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Twitter Android app dev fired: Guess it's official now.

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Re: Twitter Android app dev fired: Guess it's official now.

#161
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Far from having consequences, chapter 11 bankruptcy is actually a very powerful and advantageous financial tool in cases like this. Elon can likely wipe away the $13B+ of debt, get rid of all employee stock obligations, and continue to run the company himself under the temporary observation of a bankruptcy court. Chapter 11 filings are a very common outcome of leveraged buyouts like this one.

Wait what? Don't creditors get control of the company? Specially if the firm went down b/c of the actions of the current mgmt?

No, a company uses chapter 11 bankruptcy specifically to restructure debt and continue operating under the current management.

Re: Twitter Android app dev fired: Guess it's official now.

#162
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowhere in this thread am I assigning any blame to anyone, so that's just a strawman diversion from the conversation on your part. As for runway – that's public information as well. Twitter had $6B in cash and securities as of the last financial statement release. That has likely gone down a fair amount due to acquisition-related costs as well as severance payments. Keeping up with the ~$2B/yr burn rate, unless Twitt…

Did you forget the $5B/yr they make from advertisers?

> Did you forget the $5B/yr they make from advertisers?

They…don’t. Their last quarterly numbers had a hair over $1B in advertising revenue, and that was both a quarterly and year-over-year increase, so they weren’t making more than $4B/year from advertising before Musk took over. Their advance sales were bad for next year because of the potential of the Musk takeover, and big accounts have backed out, and big agencies publicly advised clients to back out of the platform, based on what has gone on since the takeover.

Re: Twitter Android app dev fired: Guess it's official now.

#163
I love how Elon is supposedly destroying Twitter because he is removing all those thousands of employee he supposedly needs to run it, and then the same people who say that supposedly are fleeing and so happy with the alternative Mastodon, developed for free by a tiny team of volunteers and ran by a few volunteers for free.

Which is it? Can you run Twitter or an alternative basically for free? Or do you need thousands of employees?

I think it is becoming pretty clear pretty quickly that the alternative being run and developed for free doesn’t scale to anywhere near Twitter size at all, that’s one thing that’s for sure.

Re: Twitter Android app dev fired: Guess it's official now.

#164

jfc the idiot turned off core services for the system and now people can't log in https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/15922599381095219... how much does it cost to run some microservices, what a tool

It looks like Grab and Smash

increasingly, yes

Re: Twitter Android app dev fired: Guess it's official now.

#165

He fired another one: https://twitter.com/sachee/status/1592308273071681536?s=46&t... If he fires all the engineers with a bad attitude it’ll just be the product managers left.

I guess this is what she got in trouble for? Pretty epic way to go, IMHO:

> you did not just layoff almost all of infra and then make some sassy remark about how we do batching

>like did you bother to even learn how graphql works

>you don’t get to shit on our infra if you don’t know what the fuck it does while you’re also scrambling to rehire folks you laid off

Her background: https://sashatsolomon.com/

>I'm a Staff Software engineer and co-Tech Lead of the Core API Platform Team at Twitter helping build the next generation API with GraphQL and Scala. I currently serve on the GraphQL Governing Board as a representative of Twitter, as well as on the Technical Steering Committee for GraphQL.

Re: Twitter Android app dev fired: Guess it's official now.

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Definitely a career limiting move, if not potentially career ending. She is already receiving job offers, so how could you possibly come to that ridiculous conclusion?

Of course she’s receiving generous offers from the ‘hurr durr Elon bad’ crowd. The career limitation is that most people just aren’t in that crowd. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re licking Elons boots, it could also mean they don’t care at all or that they are somewhere in the middle. I’m not in a hiring position but if I were I’d avoid her because I don’t want to import drama into my environment.

If you are competent, at the end of the day you can get away with almost anything. In the worst case, she can go start her own company as a GraphQL consultant :)

Re: Twitter Android app dev fired: Guess it's official now.

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(wasn't he supposed to be for free speech?)

(Did he stop her from saying it?)

He literally cancelled her. Got her fired from her own job because of a tweet. It's exactly the intolerance he complains of.

Re: Twitter Android app dev fired: Guess it's official now.

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's really an opportunity for the employees to make that a reality. Elon (like his other companies) is going to put the engineers in control. Please, consider investing in some real estate. I have a fantastic property in Brooklyn and it is a deal that you would not believe! Or a less sarcastic response... You mean he'll put them in charge after firing them? Twitter literally barely works right now. I'm not sure how…

Everything he's doing is bringing Twitter inline with how SpaceX and Tesla already operate. It's a massive culture shock/change. Insubordination is not tolerated. Everyone is super mission focused. No one is irreplaceable.

Yes, captain!

Re: Twitter Android app dev fired: Guess it's official now.

#169
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who thinks they can tell their boss "kiss my ass" and not get fired? > i said it before and i'll say it again > kiss my ass elon

The first line of that tweet reads > lol just got fired for shitposting I think it's okay to say "kiss my ass" after being fired. Especially if you think doing so sends the right signal.

Her "kiss my ass elon" pinned post was from July 8.

She's been publicly criticising Elon for a few days now, and not in a constructive manner like the Android dev. I can understand why she'd be let go.

Re: Twitter Android app dev fired: Guess it's official now.

#170
post #40

After seeing Elon mixing up all async services that happen in backend with Android client making as many requests, I wonder if I thought this guy is smart because I know nothing about building cars or launching space rockets. Edit: "guy is smart" probably should be "guy is technically competent". I am sure Elon is smart, I think he is being Phony while acting technically competent in every area.

I still believe that his insistence on only using computer vision for Tesla’s self driving was profoundly wrong. I got my ivy-league graduate degree in a related field right around the time when he probably was making the decision (2015) and it was obvious to everyone around me that we are not even close to having the kind of generic, reliable CV you would need for a car. Obviously, in grant proposals and papers we p…

Also in a related field (cognitive and neural linguistics) and I 100% agree. Elon read too much science fiction and doesn't understand the full stack. The results from automated statistics (I hate calling it machine learning) is amazing - but it amounts to really good pattern matching.

Which is why Tesla Autopilot struggles with left turns and has been stuck at SAE level two after a decade of work. Hell, Tesla Inc failed to automate their factories much beyond what other automakers already accomplished and that is for single-purpose robots in fixed operating environments. Yet Elon is busy selling shareholders on humanoid Tesla Bots that will be capable of running to the grocery store and getting items off the shelf ... someday.

People with a background in the hard sciences just don't do well when grappling with the soft sciences .

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