Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work • Hacker News Board

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

#541

Post by epgui » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 9:52 PM UTC

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #530

poszlem wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's stupid is people thinking that someone who successfully rules over some of the most influential companies in the world is stupid. Reminds me of all those people who claim that Trump or Putin[1] are "stupid" where in reality they just mean "I don't like them". [1] You can be a murderous dictator and not stupid, I would actually wager a guess that those people tend to actually be cleverer than average. Some appl…

The smartest man in the world can still make mistakes.

Yes, but does that mean the smartest man in the world is stupid?

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

#542

Post by giantrobot » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 9:52 PM UTC

ajkjk wrote: post #60

yummybear wrote: post #11

At this point why would anyone want to stay at twitter? The mood must be absolutely abysmal.

Definitely check with Twitter employees before assuming that. On the one hand yeah, maybe. On the other, if I was depressed with how off-course my company had gotten, watching someone come in and clean house / shake things up would be very exciting.

Even the biggest Musk fanboy at Twitter isn't immune to the morale hit from a doubling or trebling of their workload because their team was cut in half from layoffs. What consolation is the company "getting back on course" if you've got to work 70+ hour weeks for the next several months. No time off, sleeping at your desk, never seeing family, and certainly no holiday time off. At the end you now work for a Musk company so your compensation will lag the SV mean.

I feel bad for anyone in that position that feels happy. That's just a really sad Stockholm syndrome at that point.

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

#543

Post by kazinator » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 9:52 PM UTC

slg wrote: post #208

Let's say you run a company and you want to reduce staff. Let's also say you want to make an unpopular decision (or multiple unpopular decisions) that you know will drive a certain percentage of your staff to leave the company. Wouldn't it make the most sense to announce those decisions before making layoffs? Let people self select whether they want to stay and work for you and then make your layoffs after to ensure…

Hard to say! Because, look. Suppose you begin not with layoffs but with the announcement "everyone back in the office for 40h/wk", knowing that people will leave. At that point, you don't get to choose who will leave, and it won't necessarily be the less productive fraction of the employees.

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

#544

Post by willcipriano » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 9:52 PM UTC

poszlem wrote: post #517

abxytg wrote: post #481

Or -- he's stupid.

What's stupid is people thinking that someone who successfully rules over some of the most influential companies in the world is stupid. Reminds me of all those people who claim that Trump or Putin[1] are "stupid" where in reality they just mean "I don't like them". [1] You can be a murderous dictator and not stupid, I would actually wager a guess that those people tend to actually be cleverer than average. Some appl…

Been saying this forever. It's never wise to call your enemies stupid, it makes it considerably more embarrassing when you lose to a idiot.

All of my enemies are 8 foot tall, einsteinian, gigachad supermen.

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

#545

Post by skellington » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 9:52 PM UTC

rodgerd wrote: post #332

Zigurd wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the part you are overthinking: "Wouldn't it make the most sense..." It would makes sense to hire a CEO. It would make sense to plan a layoff so you don't have to beg key people to return, etc. Musk frames this as making mistakes while working fast. In this case it will push more people to leave. There is probably intent, if not exactly thought and planning behind this because Really Bad Things have not happen…

It's funny how people will argue "never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" to excuse an institution or individual they like, but here people are bending over backwards to justify Musk's behaviour at Twitter as the performance of an evil genius playing a game that we're too subtle to understand, rather than those of a bully fool who is burning his life down thanks, apparently, to a crippling so…

No post body was provided.

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

#546

Post by boole1854 » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 9:53 PM UTC

fnordpiglet wrote: post #504

SkyPuncher wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What has Twitter innovated on in the past decade? While I don't agree with the way Elon has been making this move, it's sure looking like he's trying to clear the place out so he can establish a new culture. These policy changes are likely to scare mobile, top-performers off to other companies. This likely clears out a lot of internal dissent and heal digging to make room for new "top performers". I wouldn't be shock…

Why would any competent engineer sign up to work in the environment Musk has created? I’ve seen no upside to employees offered, only brutal management and benefit reduction with a promise of hard work for less.

Musk attracts engineers by selling a vision. Reusable rockets to make humanity an interstellar species. Electric vehicles to free humanity from fossil fuels. Humanoid robots. Neuralink. And on it goes.

For Twitter, the vision Musk is selling is that "it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence". [1]

That might not be your cup of tea, or you might believe Musk is too petulant a leader to bring that vision to fruition. But it is an aspiration that will make some people excited and willing to put in the hard work Musk is demanding.

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1585619322239561728

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

#547

Post by throwuwu » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 9:53 PM UTC

rodgerd wrote: post #332

Zigurd wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the part you are overthinking: "Wouldn't it make the most sense..." It would makes sense to hire a CEO. It would make sense to plan a layoff so you don't have to beg key people to return, etc. Musk frames this as making mistakes while working fast. In this case it will push more people to leave. There is probably intent, if not exactly thought and planning behind this because Really Bad Things have not happen…

It's funny how people will argue "never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" to excuse an institution or individual they like, but here people are bending over backwards to justify Musk's behaviour at Twitter as the performance of an evil genius playing a game that we're too subtle to understand, rather than those of a bully fool who is burning his life down thanks, apparently, to a crippling so…

Maybe you don’t remember the 80s but this is how pretty much every hostile takeover went down. Leveraged buyout > massive layoffs and restructuring > change in business model and the next thing we’ll likely see is some form of selling off assets or divisions, not sure what those would be in Twitter’s case but it won’t be a surprise if they come up with something.

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

#548

Post by ThrowawayTestr » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 9:53 PM UTC

avian wrote: post #302

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…

> some people decide it's not worth two seconds of clicking fire hydrants My reaction when I get the fire hydrants/traffic lights/whatever thing is to not bother and close the site. It's not because I can't spare two seconds, but because from past experience I know that whenever I get this it's an unending captcha hell. It seems that these days the only time you're given a captcha is when some AI somewhere already de…

Do you use a vpn?

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

#549

Post by autospeaker22 » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 9:53 PM UTC

I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for.

Let's say Elon had set aside a budget to hire some of the best developers he's ever worked with or heard of, and lets give them an imaginary salary of 1.5 million total comp per year, at about 10 devs for easy math. And let's say another 500k for bennies. So our operating expense for top dev talent comes out to 20 million a year. You can have an elite tier dev team, for 20 million a year that could easily build a twitter. He could've tried to interview ex-Twitter and get feedback on technical debt, pain points, problems to have fixed in the newly architect-ed model.

So then you need users. Elon has 115 million followers on Twitter. He'd get users no matter what he built, so he's solved that problem too. You're correct that he wouldn't have the existing Twitter user base, but if he built a better product that is more modern and cut out some of the dead-weight features, wouldn't this option still be significantly cheaper than acquiring a company for $44 billion who only deals in software? At least apple makes products, as does amazon and at least amazon is a distribution behemoth. I struggle to see the 44 billion in value for what appears to be a relatively mundane application.

In my mind I don't see anyone even spending on the order of 1 billion to build a better Twitter from scratch.

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

#550

Post by MetaWhirledPeas » Thu, Nov 10, 2022, 9:54 PM UTC

alistairSH wrote: post #275

So, he fires thousands of them while hob-knobbing with other billionaires on the other side of the country. And his first company-wide communication is rescinding previous WFH policies without much reason. What an absolute knob. Edit to add... He demanded a company-wide all-hands on one hours notice, then appeared 15 minute late. I hope every employee worth their salary walks, Twitter implodes, and Musk loses much of…

I think the notion of a CEO doing all the things their workers do purely out of solidarity to be shallow and condescending. Obviously his job is different from theirs and he is going to have a different set of rules. And I doubt any of them would want to put in the number of hours he puts in. He's clearly a workaholic.