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Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

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Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#41
post #14

@dang - maybe let one twitter story through to the home page?

Normally the penality on Twitter links is such that a good number of upvotes can still rescue it; now, it seems that penality has changed and there's a very strong penalty, which I strongly disagree with given the industry impact of what's been happening at Twitter.

It's on the front page now, after 100 upvotes.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#43
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah given paulg's tweets I'm wondering if our free speech absolutist view as a website, actually holds here.

dang has done a phenomenal job at moderating this site, and I trust his judgement. It is heavily moderated, and that's a good thing to keep it focused. Too much twitter drama would be lame. But this feels like an important moment.

I generally agree, but I also think that a certain subset of political beliefs get upvoted here that creates a real echo chamber, and that there's this idea of a "middle path" rationality that is assumed, but doesn't actually exist. It's a class of problem I think could be classified as a "I don't have an accent" problem. I wrote to dang directly about this, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30252817

I think there's probably a certain class of articles, critical of paulg and hn and the hn community's "accent" that get flagged and downvoted here, by people and moderators. And, a certain class of articles that always get uncritically upvoted.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#44

I hope that the wheels stay on sufficiently to get an idea of where EM wants to take Twitter and find out what kind of value it can bring. Having said that, he really made it obvious to me as an eng that the severance is the option I would be taking. Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. But somebody who takes over the company and accrues…

> Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore". It's a lose-lose situation; I don't think Twitter's problems would be solved by engineering harder; and you will spend 80 hrs/wk where you can end up fired because people aren't as deterministic as cars. It's a comp…

No post body was provided.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#45

I hope that the wheels stay on sufficiently to get an idea of where EM wants to take Twitter and find out what kind of value it can bring. Having said that, he really made it obvious to me as an eng that the severance is the option I would be taking. Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. But somebody who takes over the company and accrues…

> Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore". It's a lose-lose situation; I don't think Twitter's problems would be solved by engineering harder; and you will spend 80 hrs/wk where you can end up fired because people aren't as deterministic as cars. It's a comp…

I guess, if you buy the premise that cash flow is problem number one and the company needs a significant pivot, then going into crunch-mode and trying to turn the ship as quickly as possible (at the cost of technical and, uh, sleep debt) is a reasonable solution. Maybe not the best, but reasonable.

But it's pretty transparent that the cash flow problem is pretty much a problem because the new owner doesn't really want to own Twitter, or believe it can pay for itself; he wants to own a different product which has as many users as Twitter did. No judgement here, I don't necessarily think he's wrong. But why as an employee would I feel obligated to make his choices my problem?

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#46
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends how he spins it and how much he will be able to control narrative. I guess he will use something like - Twitter was broken before I got in and I could not save it anymore. Being Elon, I would be more worried about the fact that Saudi's are supposed to be as one of the investors in Twitter and they already have trace of killing people. If Elon won't be able to spin the story as somebody's else problem and inst…

I'm sure he'll be able to dump it for peanuts on a company like Oracle or Salesforce.

… or Tencent …

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#47

I hope that the wheels stay on sufficiently to get an idea of where EM wants to take Twitter and find out what kind of value it can bring. Having said that, he really made it obvious to me as an eng that the severance is the option I would be taking. Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. But somebody who takes over the company and accrues…

> Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore". It's a lose-lose situation; I don't think Twitter's problems would be solved by engineering harder; and you will spend 80 hrs/wk where you can end up fired because people aren't as deterministic as cars. It's a comp…

You know the butterfly effect where one small decision affects tens of thousands of other things? That must have been the day that things were going to well at Tesla, record profits, etc, that Musk got bored and decided he only likes to work under unbearable pressure. So, he made a couple of insulting tweets and now here we are.

I really can't believe he didn't put any escape clauses in his contract, no due dilligence, etc. I think he's very smart in general but this mistake is pretty much colossal in size.

Immediately starts by threatening advertisers, retweets that story about Pelosi's husband, fires people (probably needed to be done) and then this crazy scheme.

The problem as someone else mentioned is that for Tesla and SpaceX those were really the only two places where you could work if you wanted to do electric cars or space stuff. So they attracted very dedicated people.

Twitter is just web dev stuff and these people can work anywhere. It's not a great time to look for a job but when you get a lot of middle aged people who don't necessarily want to upend their life for their job especially when it was extremely cushy before, well, it's bound to be a problem.

I do think he'll probably pull this off but it's gonna be a pretty miserable road.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#48

Maybe too many people decided to not click the 'yes' link in that email yesterday and the doors are being locked to keep people in?

The rumor is something like 75%, which would definitely explain the panic actions. This also means they don't have to specifically cut off badges for laid off people, it gives them time to decide who's actually gone.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#49

Elon's first non-reply tweet since the news broke: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593415171149791232 > How do you make a small fortune in social media? > Start out with a large one.

I'm glad he's having fun /s

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#50
post #14

@dang - maybe let one twitter story through to the home page?

It is a little strange that I have seen almost no Twitter stories on the front page in the last week. Has dang or anyone talked about why that might be? Is it getting caught in the flamewar algorithm? Are they treating this as one big story so any individual article gets removed as a repost?
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