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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

#101

Post by MBCook »

lost_tourist wrote: post #61
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…

I really hope it implodes. He has been so childish throughout, he deserves to lose the 44 billion. Sucks that thousands of people are out of work, but maybe this is better for them than a slow painful death of a once okayish company.

What about all the poor people on visas who are now desperately looking for jobs to avoid having themselves and their families deported?

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

#102

Post by mcphage »

pschuegr wrote: post #45
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…

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 wan…

> I guess, if you buy the premise that cash flow is problem number one

Well, luckily you don't need to buy the premise that cash flow was problem number one—after he bought it, he saddled it with so much debt that it definitely became problem number one!

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

#103

Post by chippiewill »

mongol wrote: post #2

How will Musk's failure at Twitter affect market confidence in his other ventures?

Not a whole lot.

Elon's primary failure with Twitter was joining a behemoth and arrogantly assuming he knew better than the existing leadership, sacked them all and pushed sweeping changes in a nonsensical time-span.

At his other ventures he already has strong leadership in place that he's worked with so he just assumes everything's already great rather than second guessing everything. In practice he doesn't run them on a day-to-day basis. He's more like a chairman with an interest in engineering than a CEO.

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

#104

Post by regpertom »

slg wrote: post #50
davidw wrote: 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?

It would surely be the flame war algorithm. Throwing some numbers out there, would this be too exaggerated? There have been 30 stories this past fortnight here with over 700 comments, mostly repeating the same love/hate musk battleground playing out across every other website. I think it’s a very interesting topic that’s unfolding but if dang wants to limit the frenzy from consuming here as well I certainly understand.

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

#105

Post by post_break »

fotta wrote: post #95
hristov wrote: post #77

This will be an interesting experiment in large scale code rot. How long do you think twitter.com will work with the code base frozen?

The TLS cert expires on December 12.

Oh man I just smiled like the Grinch.

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

#106

Post by imron »

slg wrote: post #50
davidw wrote: 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?

> Has dang or anyone talked about why that might be?

I’ve personally been visiting new and flagging all Twitter/mastodon posts I see (i started doing this after getting sick of all the Twitter/mastodon posts hitting the front page).

I don’t want the front page to be all Twitter all the time, and most of the posts boil down to speculation and gossip and the ones that don’t, usually don’t offer anything meaningfully new and interesting.

I suspect there are plenty of others like me.

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

#107

Post by [deleted] »

MBCook wrote: post #94
techolic wrote: post #84

The next outage will have a good likelihood of being the last outage.

Yeah. Multiple entire teams that run critical systems have reportedly left. It’s over. Dead site running. Such a horrible loss. Glad the stockholders are happy. This was clearly better than the lawsuit. /s

[deleted]

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

#108

Post by function_seven »

rurp wrote: post #66
kevingadd wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does this mean that 75% of the remaining staff declined to stay on? If I'm understanding that right -- wow. Isn't Elon still trying to hire people back from the last fumbled layoff?

I read it as 75% decided to ignore that email. I guess one way to interpret that is that they decided to quit, but I don’t see it that way. It’s more like an ultimatum that they refused to respond to.

Checking that box was agreeing to work “hardcore” and add a bunch of hours to your day. I imagine a lot of people receiving that email guessed that their colleagues would also ignore the box and figured “he won’t fire all of us, right?”.

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

#109

Post by a4isms »

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.

Or to put it another way:

Interviewee: "What's my upside here?"

Elon: "RSUs in this illiquid private company."

Interviewee: "Under what circumstances do they become liquid?"

Elon: "We have to first make money above and beyond paying this crushing debt, then we have to have a growth story to sell to the public, then we go public, then you wait out the employee lockout period, and if you're still an employee, you can sell your RSUs."

Interviewee: "So, like, 2-5 years of sleeping in the office to win Survivor Twitter and not get fired, plus I have to depend upon you to steer us to profitability."

Elon: "Exactly. And when it comes to profitability, my favourite tactic is firing people like you."

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

#110

Post by dagmx »

partiallypro wrote: post #73
zeruch wrote: post #42

Didn't Elon demand everyone back to the office?

Many outlets walked back that story, apparently it only applied to some.

I don’t think they walked it back so much as Elon did. The early leaked communications did say that it was the norm to have everyone back except for people who can’t or are exceptional.
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