accuracy: “everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true, except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge” and especially The Gell-Mann amnesia effect https://effectiviology.com/knolls-law/#The_Gell-Mann_amnesia...
He might think he knows the employees, based on his prejudices and clichés. Nothing more.
The big challenges create big opportunities.
What's most amusing to me is Elon takes the advice from Youtubers & Influenceers but won't listen to his own engineers.
Like, I like Steve Jobs, he could be a dick sometimes but I think he had the right idea and the right vision overall, but if he came in and bought my employer and then just started firing whole teams and fucking up the product while taking away perks and demanding more work, I would have soured on him pretty fast.
Isn't that pretty much what Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple as CEO?
"Ultimately, Jobs axed more than 70 percent of Apple’s hardware and software products."
"His product cuts resulted in the layoffs of over 3000 employees"
"Jobs managed to force the resignation of most of Apple’s board members"
https://www.macworld.com/article/219225/steve-jobss-seven-ke...
I assume, for example that Apple didn't need as many finance people after the cuts, but he didn't manage to make the whole department quit in disgust.
He kinda did in that he slashed entire product lines, but Apple was not a single-product company.
Apple was also going very very badly, Amelio had already done a lot of cutting (reduced headcount by a third), and the company was still sinking (because it had nothing to float).
That's a big difference with what looks to be 75-85% of Twitter's pre-acquisition workforce in total.
And what's so hardcore about Payroll system? Shouldn't we demand quality instead and I'm not sure if working 80 hours a week would lead to better quality of the system.
I do wonder has his idea of how people think about him been skewed by a decade or so of really only working with people who are really into him. Like, this mostly felt absolutely inevitable to me (though I'm surprised how far he pushed it so quickly), but then I never thought much of him.
> I assume a lot of the engineers have the “millennial” mentality of “I work not live, I don’t live to work”.
Not sure what's _particularly_ millennial about that. Hours worked in the US per year now is pretty similar to the period from 1970 to 1990, when there were no millennials working. There was a spike peak between 1990 and the early noughties, but not a huge one; to find big increases you're going back before 1970.
But firing everyone immediately, with no chance to transfer knowledge? Funny!
I know if I was in his position I would be trying to fire more people than I actually think I need to right now just to make sure I don't have to prolong the bad press with later layoffs and to ensure there are roles to fill in three to six months when I get a full handle on the business and know what I actually need. This would accomplish both generating good press and ensure I can fill positions with people aligned with my vision and work ethic.
Twitter is a huge social network with a huge advertising network intertwined. The problems and challenges with that are very real, very difficult, and they are social problems rather than engineering problems. It seems like Elon overestimated how much his knowledge of building cars and rockets would transfer over to social networks.
Again, these are brand new problems that Elon is solving, so they may be hard to parse due to how forward-looking he is.
https://www.newsweek.com/tantrum-twitter-reveals-how-privile...
We're pretty damn spoiled.
Heck there might be a team of 50 that has the sole responsibility to figure out the code/algorithms that puts something on the main page automatically. Instead that can temporarily be a small team of 3 people that rotate news articles or tweets.
We tend to think "each employee generates $44B / 14000" but that's far from the truth.
>there are probably 30-40 engineers that make the most value, like billions of dollars each. From there it starts dropping off like a long tail in search results. There's value, but a lot less than others. Cutting the long tail may still break huge areas of functionality - but the rest will patch and fix it over time.
If this is true, then have companies like Microsoft, Apple, all just missed the big insight Elon has caught onto first? If the best engineers are generating a few billion in value each and can completely patch up the long tail, then Microsoft ought to be able to cut its staff down to about 200 such engineers, 300 if they want a lot of extra margin. 1.8T / 3bn per high performer. There's over 100k SWEs currently employed there, needless to say that's a big reduction in salary overhead.
Here's the analogy - lots of startups with 50 employees have sold for billions right. Once the company sells the payout potential is OVER which at that point those 30 of those 50 leave (within a year) and are replaced with 1000 people to take over and slowly add new features. Now remember the codebase still exists that has revenue potential that can feed 1000 or more people, but they did it with 50.
So the code is paying for the product, it's just stable and maybe making a little profit per year. That's enough to justify it.
But startups prove all the value is in those 50 people. The other 1000? they're all replaceable but in a union. The union is that idea that ANY headcount reduction is bad press. Why'd you fire Zak, I'm leaving too!
rant over
I would say Elon is spoiled though, in thinking he can treat folks as fungible.
No, alot SW devs (the type that work at FAANG-like companies) are actually spoiled, relative to most other industries of the world. Perhaps, they have gotten so used to is that they don't recognize it. You can absolutely make an argument that the rest of the world's workforce is being abused, but that is speaking from place of privilege and its easy to be a "champion for the worker" from your ivory tower.
> Elon is spoiled though, in thinking he can treat folks as fungible.
That is because they are fungible, though. Twitter is not some paragon of technical excellence and innovation. Its a website.
>Hammering in railroad spikes
Today hammering in railroad spikes is typically done by big machines like this one made by Unimog.[0] So do you think the SWEs are generating less value than the people operating the Unimog machines? And/Or that SWE jobs rely on less skill and effort than operating the Unimog machine? Should SWEs unionize like railroad workers so that a leader like Elon couldn't unilaterally declare changes to their working condition requirements and tell them to hit the curb if they disagree?
Are the Unimog operators too lazy and cozy in the machines? Should they be paid less than they would be to hammer the spikes, because hammering the spikes is harder work?
>I can't believe we need someone to define spoiled
Well, we do. I've walked through my attempt to grok your point above, and I can't. So if you can overcome your disbelief and post that definition, it might clarify what you are trying to say.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_fastening_system#/media/F...
The benefits and salaries that Twitter employees get are just the free market at work. Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple don't pay big bucks and give huge perks because they're liberal, they do it because it's the only way to retain talented employees.
The take is hypocritical at it's core. Musk himself is an extremely privileged billionaire. Under the same principle that Musk deserves his wealth, Twitter employees deserve every penny of compensation and every hour of time off that they get.
Musk doesn't get that. He's going to utterly fail because the engineers at Twitter have other options. They don't have to work there. They worked there because they were getting competitive benefits and salary. Musk is cutting that just because he doesn't like the rate. Ok, fine, but don't be surprised when your company falls apart and you can't hire anyone as a result.
No wonder everyone gets burned out and is desperate to retire at 40.
His priority is not to preserve the business - the business is broken as defined by cash flows.
Can it be more 'broken'? Sure. Elon is taking that risk in exchange for increasing the probability (in his opinion) of reinventing Twitter as a sustainable business. That is a risk that each Twitter employee needs to decide if makes sense for their situation.
So this unfortunate in many regards, but I don't think the core of this is materially different in scope than the type of situations which could develop at just about any one of our employer's (albeit it at a much larger scale than most).