The world cup is in two days -- how will Twitter cope with the largest amount of traffic it sees all year? Why fire the majority of employees right before this major event?
I don't know about soccer, but American sports news is hugely tied up with twitter. It's replaced the sports page of the news paper, ESPN, and even sports radio. I imagine it's the same for international football.
Do we have any real evidence of this or just what Elon tweets? Not sarcastic - I've just only seen his tweets saying that I don't believe the things he says.
>In an email for remote Twitter engineers, Elon Musk says he wants to speak to people on video ("only those who cannot physically get to Twitter HQ are excused") but "if possible, I would encourage you to fly to SF to present in person." He'll be at the office until midnight.
This shows how out of touch he is - fly, right now, possibly across the country, just to please me. He has no concept or care of how much that might cost or disrupt someones life.
Could you explain to me who you think is processing reimbursements when AR/AP seems to have all quit? Ditto for company cards--most company cards I've had have fallback personal obligations if the company refuses to pay for a charge. What assurances do any of these people have that they won't be stuck with the check?
A Twitter developer can get a "6-figure job" just about anywhere pretty quickly, and many can get ones that haven't just gutted their total comp by going private. What's the point, exactly?
if i was a remote at twitter i would go just to satisfy my curiosity. It would be one hell of an experience to witness Musk in all his crazy and what the plans are. Back in reality, I think my expectations would be solidly set on jumping ship within 30 days though.
Loyer's and Bankers know that's part of the job depending on where they work. When going over job expectations at all of my jobs traveling with one days' notice was never expected.
I would go the other way and claim the other professions you mentioned must be the coddled ones. How little must they actually have responsibility for in their personal life if they can just fly across country at a moments notice? I can’t do that, I have responsibilities to take care of that are way more important than stroking some guys ego.
I’ve never had a corporate card in my entire career, including Twitter. I’ve been able to book via a company provided travel agency, but I’ve never had the card in my hands.
> I’ve never had a corporate card in my entire career
oh i guess that's what happens when you assume heh. i've always had a corporate card, or for at least the past 15 years. I work in consulting though so it's more common to book flights/hotels and travel individually.
> those who cannot physically get to Twitter HQ are excused
Probably means that if there are no actual flights from where you're to SF and that you couldn't get there in time no matter how much you wanted. Not exactly the same thing...
There is literally no reason to think he means that. That seems more like a deep personal hatred of someone and just trying to find the worst in everything they say or do.
That's how the majority of people would interpret:
"only those who cannot physically get to Twitter HQ are excused"
the key word is "physically".
> That seems more like a deep personal hatred
No need to make strange assumptions. I have no feelings one way or the other. Yet I'm pretty sure that most reasonable people would interpret what Musk said the same way I did.
Its been thrown around a lot on Twitter from recently departed employees and a couple other tech people who have been pretty accurate about Twitter news, but I haven't seen it carried by any major media sites.
I'm tired of working in woke corporations with their fake friendliness, stupid rituals and tons of people doing nothing. You anyway end up wasting time at work so it's not like you can't go to the beach instead but you end up with nothing productive being done.
The only cons is relocation and being an employee, I like my tax setup and quality of life here.
Also, not being free to work remote.
Might have all resigned because they knew the days of them riding the gravy train were over. It's hard to put any meaning to that without knowing more detail.
That would be nice. I know a senior developer that doesn't actually do anything, he had like 2 small CLs this year. But apparently he can't be fired, so he is just there, increasing work load for everyone else.
That's not "doing nothing" it's "doing bureaucracy" and IMHO it's a lot more mentally exhausting than coding.
Imagine if every hour of every work day in your calendar is full of various forms of "planning" meetings. How are you supposed to write code and attend all this nonsense at the same time? You can't.
To be fair it sure feels like doing nothing but employers consider it necessary and a job that only senior people can handle.
I've been in one of these jobs before, and it's certainly exhausting. I'm not necessarily convinced it's useful though. It always seemed like a lot of planning and replanning of work that prevented anything from actually getting done.
Sorry to hear. That is honestly a huge reflection on the company and in my case for every 1 of those devs there are 9 that are incredibly talented and hard working (in my <10 year experience in the CS workforce)
I suspect this is what he's after. For whatever reason he thinks a significant number of Twitter devs did little if anything. Maybe he's even right about that, it's not exactly unheard of in big companies.
But I don't think this is a particularly effective way to root those people out.
It's also possible he's reassigning teams from the ground up, and this is his sorting method.
I'm a senior developer at bit tech and I had 1 small CL this year.
I've spent whole year aligning a team strategy with an overall company strategy, and making sure that rest of the people on my team build is actually fitting into that strategy.
In the past, team spend many years build custom stuff, that always had to be thrown away. Now, work we're doing is a part of a company direction, our expertise influenced it, and as a result we're no longer building throw away things, but also building something that impacts the whole company. I'll be blunt - I've made people on my team 10x more productive as a result.
At bigger companies there's many ways you can be a senior developer. Does it sucks that people need to do stuff like that? Oh yeah, I'd prefer to have 100s of CL this year. But that's often a motion, not progress. As a senior, I'm accountable to make sure we make progress.
It could be a rough test to weed out the non-coders who may try to cheat his call. What matters is a low false-positive rate. Like there may be several hostile employees looking to sneak in for some stories they can sell to the media later.
I thought Microsoft got rid of the architect role? At least it was that way in the mid-2010s when I was there. After Vista/Longhorn there was a definite push to stop all the architecture astronauts and actually build and ship things.
I think you can judge some things. It’s crude but if you give a paragraph of context and a screenshot of a function or something, I think that gives some nonzero amount of information.
Of course you can? It's basically asking to see what you consider your best work.
If you're earning 100k a year and the most important code you show is how you turned a link colour from light blue to blue -- then your $100,000 a year job has now become questionable.
It's hardly losing the plot to ask someone "What have you achieved and what do you think your best work is?"
Lots of development jobs involve doing work that isn't flashy, showy or even cool. Does the lack of flashy, showy cool stuff mean it's of less value? Almost certainly not. There are other reasons why a specific developer may not be "pulling their weight", but a bunch of code excerpts is about the least likely way to discover them.
Totally agree. As distasteful as Elon’s process may be, at the end of the day all of us making boatloads of money should be able to point to our results and deliverables. If an engineer is making $200k and wrote a couple hundred lines of code all year, that’s probably a problem. Certainly, only a relatively few people should have the valid excuse that their work doesn’t involve writing code.
I can show you my results and deliverables all you want, but they're definitely not going to be measured in the number lines on code in a screenshot. Come on, you know this
Totally agree. But I think you would agree that a good engineer (with lots of exceptions for architects, tech lead managers, etc) should be able to look at their git history and find some nice chunks of code besides just adding comments or cleaning up imports/includes.
From screenshots? There's no way that Musk has any ability to judge the quality of a programmer based on "up to 10" screenshots of code entirely divorced from its context, especially since he is not a programmer and has no experience whatsoever with any of Twitter's codebases.
It’s probably more of a filter to see who can’t even come up with 10 examples of work they’ve delivered over the course of a year.
I do a lot of code reviews, and it’s very obvious who on the team barely churns out useful code —- even just from the low density and volume of their code.
run a git blame on any file and you're likely to see a dozen or more people touching it. You would need a large chunk of freshly-written code unmolested by your coworkers. And what's that even going to prove? You're not inventing any novel algorithm. You're going to write whatever code your PM wanted written to support whatever stupid features or A/B test they wanted done. And Elon's going to sit there and judge the worth of that? Based on what metric?
It must be amazing to have such good will that even batshit crazy behavior is rationalized as somehow reasonable. Elon's going off the deep end.
The primary role of leadership is to feed tasks and guidance to skilled people who your organization has selected based on known temperament and skillset.
If you run a software company and don't know you employ who can code you are at titanic slipping beneath the waves status still calling on skilled ship designers.
Running a python script is hard if you're a dev but not a python dev. I got into all varieties of dependency hell on macOS last time I tried to stand up a simple python project I git cloned.
Using git might be hard as well if you hadn't done any actual development in the last 15-20 years. Understanding Twitter's codebase without having worked with it all would be a magnitude or two harder.
Yeah that's wild, so you have like maybe 80-150 lines per shot to prove your worth. What is he looking for, algorithm interview tricks like a quick sort or graph traversal? He's in for a shock when he learns most coding isn't what is done in interviews--I bet most Twitter engineer's best work would look like some ugly tangle of complex syncronization logic to allow highly parallel processing. Fast, efficient code isn't always nice to look at or read.
> What is he looking for, algorithm interview tricks like a quick sort or graph traversal?
This is so obviously not the point of the exercise that it feels like bad faith. I doubt he's firing anyone at this point. Just looking to see how does what and talk with them about their impact. The code examples are just to get the ball rolling. Basically everyone in leadership at twitter is gone, Musk needs to figure out who can be trusted to keep things from collapsing, not who to fire.
But people aren't paid based on the quality of their work, or productivity, but simple supply and demand. We're constantly told this justifies both the high wages of tech and the low wages of, say, Amazon warehouse workers and janitors, on principle. People at Twitter make $100,000 a year because that's what the market value of keeping an ass in that chair is worth.
A lot of Seniors/Staff don't write "code". They're architecting/planning/guiding. If I'm a Senior Staff DevOps engineer who maintains our entire Kube infra, am I gonna show Elon some sweet YAML configs? "Oh here's my Go templating for our org wide Helm charts that isn't really novel but is really important?"
Every organization is different but no, I don't think most of them should be writing code. I wouldn't put any kind of quantifier on it. Software development is not just "writing code". Shipping code from ideation to production is more complicated than layman want to make it out to be, especially at these scales. This dystopian "nobody works" fantasy that some people wish for is simply that, a fantasy. I'm willing to bet most, if not all Twitter developers were above average across the industry and were producing work of value.
No, and this is a core misunderstanding of the profession.
The job of software engineers is to design and implement solutions to business problems with technology. The job of a software engineer is not merely "write code." Writing code will almost certainly be the smallest percentage of a skilled engineer's time. They need to be spending their time thinking and designing.
We're talking about solving extreme scaling problems at extreme scales here, not churning out crud apps at a local freelance studio.
Hacker News Perspective: “I’m a software developer — how dare you ask to see my code! How dare you even imply that developers should be writing code! The best software organizations are the ones where barely a few people (out of thousanda of developers) actually write any code at all.”
You're completely right, maybe a software developer's total contribution to the bottom line can be conveyed with a few snapshots of context-less code. Maybe every complex problem humanity faces today has an equally easy solution. Maybe nuance and being methodical is for chumps.
> maybe a software developer's total contribution to the bottom line can be conveyed with a few snapshots of context-less code.
I've never suggested someone should be fired if they can't produce code snippets. But it's fair to expect people who don't actively code (when they're not managers or have a non-coding title) to have a reason they're not coding. And there are many perfectly great reasons, especially for very senior engineers. But if someone isn't coding and they're not actually doing anything else of particular value... well, they're not valuable engineers.
Code is not the single-and-only decider of an engineer's contributions, but I reject the notion that it can't be a starting filter to evaluate someone's contributions, and the assessment to proceed from there.
I am not misunderstanding the profession. At a small or a large SW company, engineers should —by and large, with some exceptions— be writing code. I don’t care (and never mentioned) how much time the writing of code takes… whether people spend one hour a day typing or 8.
But while engineers obviously have to spend time thinking and designing, it’s the code that does the actual work and embodies the value of the engineer’s plans. I simply fail to see how a software org could exist where only a small minority of engineers are coding. Makes no sense to me, sorry.
Do you actually write software then ? In practice I've found DevOps to mean "sysadmins who know how to write scripts and understand enough development process to be supportive".
I've found it to formalise the realisation that there are a number of developers who are hands on and keep the stuff running in production, and rather than employ another bunch to do this, it might make more sense to just leave the developers to it.
You want your seniors/staff to have engineering experience, but at some level complaining that they don’t code any more is like complaining that the people who design bridges aren’t going out there and laying concrete foundations 400m deep into river beds any more.
If I was forced to take part in this absolutely idiotic exercise I’d be including descriptions of the purpose of the code along with the screenshots/printouts.
“These are the configuration files I maintain. Collectively these control the orchestration of 9,000 of our servers which make up over 80% of our infrastructure” would be be pretty compelling.
Ultimately, while he’s going about it in an insane way that I will not defend one iota, he’s trying to figure out who does what.
It’s one of those things where you have to read between the lines and figure out what the client/exec/boomer actually needs and wants, versus the nonsensical thing they actually asked for.
Your boss who wants his emails printed out every morning may actually just literally want them on paper OR they may actually want a system of triaging and responding to messages that is easy to do with paper but is difficult to achieve with software (and is still, honestly, clunkier than using paper sometimes if we’re being honest)
Or it's just a brute expression of dominance to find out who the subservient employees are.
A hazing ritual to find out who is properly loyal, and who is unwilling to bend the knee.
I don't think he cares too much about the screenshots themselves. I think this is a pretty simple test to see who comes running to the 10th floor and who says: "that's insane, no".
How do you expect a staff engineer in the middle of driving a multi-year project to revamp some large crufty part of the architecture to a better state, something that will pay off in 3-5 years time, be able to take screenshots of their "best work" to prove to Elon Musk they're worth it?
It's a special kind of hell, it manages to be much worse than the hell it is on having to politically push this kind of project to multiple layers of decision-making higher management to get enough buy in because it's a damn expensive project.
In this hypothetical, did the staff engineer do anything besides attend meetings in the last 12 months? Did they write any code, or design docs, or actually contribute anything?
Elon’s a jerk, but this thread seems to be full of people saying “I deliver value even though I can’t actually demonstrate any evidence of it.”
Only at home these days. First fifteen years of my career, as engineer and TL, I wrote a ton of code — every day was for coding, and even late nights and weekends for the extra-fun projects.
Now as a manager and sometimes architect, no code from me but I still review code and spend time stopping bad ideas, getting teams to work together, and all that fun stuff. But I still regard code merged into master, as the ultimate tangible of our work.
No, I completely disagree with the premise here that only a minority of the software organization should actually be expected to deliver code.
As a manager, it’s not in my job description anymore. And when I put on an architect hat, my output is design docs and aligning many different opinions between teams. Also, the senior-most people on my team are no longer coding 100% of their time (they’re designing, reviewing, mentoring) and that’s obviously ok and good.
...But if >50% my team spends every week only mentoring others and attending meetings and writing design docs (as someone else suggested here), I think it would be appropriate to ask what the heck is going on. The idea that for a typical rank-and-file developer (not the TL, manager, architect, etc) that they should be seen as productive software developers without being able to show even a handful of code examples over the course of a year, I’m sorry but I just don’t understand how such a software org would ever actually function.
> only mentoring others and attending meetings and writing design docs (as someone else suggested here)
If you are mentioning a previous comment of mine [1] in this thread I think you're grossly misrepresenting my words. And if so I definitely take offense in that as it's not only uncharitable, it's completely missing the point and reducing a brief expansion based on one of your questions to "only attending meetings and writing design docs", something I've never mentioned in the hypothetical scenario you raised.
I expect my assumptions are wrong because if not I'd definitely say you're not fit to be a leader or architect of anything.
No, that was about someone else who posted that they would not expect even half of software developers, to be actually writing code. I found that statement bizarre.
Like, yeah of course the top engineers find themselves less and less hands-on-keyboard as they turn more to technical leadership roles. But some people seem to be arguing that code isn’t the bread and butter work for majority of developers. Who’s doing the actual work then, is my question for them.
Read more than one word answer you expected to find.
> I wouldn't put any kind of quantifier on it. I'm willing to bet most, if not all Twitter developers were above average across the industry and were producing work of value.
He literally says he doesn't expect most software engineers to be coding. That's outlandish, and his follow-up that thousands of Twitter engineers somehow can still be "producing work or value" without coding is ridiculous.
Yes, of course they did: design docs, RFCs, some PoCs to validate assumptions on small scale, etc. that's all part of a staff engineer job.
Now the question is: does Elon have enough technical expertise (or access to such) to be able to judge if a collection of assorted 10 screenshots without context of some GDoc pages, some shoddy PoC code and comments on RFCs is up to par with his bar of what a Staff Software Engineer title should produce? I highly doubt it.
It's not about showing evidence of work, it's that technical work can differ so much depending on context and constraints that it's impossible to demonstrate its value in such a reductive way, it's simple and clear stupidity to even ask to be demonstrated that way.
I’m actually not defending Elon. A blanket “show me ten git snippets” is dumb. This is a horrible way to start off as new boss. I’m only saying, there’s way too much apologism in this thread for not having tangible work results.
To your point, if I started as new manager for a team and the TL said they mostly wrote RFCs and design docs, my next question would be whether those docs led to an actual implementation (by orher people is ok). IF it turned out they write go-nowhere docs and sit in meetings giving obvious advice all day, then I’ll flag it as a potential problem that needs deeper investigation.
The most important person on my team can probably no longer write idiomatic code for the platform we use at this point, as the platform has moved forward while he's spent the last 6 years mostly working on high level architecture and tying together systems that range from HMI to Automotive to AI...
You could probably fit his committed code for the last 6 months on one page, confuse it for a junior dev's output, and yet firing him would kneecap the team. Other people know individual parts of what he knows, but the value of having one person who knows them all in immeasurable.
I can't imagine a place at Twitter scale didn't have similar individuals.
And the new boss has enough time to throughly review the contributions of every employee in the company? To be fair is the number of engineers left in Twitter falls to double digits this just might become possible...
Right, they must be experts at what Twitter is doing. Industrial, electric, rocket engineering etc. is basically the same as frontend/backend development.
To be fair I can't tell if your post is sarcasm or not.
Why would it be sarcasm? I read somewhere (?) that Elon brought in his eng leads from SpaceX and Tesla to help him sort things out.
At any rate, I think you'd be mistaken to believe that there aren't top-notch software engineers at SpaceX and Tesla. They both have front-end tools, massive backend systems, data pipelines at huge scale, metrics and analysis systems, and so forth.
I doubt this could have a significantly different outcome than just firing people at random (or using some bizarre metrics like lines of code committed). That's probably irrelevant if Musk's goal is to simply drastically cut the number of employees at Twitter one way or the other.
Twitter has like less than 1000 employees. If half are getting this review for 10 minutes each that's 83 hours. A team of 8 that he trusts can do that in a day. No it's not thorough, but it's a start and you can schedule more thorough reviews as needed.
First off, it had a lot more than 1000 employees when this started.
But this thread is missing the forest for the trees: take my coworker for example.
He's become such a pivotal player because he stayed at the company much longer than the average tenure in our industry.
Why did he do that? Well, my hunch is the fact no one sweats him if he needs to pick up his kids from school, he can work from home as needed, he's not expected to work 80 hours a week... all play into that.
So it doesn't really matter if you realize he's valuable, fire half the company and start talking about extreme work hours and he'll rightfully leave.
People like him such experts at the specifics of their jobs that even 30 hours of their work is worth more than 80 hours of some loyal Elon drone who might have all the zeal in the world, but can't magically recreate 6 years worth of being deeply embedded in a company.
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We already saw Twitter employees saying Elon has fired people who fit in this category.
And to add fuel to dumpster fire, those people tend to have stayed due to a bond with the job. Start shaking it up by getting rid of people they build camaraderie with and doubling work hours and they'll leave.
After all, having a resume showing years of executing at a high level in a company like Twitter is a huge boon. Money was raining from the sky until very recently and these people ignored it and stayed put. You can't find people like that easily in our industry.
Or you could just rank everyone by the number lines they committed in the less 6 months and fire the bottom 50%. I would put very little trust in any review process someone who displayed such lack of judgement comes up with.
A more reasonable explanation is that he just wants the employees to self select. (Sane) People who are unwilling to take this process seriously will just leave and only those who'd fit in the environment he's creating would stay.
You accidentally stumbled across what everyone else has been complaining about this entire time... he fired 3,700 people in a couple of weeks!
He was asking them to print our their code and show it to a team of his engineers, that didn't exactly leave time for in-depth discussions about non-code impact.
His entire mantra has been code-is-king and claiming people's non-code work was cruft from over-engineering, so it's not exactly like he'd accept that excuse anyways.
How is that the fault of the developer since in all likelihood a PM dictates what they do. If the PMs don’t prioritize important things and obsess over the shade of blue, fire the PM and give the dev a chance
Presumably this case was covered in the first round of layoffs when they stack ranked engineers by lines of code produced in the last (6 months? 1 year?)
Here's a different take. I was a Staff Engineer at one job. Want to know what my best work one year was? An outsourcing contract I spent a few months negotiating.
Any code I checked (that year anyway) in paled in comparison to the value I added by doing that.
There is a huge back end on Twitter even though the front end looks poorly thought out and over-simplified... The back-end reporting and tracking apparatuses built into that site are probably failing miserably, and pissing off a lot of undisclosed clients.
Elon needs technical architects and technical direction more than just developers if you ask me.
I don't think Twitter will completely fail, but I'm pretty sure it will stumble quite publicly/visibly a lot in the coming weeks.
I think it will have outages/fail whales until stumbling into a new sale or bankruptcy because it's scared off the advertisers.
I don't think the majority opinion on engineers is that it'll crash and then they'll throw in the towel and that's it, but there's plenty of other ultimately fatal outcomes for twitter, and plenty of non-fatal technical issues they can encounter on the way there.
It's not going to stumble into a new sale or bankruptcy anytime soon (next several years).
He'll slash the costs dramatically to adjust for the loss of revenue. He just sold another $4 billion in Tesla stock the other day to most likely cover the expected losses over the next few years. Slash deep enough and you can easily run Twitter on a few hundred million dollar loss per year. He probably thinks he can get it to break-even following this approach over the next few years and go from there.
Facebook was profitable at under $1b in sales with a larger userbase size 12 years ago. Why can't Twitter get there today? Twitter was unprofitable with $5.2b in sales, it was an exceptionally bloated corporation.
im not supporting the move, but i do think this is why its important to have a personal portfolio; of things you do yourself, have done for other jobs, and that you have kludged together independently for the benefit of the company, but were not yet received.
use the opportunity to prove how undervalued you were, and how essential you will be to restructuring.
I don’t want to see this movie. So far, it’s an entitled and mentally-ill man-child learning that all the praise he’s gotten in recent years is for other people’s work, and he’s not a domain expert on every type of technology.
I think we all deal with enough of that on a small scale to be sick of it.
> I just hope whoever processes severance checks is still working.
In the dotcom era, I was in the middle of a mass layoff. At the meeting, "everybody go back to your desk and dial extension 1234, and you will get a message with your employment status, instructions and next steps".
PBX crashed.
PBX took a while being brought back up because, well, the people responsible for supporting it wanted to find out whether _they_ were some of those laid off before deciding whether they wanted to bring it back up.
Even if this is eyewash to flush out leakers... why spend the time doing this as the owner of the company? There seems to be a lot more important work they could be tackling on instead of being a meme lord to a bunch of 14 year olds.
Currently some big portion of the company (maybe a third?) have decided to quit but haven’t been terminated yet, and are still receiving these all-company emails. They are not afraid of being fired by Elon.
They save all the "stuff that requires physical activity" to when he visits, some of it for show, and actually are doing the real work when he's not there. It's hilarious to think that what you can see from the fence line, constitutes an assessment of what work is being done
I'm not voting because I think it's true or untrue (although I do think it's untrue) I'm downvoting because it's an extraordinary claim offered with absolutely zero evidence, and I've watched the entire Western world practically collapse from offering credence to this behavior over the past decade.
Isn't that true of most CEOs though? When a CEO comes around, you have nothing to gain and your entire employment to lose.
Edit: The point is not that we all reside in toxic workplaces. The point is that there is no upside to interacting with a CEO. A parallel situation might be giving a loaded pistol with a child. In that case, the upside is that they now have one thousand and one chew toys instead of one thousand. The downside is that they can kill themselves accidentally. Outside of a few specific people in a company, a CEO most likely can't make anyone's life better. However, if, for example, you're coding and a pornographic ad appears in Firefox on your second monitor, then your employment isn't likely to continue much longer.
I've never felt that way at the 3 tech companies I've worked at.
More to the contrary, I'd want the CEO or CTO to know me, who i am, and what I've done.
How large are the companies approximately? I've worked for small to large. The visibility was possible on the smaller companies, the larger was increasingly difficult (oceans of smaller teams). I haven't worked at a company where I've feared the CEO.
Those tech companies must have been small. Don’t get me wrong. I spent most of my career at small companies. But, currently, my CEO is 7 levels above me in the hierarchy and I’m one of 1.6+ million employees.
I've worked for a top 50 company by market cap and the CEO and other execs we're pleasant people. Well one or two of the execs were assholes but not the 'ill get you fired' assholes.
At my last exit interview, my CEO was asking me how he could improve his understanding of the engineering team. I threw out the idea that he could meet with people for 15 minutes on a rotation. He explained that he couldn't do that without terrifying people.
Just because people are scared of the CEO doesn't mean most CEOs weaponize this into a tool of micromanagement.
It's a learned helplessness response. I've been burned by enough "yes man" management that I've given up trying to do more than necessary for management. Want feedback? Sorry, I don't have any.
Fuck, I've gotten a reprimand for pointing out how Musk is perhaps not the best role model when someone mentioned they idolized him. That learned me.
I am hyper cognizant of that as a manager. I have to teach my new people not to fear me, because a lot of working class people come from industries where your boss is NOT your friend.
Any CEO who forces you to bend the knee in order to remain employed isn't a CEO that's worthy of your employment. If an executive wants my respect, they can earn it by doing things that are worthy of respect.
Nah I worked for a fortune 50 company and loved when I was able to interact with the CEO. I was able to often as I headed up some important infra. The local (CEO was stationed overseas but visited occasionally) execs were also fun to work with. Unless you like assaulted them or were extremely rude they would never go and try and get you fired for a mistake or for being off. Not that they were probably exceptional people or anything but more likely they just didn't care.
From what I've read the past few weeks, Elon is mostly just a figurehead at SpaceX at this point and it seems like only his cultural presence (read: making everyone work long hours) is still around. Not sure about Tesla but it seems like it's about the same besides very high level business direction decisions.
I've heard from tesla autopilot engineers that he just comes in and lays everyone off if he doesn't like their approach. The self-driving teams have apparently cycled through engineers like crazy. I'd love to get a current, internal confirmation on this.
Just consider how hard it is to find good people for a startup. What if indeed, most tech workers everywhere are bad? It doesn’t mean you observe lots of turnover. But it makes it possible that a company is really successful because of it, rather than despite it.
I really don't get why corporations in this day and age still make people work long hours.
There have been countless studies showing that long hours lead to more mistakes, worse productivity, decreased motivation, worse health, and burnout. Workers are also more likely to leave for a job with a better work/life balance if given the chance.
It seems many corporate execs haven't gotten the message yet, and I don't know why.
Because they pick and choose the science they want to believe. Teenagers should start school later too. And Open Offices reduce productivity for a large segment of the workforce. Vacations are a good thing, not a weakness.
His history at X.com and then PayPal is definitely of someone who tried pushing their own technical delusions down the throats of other technical people, there he got fired for it.
It seems minor now but at the time he was pushing for PayPal's tech stack to ditch Linux and use a Microsoft stack instead. Peter Thiel backstabbed him to oust him for that.
I know someone that works at Tesla and they say that when Elon comes around there's an aura of terror. They've personally seen him firing people on a whim during one of his "visits".
Yup, at PayPal, as CEO, it was "it's cool and all you have this working prototype of PayPal, but really, I think it should be Windows and ASP, so let's start fresh."
Board of Directors: "We're not going to do that".
I don't think it was backstabbing on Thiel's part (though I despise the man, personally) - there was very little in the way of cogent argument beyond Musk not really knowing Linux at the time. And to be clear, he wasn't CEO because he was a founder/PayPal was his idea/his technical vision and direction - he was only CEO because he was the largest shareholder of the two companies when they merged.
What do you mean "we" the information has been out there for years for anyone who wasn't trying not to see it. The racism lawsuits, the article by his ex-wife, the thai cave thing, the SEC case, his general behavior on social media and the people he publicly associates with. It paints a picture of someone who is, at best, unreliable, thin-skinned, egotistical, and reckless.
I can barely believe this man started a spaceflight company. He must have had some incredibly subordinates to pull that off; not only did they have to deal with him, but they also had to bootstrap spaceflight.
If you read his Ashlee Vance about him, you’ll understand that he’s always had this character on him. The biggest difference is that what he does no longer stays inside Spacex or Tesla.
He's always had an outsized ego, a lot of money from his family that masked his individual success, and, up until now, was successful at cosplaying an engineer.
Good people tend to give others the benefit of the doubt. My personal point of no return is when those children were trapped in a cave, and Elon musk came in to turn that crisis situation into a publicity stunt to further his engineer cosplay.
Apparently when they first met, she gave him a dressing down and told him a bunch of things he needed to do to be successful. He then tracked her down and hired her to do all the things.
Right, you don't build a spaceflight / rocket company in a vacuum, or from scratch as a software engineer. He poached top talent and got the job done from the bank and his twitter account. Not that I'm knocking that (it worked!), but the "Elon is a great engineer" trope is questionable.
Unrelated but I wish the market/VC/wallstreet put more value into hardware. I know why they never will (lower margins and harder to scale) but as an engineer I would much rather work on something like space ships or automation in robotics over just another internal reporting service that is being rebuilt just to deliver a report in 1 hour instead of 1 day.
You'd be surprised how much space/robotics is just analytics and reporting. But I get the sentiment. If you want to get into robotics, coursera courses and some ML knowledge can go a long way in today's hiring market.
Yeah that makes sense, maybe the grass is always greener, but I think even if I was doing reporting pipelines at a robotics company I would enjoy it more than the reporting pipeline I currently work on in the adtech industry.
Yeah but put that MIT guy at Boeing or LM, and you get the same disposable rockets they've been building for 100 years. You need a crazy guy at the top to allow for crazy things, otherwise you'll get the same results. If you put a bunch of Google engineers under Oracle or Cisco management, you get Oracle or Cisco in the end.
> Yeah but put that MIT guy at Boeing or LM, and you get the same disposable rockets they've been building for 100 years.
I don't think he'd have gone there. But you're right, that a good vision is absolutely going to attract the right talent and make a cohesive company. It's just that's not engineering that's management.
I think he devolved into this state over time. Back when he started SpaceX he had no Twitter, no mob of fans that worship the ground he walks on and of course he wasn't THAT rich. I don't think any of this is healthy for a human in the long term.
I'm starting to think that Elon has really bought into the myth of his own genius (i.e. that he's something like a real life Tony Stark). That didn't really exist until maybe 8-10 years ago.
His ability to attract top tier talent and work them hard is second to none. And frankly, many great engineers want to work hard and want to work with other great engineers who want to work hard on something that matters for society. That rules out most Silicon Valley startups.
Electric cars and SpaceX are intrinsically cool to work on, but it remains to be seen whether working on "Twitter 2.0" will be interesting enough for Elon to attract enough talent.
Agree with your sentiment, and think Elon did miscalculate here. Because, yes, how much innovation is left in social media company? Maybe some, but nothing compared to changing how the world drives and uses fossil fuels, or sending people to Mars.
I still think Elon is a brilliant person who (along with teams of other brilliant people) has accomplished incredible things. But as others are saying, think in this case, his ego got the better of him. I'm a software dev, and there is little chance I'd kill myself to build a different version of Twitter.
Is it really that bizarre of a conspiracy? If you browse Blind for a day you kind of lose the faith in software engineering as a profession. People proud for making $400k while working 5 hours a week.
Blind is an alternate reality and a fraction of the market. A lot of people on Blind completely misrepresent themselves and have either worked really hard to get there or are just skilled. Sure some paper chase but using Blind as a gauge of anything is a mistake.
What Blind shows is that for a portion of the population TC is just a game. Sure they have "skills" but a lot of those skills are grinding leetcode, creating referral networks, and otherwise becoming skilled at getting hired and surviving in a large FAANG.
In my experience leetcode has surprisingly low correlation with programming ability and most definitely software engineering.
It's not just Blind either. I've been surprised how many young people aspire to "work at a FAANG" as a goal, and software is just a convenient way to get there.
the whole thing really does feel like when VW tried to blame engineers for their emissions scandal. Engineers do not set hiring goals or vision for the company. They are not responsible for coming up with features. Yet they are getting 100% of the blame right now.
This is really about two things. 1) Twitter can't afford the debt burdens Elon put on them and 2) Elon really resents being forced to buy a company he does not want and is sticking it to people in the most asinine way possible.
I don't think the issue is all on the engineers. Empire building at big tech companies is how we get to a place where some engineer can work 5-10 hours per week doing essentially nothing of value. The entire management track is set up to promote people who have X number of reports under them. A manager who makes 1b in revenue with a team of 10 will be passed up for a promotion over a team of 50 that makes 100m but looks busy.
Not really a problem, just that when the app is run in the intranet sourcemaps will be applied, since you aren’t in the twitter intranet, you don’t have access to the sourcemaps so they just fail to import. Not a problem :)
I'm a software engineer and I still suspect Twitter will be on average no worse (could be better even) with 1/3rd or less of its current engineer count.
It's current engineer count as of today, or it's current engineer count as of 2 weeks ago?
By all accounts after the layoffs, voluntary resignations in response to layoffs, and people who refused the ultimatum and so probably consider themselves laid off, it's not clear Twitter even has a skeleton crew
I'm personally surprised that with so much of the workforce gone, and internal operations being total bedlam, the only thing that went down were 2FA emails.
Someone at Twitter knew what they were doing. Let's hope they didn't get swept up.
If they stopped builds, should be stable. All the infrastructure I've ever worked with has been the most stable when developers aren't pushing to production. 95% or more of incidents are caused by deployments. If you send everyone home, and things autoscale, it can stay up for a good while without SRE or similar functions having to do something.
Very insightful. It is definitely a balance. They could get away with less devs. I guess I am curious what the specific breaking point will be. Sr Devs will only put up with so much (Even when making an incredible salary).
Side note: do we know how much Twitter Sr. Devs make for sure? I know the term "400k for 5hrs a week" keeps getting thrown around. However, that doesn't seem incredibly well researched and has some triggers baked in
But the current reports are in the vicinity of 60% to 90% of the companies employees.
Obviously it’s extremely hard to get accurate numbers because one minute it’s reply yes to this or your gone, the next it’s report to this room, then batches are getting rehired because they are essential to operations and it’s jumping around like the staff head count graph has arrhythmia.
It really depends on who stays and who goes. Big organizations are collections of individual teams. Each key part of the site has a team behind it with 5 - 10 engineers.
If the departures are such that for each team, 1 competent senior engineer remains who can keep that domain running, then Twitter could be unaffected with 1/5 of its workforce. They might not be building new features, but the current site could function, which is reasonable since the current site is arguably feature complete.
But in reality it won't be as clean as that. If the whole localization team quits, suddenly the site won't be translated to other languages. If the whole mobile release team quits, suddenly the Twitter app might disappear from the app store. Or the security team is gutted and suddenly everyone's passwords are leaked.
He's obviously been infected with all the online right-wing anti-wokism ideas about tech companies. What's surprising to me is that I thought a lot of those people were in on the troll, but apparently he was a true believer.
I think you're misunderstanding the situation. It's not that ALL software engineers don't do anything. It's that Twitter has so much staff, you start to question what can they all actually be doing.
If someone had 10 people cleaning a small apartment every day, you'd question what were they actually doing. That wouldn't make sense.
Conversely, if you had 7,000 people cleaning an apartment occupied by a few million people across the globe, that might make some sense.
There's no doubt that Twitter could be leaner than it was as of September, but haphazardly firing employees at random and alienating the most employable of the remainder into resignation is not the way to go about it. He could have spent a few months getting to know the place, but deliberately chose not to.
Software Engineers aren’t doing things all the time but there is a tremendous amount of company knowledge and experience locked up in them. You basically pay to keep them employed for when you need them. They are paid for value not hours.
Well said. I think this is where the 4-day work week and WFH pushes in the software industry get their momentum: most of us don't need to work 40 hours in an office with a manager looking over our shoulder to provide that value.
Problem is a lot of people just don’t understand this because they’re used to having a 1:1 relationship between the hours they work and the value they deliver.
Elon has clearly read enough Hacker News to ask the question we've all been asking for the last... 5? 10? years. "What do all of those engineers do at [Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Netflix/Google]".
That's a fine question to ask -- it's clear that plenty of those engineers aren't contributing real value. They're working on passion projects, or side projects like React or Docusaurus, or pie-in-the-sky next-gen products, or reinventing the wheel in-house, or infrastructure, etc. Many are working on similar projects in separate silos of large companies, completely unaware that they have "twin" teams elsewhere in the org solving damn near the same problem, but not in a generalized way.
The big problem is that Elon has no idea what the fuck he is doing. I don't mean to disparage anyone, but jeez... the guy has fired thousands of people in the last few weeks and looks like he's on the cusp of running a company that's been around for over a decade into the ground in the next few weeks. Over the holidays. And who's going to deal with the issue? Oh yeah, the H1B visa holding employees who can't escape. He's officially a jerk, and that's not even counting the times when he called innocent people child molesters, or spouted lies about crypto, or tried to manipulate Tesla stock, etc. etc.
TL;DR: Elon is an idiot trying to use internet wisdom to run a company. This whole situation reminds me of when some rich person you know tries to run a small business, like a coffee shop or an ice cream shop, and they screw up just about every piece of it... because they don't get the fundamentals. Elon does NOT get the fundamentals, based on observations of him over the last few years. It's clear he's just a lucky rich kid with a big ego and lots of confidence who loves smoking weed and ruining other people's lives.
"...and looks like he's on the cusp of running a company that's been around for over a decade into the ground in the next few weeks."
What do you base that on? There's no evidence to point the company is going downhill or improving at the moment. You seem to be basing this on a personal hatred for Elon and nothing else.
Many (newly) former Twitter employees have raised concerns about essential services now left unattended.
Reports indicate the internal beta build Twitter instance has slowed down significantly this week -- a sign that services, code, or other essential infrastructure is being neglected.
Musk fired half the company and drove two-thirds of the remainder to quit. He's asking the remaining employees to print out their code contributions to prove their worth.
These things might not be explicit signs of trouble in the company, but I sure wouldn't read them as positive. A shakeup could be a good thing in the long term if the company has stagnated... but there's no guarantee.
I raised multiple explicit examples in my previous post; here's some more. I think Elon is a complete dunderhead, because it's hard not to think so based on his behavior. I still think Twitter is at a very high risk right now of collapsing. With him making such dramatic moves as CEO, isn't it impossible to separate his bad behavior from Twitter's future?
They give various reasons for their view based on observations of recent events at Twitter, in the comment you are responding to. What reasons do you have for attributing their views to personal animus? It's hard for me to imagine a way you could know the contents of the mind of a stranger on the internet, and I wonder if maybe you would make this remark about any comment expressing a similar sentiment, regardless of the evidence they provided or what their motives may be.
I submit that people who make this type of comment should be prepared to offer up not only what evidence they have that criticism of Musk (or whatever is being discussed) is insincere, but what sort of evidence they would need in order to accept the criticism.
His acquisition bumped the burn rate up by a sweet billion dollars a year while his conduct maximized spooking off any advertising clients still left in an impending recession.
And nearly every decision he's made has driven away Twitter's best developers, who could probably be useful in reducing the headcount in an efficient and non-shambolic fashion.
He's trying to decimate the workforce on purpose, although it's not going as smoothly as he hoped from outside appearances. He wants huge numbers of Twitter employees to quit, and he has been very clearly laying out the terms for behavior for the type of people he would like to run Twitter with. He's intentionally shaking the tree violently. He's hoping that the types that remain will be his types of employees. He's going to try to rebuild the workforce starting from those, so it's his company in ethos / function.
He thinks Twitter can run with far fewer engineers, and drastically fewer staff overall, than what it was operating with previously. He knows the value of engineers, he has made that part clear: he plainly said that engineers are most of what is important about Twitter, not the rest of the staff, he said it should be an engineer heavy company.
I highly doubt the majority of engineers who are actually good at what they do would be willing to remain in such a toxic environment Musk is creating.
Also so far he has displayed very little understanding of what engineers actually do (the bring you screenshots thing and the way he responded to one of them correcting him on Twitter and a bunch of other cases don't paint the brightest picture).
I make no wager on whether he can actually reach what he's trying to achieve. Rather, I'm merely proposing what I think he's doing / why he's doing it.
I don't think he can run Twitter very effectively out of San Francisco going forward, after his behavior. He'll try to run it out of Texas instead.
That's definitely the bet he's making. I think most of the best people will leave because they can make the same money working normal hours. He'll end up with those who can't find another job, those stuck at Twitter because of visas, and some unknown percentage of his desired "hardcore" employees.
That's naturally the billion dollar question. Can he get what he wants and can he get it in that physical region, where Twitter operates out of, now that he has burned many bridges.
He will move the Twitter HQ, within 12-24 months I'd guess. He'll move it to Texas. Most likely he has already begun preparations for that and we'll see an announcement within six months.
The thing I don't get is the hyper-focus on salient or "fancy" code. We're not all Jeff Dean and most code is bland and boring plumbing work anyways. Even in awesome ML powered systems, it's still 99% bland foundation, 1% cool algorithms. Hell, as a manager, you don't want only "rockstar" developers because they'll become bored working on the plumbing code, which again, is most work. From datascience there's the phrase "Everyone wants to do the model work, not the data work" and it sounds like he wants only those people? Why?
Smart and idiot might not be mutually exclusive. I've known a lot of smart people who can act idiotic in certain circumstances. Elon could be very smart when it comes to engineering... but idiotic when it comes to running Twitter.
He's not actually trying to document programming prowess with screenshots. They've already fired everyone they want to fire, this is some sort of "welcome to twitter 2.0" ritual
Without a source on that "apparently" I'm going to take that as the output of Musk's usual legend-building apparatus.
The guy has so much capacity to build his own legend (and have others believe it) that people refer to him as the founder of Tesla without even blinking.
He also pissed people off by insisting PayPal runs on Windows instead of Linux. Hey, I have fond memories of coding for the Windows platform for fun, but especially back in the day we kind of scoffed at those who wanted to run mission-critical systems on a Windows server.
Tom Mueller is a highly respected engineer, and just because what he says doesn't align with your narrative or belief doesn't mean he is singing praises.
Oh by the way, Tom Mueller made that tweet after he left SpaceX.
If I were at Twitter and received this email, I would be providing code and commits focused on business impact. Saliency is scoped to something, and without explanation that 'something' is likely the business. The context is engineering at twitter, not programming. In other words, not silly one liners that are not immediately obvious but instead business critical code that moved the needle -- however bland.
It's literally just some bizarre hazing ritual. Trying to evaluate whether code is good or bad from some screenshots without understanding the context and being familiar with the codebase makes no sense anyway. Anyone can show you ten screenshots of formally well written code and you have no idea whether it's useless or not.
Where did he say that he will evaluate if the code is good or bad? He didn't. It's more likely just a way to see what employees think is their most important work.
If the goal was actually to see what employees think is their most important work, that (and criteria) would be specified, instead of playing "what is he looking for" mind games.
That is completely a mind game. Salient according to what criteria? Is he going to be happy to see wonderful high level distributed designs? Great coding practices at the micro level? Unit tests? Performance-oriented code? Ops greatness? CRUD boilerplate that any junior IC could jump into without much understanding (seems like this might be a stealth winner if he’s gearing up to build a skeleton crew of low-seniority devs that don’t have a lot of career options). Is feature work sexy to him or does he want to see work that is oriented around KTLO cost minimization? Improvements on usability (decreases support costs)? Reliability? Scalability? Security mindset? (obviously kidding about that last one) There are so many things that are “salient” depending on his priorities and attitudes that this is a fool’s errand.
> That is completely a mind game. Salient according to what criteria?
Is what you do worth your salary? That is a pretty simple criteria, if you deliver significant value in basically any way that should be enough. Why do you think this is would be so hard? We had to write down reasoning like this to motivate our job at Google 1-2 times a year, it isn't hard to do.
My complaint isn't in the general concept of justifying your value. My complaint is in the request to have every coder in the company boil this down to such a simplistic representation of it on short notice in an environment where every indication is that it's going to be considered for a laughably small amount of time and then you might be fired on the spot if you didn't focus on the right axes.
Why does everyone assume that people won't have a chance to explain the value of their code in these interviews? How much time do you think you would need to put together a list of your 10 biggest contributions and some screen caps to illustrate them?
> Why does everyone assume that people won't have a chance to explain ...
I think the fact that this is happening to every coder at twitter in a few hours' span, coupled with the fact that thus far, the firings have been capricious, hasty, and based on apparently very little data. Nothing about these exercises seems to be "measured" in the "carefully considered" sense.
If you're thinking of these in contrast to standard performance evals that we all expect to have to do, you should also actually compare the processes in a meaningful way. Perf evals: you get weeks to work on them, you get to write a long-form essay making your case, you rarely ever get fired on the spot for not doing well, you get all manner of coaching and documentation about how to do well on them (including very specific tips on criteria for success). Compare and contrast with "bring me 10 screenshots of your code by 2pm today" along with the recent atmosphere of "anyone who doesn't meet the surprise criteria we just sprung on you is fired" and you wonder why people think this is absurd?
He can run his company how he wants, but this is way out of line with what I (and obviously many others) have come to expect. Don't understand the outrage? Well, this is the explanation. We've never had to put up with this shit before, and we don't feel like starting now. 1200 people quit yesterday. We still don't know how many were unwilling to jump through this latest dumb hoop. We shall see.
Of course nobody is excited to explain what value they provide on short notice to keep their job. Nobody likes getting fired either.
I agree that these exercises are neither measured, careful, or well coached.
It is a blunt and imperfect way to see who codes at all, who can articulate their job, who can handle uncertainty and pressure, and also who will follow orders.
Taking a screenshot and explaining your code is not some impossible task. People just don't like the stakes.
My point is that it seems like people are overly focusing and critical of the request itself, when when request is a practical way to meet the goal. it just happens that the goal is crazy, unmeasured, rash.
I agree it is out of line from what people want and expect. I'm not sure there is any way to cut >75% of staff and gut a company culture in weeks that would fit the expectations and desires of employees. The situation is unheard of.
Ok, well everything you’ve said in this subthread up until here has seemed to defend the request as reasonable. That is the confusing part. Our entire conversation still works if we swap in “please measure the length of your forearm and report to the 10th floor” for the request. It’s an unreasonable and arbitrary way to compare employees for immediate dismissal, yet it’s definitely a way that would let you cut 75% if that was your goal.
I'm saying that I wouldn't like it, but it is a reasonable request to expect a worker to be able to perform it.
I think that it's imperfect but probably an moderately effective way to compare employees for immediate dismissal. I would not like facing immediate dismissal.
I think the difference is that I don't think it is nearly as arbitrary as you do.
It is an email with an explanation of what you do, then some screenshots with code. People who mostly delivered value by writing code at Google wrote an explanation what they did, and often linked to different changelists with code they had written. The only strange part here is the screenshots of code instead of PR's, but adapting to that isn't very hard, take some screen shot of the diff or some part of the code and explain how that code fullfills the things you talked about in the email.
A person who can't do that lacks the soft skills to be an effective software engineer.
The most important work I've done in any company isn't obvious from some small snippet of code in isolation. It's a clever bit of modeling data or code architecture that would look completely unexciting without knowledge of the problem domain.
I think the only reason is to figure out if people are working.
Any dev I could think of doing their actual job can take 10 screenshots and point what they worked on in the last 6 months. It would be insane if they couldn't.
Including PEs and Sr.PEs? If they're coding, it's usually a detriment to the business unless they are extremely specialized and possess some blend of skills that allow them to take on tasking that cannot be delegated to others. I'm mostly talking about top companies where those titles are hard-earned and are associated with very broad impact.
Legally I’d agree with you, but that just means he has to pay severance and whatnot which I suspect is just a line item to him. If I’m right he’s trying to go full “Sparta” and his actual goal is to end up with the best devs at the finish line.
> Before doing so, please email me a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code.
I mean, i spent 20 months working on a project for a bank recently. I had a lot of salient code at the beginning, fun little algorithms and cool regex.
The last iteration of the code i committed, the salient part was basically a lisp interpreter (if lisp was formatted like json), but everything else was plain and boring. The last issue i had is that the ES version was upgraded and the python library i used to connect to ES was version locked, and did not work.
I think that for the next 4 years, this will be the only type of modifications my SRE ex-collegue who now own the code will make. Still, it can take days.
Spending days figuring out a few boring lines of change that has an outsized impact would, imho, be a fairly compelling bit of code to show off. IMHO while he might be crazy and way out of line, he's effectively asking people to reinterview for their jobs, except instead of doing blind code tests he's asking them to show off the best work they've done recently.
So, for information: as the program was asked to do more and interface with more (and since the output formatting keep changing every semester), most of the code logic was deported in the configuration files.
Nothing really had any outsized impact in the last 12 months of the project imho. Once the minimum viable product was done, every bit of improvement i did was either simplifying, performance-related or adding more configurability (and test, and documentation).
I did a piece of code that adapted to the ES request that i really like and could be showed off, but it took me three weeks, but 90% of what i parametrized could be hardcoded and it would have changed nothing in the long run.
No, it’s not. In fact, if the fanciness of your code is the only thing that contributes its salience, that’s a negative.
10 lines of salient code could be the entry point into some subsystem you wrote, or where you integrate with another system. It wouldn’t look fancy but it’s salient.
I can see this making sense for type signatures and data structures—or class definitions, interface definitions. Not so sure about "entry points". Contracts, abstractions. Typical Haskell code would really lend itself to being summarized like this—typeclass instances, etc.
Unfortunately, "salient" does not mean anything similar to "fancy", which invalidates the original grandparent's statement (unless you can cite something else).
As I didn't knew the word, I gave it to DeepL for translation and in German it translates to words which would be used for extraordinary and over-the-top things (herausragend, hervorragend, hervorstechend). If someone would have used these, I'd have understood it as a call to show my best code.
I think the point is more that most of the hard work behind Twitter isn't in writing the "fancy" code at all - it's in developing the infrastructure that allows that code to safely propagate across Twitter's massive network of servers, and abstracting that complexity away so that the developers who make the "fancy" user-visible changes don't have to worry about it.
> We don’t ever, ever want B players on an A team.
Define B players.
I've hired engineers not because they are the most amazing coders, but because they are amazing at finding out what is wrong organizationally and then making the needed friends to help move things along.
I've hired engineers who are catalysts for making other engineers perform better.
I've hired engineers who wrote solid code, at a reliable speed, but whom I wouldn't describe as "brilliant". I could assign them a feature and know they'd hit the deliverable date +/- a day, every single time.
Sure I had rockstar 10x engineers, but it takes all types, and focusing on "amount of quality code churned out per hour" is only going to work in certain organizations at certain times in a company's life.
What if Twitter actually succeeds after this? I'm not saying that it's likely, but what if? Let's imagine it as a thought exercise. What will this say about the current state of software engineering in startups and big techs?
The stock can't rebound, it's a private company now. Whatever price it's available for on the private equity market will be unknown and/or fake.
Twitter stock didn't tank, it actually stayed really high because he was locked in to purchase it well beyond the market value (as the entire sector was falling). It oscillated a bit, but you couldn't really call it a tank (especially in light of how the rest of tech was doing at the time)
Sort of reminds me of the Freenode drama last year. The outcome of which might be informative -- almost everyone moved off Freenode, and all their new non-IRC platform stuff seems to have vanished from the web by now.
EDIT: I assure you, this made sense in response to the non-stock part of the now-edited-away parent comment. :D
For a long time tech was eating the world and the more engineers you had the more likely you were to accidentally walk into a massive piece of the pie (the google model). Now things are more mature and there’s probably just less opportunity to do that.
But really I think leadership styles have to match the leader. Most leaders can’t get away with this because they fundamentally don’t want to.
It will be really hard to take the right lessons away from this situation. 90% of what Elon is doing that is successful is probably below the surface, if the lesson is, come into a company and fire 90% of people and you’ll thrive, I think you’re going to have a bad time.
Most important Edit: you have to have fuck you money for this to work so you can sell $4 billion in stock to keep the company afloat after you tank the revenue.
> For a long time tech was eating the world and the more engineers you had the more likely you were to accidentally walk into a massive piece of the pie (the google model). Now things are more mature and there’s probably just less opportunity to do that.
Might be true, just easily might not be. Seems too uncertain to draw conclusions. Like, why didn't this happen ten years ago? Twenty? OK, take those explanations. Why can't they happen again?
successful in what metric? Elon can privately throw billions at this if his ego can't let go of it. If you want to see success you just need to look at bytedance and tencent.
There's a lot of cruft, wouldn't you agree? Now, software engineering has a hard time getting rid of it, because we don't know what's going to be cruft in advance. So many promising designs turned out to be just a waste of time. But as long as we can't predict success, we're going to have to go through the motions.
Once you have a working product, it's a bit easier. Maintenance is more predictable. But without R&D/innovation, you're slowly going to fall behind, and that's hard to overcome.
So it might not be impossible that Twitter can keep running with a much smaller staff, but even then it might be the beginning of the end. We'll know in a few years...
That's a really good question, and much more interesting to me than just commenting on an ongoing train wreck.
I suppose that we would need to first decide whether (in this scenario where he succeeded) Elon had actually fixed Twitter, or whether he tore it down to the studs and built a different company out of it, one which happened to be called Twitter, but did something completely different, with new people and new leadership. It feels like that's what he wants to do, and maybe that's why he's not backing down as everybody in the company leaves.
I mean it sounds like he wants it to be a messaging service that functions as a payment service, and possibly also loans money (according to that Q&A session).
I have no idea what his vision for the company actually is, it just sounds like his mantra is "anything is on the table at this point, but we need to make money fast".
i don't care for elon & co.'s broader mission, but for this reason i am hoping the skeleton crew that remains succeeds - i admit that it's naive to expect any positive change to come from it though
He's a terrible person and I empathize with the people who are suffering because of his huge, but fragile ego. I would hate for the Elon-idolizers to adopt his abrasive style, thinking that makes them good or radical leaders. That idea terrifies me, and reminds me of Steve-Jobs-wannabes who didn't realize he succeeded in spite of his manner. You can treat people with respect and still succeed; I have no kind words for anyone who inspires disrespect/looking down on employees (fellow engineers).
Regardless of Musks success or failure at Twitter, the concentration of wealth in fewer hands will march on (due to automation and software eating everything, eventually, software will eat software). The middle-class SDE-type have been ignoring this reality for a while now, feeling safe because we thought we could find a different well-paying job at the drop of a pin. The bimodal income in the Software world is about to become more defined, with more folk shifting to the lower-income peak.
He's not doing anything unusual - he's just doing ti very aggressively and quickly. He dropped the bottom 50% as reported on by managers and now he has identified the best of that 50% and asked everyone else to either commit or get out. This is standard operating procedure but it is usually done over the course of many months to over a year instead of like 1 month in this case.
If it works then I think senior managers will be more willing to reorg quickly and build from the solid core.
However, I'm not sure it will change most things at most places. Managers love headcount more than anything. Each person under them makes them more important. Managers love this. I've had roles where I don't need anymore headcount but I was forced to add it because my managers wanted more headcount.
Worst case, we'll have profitable tech companies far earlier in the lifecycle.
If elon has a massive success, which I define as taking Twitter back public in 2-3 years at a huge profit, then likely wallstreet will start to demand copycat behavior from public tech companies.
Well the most plausible path to salvation is probably to issue a shitcoin that he can pump and dump a shitcoin, so I don't think that will have much salience to the rest of the industry....
That said, I do think it's very likely that 80% of the present value of any given company is derived from work that was done on the very first version. Twitter the product can likely coast as is for a long time. However I think the reason for having large product teams at mature companies working on marginal projects is because the stock price depends on it. Your potential for discovering new S-curves is priced into your revenue multiple. So while a private twitter might be able to find profitability as a 700 person company, theres (probably) no way for them to achieve meaningful growth. As a result, public companies probably wouldn't view this as a viable playbook.
However I feel like Elon's public statements (and track record as an eng focused leader) make me doubt this will happen. He seems much more enamored of Hardcore Engineers who can ship new features (ie fart pillows[1]) rather than the ops/business side, so I don't think creating a glorified lifestyle business is something he's interested in pursuing.
What is "success"? What does it mean to gain the whole world but lose your soul?
Look, Twitter was over-hired, no doubt about it. I have no clue how you would need as many engineers as they had. That said, Twitter did/does have hard problems. People joke about how simple Twitter is but it's just not. The ability to search across all tweets alone in realtime is a massive undertaking at their scale. Even with that they had more employees than they problem needed. My issue with how Elon has managed this is more about how ham-fisted these multiple rounds of layoffs/firings are coupled with how inconsistent he is. Just 18 hours ago they said not to come in till Monday and then with only a few hours notice you need to be in the building with a list of achievements and screenshots (!?) of your code.
I've produced a lot of code over the last 6 months, I'd want more than a couple hours (including traveling) to put together a "portfolio" of sorts. Though has I worked at Twitter I'd have taken the layoff yesterday rather than continue to be jerked around by this... jerk.
To me it matters less if Twitter survives this and more about what that means for the employees that are left. Are they going to see any of the "success" if they turn it around? As it stands they have been asked to work longer hours/weekends but their salaries aren't changing (that we know of). The company isn't public and I've yet to hear of any sort of profit-share/equity/etc that's being given out to those who are going to stay. Also Twitter succeeding != Twitter being a good place to work at. Currently the only person that benefits from Twitter succeeding is Elon. I can't imagine putting my life on hold to enrich a billionaire, especially since Twitter itself isn't a noble cause, no matter what some people deluded themselves into thinking.
I'm not anti-hard-work, I'm anti-hard-work if I'm not going to get something in return which as of now Twitter/Elon has not outlined any rewards other than "being part of Twitter 2.0".
Layoffs are happening across the industry anyway. This means more work per person, and the increased competition for jobs means negotiating power for wages will go down. So this is all happening regardless, just in a less dramatic fashion.
But yeah likely if Twitter does well then we'll also see a bunch of copycat douchebaggery at the C level because "it worked for Elon". For whatever reason, history seems to show us that any time some douchebag succeeds, all the wannabes come out of the woodwork to emulate it.
My company’s had enough turnover without adequate replacement lately that pretty much everything that isn’t high-priority maintenance now just gets backlogged.
It's a question I've been thinking about during this. The current narrative is that Musk is destroying value, which he probably is, but what if Twitter was as bloated as he thinks it was. What if he gets a core of 500 people working hard and twitter not only stabilizes but grows and innovates and becomes worth 10x. That's honestly a pretty scary notion for a lot of software engineers. CEOs will (and some already have) look around and realize that maybe they can get rid of a lot of the people around them, save a lot of money, and end up with a team better able to make product.
Now, I don't really believe that will happen because software and technology is mind numbingly complex now, and I think only through large bodies of software engineers are we able to tame it, but it is one distinct possibility. Obviously it is the outcome Musk believes in.
Issue is, people kill themselves to make awesome electric cars and rockets straight out of scifi, but to make a better twitter? I'm not seeing it.
The issue is, if Musk wants to find a core team of hardcore devs, I don't think the way he's acting is going to attract them. People who are great and know they are great probably don't want to be treated this way, unless they've drunk the Kool-Aid. It'd be more productive for Musk to be humble and actually have a plan to "win" in order attract top talent, top talent also wouldn't want to stay for a dickbag who seems to be very clueless. If Musk had a grand plan, keeping it secret is very very counterproductive. It gives off the air "I know I've been seemingly acting like a fucking idiot, but trust me, I have a plan, do you want to join?", how many would think "let's trust him now", if they haven't drunk said Kool-Aid.
I don't want to oversell Twitter -- I don't even like it (today). But most of the software we work on is frankly boring, even redundant or pointless at worst. Twitter may not be rockets or electric cars, but it is something most people are familiar with and its impact (Good, bad, whatever) is sizable.
In the case of success I think it probably just puts back into perspective that all things considered most employees are still average quality despite being made out to be situationally necessary. That there may be some overestimation of how many actually are necessary and misattributing for who is actually high quality.
The degree you would buy into this probably depends on how much you believe that Twitter is a good representation for the rest of the industry. I imagine a number of people would prefer to believe it is not in the case of success if it is their self value in question.
Even as long-time skeptic of Musk's ballyhooed business/engineering acumen, I have no clue what's going on here. Surely nobody at this level could be this brazenly incompetent when it comes to communicating a vision and building some sense of unity. Even the biggest fakers in the world are self-aware about the importance of maintaining the illusion of power and control.
If you had told me that these emails were being written by Kanye as he scrambled to find a new shoe partner after Adidas, I would have believed you.
You truly wonder at this? Look at the state of the world the last few years. If you’re lucky or brazen enough they may even let you run a whole country!
Qualifications make the people suffer less but historically have never been required for leaders in any venue. In Europe awful kings were simply born to the throne and people had to accept it, for example. We remember ‘X the Cruel’ but none of their subjects.
It's funny how historically a lot of "kings" were more like dictatorial mayors of small cities to largish collections of huts and many great battles were actually more like cattle raids.
The only reason Musk is getting away with any of this is that we've got the pending recession going on and others doing layoffs to jumping jobs isn't as easy for those who remain. I certainly would never go through that dance to prove my worth.
> The only reason Musk is getting away with any of this
Is he though? There are reports of very few people left, and I suspect many of those are stuck on h1bs, rather than there by allegiance to the new mad king.
I think what happens is his strange behavior is proportional to how little he sleeps. He has a spectrum between mildly unusual to full Kanye.
While I'm usually not in favor of professional unions for programmers, I think that's the only option at Twitter at this point unless people are ready to quit en mass.
It would actually be really interesting if the remaining staff at Twitter tried forming a union at this juncture.
How many more of his employees would Musk be willing to fire or make enemies over this without completely ruining the shell of a company he still owns?
I am really wildly speculating here, but I wonder if his source of energy is something like Aderall, and if that has any effects on people who are already “troubled” by their giant egos. And lack of sleep doesn’t help.
All of us should be considering it. If it (hostile takeover and or maniacal management) could happen at Twitter, it could happen almost anywhere else. Better before it happens again. I used to think it unnecessary for software, but I was wrong.
I've gotten the impression that a lot of people at high levels get there through a kind of self-perpetuating prestige cycle, often starting at an elite school and jumping between high-prestige jobs from there. The measure of success is not what they've done (which is mostly taking credit for other people's work), but what it looks like they've done. Starting a big-name company matters more than whether that company goes belly-up five years later. The people who end up on top are the ones who get extra-lucky and capitalize on it.
A recent example from tech is Adam Neumann (the WeWork guy) who came up with an absurd business model for commercial real estate, led a widely-ridiculed IPO, and lit a billion dollars of other people's money on fire. A couple years later a16z announces they're giving him a third of a billion dollars to fail again because (paraphrasing from memory) he was the only person who made a profound effort to transform the real estate market.
You can also see smaller-scale examples in media. There are New York Times op ed columnists who have been wrong about everything for decades, but they keep getting invitations from talk shows and universities and publishing companies because of the prestige of being a NYT columnist. But a big reason they're still a columnist is because of all the prestige they get from doing that other stuff.
It's a circular process, and it seems to be hard to fall out of unless you fail publicly and catastrophically. Sometimes it takes multiple such failures. These people all run in the same social circles, which probably also helps. I suspect an awful lot of elites would fare poorly in a real skill-based competition for their official jobs, and consciously or unconsciously act to prevent such a culture from developing.
I don't know any of these people personally, so take this with a large grain of salt. But in the case of Musk, it's clear to me that nobody who spends that much time being a flamboyant asshole on Twitter can be getting any real work done, much less running 2-4 different companies at a time. His real job is prestige development. I'm not sure he has anything in his playbook that doesn't rely on a pre-existing desire to work with The Great Elon Musk and his Great World-Changing Companies. Like many elites, when forced to focus on his official job, he is mediocre at best.
> Surely nobody at this level could be this brazenly incompetent when it comes to communicating a vision and building some sense of unity.
Why don't you think someone at that level could be so incompetent? Megalomania and being out-of-touch reinforce each other. History, from ancient to the present, is full of wealthy, powerful, and paranoid people acting incompetently and thereby doing tremendous damage in the process.
he's probably going to start handing out TODOs and randomly pointing at people and saying "now you're in charge of X and you, over there, are in charge of Y". Like a realtime re-org.
Does this mean he is actually looking to do more firings After the massive exodus yesterday?!?
This is just...
Honestly at this point this is just fascinating to watch from the outside and I feel bad for everyone impacted. Particularly those that had no choice but to stay (Visa's)
For better or worse I would assume the opposite: a great number of the engineering leads are gone and he's looking for people to replace them. If that's the case, though, just being an epic coder will not necessarily make you successful as a leader.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 484 ms ] threadWat?
World Cup is definitely going to surge traffic
https://twitter.com/ZoeSchiffer/status/1593665774744350721
a) will be using Twitter expenses to fly (company credit card or reimbursed)
b) may keep their 6-figure jobs.
A Twitter developer can get a "6-figure job" just about anywhere pretty quickly, and many can get ones that haven't just gutted their total comp by going private. What's the point, exactly?
This is not part of what the engineers signed up for and has nothing to do with being "coddled"
oh i guess that's what happens when you assume heh. i've always had a corporate card, or for at least the past 15 years. I work in consulting though so it's more common to book flights/hotels and travel individually.
Why?
Probably means that if there are no actual flights from where you're to SF and that you couldn't get there in time no matter how much you wanted. Not exactly the same thing...
"only those who cannot physically get to Twitter HQ are excused"
the key word is "physically".
> That seems more like a deep personal hatred No need to make strange assumptions. I have no feelings one way or the other. Yet I'm pretty sure that most reasonable people would interpret what Musk said the same way I did.
I hope a historian is following Musk around and taking notes, because this will make a delicious movie about hubris and its limits.
>In a follow up email, Musk encouraged people to fly to SF for this.
https://twitter.com/kateconger/status/1593657847564353536
How confident are you about that?
Who would, anymore?
I'm tired of working in woke corporations with their fake friendliness, stupid rituals and tons of people doing nothing. You anyway end up wasting time at work so it's not like you can't go to the beach instead but you end up with nothing productive being done.
The only cons is relocation and being an employee, I like my tax setup and quality of life here. Also, not being free to work remote.
I'm sure the world is full of engineers who would go work for Twitter if only things x, y, and z were different, but they aren't.
"coordinate and plan technology" can be a huge amount of effort, vastly greater than "nothing".
Imagine if every hour of every work day in your calendar is full of various forms of "planning" meetings. How are you supposed to write code and attend all this nonsense at the same time? You can't.
To be fair it sure feels like doing nothing but employers consider it necessary and a job that only senior people can handle.
Another way to read this is as saying coordination and planning are the job. They "do nothing but", as in "only do".
But I don't think this is a particularly effective way to root those people out.
It's also possible he's reassigning teams from the ground up, and this is his sorting method.
I've spent whole year aligning a team strategy with an overall company strategy, and making sure that rest of the people on my team build is actually fitting into that strategy.
In the past, team spend many years build custom stuff, that always had to be thrown away. Now, work we're doing is a part of a company direction, our expertise influenced it, and as a result we're no longer building throw away things, but also building something that impacts the whole company. I'll be blunt - I've made people on my team 10x more productive as a result.
At bigger companies there's many ways you can be a senior developer. Does it sucks that people need to do stuff like that? Oh yeah, I'd prefer to have 100s of CL this year. But that's often a motion, not progress. As a senior, I'm accountable to make sure we make progress.
If you're earning 100k a year and the most important code you show is how you turned a link colour from light blue to blue -- then your $100,000 a year job has now become questionable.
It's hardly losing the plot to ask someone "What have you achieved and what do you think your best work is?"
If you want to argue whether the people who do them should get US$100k/yr, that's a different question.
Lots of development jobs involve doing work that isn't flashy, showy or even cool. Does the lack of flashy, showy cool stuff mean it's of less value? Almost certainly not. There are other reasons why a specific developer may not be "pulling their weight", but a bunch of code excerpts is about the least likely way to discover them.
I do a lot of code reviews, and it’s very obvious who on the team barely churns out useful code —- even just from the low density and volume of their code.
Most engineers should be able to run “git log -p —author=myname —since=‘12 months ago’” and find 10 examples of non-trivial code.
And those that can’t, should be able to provide a good explanation of what they contribute instead.
The primary role of leadership is to feed tasks and guidance to skilled people who your organization has selected based on known temperament and skillset.
If you run a software company and don't know you employ who can code you are at titanic slipping beneath the waves status still calling on skilled ship designers.
It's done he burned 44B by being a bad leader.
I’m guessing the screenshots themselves will be less relevant than their owners’ description of what the depicted code actually does.
This is all very dumb and I’m not defending the way he’s doing this.
Also it's really not something a CEO in a company of such size should be doing...
This is so obviously not the point of the exercise that it feels like bad faith. I doubt he's firing anyone at this point. Just looking to see how does what and talk with them about their impact. The code examples are just to get the ball rolling. Basically everyone in leadership at twitter is gone, Musk needs to figure out who can be trusted to keep things from collapsing, not who to fire.
Feels like everyone wants to be the exception, and just assumes “someone else” should do actual hands-on work
In an org of that size, there's much work just in stopping other people writing really bad code.
> Feels like everyone wants to be the exception
Right. You can easily write 10x the number of lines than an average engineer and create negative value for the product.
The job of software engineers is to design and implement solutions to business problems with technology. The job of a software engineer is not merely "write code." Writing code will almost certainly be the smallest percentage of a skilled engineer's time. They need to be spending their time thinking and designing.
We're talking about solving extreme scaling problems at extreme scales here, not churning out crud apps at a local freelance studio.
Senior/Staff's Perspective: "I was hired to solve business problems, sometimes I write code"
;-)
I've never suggested someone should be fired if they can't produce code snippets. But it's fair to expect people who don't actively code (when they're not managers or have a non-coding title) to have a reason they're not coding. And there are many perfectly great reasons, especially for very senior engineers. But if someone isn't coding and they're not actually doing anything else of particular value... well, they're not valuable engineers.
Code is not the single-and-only decider of an engineer's contributions, but I reject the notion that it can't be a starting filter to evaluate someone's contributions, and the assessment to proceed from there.
But while engineers obviously have to spend time thinking and designing, it’s the code that does the actual work and embodies the value of the engineer’s plans. I simply fail to see how a software org could exist where only a small minority of engineers are coding. Makes no sense to me, sorry.
This is a problem.
you're saying they can't pour footings for a data center -- not the same job at all
(or even can't set up a build system, which, god bless)
If I was forced to take part in this absolutely idiotic exercise I’d be including descriptions of the purpose of the code along with the screenshots/printouts.
“These are the configuration files I maintain. Collectively these control the orchestration of 9,000 of our servers which make up over 80% of our infrastructure” would be be pretty compelling.
Ultimately, while he’s going about it in an insane way that I will not defend one iota, he’s trying to figure out who does what.
It’s one of those things where you have to read between the lines and figure out what the client/exec/boomer actually needs and wants, versus the nonsensical thing they actually asked for.
Your boss who wants his emails printed out every morning may actually just literally want them on paper OR they may actually want a system of triaging and responding to messages that is easy to do with paper but is difficult to achieve with software (and is still, honestly, clunkier than using paper sometimes if we’re being honest)
A hazing ritual to find out who is properly loyal, and who is unwilling to bend the knee.
I don't think he cares too much about the screenshots themselves. I think this is a pretty simple test to see who comes running to the 10th floor and who says: "that's insane, no".
It's a special kind of hell, it manages to be much worse than the hell it is on having to politically push this kind of project to multiple layers of decision-making higher management to get enough buy in because it's a damn expensive project.
Elon’s a jerk, but this thread seems to be full of people saying “I deliver value even though I can’t actually demonstrate any evidence of it.”
Now as a manager and sometimes architect, no code from me but I still review code and spend time stopping bad ideas, getting teams to work together, and all that fun stuff. But I still regard code merged into master, as the ultimate tangible of our work.
So, you DO understand what we're trying to say on this thread. I don't get why you are defending this measure as a valid way to measure engineers
As a manager, it’s not in my job description anymore. And when I put on an architect hat, my output is design docs and aligning many different opinions between teams. Also, the senior-most people on my team are no longer coding 100% of their time (they’re designing, reviewing, mentoring) and that’s obviously ok and good.
...But if >50% my team spends every week only mentoring others and attending meetings and writing design docs (as someone else suggested here), I think it would be appropriate to ask what the heck is going on. The idea that for a typical rank-and-file developer (not the TL, manager, architect, etc) that they should be seen as productive software developers without being able to show even a handful of code examples over the course of a year, I’m sorry but I just don’t understand how such a software org would ever actually function.
If you are mentioning a previous comment of mine [1] in this thread I think you're grossly misrepresenting my words. And if so I definitely take offense in that as it's not only uncharitable, it's completely missing the point and reducing a brief expansion based on one of your questions to "only attending meetings and writing design docs", something I've never mentioned in the hypothetical scenario you raised.
I expect my assumptions are wrong because if not I'd definitely say you're not fit to be a leader or architect of anything.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33660403
Like, yeah of course the top engineers find themselves less and less hands-on-keyboard as they turn more to technical leadership roles. But some people seem to be arguing that code isn’t the bread and butter work for majority of developers. Who’s doing the actual work then, is my question for them.
I don't think anyone actually said that.
I wrote:
> In an org with thousands of software engineers, shouldn’t most of them be writing code?
And this person's reply was:
> no, I don't think most of them should be writing code
> I wouldn't put any kind of quantifier on it. I'm willing to bet most, if not all Twitter developers were above average across the industry and were producing work of value.
Now the question is: does Elon have enough technical expertise (or access to such) to be able to judge if a collection of assorted 10 screenshots without context of some GDoc pages, some shoddy PoC code and comments on RFCs is up to par with his bar of what a Staff Software Engineer title should produce? I highly doubt it.
It's not about showing evidence of work, it's that technical work can differ so much depending on context and constraints that it's impossible to demonstrate its value in such a reductive way, it's simple and clear stupidity to even ask to be demonstrated that way.
To your point, if I started as new manager for a team and the TL said they mostly wrote RFCs and design docs, my next question would be whether those docs led to an actual implementation (by orher people is ok). IF it turned out they write go-nowhere docs and sit in meetings giving obvious advice all day, then I’ll flag it as a potential problem that needs deeper investigation.
You could probably fit his committed code for the last 6 months on one page, confuse it for a junior dev's output, and yet firing him would kneecap the team. Other people know individual parts of what he knows, but the value of having one person who knows them all in immeasurable.
I can't imagine a place at Twitter scale didn't have similar individuals.
Also does he really have that many at Twitter people whom he trusts? And are there many who trust him?
To be fair I can't tell if your post is sarcasm or not.
At any rate, I think you'd be mistaken to believe that there aren't top-notch software engineers at SpaceX and Tesla. They both have front-end tools, massive backend systems, data pipelines at huge scale, metrics and analysis systems, and so forth.
I doubt this could have a significantly different outcome than just firing people at random (or using some bizarre metrics like lines of code committed). That's probably irrelevant if Musk's goal is to simply drastically cut the number of employees at Twitter one way or the other.
But this thread is missing the forest for the trees: take my coworker for example.
He's become such a pivotal player because he stayed at the company much longer than the average tenure in our industry.
Why did he do that? Well, my hunch is the fact no one sweats him if he needs to pick up his kids from school, he can work from home as needed, he's not expected to work 80 hours a week... all play into that.
So it doesn't really matter if you realize he's valuable, fire half the company and start talking about extreme work hours and he'll rightfully leave.
People like him such experts at the specifics of their jobs that even 30 hours of their work is worth more than 80 hours of some loyal Elon drone who might have all the zeal in the world, but can't magically recreate 6 years worth of being deeply embedded in a company.
-
We already saw Twitter employees saying Elon has fired people who fit in this category.
And to add fuel to dumpster fire, those people tend to have stayed due to a bond with the job. Start shaking it up by getting rid of people they build camaraderie with and doubling work hours and they'll leave.
After all, having a resume showing years of executing at a high level in a company like Twitter is a huge boon. Money was raining from the sky until very recently and these people ignored it and stayed put. You can't find people like that easily in our industry.
A more reasonable explanation is that he just wants the employees to self select. (Sane) People who are unwilling to take this process seriously will just leave and only those who'd fit in the environment he's creating would stay.
He was asking them to print our their code and show it to a team of his engineers, that didn't exactly leave time for in-depth discussions about non-code impact.
His entire mantra has been code-is-king and claiming people's non-code work was cruft from over-engineering, so it's not exactly like he'd accept that excuse anyways.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6_eqxh-Qok
Any code I checked (that year anyway) in paled in comparison to the value I added by doing that.
that's not what's being asked, they're asking for screenshots of code. Which is not the same.
Elon needs technical architects and technical direction more than just developers if you ask me.
I don't think Twitter will completely fail, but I'm pretty sure it will stumble quite publicly/visibly a lot in the coming weeks.
I don't think the majority opinion on engineers is that it'll crash and then they'll throw in the towel and that's it, but there's plenty of other ultimately fatal outcomes for twitter, and plenty of non-fatal technical issues they can encounter on the way there.
He'll slash the costs dramatically to adjust for the loss of revenue. He just sold another $4 billion in Tesla stock the other day to most likely cover the expected losses over the next few years. Slash deep enough and you can easily run Twitter on a few hundred million dollar loss per year. He probably thinks he can get it to break-even following this approach over the next few years and go from there.
Facebook was profitable at under $1b in sales with a larger userbase size 12 years ago. Why can't Twitter get there today? Twitter was unprofitable with $5.2b in sales, it was an exceptionally bloated corporation.
I guess every cloud has a silver lining
use the opportunity to prove how undervalued you were, and how essential you will be to restructuring.
The movie is going to be great.
I think we all deal with enough of that on a small scale to be sick of it.
In the dotcom era, I was in the middle of a mass layoff. At the meeting, "everybody go back to your desk and dial extension 1234, and you will get a message with your employment status, instructions and next steps".
PBX crashed.
PBX took a while being brought back up because, well, the people responsible for supporting it wanted to find out whether _they_ were some of those laid off before deciding whether they wanted to bring it back up.
If he doesn't visit for a few weeks, nothing gets done.
They save all the "stuff that requires physical activity" to when he visits, some of it for show, and actually are doing the real work when he's not there. It's hilarious to think that what you can see from the fence line, constitutes an assessment of what work is being done
Wow, if his leadership results in such a bad situation at SpaceX I can only image how poor the result will be at Twitter with whatever is left.
The workers have noticed Elon likes to see everyone acting busy and has a propensity for causing a lot of trouble when he doesn't see what he likes.
Therefore, they act busy when he's around, and go back to normal, productive work when he's not.
Edit: The point is not that we all reside in toxic workplaces. The point is that there is no upside to interacting with a CEO. A parallel situation might be giving a loaded pistol with a child. In that case, the upside is that they now have one thousand and one chew toys instead of one thousand. The downside is that they can kill themselves accidentally. Outside of a few specific people in a company, a CEO most likely can't make anyone's life better. However, if, for example, you're coding and a pornographic ad appears in Firefox on your second monitor, then your employment isn't likely to continue much longer.
Just because people are scared of the CEO doesn't mean most CEOs weaponize this into a tool of micromanagement.
Fuck, I've gotten a reprimand for pointing out how Musk is perhaps not the best role model when someone mentioned they idolized him. That learned me.
Maybe after 2 or 3 times it gets better. Build up a rapport first.
There have been countless studies showing that long hours lead to more mistakes, worse productivity, decreased motivation, worse health, and burnout. Workers are also more likely to leave for a job with a better work/life balance if given the chance.
It seems many corporate execs haven't gotten the message yet, and I don't know why.
There's few tests to root out bad managers. The damage bad management is capable of is.. impressive, extensive.
Good managers help their direct reports, helping them succeed and stand out at promotion time.
Guess which will usually get the promotion?
It seems minor now but at the time he was pushing for PayPal's tech stack to ditch Linux and use a Microsoft stack instead. Peter Thiel backstabbed him to oust him for that.
I know someone that works at Tesla and they say that when Elon comes around there's an aura of terror. They've personally seen him firing people on a whim during one of his "visits".
Neighbor works for SpaceX and says the same thing.
Board of Directors: "We're not going to do that".
I don't think it was backstabbing on Thiel's part (though I despise the man, personally) - there was very little in the way of cogent argument beyond Musk not really knowing Linux at the time. And to be clear, he wasn't CEO because he was a founder/PayPal was his idea/his technical vision and direction - he was only CEO because he was the largest shareholder of the two companies when they merged.
If you antagonize enough super-stressed-out employees, I'd think one will eventually lose it.
With Twitter he is an outsider coming in to a company serving a very different market, with existing structures and projects he can't know about.
Good people tend to give others the benefit of the doubt. My personal point of no return is when those children were trapped in a cave, and Elon musk came in to turn that crisis situation into a publicity stunt to further his engineer cosplay.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1591850617462738946
Look: http://larsblackmore.com/
That's the kind of person who makes spacex successful.
Even his "physics degree" is apparently BS
I don't think he'd have gone there. But you're right, that a good vision is absolutely going to attract the right talent and make a cohesive company. It's just that's not engineering that's management.
Sure, you don't build it in a vacuum (I'll see myself out)
Electric cars and SpaceX are intrinsically cool to work on, but it remains to be seen whether working on "Twitter 2.0" will be interesting enough for Elon to attract enough talent.
I still think Elon is a brilliant person who (along with teams of other brilliant people) has accomplished incredible things. But as others are saying, think in this case, his ego got the better of him. I'm a software dev, and there is little chance I'd kill myself to build a different version of Twitter.
Btw, a dev build is in prod right now. Or someone forgot to minimize the JS. Tons of import map issues.
In my experience leetcode has surprisingly low correlation with programming ability and most definitely software engineering.
It's not just Blind either. I've been surprised how many young people aspire to "work at a FAANG" as a goal, and software is just a convenient way to get there.
This is really about two things. 1) Twitter can't afford the debt burdens Elon put on them and 2) Elon really resents being forced to buy a company he does not want and is sticking it to people in the most asinine way possible.
By all accounts after the layoffs, voluntary resignations in response to layoffs, and people who refused the ultimatum and so probably consider themselves laid off, it's not clear Twitter even has a skeleton crew
Someone at Twitter knew what they were doing. Let's hope they didn't get swept up.
Side note: do we know how much Twitter Sr. Devs make for sure? I know the term "400k for 5hrs a week" keeps getting thrown around. However, that doesn't seem incredibly well researched and has some triggers baked in
But the current reports are in the vicinity of 60% to 90% of the companies employees.
Obviously it’s extremely hard to get accurate numbers because one minute it’s reply yes to this or your gone, the next it’s report to this room, then batches are getting rehired because they are essential to operations and it’s jumping around like the staff head count graph has arrhythmia.
If the departures are such that for each team, 1 competent senior engineer remains who can keep that domain running, then Twitter could be unaffected with 1/5 of its workforce. They might not be building new features, but the current site could function, which is reasonable since the current site is arguably feature complete.
But in reality it won't be as clean as that. If the whole localization team quits, suddenly the site won't be translated to other languages. If the whole mobile release team quits, suddenly the Twitter app might disappear from the app store. Or the security team is gutted and suddenly everyone's passwords are leaked.
If someone had 10 people cleaning a small apartment every day, you'd question what were they actually doing. That wouldn't make sense.
There's no doubt that Twitter could be leaner than it was as of September, but haphazardly firing employees at random and alienating the most employable of the remainder into resignation is not the way to go about it. He could have spent a few months getting to know the place, but deliberately chose not to.
TBC, talking about the code part.
There's another Twitter, which is not code, but guest and resident services. Your example holds there.
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/whatsapp-bought-for-19-b...
Did it have to moderate content?
Twitter is vastly more complex than Whatsapp when it comes to functionality and platforms it had to support.
The argument is not that twitter can't be ran leaner, it's that the current process of leaning twitter is bad.
Your goal isn’t one cleaning person, it’s the right amount
That's a fine question to ask -- it's clear that plenty of those engineers aren't contributing real value. They're working on passion projects, or side projects like React or Docusaurus, or pie-in-the-sky next-gen products, or reinventing the wheel in-house, or infrastructure, etc. Many are working on similar projects in separate silos of large companies, completely unaware that they have "twin" teams elsewhere in the org solving damn near the same problem, but not in a generalized way.
The big problem is that Elon has no idea what the fuck he is doing. I don't mean to disparage anyone, but jeez... the guy has fired thousands of people in the last few weeks and looks like he's on the cusp of running a company that's been around for over a decade into the ground in the next few weeks. Over the holidays. And who's going to deal with the issue? Oh yeah, the H1B visa holding employees who can't escape. He's officially a jerk, and that's not even counting the times when he called innocent people child molesters, or spouted lies about crypto, or tried to manipulate Tesla stock, etc. etc.
TL;DR: Elon is an idiot trying to use internet wisdom to run a company. This whole situation reminds me of when some rich person you know tries to run a small business, like a coffee shop or an ice cream shop, and they screw up just about every piece of it... because they don't get the fundamentals. Elon does NOT get the fundamentals, based on observations of him over the last few years. It's clear he's just a lucky rich kid with a big ego and lots of confidence who loves smoking weed and ruining other people's lives.
What do you base that on? There's no evidence to point the company is going downhill or improving at the moment. You seem to be basing this on a personal hatred for Elon and nothing else.
Reports indicate the internal beta build Twitter instance has slowed down significantly this week -- a sign that services, code, or other essential infrastructure is being neglected.
Musk fired half the company and drove two-thirds of the remainder to quit. He's asking the remaining employees to print out their code contributions to prove their worth.
These things might not be explicit signs of trouble in the company, but I sure wouldn't read them as positive. A shakeup could be a good thing in the long term if the company has stagnated... but there's no guarantee.
I raised multiple explicit examples in my previous post; here's some more. I think Elon is a complete dunderhead, because it's hard not to think so based on his behavior. I still think Twitter is at a very high risk right now of collapsing. With him making such dramatic moves as CEO, isn't it impossible to separate his bad behavior from Twitter's future?
I submit that people who make this type of comment should be prepared to offer up not only what evidence they have that criticism of Musk (or whatever is being discussed) is insincere, but what sort of evidence they would need in order to accept the criticism.
That's the way it works. Maps aren't uploaded to production so they fail to load for you.
""Support your favourite people on Twitter for bonus content and extra perks.""
He's trying to decimate the workforce on purpose, although it's not going as smoothly as he hoped from outside appearances. He wants huge numbers of Twitter employees to quit, and he has been very clearly laying out the terms for behavior for the type of people he would like to run Twitter with. He's intentionally shaking the tree violently. He's hoping that the types that remain will be his types of employees. He's going to try to rebuild the workforce starting from those, so it's his company in ethos / function.
He thinks Twitter can run with far fewer engineers, and drastically fewer staff overall, than what it was operating with previously. He knows the value of engineers, he has made that part clear: he plainly said that engineers are most of what is important about Twitter, not the rest of the staff, he said it should be an engineer heavy company.
Also so far he has displayed very little understanding of what engineers actually do (the bring you screenshots thing and the way he responded to one of them correcting him on Twitter and a bunch of other cases don't paint the brightest picture).
I don't think he can run Twitter very effectively out of San Francisco going forward, after his behavior. He'll try to run it out of Texas instead.
I assume he already laid off most h1bs, who would say and do anything to not get deported but might not be the best engineers.
Still, the people that claim to work 'hardcore' might just say that. They might survive for 3 months, which is how much severance they are forfeiting.
He will move the Twitter HQ, within 12-24 months I'd guess. He'll move it to Texas. Most likely he has already begun preparations for that and we'll see an announcement within six months.
Not the first time this has happened: https://twitter.com/NilsIRL/status/1479065003684765697
not sure if this is normal but tons of resources link to ton.local.twitter.com which NXDOMAINs against quad-8
also you're totally right; none of the JS is minified!
How long can the systems chug along with no one watching.
Can he code.to save his life? Does he know anything about engineering from Tesla or SpaceX, beyond catchphrases?
But that doesn't mean you know how to run a social media company, and trying to pivot Twitter's work culture on a dime is going to be chaotic.
FWIW I think he's a toxic asshole, but that doesn't mean he's an idiot.
The guy has so much capacity to build his own legend (and have others believe it) that people refer to him as the founder of Tesla without even blinking.
Tom Mueller publicly defended Elon on multiple occasions: https://mobile.twitter.com/lrocket/status/151291923068914892...
Oh by the way, Tom Mueller made that tweet after he left SpaceX.
He hasn't played any mind games. He's asked for exactly what he wants.
Is what you do worth your salary? That is a pretty simple criteria, if you deliver significant value in basically any way that should be enough. Why do you think this is would be so hard? We had to write down reasoning like this to motivate our job at Google 1-2 times a year, it isn't hard to do.
My complaint isn't in the general concept of justifying your value. My complaint is in the request to have every coder in the company boil this down to such a simplistic representation of it on short notice in an environment where every indication is that it's going to be considered for a laughably small amount of time and then you might be fired on the spot if you didn't focus on the right axes.
I think the fact that this is happening to every coder at twitter in a few hours' span, coupled with the fact that thus far, the firings have been capricious, hasty, and based on apparently very little data. Nothing about these exercises seems to be "measured" in the "carefully considered" sense.
If you're thinking of these in contrast to standard performance evals that we all expect to have to do, you should also actually compare the processes in a meaningful way. Perf evals: you get weeks to work on them, you get to write a long-form essay making your case, you rarely ever get fired on the spot for not doing well, you get all manner of coaching and documentation about how to do well on them (including very specific tips on criteria for success). Compare and contrast with "bring me 10 screenshots of your code by 2pm today" along with the recent atmosphere of "anyone who doesn't meet the surprise criteria we just sprung on you is fired" and you wonder why people think this is absurd?
He can run his company how he wants, but this is way out of line with what I (and obviously many others) have come to expect. Don't understand the outrage? Well, this is the explanation. We've never had to put up with this shit before, and we don't feel like starting now. 1200 people quit yesterday. We still don't know how many were unwilling to jump through this latest dumb hoop. We shall see.
I agree that these exercises are neither measured, careful, or well coached.
It is a blunt and imperfect way to see who codes at all, who can articulate their job, who can handle uncertainty and pressure, and also who will follow orders.
Taking a screenshot and explaining your code is not some impossible task. People just don't like the stakes.
My point is that it seems like people are overly focusing and critical of the request itself, when when request is a practical way to meet the goal. it just happens that the goal is crazy, unmeasured, rash.
I agree it is out of line from what people want and expect. I'm not sure there is any way to cut >75% of staff and gut a company culture in weeks that would fit the expectations and desires of employees. The situation is unheard of.
I think that it's imperfect but probably an moderately effective way to compare employees for immediate dismissal. I would not like facing immediate dismissal.
I think the difference is that I don't think it is nearly as arbitrary as you do.
A person who can't do that lacks the soft skills to be an effective software engineer.
Any dev I could think of doing their actual job can take 10 screenshots and point what they worked on in the last 6 months. It would be insane if they couldn't.
This could be a very simple process of keeping them running through obstacle courses while the “weak” ones self-eliminate.
The most desperate and blindly loyal maybe. The second category might be desirable, but the first one definitely isn't.
I mean, i spent 20 months working on a project for a bank recently. I had a lot of salient code at the beginning, fun little algorithms and cool regex.
The last iteration of the code i committed, the salient part was basically a lisp interpreter (if lisp was formatted like json), but everything else was plain and boring. The last issue i had is that the ES version was upgraded and the python library i used to connect to ES was version locked, and did not work.
I think that for the next 4 years, this will be the only type of modifications my SRE ex-collegue who now own the code will make. Still, it can take days.
Nothing really had any outsized impact in the last 12 months of the project imho. Once the minimum viable product was done, every bit of improvement i did was either simplifying, performance-related or adding more configurability (and test, and documentation).
I did a piece of code that adapted to the ES request that i really like and could be showed off, but it took me three weeks, but 90% of what i parametrized could be hardcoded and it would have changed nothing in the long run.
10 lines of salient code could be the entry point into some subsystem you wrote, or where you integrate with another system. It wouldn’t look fancy but it’s salient.
Define B players.
I've hired engineers not because they are the most amazing coders, but because they are amazing at finding out what is wrong organizationally and then making the needed friends to help move things along.
I've hired engineers who are catalysts for making other engineers perform better.
I've hired engineers who wrote solid code, at a reliable speed, but whom I wouldn't describe as "brilliant". I could assign them a feature and know they'd hit the deliverable date +/- a day, every single time.
Sure I had rockstar 10x engineers, but it takes all types, and focusing on "amount of quality code churned out per hour" is only going to work in certain organizations at certain times in a company's life.
So a decent amount of devs get a nice six-figure salary (RSU, equity), pretty good benefits, kush perks, and more to mess with a template? Órale...
https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/11/12/23452396/elon-musk-twi...
If it does tank they were part of it.
Hopefully somewhere in the twitter headquarter they are yelling at him to stop. It would be great once times passes to hear their side.
There is no publicly listed stock that can rebound. Any new investor will surely want to look at the books first:
Twitter stock didn't tank, it actually stayed really high because he was locked in to purchase it well beyond the market value (as the entire sector was falling). It oscillated a bit, but you couldn't really call it a tank (especially in light of how the rest of tech was doing at the time)
EDIT: I assure you, this made sense in response to the non-stock part of the now-edited-away parent comment. :D
For a long time tech was eating the world and the more engineers you had the more likely you were to accidentally walk into a massive piece of the pie (the google model). Now things are more mature and there’s probably just less opportunity to do that.
But really I think leadership styles have to match the leader. Most leaders can’t get away with this because they fundamentally don’t want to.
It will be really hard to take the right lessons away from this situation. 90% of what Elon is doing that is successful is probably below the surface, if the lesson is, come into a company and fire 90% of people and you’ll thrive, I think you’re going to have a bad time.
Most important Edit: you have to have fuck you money for this to work so you can sell $4 billion in stock to keep the company afloat after you tank the revenue.
Might be true, just easily might not be. Seems too uncertain to draw conclusions. Like, why didn't this happen ten years ago? Twenty? OK, take those explanations. Why can't they happen again?
Perhaps a union or guild of some description would be in order.
Once you have a working product, it's a bit easier. Maintenance is more predictable. But without R&D/innovation, you're slowly going to fall behind, and that's hard to overcome.
So it might not be impossible that Twitter can keep running with a much smaller staff, but even then it might be the beginning of the end. We'll know in a few years...
I suppose that we would need to first decide whether (in this scenario where he succeeded) Elon had actually fixed Twitter, or whether he tore it down to the studs and built a different company out of it, one which happened to be called Twitter, but did something completely different, with new people and new leadership. It feels like that's what he wants to do, and maybe that's why he's not backing down as everybody in the company leaves.
I really just want to make sure this isn't a cop out in the chances his stunts succeed(ie yeah it's successful now but it's different!)
I have no idea what his vision for the company actually is, it just sounds like his mantra is "anything is on the table at this point, but we need to make money fast".
Regardless of Musks success or failure at Twitter, the concentration of wealth in fewer hands will march on (due to automation and software eating everything, eventually, software will eat software). The middle-class SDE-type have been ignoring this reality for a while now, feeling safe because we thought we could find a different well-paying job at the drop of a pin. The bimodal income in the Software world is about to become more defined, with more folk shifting to the lower-income peak.
If it works then I think senior managers will be more willing to reorg quickly and build from the solid core.
However, I'm not sure it will change most things at most places. Managers love headcount more than anything. Each person under them makes them more important. Managers love this. I've had roles where I don't need anymore headcount but I was forced to add it because my managers wanted more headcount.
Worst case, we'll have profitable tech companies far earlier in the lifecycle.
That said, I do think it's very likely that 80% of the present value of any given company is derived from work that was done on the very first version. Twitter the product can likely coast as is for a long time. However I think the reason for having large product teams at mature companies working on marginal projects is because the stock price depends on it. Your potential for discovering new S-curves is priced into your revenue multiple. So while a private twitter might be able to find profitability as a 700 person company, theres (probably) no way for them to achieve meaningful growth. As a result, public companies probably wouldn't view this as a viable playbook.
However I feel like Elon's public statements (and track record as an eng focused leader) make me doubt this will happen. He seems much more enamored of Hardcore Engineers who can ship new features (ie fart pillows[1]) rather than the ops/business side, so I don't think creating a glorified lifestyle business is something he's interested in pursuing.
[1] https://electrek.co/2021/01/19/how-to-make-your-tesla-fart/
Look, Twitter was over-hired, no doubt about it. I have no clue how you would need as many engineers as they had. That said, Twitter did/does have hard problems. People joke about how simple Twitter is but it's just not. The ability to search across all tweets alone in realtime is a massive undertaking at their scale. Even with that they had more employees than they problem needed. My issue with how Elon has managed this is more about how ham-fisted these multiple rounds of layoffs/firings are coupled with how inconsistent he is. Just 18 hours ago they said not to come in till Monday and then with only a few hours notice you need to be in the building with a list of achievements and screenshots (!?) of your code.
I've produced a lot of code over the last 6 months, I'd want more than a couple hours (including traveling) to put together a "portfolio" of sorts. Though has I worked at Twitter I'd have taken the layoff yesterday rather than continue to be jerked around by this... jerk.
To me it matters less if Twitter survives this and more about what that means for the employees that are left. Are they going to see any of the "success" if they turn it around? As it stands they have been asked to work longer hours/weekends but their salaries aren't changing (that we know of). The company isn't public and I've yet to hear of any sort of profit-share/equity/etc that's being given out to those who are going to stay. Also Twitter succeeding != Twitter being a good place to work at. Currently the only person that benefits from Twitter succeeding is Elon. I can't imagine putting my life on hold to enrich a billionaire, especially since Twitter itself isn't a noble cause, no matter what some people deluded themselves into thinking.
I'm not anti-hard-work, I'm anti-hard-work if I'm not going to get something in return which as of now Twitter/Elon has not outlined any rewards other than "being part of Twitter 2.0".
But yeah likely if Twitter does well then we'll also see a bunch of copycat douchebaggery at the C level because "it worked for Elon". For whatever reason, history seems to show us that any time some douchebag succeeds, all the wannabes come out of the woodwork to emulate it.
Or it might just mean less stuff gets done.
My company’s had enough turnover without adequate replacement lately that pretty much everything that isn’t high-priority maintenance now just gets backlogged.
Now, I don't really believe that will happen because software and technology is mind numbingly complex now, and I think only through large bodies of software engineers are we able to tame it, but it is one distinct possibility. Obviously it is the outcome Musk believes in.
Issue is, people kill themselves to make awesome electric cars and rockets straight out of scifi, but to make a better twitter? I'm not seeing it.
But I'm often (usually?) wrong!
The degree you would buy into this probably depends on how much you believe that Twitter is a good representation for the rest of the industry. I imagine a number of people would prefer to believe it is not in the case of success if it is their self value in question.
If you had told me that these emails were being written by Kanye as he scrambled to find a new shoe partner after Adidas, I would have believed you.
Qualifications make the people suffer less but historically have never been required for leaders in any venue. In Europe awful kings were simply born to the throne and people had to accept it, for example. We remember ‘X the Cruel’ but none of their subjects.
The victors write the history books.
The only reason Musk is getting away with any of this is that we've got the pending recession going on and others doing layoffs to jumping jobs isn't as easy for those who remain. I certainly would never go through that dance to prove my worth.
Is he though? There are reports of very few people left, and I suspect many of those are stuck on h1bs, rather than there by allegiance to the new mad king.
While I'm usually not in favor of professional unions for programmers, I think that's the only option at Twitter at this point unless people are ready to quit en mass.
How many more of his employees would Musk be willing to fire or make enemies over this without completely ruining the shell of a company he still owns?
A recent example from tech is Adam Neumann (the WeWork guy) who came up with an absurd business model for commercial real estate, led a widely-ridiculed IPO, and lit a billion dollars of other people's money on fire. A couple years later a16z announces they're giving him a third of a billion dollars to fail again because (paraphrasing from memory) he was the only person who made a profound effort to transform the real estate market.
You can also see smaller-scale examples in media. There are New York Times op ed columnists who have been wrong about everything for decades, but they keep getting invitations from talk shows and universities and publishing companies because of the prestige of being a NYT columnist. But a big reason they're still a columnist is because of all the prestige they get from doing that other stuff.
It's a circular process, and it seems to be hard to fall out of unless you fail publicly and catastrophically. Sometimes it takes multiple such failures. These people all run in the same social circles, which probably also helps. I suspect an awful lot of elites would fare poorly in a real skill-based competition for their official jobs, and consciously or unconsciously act to prevent such a culture from developing.
I don't know any of these people personally, so take this with a large grain of salt. But in the case of Musk, it's clear to me that nobody who spends that much time being a flamboyant asshole on Twitter can be getting any real work done, much less running 2-4 different companies at a time. His real job is prestige development. I'm not sure he has anything in his playbook that doesn't rely on a pre-existing desire to work with The Great Elon Musk and his Great World-Changing Companies. Like many elites, when forced to focus on his official job, he is mediocre at best.
Why don't you think someone at that level could be so incompetent? Megalomania and being out-of-touch reinforce each other. History, from ancient to the present, is full of wealthy, powerful, and paranoid people acting incompetently and thereby doing tremendous damage in the process.
This is just...
Honestly at this point this is just fascinating to watch from the outside and I feel bad for everyone impacted. Particularly those that had no choice but to stay (Visa's)
I guess he’ll be able to drive them hardcore.
Personally, expect for those with visa issues, I won’t have much respect for anyone who still remains.
Unless of course, some of the good ones might be able to really renegotiate their comp and contract at this time.