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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

#401

Post by MBCook »

threeseed wrote: post #287
MBCook wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No excuses. No redirecting blame. This is 100% on Musk.

I also blame the previous management. They should have gone forward with the lawsuit.

Instead they took a payout and this happened.

They destroyed their company. I don’t think they knew it would be this bad this fast, but it was never going to go well.

I blame them all.

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

#402

Post by memish »

A couple weeks ago 50% were laid off and nothing happened. Now I read on Twitter that Twitter died and it's at a record high DAU. Make it make sense!

It may be bumpy in the short term, but then all of the supremely confident naysayers are going to look ridiculous and spiteful if it turns out that Twitter can operate with 80-90% fewer employees.

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

#403

Post by nocoiner »

mandeepj wrote: post #345
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'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter. He lives off Twitter. His fame and fortune would not be where it’s without Twitter and he very well knows it. You can label that an emotional connection or even personal. I don’t think he out right planned to buy it. One thing after another, he found himself locked into - buying it.

Well, yes. After he presented an acquisition agreement to the Twitter board of directors and presented them with a committed financing package, the Twitter board literally could not refuse Musk’s without spending the rest of their lives in depositions with Twitter public shareholders.

So Twitter of course accepted the deal, Musk (voluntarily) signed the merger agreement, and that was that - he was indeed locked into buying the company (subject to certain conditions - receipt of regulatory approvals, Twitter shareholders approving the merger, stuff like that).

This was not like hitting a lucky streak at the craps table and waking up 12 hours later with a new wife. The decision to purchase was deliberate. Doesn’t mean he didn’t develop buyer’s remorse after - he most certainly did - but the threatened tender offer, the rich, target-friendly merger agreement - this is exactly how you aggressively and deliberately pursue ownership of a big public company.

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

#404

Post by edmundsauto »

nemo44x wrote: post #290

Twitter needs at most 50 people to keep the lights on. 200 to innovate. We all know this.

I don't intend to be mean, but I think your statement is trivially disprovable:

$4.8B annual revenue, even if every advertiser spent $1M annually, that's 4,800 advertisers who all require inside reps. If each rep can handle 100 clients (unlikely; that's less than 1 hour / month attention), they would need 480 inside reps alone just to keep ad agencies happy.

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

#405

Post by dehrmann »

burntalmonds wrote: post #99
mym1990 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that this is at all significant, but these past few months of Twitter charades have erased any appetite for one day buying a Tesla, or any other Musk owned products. Luckily almost every automaker is coming out with their own EVs in the next couple years, so the market should be pretty competitive(in some ways it already is).

Same here. I'll never buy a Tesla now, whereas before I might have.

The common refrain from Tesla owners is they love the car, but wish Elon would shut up so they'd have to stop defending their choice.

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

#406

Post by [deleted] »

threeseed wrote: post #269
hintymad wrote: post #175

The 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.

There's reports the NOC and SREs have all left as well. Surely an outage is right around the corner.

[deleted]

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

#407

Post by kamaal »

memish wrote: post #307
7e wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you think the CEO of Tesla and Founder, CEO, Chief Engineer of SpaceX is a failure, I'm dying to know: What have you accomplished?

This is HN, if this is failure, people here aspire to fail upwards like this.

Who wouldn't?

Most of us here hang out for listening to fellow hackers who have failed upwards.

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

#408

Post by jameshush »

slg wrote: post #53
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. 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…

I once worked for an adtech company that had profit sharing instead of RSUs. The early employees were compensated very well because it was unsurprisingly very profitable. I joined after they raised money so they switched to "phantom equity" in a LLC instead of RSUs. When they went public I was granted 1 stock for every piece of phantom equity plus about $5. These weren't options, I didn't have to pay anything to exercise them. Worked out to a 50% appreciation over two-ish years of working there, so not too shabby at all.

The point is there's other forms of variable compensation beside options you can give to employees of a private entity that are just as good (or even better) than options that may or may not become liquid over 7-10 years. Twitter could set up something similar to entice top performers to stay.

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

#409

Post by dehrmann »

philosopher1234 wrote: post #131
1letterunixname wrote: post #69

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.

While I suspect this is the case, this is also looking like his first high-profile expensive failure. If Twitter survives, he might grow up a lot during the process.

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

#410

Post by nocoiner »

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…

> I really can't believe he didn't put any escape clauses in his contract, no due dilligence, etc. I think he's very smart in general but this mistake is pretty much colossal in size.

As an almost ironclad rule, acquisition agreements for big public companies don’t have escape clauses or diligence outs. The buyer does the diligence before they sign the acquisition agreement. His very, very good lawyers at Skadden advised him of this. After it’s signed, it’s really just a question of how quickly the logistics of taking a public company private can be completed.

Musk, for all intents and purposes, bought Twitter back in April. He just didn’t take possession and pay for it until October.

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