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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

#81

Post by rurp »

minimaxir wrote: post #41
davidw wrote: 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.

I agree that it's wrong to penalize these topics. I don't normally get caught up in the drama of the day, but this trainwreck has really gotten my attention. Whatever the outcome, these events are going to have a major effect on our industry and the broader economy. The reckless absurdity of it all makes it even more newsworthy; major developments have been happening almost daily.

It doesn't hurt that this episode has brought some friends around to agreeing with my dismal view of Elon :)

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

#82

Post by furyofantares »

nemothekid wrote: post #34
pschuegr wrote: post #25

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…

> What's most surprising it seems he has no thesis for the company or how it can be made better or what was so terrible about it.

I believe the thesis is he thinks it's possible to duplicate WeChat as a ubiquitous everything-app (news, media, social media, payments, ordering in restaurants, shopping, messaging) in the West. Why someone would believe that, I don't know. I imagine thinking you could also be the owner of it might motivate believing it can happen somewhat.

I suppose the other thesis is that Twitter was horribly mismanaged and can work on far fewer resources to do more if he runs it like Space X or Tesla. That seems plausible to me though in this case it's beyond me why he thinks the actions he's taken will get him there.

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

#83

Post by 1attice »

generationP wrote: post #71
nemothekid wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Looks like EM is riven between "make Twitter an open platform for all opinions" and "burn Twitter down". Both good aims, but a mixed strategy does not lead anywhere good.

..."both are good aims"? rubs face

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

#85

Post by graderjs »

pschuegr wrote: post #25

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…

A culture where being smart gets you social debt may be part of the problem

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

#86

Post by shagie »

pschuegr wrote: post #25

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.

This is a death march - no question about it. The book by Edward Yourdon should be required reading for any who are still at Twitter.

One of the things that is in the book had in it that I recall was a four quadrant grid of 'morale' and 'likelihood of success'(?).

There are indeed high morale high chance of success death marches - and they can be fun to be on. The "we will get this done and it will be glorious" type things.

There are also the low morale high chance of success that just drag on and it is a "we will get this done, and then we will all quit." I've been on that one - it was awful. I can only imagine the low morale low chance ones being completely dreadful and people hoping that it gets canceled before too much longer.

Amazon says that I got a copy of this on August 11th, 2012... and that was an order in which the book I got was given to my manager at the time. The project rolled out in October (before Black Friday code freezes went in effect) and I started looking for new employment in January after the company did its yearly bonuses.

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

#87

Post by ncallaway »

spamizbad wrote: post #58
slg wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. And for the right financial upside. I completely understand going hardcore at a startup in which you have equity. But hasn't Twitter going private removed a lot of the incentive for employees? What is the upside for a Twitter engineer dedicating themselves to the company? Making one of the richest peo…

They could still do RSUs but you’ve got some big creditors who are first in line.

And… is there even a future liquidity event planned? How helpful is an RSU if there’s no opportunity to turn it into cash at some future date?

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

#89

Post by nemothekid »

DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #47
nemothekid wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 dilligenc…

>Twitter is just web dev stuff

"Just web dev" stuff is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It's not like Twitter is just some react code on the cloud. It's been around since 2006 and is essentially a massive realtime platform. I don't think Twitter has any unique secret sauce, but the kind of people who can run a large online platform and dedicated metal really don't exist anymore; and under fire they will either need to run to the cloud (increasing costs) or start dealing with outages.

>I do think he'll probably pull this off

It seems far more likely to me that he ends up selling it to Google or something for pennies. So far, publicly, he hasn't communicated any sort of thesis or plan and most of the head engineering staff has been let go. How long do you think it will take to get a new engineering lead up to speed on 16 years of Twitter infra while also meaningfully transforming the company? His only option at this point is maintaining the app on a shoe-string budget to get "profit", but that seems like a very boring outcome that should have been left to a P/E firm.

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