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Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work

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

#601

Post by PartiallyTyped »

autospeaker22 wrote: post #549

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…

> 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.

No, you won't. There's a lot more to running a social media site than just building it. You can't just build and ship.

Either it is a paid service, or it runs on ads. For the former, good luck amassing any substantial amount of users.

For the latter, well, evidence shows that brand security is important and advertisers don't want their brands displayed along the endless stream of n-words, racism, and homophobia enabled by free-speech absolutionists like Elon. So with such a cesspool, why would anyone in their right mind join? Without users, you can not run an ad-based social network either.

Now that I covered the bare minimum; this is a great read on why you can't just build and ship, if it was easy, twitter wouldn't have been unprofitable for years, and all other twitter clones with free speech wouldn't have failed.

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...

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

#602

Post by Balgair »

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...

To be clear, the FTC is more than happy to pursue criminal charges against individuals when they screw with users.

The (former) CSO of Uber, Joseph Sullivan, is now a felon because of a 2016 hack of Uber and his attempts to cover up the hack.

Joe is looking at a potential of 5 years in a federal prison, where there is no time off for good behavior and the like. In the Fed, you serve the whole sentence (some caveats do apply). He'll also loose the right to vote and hold public office, employment rights, domestic rights, and financial and contractual rights, plus a lot of 'probationary' issues. This will follow him for the rest of his life, likely.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-chief-security-o...

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

#603

Post by autospeaker22 »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #583
autospeaker22 wrote: post #549

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…

> 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. It'd be even cheaper if he had the sense to not play chicken with Twitter's board only to get called on his bluff. Nothing about how he's handled Twitter thus far suggests that he ever took his offer to buy them seriously. He was showboating from the beginning and screwed up, and thous…

Your theory is the one that seems most plausible to me. Pushed into a decision he thought he could back out of and now trying to fix it the best way he sees fit.

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

#604

Post by ericmcer »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #528
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…

I made a half-joke here on HN a few months ago that Musk was buying Twitter just to destroy it for the lols. Maybe everyone's wasting their time with rational economic analysis, trying to figure out a pretty simple guy with an obscene pile of fuck-you money and an axe to grind.

Everyone is looking at it too short term. Twitter isn’t going to disappear and he has shown a willingness to ride through rough economic times to reach his vision.

Social Media is how people interact with the world now, most info we receive is filtered through it in some form. In the last 10 or so years the idea that these platforms need tight moderation to control what and who is speaking on them has become ubiquitous. I think his main gamble is that the future of social media does not involve automated moderation and tight content restrictions, but a more open platform and he is gonna use twitter to play that bet out. It isn’t a horrible bet.

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

#605

Post by jrochkind1 »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #583
autospeaker22 wrote: post #549

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…

> 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. It'd be even cheaper if he had the sense to not play chicken with Twitter's board only to get called on his bluff. Nothing about how he's handled Twitter thus far suggests that he ever took his offer to buy them seriously. He was showboating from the beginning and screwed up, and thous…

I may be missing something, but would it have been that hard to fail to get financing and get out of it, since it was a bad deal that others shouldn't want to finance, if he had started working on failing to get financing before he... succefully lined up financing?

I guess it would have been a hit to his ego if he had failed to get financing... it'll probably be a bigger one to drive twitter into the ground and throw away his and others billions.

The whole thing is very bizarre from the start to now.

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

#607

Post by jensvdh »

autospeaker22 wrote: post #549

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…

If you paid me anywhere between 750-1.5M a year just go on in the office 40 hours a week I'd take that offer any day every day.

I did the same for less than half of that not even 2 years ago.

The problem with Musk companies is 1) It'll be MINIMUM 40 hours a week, no WLB 2) His companies aren't known for paying competitively

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

#608

Post by heavyset_go »

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…

Changes in terms of employment, like going from WFH to mandatory in-office, makes employees eligible to collect unemployment should they choose to quit. It's one of the few reasons you can collect unemployment after voluntarily quitting.

Such a move can backfire, and more people can quit than you planned on laying off, and that can make your UI liabilities larger than they would have been with just a layoff.

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

#609

Post by bilbo0s »

danans wrote: post #552
abxytg wrote: post #481

Or -- he's stupid.

I think the stupidity was in the non-contingent offer to purchase it. Now he's trying to pay for that stupidity. Maybe he's doing that stupidly too, but only time will tell.

This.

He let emotion laden political nonsense lead him into making an extraordinarily bad deal. OK. Fine. Not what prudent businessmen would have done, but now he's where he is with the Twitter deal.

So at this point it's all about leading from where you are, and sometimes where you are is in a place where there are zero good options. Every option is terrible, and probably won't work to extricate you from your situation.

But here's the thing, you have to take one of the options because you cannot stay where you are. The one thing you know is that where you are leads to certain death. Go left. Go right. But you can't stay here. That's the situation Elon is in.

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

#610

Post by khazhoux »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #550
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.

> I doubt any of them would want to put in the number of hours he puts in.

I guess that would depend on whether they'd be getting employee comp/equity, or Elon's comp/equity.

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