Probably a good time to download an archive of your Twitter data: https://twitter.com/settings/download_your_data
Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
171–180 of 1001 posts
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#172I'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.
$10, hell. You'd need to put down $500 just to come out $10 ahead.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#173I am chalking this up to Russia syndrome. Personality types driven to do great things aren't easily satisfied. Most are perpetually dissatisfied & they need to raise the stakes.
They win the war of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th coalitions. For the first time, they find that things are going fine. All they have to do is nothing. Pull back and consolidate. Maybe refine some things, tinker a bit. But it's not enough. It will never be enough. So they invade Russia.
In his life, Napoleon had success after success after success. Every step of the way, critics told him that he'd fail. But he did it anyway, and won 38 battles. 17 at near impossible odds.
How can someone like him be satisfied with sitting at home, ruling France? How could he be satisfied with puttering around in the countryside talking about his code with random farmers?
And so he decided to invade.
People warned him against invading. Armand de Caulaincourt staked his reputation on it, went with him on the campaign, and kept warning him. Warning him against wintering in Russia. He kept telling him to turn back. But Napoleon didn't listen.
They'd been wrong every single time. And he'd been right. Let them babble, his path was one set at a different level than theirs.
Except, that one time they were right.
It seems that when you are touched with greatness, you end up believing that you can do anything. And far more often than not, you can.
Right up until the moment you can't.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#174Regardless of your feelings about Elon Musk as a person, this kind of behavior is absolutely crazy for the leader of a company. I can't imagine what investors who signed on to do this with him are thinking unless their goal was to simply destroy the company.
Why would two of Musk’s financiers in this Qatar and Saudi Arabia want twitter dead? Oh wait.
Source?
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#175The management is worried about internal sabotage?
My Twitter friends said Twitter has been having large exodus. CSL(core systems lib?) team, blobstore team, graph platform team, and revenue forecasting team seemed have all quit. I'm not sure how robust and autonomous Twitter's infra is. Hopefully Twitter will continue to function.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#176This will be an interesting experiment in large scale code rot. How long do you think twitter.com will work with the code base frozen?
Not long, but perhaps not for the reasons you think. With the code base frozen, no new incompatibilities can be introduced. That's how software (including operating system) releases worked for many years, and they did work. VM/container images are still basically this way, and they tend to keep running quite well too. One problem with both of these models is that existing security vulnerabilities don't get fixed, but that's not code rot. It's a serious but separate issue.
No, the way I think a frozen codebase will rear its head is when things that haven't been restarted in too long start to misbehave. When new updates are being pushed out frequently by a busy team, every machine (container, process, whatever) is being restarted regularly. People don't even realize what they're avoiding each time. Resource leaks, deadlocks, and timer issues can remain undetected a long time in that environment, then surface when the longevity increases. Even worse, some things tend to fail after a predictable amount of time, i.e. across most or all machines at once in a cluster.
I first saw this in 1990 at Encore, when our shiny new SMP version of UNIX became capable of staying up for a whole month at a time. Because of problems like those mentioned above, getting from one month to two took almost as long as getting from zero to one. I've seen the same scenario play out on many other systems since, and there's no reason to believe the systems within Twitter are immune.
Stasis is not the same as stability.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#177Are 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.
How are they going to release updates when they just nuked the entire design and engineering staff?
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#178Probably a good time to download an archive of your Twitter data: https://twitter.com/settings/download_your_data
Unfortunately it may no longer be an option as some have said the 2FA SMS needed to download the archive is not responsive.
2FA SMS just worked for me. I have little faith that I'll ever actually receive the zip archive, though.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#179Why Elon insists on actually running a company? He should hire competent people and stick to PR/bullshit thing. It works wonders in his other ventures, mostly. And no, competent doesn't mean Kimbal.
This seems to me to be a byproduct of the “hurry up and close the deal”. May not have had replacement leadership but felt the need to take out the executive team.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#180I 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…
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