HN Explorer

Ask HN: Why is anybody still working for Twitter?

18 points by batguano ↗ HN
Elon fired a principal engineer last week because the engineer had the temerity to tell him that fewer people wanted to read tweets by the increasingly unhinged Musk. Morale must be thru the floor, and work/life balance insane. I sincerely wonder why anyone would stay at a place like that. Are the remaining employees True Believers in Elon and his plan? Are they that afraid of the current job market? Or was there really tons of dead weight at Twitter? With such deep cuts, I'd have expected even more serious outages than what we've seen so far.

28 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 66.7 ms ] thread
paulpauper
People work at Chipotle or Disney which are far worse than even Twitter. so...It's not like people can just quit and find better work.
ggm
Engineers at FAANG could rebalance to a lifestyle closer to the American norm and still be better off than most people. Even only 1-2 years on FAANG salary if saved, is equivalent to 5-6 or more of more normal income levels. 10+ could exceed lifetime earnings for someone on minimum wage.

So yes, there are lifestyle adjustments: kids move to a state school, downsize car and house: but you own that downsize outright, and you made bank in your IRA equivalent to 10 years at average income.

You could sustain a year of job hunting and not have a problem.

Of course if you spent all that income, you also might not be able to. And the tail cost of tax on vesting could hurt. Mostly this is hurt to self esteem if you frame it that way.

I'm not a FAANG. I have a story about partners at a conference swapping life issues, one was concerned which of the two Tesla (the x or the matching his n hers x) they should keep...

superchroma
Money is money, and not everyone is having to deal with elon on a daily basis. I suspect some people's jobs have not changed at all.
wlindley
Why are folks wailing and gnashing teeth over Mr. Musk buying Twitter, but they still gush like giddy schoolgirls over Tesla, and their "self-driving" vaporware? =confused=
marssaxman
Maybe they're not the same folks in both examples.
moomoo11
Does it matter? At least they're not working for far worse like Meta or AMZN.
bell-cot
People don't all follow the same career advice book. Or have the same mindset & emotions about Bail vs. Stay. There's a wide bell-curve for pretty much anything involving humans.

Speaking as an old geezer - I see a whole lotta people, even older ones, who never really "get" that other people don't share their worldview / emotions / etc. I've had seemingly bright, educated grandparents proclaim to me that they can't believe that anyone would ever do X...just 20 minutes after they told me a story about their own grandkid doing X.

savoytruffle
Remember when Steve Jobs would "allegedly" fire you in the elevator if you couldn't explain what you were up to?

Now theLoon wants every customer's warranty card to include a paean to his genius. Well, if it was the 1990's.

I am a little bit surprised I am still able to "block" the Musk account on Twitter.

birdymcbird
>> Or was there really tons of dead weight at Twitter?

elon fired > half the company. site runs reasonably well. personally havent seen issues.

main question is what these people did.

and being in big tech seen this up close. original leadership leave, replace by professional managers. Professional manager have no vision or care about product. only goal to grow head count..get promoted.

amazes me why so many people triggered by musk firing half company. class of worker producing no economic value but paid hundreds of thousands USD per year..catered food.. it massive GRIFT. business is business, not charity.

superchroma
It's broken for hours of the day for me, images just won't load, as will certain feeds. This happens for multiple days in a row now.
nailer
Huh weird. I’m a daily twitter user and have seen no issues with images.

Instead engagement with my posts has increased, accounts I like are back, and it’s easier to see a timeline view now.

birdymcbird
Don’t see this on twitters iphone app at all.

if this really happening then musk right to fire engineers.

from me time at google and amazon - most critical services operate independently..not requiring entire teams to operate. just need 1-2 engineer on call.

for most part of traffic spike then auto scaling solution in place to add compute capacity.

service never should be brittle.

Twitter case very interesting. practically no major feature work in 5 year.

me best guess Twitter may have issue now because they pushing feature under musk. as he said himself expect issues to happen.

but all these people crying Twitter demise are like clowns. musk ripped band aid off the massive grift..people paid $350k+ a year to not do much productive work.

zem
families to support, bills to pay, uncertain job market, h1b visas - there are all sorts of reasons people might not have the ability or confidence to leave a crappy job.
viraptor
While I can't speak for the employees, some ideas: If the pay is good, they can start doing "just enough" and hope for redundancy. They may be bound by visa/insurance situation. They may be interviewing / looking for good offers. They may be waiting for the current wave of redundancies to pass, waiting for good offers to a appear again. They may not care and just like the money.
nailer
> Elon fired a principal engineer last week because the engineer had the temerity to tell him that fewer people wanted to read tweets by the increasingly unhinged Musk.

I have never heard this before. It seems very unlikely and given you seem to have some personal issue with Musk I’m unlikely to believe it unless you provide a source.

byroot
https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/9/23593099/elon-musk-twitter...
nailer
From a credible source please.
byroot
Is Forbes good enough for you? https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/02/09/elon-musk-...
nailer
> “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions,” Musk reportedly said.

I’d fire someone who tried to claim that staggering lack of impressions was organic too. Twitter is in a much better place without employees that make up BS to avoid doing actual work.

It’s also simultaneously amazing yet unsurprising to see Verge (and the OP) try and frame concern over concerning numbers like this as an matter of ego.

byroot
If it isn't a matter of ego, how to you explain that the fix was to add a special weight to his tweets specifically?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-15/musk-forc...

I hope Bloomberg is reliable enough for you.

mypastself
It is within the realm of possibility that the report you’re referring to is inaccurate.
cocodill
May be cause twitter got much better since Elon took over the place.
gaws
That's cute.
rvz
> Morale must be thru the floor, and work/life balance insane. I sincerely wonder why anyone would stay at a place like that.

There are far more worse places and companies than the blue bird site. I don't see techies here rushing to work for the government or being a retail worker at Walmart or Amazon.

> With such deep cuts, I'd have expected even more serious outages than what we've seen so far.

Well despite the 'news' suggesting that Twitter will totally collapse in the coming weeks (spoiler: It did not) over 200M+ users are still sitting on Twitter.

RGamma
Besides tangible reasons? Human psychology is a curious thing, perhaps they don't even know themselves; they just do.
nailer
> Elon fired a principal engineer last week because the engineer had the temerity to tell him that fewer people wanted to read tweets by the increasingly unhinged Musk.

This is false. What actually happened:

> “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions,” Musk reportedly said.

An employee tried to claim this figure was organic (which is obviously fantastical) and was rightfully fired.