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…
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 exer…
Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
451–460 of 1001 posts
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#452>In addition to the payroll team being gone, Twitter's entire US tax team is gone, I'm told, along with its financial reporting team. Not great. https://twitter.com/HaysKali/status/1593449877094047744
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#453Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#454I 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…
A culture where being smart gets you social debt may be part of the problem
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
The legal system still exists though and your changes would need to not be auditable or else you're going to get thrown in jail. And no matter how much you think you're smarter than the average bear, you're probably going to leave traces. And if Musk gets personally pissed off at some bit of particularly bad sabotage he's got enough money to hire some actual expert outside talent to manage the incident and nail your…
"In the chaos of layoffs, firings, and resignations our security team was entirely gutted and as a result my login must have hacked by one of the literal billions of people on the planet with an interest in taking down this company, even if only for the lolz. The proof of our security issues, staffing woes, and public animosity has been extensively documented. Whatever traces of sabotage you may have found cannot rea…
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No they don’t all require inside sales reps. Most advertising can be automated. 95% of clients can self serve. They ran this website 12 years ago with the same number of users and like 200 people.
12 years ago we didn't have stuff like GDPR or CCPA or any number of data compliance laws that require a full team around to prevent getting fined into oblivion.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#457Earlier 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. 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…
We, the unwilling
Led by the unknowing
Are doing the impossible
For the ungrateful
We have done so much
For so long
With so little
We are now qualified
To do anything
With nothing
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#458I 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. 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…
Have you ever used Twitter?
To someone who has used Twitter in the past weeks this reads like deliberate trolling.
Twitter was absolutely terrible to use and the pace of noticible change within days/weeks under Elon is mind blowing to me. He's clearly going fast with things like getting rid of (shadow-)banning for no apparent reason, getting rid of banning anything of a certain political flavor, making Twitter faster (both in browser as well as on Android), getting rid of fake scammer accounts who deliberately impersonated famous people and companies to scam people, getting rid of bots and spam which where a HUGE problem (still are until the transition to verified is done) and so on.
I mean getting rid of politically flavored sensorship alone will have a massive impact globally for something like Twitter. That alone was obviously very terrible to many people before Musk.
PS: since you said you don't understand what his vision is. My best guess: it's to create a platform that competes with click-bait sponsored propaganda journalism. In the form of citizen journalism on Twitter. I think it could work and I also think there's a huge need for it as traditional journalism is dead in my opinion.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#459Elon's first non-reply tweet since the news broke: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593415171149791232 > How do you make a small fortune in social media? > Start out with a large one.
Good word, it gets better from there: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593455727611215872 > And … we just hit another all-time high in Twitter usage lol > Let that sink in … He literally cannot distinguish between good and bad attention. He still thinks he's winning this.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#460Elon's first non-reply tweet since the news broke: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593415171149791232 > How do you make a small fortune in social media? > Start out with a large one.
A top reply [0] that Elon replied to: > Elon, there's a bunch of us in SV who will come up tonight to help on the infra side to keep the site up. > If you need help just ask. As if you could just drive over to the Twitter HQ, grok how all the infrastructure works, and make/provide meaningful contributions/tweaks/upkeep.... tonight That's either a level of delusion that I can't imagine and/or someone who has no idea w…
The infra is just too clever for anybody to grok in a million years. These clowns probably don't even have fedoras, no way they'll ever figure it out.