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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

#251

Post by jboy55 »

shagie wrote: post #86
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 ch…

One of the things I do to ground myself in situations where I'm facing a death march, or find myself working at a company that does a pivot is listen to the song "Road to Nowhere" by the Talking Heads. If the intro lyrics cut too deep, I start looking.

Well, we know where we're goin'

But we don't know where we've been

And we know what we're knowin'

But we can't say what we've seen

And we're not little children

And we know what we want

And the future is certain

Give us time to work it out

https://genius.com/Talking-heads-road-to-nowhere-lyrics

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

#253

Post by meltyness »

CaliforniaKarl wrote: post #231
meltyness wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OH WOW, LOOK! https://twitter.com/account/personalization/download_your_da...

Your point? When I go to that URL, I get {"errors":[{"code":410,"message":"You need to verify your password before you can view this content."}]}

Ah -- if you're logged in and have requested to download your data, it produces a PDF with a bunch of private account info, looks vaguely like that's publicly exposed, but it's probably not.

Might have given someone a fright, until they realized what was happening, and that it was dynamic content, of course.

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

#254

Post by rurp »

chippiewill wrote: post #103
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…

> He's more like a chairman with an interest in engineering than a CEO.

This strikes me as a very apt description. Still though, he basically has free rein at those companies and there is always a chance he decides to get more involved. Maybe Tesla or SpaceX hits a rough patch next year and he decides to get more hands on and "fix" the situation. That fear is probably a lot more relevent in potential customer's minds these days.

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

#255

Post by kibwen »

Ferrotin wrote: post #161
slg wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The comment threads in them are a train wreck.

Which would be apropos for the train wreck under discussion.

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

#257

Post by chadash »

7e wrote: post #228
areoform wrote: post #173

I 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 wi…

But Elon was fired from PayPal. He failed at Boring Company and Neuralink. He faked his educational credentials and was in the country illegally. He failed at Full Self Driving, the Roadster is nowhere to be seen, the Cybertruck is MIA and the Tesla Semi is years late. 95% of predictions he has made has failed to pass. As far as I can tell, he lucked out during the .com boom, then invested in Tesla and almost drove i…

> Elon's MO is burning a ton of cash that his competitors aren't willing to do in order to be first in some space. That doesn't take talent.

He's had failures before. But this line seems unfair. He was neither the first person in electric cars (a few notable failures before him) nor in rockets (e.g. Boeing)... but he was able to lead a team that figured out some of the key tech and the business models to make these things viable. Even with a lot of money, this is no small feat.

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

#259

Post by cokeandpepsi »

cwilkes wrote: post #10
BeefWellington wrote: post #8

Regardless 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.

Didn't the saudi's get in trouble for trying to plant spies in twitter to sniff out political dissidents?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/09/twitter-saud...

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

#260

Post by jasmer »

His antics were fine in the context of material growth at Tesla, and SpaceX.

There are incredible aspirational aspects to those businesses, and they have massive support from Big Government, and crucially, people mostly knew what they were getting into aka they went to work for him.

It's the opposite at Twitter.

This is looking more messed up every day, and Elon is messing with other people's money and they won't stand for this for very long.

When he says 'we could be out of business next year' as a bit of a fear/motivation tactic, that's going to make his backers uncomfortable.

If this keeps up Elon will be replaced and it's hard to fathom by whom.

I suggest he will use the excuse of 'need to work on Tesla/Space X', but the terms of his continued oversight of Twitter will be interesting.

Much like the otherwise 'normal' people who worked at the White House during the Trump admin, it's alluring for people to be that close to power, even at the cost of having the wrath of toxicity hanging over them. Any reasonable person taking over Twitter will want to have a pretty big firewall between them and Musk.

I suggest it will be better for everyone: Musk can get a few points in for reform which is his prerogative and there's nothing wrong with that, and Twitter will have a chance at operational performance without the constant contradictions between Musk's populism and the basic operating civil culture at Twitter.

There are so many uphill battles to fight before Musk can even try to get some of the reforms that he wants (which are a bit glib because most things at Twitter exist for a reason), and he's going to spend too much time just getting back on the 'right foot' ... I suggest that it's probably a good idea for him to just step down.

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