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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

#131

EM->sr engs: "Why did so many good engineers leave?" Sr engs: ... (Because you're an a.h.) People without equity should refuse to work like indentured servants for peanuts only to be told "they're not working hard enough". It's the only way to teach EM a lesson about hubris. $50 says Twitter will die down to a skeleton staff and be kept afloat by third-rate MSPs. No one will want to work on that creaky, steaming pile…

Elon musk is 50 and filthy rich. No matter how hard he gets burned by twitter, he will not be learning.

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

#132
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 am deeply concerned that only one person is holding this ship on course, and that person's time is running out.

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

#134
post #70

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'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter. The first time? It really looks like it was the result of a disagreement with the Twitter board. They wouldn't accept his advice or help on how to make twitter better after he became a 9.1% shareholder. The offer to buy the company outright might have been more spite than anything else. I think he calmed down and realised what a bad idea his o…

Its clear that Jack Dorsey let Elon know about the only real alternative path for Twitter, which is opening protocols and reversing profit-seeking decisions made many years ago now.

The conversation, leaked: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1575588277700026368/ph...

However, I'm beginning to think Elon didn't get the deep dive he needed to understand what this really means. I have my ears up for the language or relationships showing he is really spending time on this... but I have only seen a dog chasing its tail.

At some level, Elon is characteristically aligned with this version of Twitter, however by saddling current Twitter with so much serviceable debt it is probably more difficult to go back in time than it ever was before.

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

#135

I'm a little bit confounded that Twitter's current culture is such that a large number of people contemplate sabotage as an appropriate response to changing employment conditions. I mean, maybe the company culture really is broken.

In Elon’s mind… And given that he fired most of the stuff and shutdown most of internal services, big outage is more likely each day.

And I can bet $10 he’ll blame it on sabotage.

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

#136

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…

If I'm giving Elon the benefit of the doubt, A. he's intelligent B. He has 20+ years of corporate experience running companies, I would assume that there was some method to this madness. If I had to guess, he came in with the assumption that forces in the company would be hostile to him based on their beliefs. In order to weed those forces out, he engineered some of this madness to shake those people out. Unfortunate…

Yeah, he's said this so many times it's a bore. He deletes. First. After deleting 'LAST'.

So he's doing exactly as we all should expect, he's literally said it. I used to delete last Now I delete first.

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

#137

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…

> 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 o…

If he can replicate WeChat this could be a good deal even if current Twitter flashes out in the process.

I’m not sure how Twitter is helping in creating WeChat for the rest of the world.

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

#138
post #38
post #2

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

You’ve diagnosed failure after a month? How many puts have you bought at what price? This is the perfect moment to cement your reputation as a stock market expert.

> about: Investor, husband, father. Those weird spelling and syntax errors are thanks to Siri. I try to preserve my arthritic hands for higher value targets than trolling hacker news.

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

#139

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…

> somebody who takes over the company and accrues so much social debt so quickly

What is 'social debt' and how is it (objectively) measured?

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

#140
post #88

Are people who still want to argue that Elon isn't destroying Twitter?

He is pushing the limits (and maybe finding them) of how quickly you can correct head count in a larger company. We won’t know if his actual vision for the product is bad until he gets done with this transitional period and can start releasing updates. Basically I’d argue not much happened yet but HR meetings.
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