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Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

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Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#381

Post by Loughla »

flanked-evergl wrote: post #276
Loughla wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years? I'll bite on this one. For reference, I personally believe Elon Musk is a degenerate blowhard who has literally zero concept of what life actually is like for billions of people on the planet, nor does he care. I believe he belongs to the class of people known as 'parasites'. Here's my take: 1 year: Initially, we'll see improvements. Dead wei…

> up to and including "vague" threats of violence. I'm no expert in Twitter, but I have heard many people of note complain about receiving death threats on Twitter. One example: https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-dea... > Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has revealed that some mornings she starts her day by reading the death threats she has received from men on Twitter. Making a death threat, or a threa…

Good questions!

>Can you clarify why you think the new owners will look the other way at crimes being committed on their platform?

The old owners only did what they had to when the threats floated to the surface of the lagoon. The new owner has explicitly said that free speech means free speech. I believe overt threats of violence (read: I will kill X on June 5, 2023) will be addressed, but anything that can be played off as "satire" or "joking" (Read: somebody should kill X. lol jk) will be ignored, if not promoted for the extra eyes and clicks.

>is this the trajectory you see regardless of ownership?

No. I believe with old ownership we would see what we currently have in perpetuity. There was no innovation from Twitter, but there was also no real negative change either. Status quo.

>And if not how will new ownership contribute to it?

From what I read/see, Elon Musk espouses the view that people who disagree with him are lesser than. I believe he genuinely thinks he is better than everyone else; smarter, stronger, faster, better. I believe he will see people who act and think the same way (read: toxic) on Twitter, and automatically defend them if not outright promote them. This group will include people who incite violence.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#382

Post by bhawks »

KaiserPro wrote: post #308

THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion. Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive". Musk is not a proponent of that. He is a micromanaging, capricious, easily distracted, arrogant and vindictive CEO. If twitter thrives then we can expect copycats to try and spread his shitty work philosophy (like everyone ido…

996 culture in China already highlights this as a valid strategy. Perhaps a little too obscure for the typical pointy haired boss. Elon will be a great poster boy.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#383

Post by trashtester »

irae wrote: post #245

The specific team the article mentions, the "inventing and building ethical AI [stuff]" seems like a very reasonable choice for layoff. This is a company in debit, and as such I see no good reason for them to have a long term, unknown timeline, unknown outcomes and (likely) expensive team. Especially considering how much AI critics accuse AI of being racist, sexist and all sorts of impossible to judge human behavior…

I'm pretty sure Elon has more confidence in the Tesla AI team. I suppose he will move someone he trusts into a team lead for whatever AI activities (if any) Twitter will have in the future.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#384

Post by devwastaken »

rdtwo wrote: post #265
redwood wrote: post #9

In my view no single medium (the media is the message) has done more to weaken the quality of public discourse in the world than Twitter. But maybe Facebook proves that even if you're allowed to use prose crazies dominate so maybe the issue is deeper

I don’t think that’s true. Twitter is/was the only remaining news medium where experts had a voice. During the pandemic doctors and infectious diseases experts were using it to call or government blow hards. Now that’s going to die as well and we may return to complete darkness.

I saw the opposite. "Experts" being totally wrong and fear mongering without evidence. It was rural governments that said "prove it".

Recall how various studies on covid lethality, vaccination and masks were wildly different. The Israel study is a quick one. This is exactly what happened when influenza was new in the 1920's.

Yet the "experts" made it sound like everyone is going to die if you are not wearing a mask 24/7 and isolating. This is what "do no harm" ideology becomes - causing mass harm to everyone to potentially protect a few.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#385

Post by maxbond »

commandlinefan wrote: post #340
maxbond wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erring on the side of things often changing less then we may anticipate, my guess is that Twitter becomes a sort of Tumblr for people of a certain persuasion, that being the people who like the ideas Musk is putting forward. It still exists, it puts out new features from time to time, there's a large group of people who simultaneously love and hate it and spend enormous time and energy there, but it's role as the pri…

> Airing on the side of things Pretty sure you mean "erring", here.

Darn homophones! Thanks

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#386

Post by time_to_smile »

KaiserPro wrote: post #308

THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion. Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive". Musk is not a proponent of that. He is a micromanaging, capricious, easily distracted, arrogant and vindictive CEO. If twitter thrives then we can expect copycats to try and spread his shitty work philosophy (like everyone ido…

Tech "treated employees right" because for awhile software engineers had a "monopoly on skill". If you rewind to around 2008 and earlier there really were more getting work done, building real things jobs out there than people who could do it. There were a lot of startups that hand a hard time getting people to just build the initial CRUD apps to start their business.

Startups and smart companies realized that if you couldn't compete on pay you could compete on how you treated employees. In the years leading up to the start of the current boom the pay differential between big companies and startups was't as vast as it is now.

Then industry started pushing hard to create more software engineers from the traditional path of increased undergrad comp sci enrollments to the development and expansion of the bootcamp industry. Then the money started to go up and more and more people started rushing into the industry for the money. When I started in tech ~2005 almost every software person I knew got into the field because they loved to write code and build things, when I talk to recent software engineers almost all of them answer that compensation is their main driver today.

Now anyone hiring today (or let's say 3 months prior to today) will claim that it's still really hard to find good devs. However the amount of work being done that is essential and productive has dramatically decreased. Head counts have been expanding because money was flowing and managers need more people under them to get promoted (this logic flows even to the CEO level).

But now this long, long tech bubble is starting to burst and we'll companies across the board start asking "how much of this work is really necessary? how can we become profitable?" and we'll realize as an industry that we are way over indexed on software engineers.

This is exactly what happened during the dotcom era, I guess most people are just too young to remember. Anyone who could use a computer got hired to work in tech, paid ridiculous for the time, there were tons of people enrolling in EE and CS, a huge number of software engineers. The the bubble burst and a lot of the engineers disappeared, CS enrollments dropped radically, salaries went way down, and the only people left in the industry were people who just really like writing code and building things.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#387

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

inglor_cz wrote: post #356
KaiserPro wrote: post #308

THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion. Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive". Musk is not a proponent of that. He is a micromanaging, capricious, easily distracted, arrogant and vindictive CEO. If twitter thrives then we can expect copycats to try and spread his shitty work philosophy (like everyone ido…

SpaceX does not seem to have a problem attracting talent and even poaching it from competitors. The difference might be in the fact that Musk founded it and allegedly takes part in the recruitment process himself. Maybe he wants to do the same at Twitter. Turning an already existing company with an already existing company culture around is much more complicated, though.

SpaceX is going somewhere. Twitter is going nowhere.

This is a political play.

Musk may be a competent engineer, but he's used to being Emperor. He's completely out of his depth with culture and politics. So he's unprepared for the brutal muck-racking, humiliation, and character assassination that underpin political power games.

The "You can have free speech for just $8/month" accidental branding is already such a bad look. I don't see that he has the instincts, talent, or experience to even understand why - never mind to do better.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#388

Post by [deleted] »

cal85 wrote: post #378
notacoward wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think it will be four years? Considering his attention span, and the rapidity with which Twitter is already deteriorating, I suspect it will be much less than that.

Yeah he’s only seen like a handful of new space rocket designs through from conception to profitability, and he only created one major car company before moving onto other things. He can never stick to anything.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#389

Post by naasking »

mikkergp wrote: post #269
losvedir wrote: post #180

And so the grand experiment begins. I feel bad for the folks losing their job because that always sucks, and I hope there's a decent severance package. Now we'll see what happens to Twitter... I hardly use it, so if it implodes it won't bother me too much. But I am curious to see if all the "how do you need X people to do Y?" commenters are correct in this case. The app is simple but doing simple things at scale is h…

It will be interesting to see how Elon defines success. Twitter in it's current form is a dead end, and there's no way "more free speech" is going increase either revenue or users. So if you think Elon is going to succeed at making Twitter a better Twitter as we know it, then I'm confident this take is wrong. Which is why he's focused on the everything X app or whatever. Now, I wouldn't want to underestimate Elon, he…

> It's one of the smallest social networks and Twitter as Twitter, i.e. the one big open forum with politicians, journalists scientists etc _is_ it's competitive advantage. So I don't know how you get from Twitter to X when almost every other social media does the things X would do better than Twitter.

Being the elites' gathering place is indeed its biggest advantage, and the fact that consumers can get public visibility on issues they're facing helps companies with their public image. There are many times where I or friends have posted about issues after exhausting the standard support channels, and quickly cut through the bureaucratic red tape and got our problem solved. I think that's a monetizable angle.

I think something similar would apply to other elites as well. Politicians can get direct feedback from constituents, music artists get direct feedback from fans (see the recent Lizzo "spaz" thing), and so on. However, in the current climate, elites are getting skewed feedback, so "more free speech" could actually help, if it's done right.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#390

Post by FormerBandmate »

admissionsguy wrote: post #371
KaiserPro wrote: post #308

THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion. Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive". Musk is not a proponent of that. He is a micromanaging, capricious, easily distracted, arrogant and vindictive CEO. If twitter thrives then we can expect copycats to try and spread his shitty work philosophy (like everyone ido…

Then stop being employees. Jesus Christ, you people take those massive salaried yet act like little children throwing tantrums because you fear your boss may not coddle you as much.

You’re right, everyone should just completely uproot their lives for the hell of it and start completely untested startups with no safety net whenever their boss cracks down, instead of justify complaining about his insanity
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