Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 1001 posts

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#211

Post by leftcenterright »

badwolf wrote: post #184
fermentation wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that work? If a SWE isn't aware of the gazillion laws surrounding their code, why isn't the company liable when X of those laws are inevitably violated? What about the people who review the code? Or the people who wrote the systems that push the code?

It seems Musk's new legal "department" is wanting developers to self-certify - put their own name on the certification. https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/10/23451198/twitter-ftc-elo...

Looking at how complex Twitter's internal systems appear to be based on Mudge's report [1], I doubt informed developers would dare certify things they do not fully understand. Depends a bit on what entity (system, service, environment) they have to certify.

> In January 2022, Mudge determined and reported to the executive team that (because of poor engineering architecture decisions that preceded Mudge's employment) Twitter had over 300 corporate systems and upwards of 10,000 services that might still be affected, but Twitter was unable to thoroughly assess its exposure to Log4j and did not have capacity, if pressed in a formal investigation, to show to the FTC that the company had properly remediated the problem.

> Mudge knew that the actual underlying data showed that at the end of 2021, 51 % of the ~ 11 thousand full-time employees had privileged access to Twitter's production systems, a 5% increase from the 46% of total employees in February of 2021 that Mudge had shared in his initial findings delivered to the Board in early 2021

1. https://techpolicy.press/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/whistleb...

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#212

Post by Spooky23 »

whiskey14 wrote: post #30
kypro wrote: post #23

I am split on the remote work thing from a productivity / creativity perspective. I do think there are times when I'm less productivity working from home compared to the office. I also think as a team we're less creative. Some of the best stuff I've done in my career has come out of casual conversations with my team about the stuff we're building. I've noticed I don't think about what I'm building as much when workin…

I'm beginning to think that collective distributed satellite offices is going to be big. Like WeWork but for companies to house their local staff and far less culty. Would help if they had standing desks, folding treadmills, three screens and everything else for a superb dev experience that is a bit of a pain to set up at home.

The US Gov pioneered this. It didn’t work very well.

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#214

Post by ballenf »

Matheus28 wrote: post #169
rgovostes wrote: post #152

> over the next few days, the absolute top priority is finding and suspending any verified bots/trolls/spam. Would it improve the situation to simply require a CAPTCHA once per day per non-subscriber to tweet? I would think it would greatly increase the cost to operate a troll farm, but have minimal impact on real users (setting aside accessibility and third-party clients a moment). If it causes attrition because som…

Captcha solvers charge less than $4 per 1000 solved captchas. It'd likely still be worth it to do that sort of spam.

Hopefully it wouldn't make the well-funded bots more successful.

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#215

Post by [deleted] »

badwolf wrote: post #184
fermentation wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that work? If a SWE isn't aware of the gazillion laws surrounding their code, why isn't the company liable when X of those laws are inevitably violated? What about the people who review the code? Or the people who wrote the systems that push the code?

It seems Musk's new legal "department" is wanting developers to self-certify - put their own name on the certification. https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/10/23451198/twitter-ftc-elo...

[deleted]

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#216

Post by cwkoss »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #192
burkaman wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related, what are the odds that Musk would be cool with any Twitter employee taking multiple other full-time jobs at the same time?

He is simply doing what he believes is in the shareholders' best interests. If you bought a company, especially a failing company, it wouldn't be business as usual: you would immediately set policies that make the most sense for your shareholders and increase profits. And, Musk has a reputation to be a very hard 24x7 worker but also one not bound by a timezone, let alone geographic location, but again it's a lot easi…

> Musk is known to be a very hard 24x7 worker

This is just PR. Seems naive to believe the emperor is wearing clothes.

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#217

Post by jeffrallen »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #165
unwind wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't typical contracts for people like Twitter's staff in the US come with timing requirements on quitting? As in, you can't really quit "on the day", you have to leave proper notice and so on? I understand that in practice once someone says "I quit!" there might be little interest from the employer to keep them around, but in a scenario like you outline I would be very afraid of legal ramifications. Just a thought,…

Most states in the US are "At will employment". You can quit on the day! It is just not considered "polite" / "professional".

Buying a company, firing all the executives and then half the employees is also not very polite or professional.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#218

Post by klodolph »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #194

According to leaked email on CNBC, Musk said that Twitter needs 50% of its revenue to be subscriptions in order to surivive: > That is why the priority over the past ten days has been to develop and launch Twitter Blue Verified subscriptions (huge props to the team!). Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn. We need roughly half of our r…

Revenue of $5bn. Let’s say that you burn half of it down, so you’re making $2.5bn with ads, and $2.5bn with subscriptions. If there 200M DAU, then that means you want to make $12.5/year, per user, for subscriptions.

I don’t see how that would be possible, even under the most wildly optimistic scenarios.

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#219

Post by mk_stjames »

unwind wrote: post #139
csmpltn wrote: post #106

Here's a cool and perhaps unforeseen hypothetical turn-of-events: 100% of Twitter's staff give their resignation letter on Friday, and don't show up to work. Leadership wakes up to a collapsing platform, a 44 billion USD bill to pay, with no one to keep the lights on or answer the PagerDuty alerts. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes? No time for silly "knowledge transfers", or "onboarding new team members". You jus…

Don't typical contracts for people like Twitter's staff in the US come with timing requirements on quitting? As in, you can't really quit "on the day", you have to leave proper notice and so on? I understand that in practice once someone says "I quit!" there might be little interest from the employer to keep them around, but in a scenario like you outline I would be very afraid of legal ramifications. Just a thought,…

California is an 'at-will' work state, which means you can both be fired at-will or you can leave a company at-will with zero notice (it goes both ways). I know, because I've done it (left, that is, with only notice given the day-of). Unless this has changed in the years since I've left CA/the US.

Re: Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

#220

Post by arez »

memish wrote: post #193
madrox wrote: post #149

I see we're still deep in the "fuck around" stage and have yet to reach "find out."

What you find out is in proportion to how much you fuck around. You have to fuck around to innovate and do new shit. It took a lot of fucking at Tesla and SpaceX to get to where they are.

that's the same steps to fuck it up btw
Post reply on HN