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100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

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Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#91

Post by erk__ »

cratermoon wrote: post #65
tracerbulletx wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anything like this has ever happened before to a system with this scale, so who can say? But just as an engineer at another company that probably has a vaguely similar architecture it's certainly in a place of extreme risk. It just depends on if they can get people in place to hold together the critical services. Also things are much more likely to break it they start trying to change things, it will ta…

I have a hunch that over Thanksgiving the increased traffic will break something, and there will be nobody around to fix it, so more stuff will break. I have a hunch that most of SRE people that would normally be watching the metrics ready to jump on anything starting to look dicey are gone.

Not just thanksgiving, by the world cup is starting next week as well and that usually drives a lot of traffic

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#92

Post by dragontamer »

toss1 wrote: post #11
labrador wrote: post #4

Kylie Robison (Tech reporter for @FortuneMagazine): What I’m hearing from Twitter employees; It looks like roughly 75% of the remaining 3,700ish Twitter employees have not opted to stay after the “hardcore” email. https://twitter.com/kyliebytes/status/1593391167718113280

That brings it down to under 1000 employees So Elon paid $44B for a company now with 900-odd employees. For a 10-year ROI, that's $4.4B per year profit, or $440 million/per employee For contrast, Netflix has the highest revenue per employee at $2.63 million/person, and Apple is second at $2.38 million, and Alphabet & Meta next at $1.64, and eBay at $0.9 million per employee. So, he'll need to get 200x the profitabili…

Don't forget the $1.3 Billion in interest payments from the loans they took on. ($13 Billion in debt signed on the deal, assuming 10% rate of CCC bonds from April 2022).

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#93

Post by gretch »

justin66 wrote: post #81
gretch wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is losing information on the war really a bad thing? I mean of course it is for people living in Ukraine who need updated information to survive. (But I would also hope they have govt sponsored alternatives) But I actually thought it was deeply disturbing how many ppl in unrelated places, like California, would wake up and look forward to getting a fresh voyeur look on the suffering of others. Ppl were spectating and…

That "fresh voyeur look on the suffering of others" (odd framing) is why there is widespread, bipartisan political support for supporting Ukraine with munitions and money. People wouldn't make that choice if they did not know what is going on.

I don’t think that’s true at all? Support was setup and had been streaming into to Ukraine for a long time before any confirmation of a war, much less images. I remember when trump was president and there was the dispute where he was holding back the regular defense aid that the US sends to Ukraine. The point being that hundreds of millions were approved and sent with 0 tweets about the war (literally didn’t happen yet)

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#94

Post by Casteil »

detaro wrote: post #59
Zigurd wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an under-explored part of how we got here. Elon did not want to buy Twitter. He bought it only because he thought he could flip it and lose less than what settling would cost (plus what damage depositions would do). Right up to a few days before the deal closed, Elon was hoping he would not have to actually run Twitter. And that's the second part that is under-explored: Elon could not find a CEO. And he never…

Neither wanting to flip it nor not wanting to run it explain what he has done once he actually owned though, more the opposite in fact. You don't prepare a company for flipping it by whatever this mess is, nor does it make being its CEO a more attractive job, nor did he have to run in as directly as he does. (Well, unless you don't care about the flipping price. Verizon managed to sell Tumblr after all ;))

Perhaps he thought it'd be easier than it really is after SpaceX's wild success in reusing orbital rocket boosters.

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#95

Post by themacguffinman »

gretch wrote: post #93
justin66 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That "fresh voyeur look on the suffering of others" (odd framing) is why there is widespread, bipartisan political support for supporting Ukraine with munitions and money. People wouldn't make that choice if they did not know what is going on.

I don’t think that’s true at all? Support was setup and had been streaming into to Ukraine for a long time before any confirmation of a war, much less images. I remember when trump was president and there was the dispute where he was holding back the regular defense aid that the US sends to Ukraine. The point being that hundreds of millions were approved and sent with 0 tweets about the war (literally didn’t happen y…

The United States is perhaps Ukraine's biggest supporter for strategic reasons, but it's also critical that Europe supports Ukraine and their support has been a lot more uncertain and reliant on democratic pressure.

Even the USA's support will wane if the economic costs create democratic pressure against Ukrainian support. One half of US Congress has just come under control by the GOP, a major political party that has a prominent isolationist faction who have been pretty open that they don't see the point in opposing Putin and would rather focus on domestic concerns. This isolationist pressure is well contained in the US thus far because Americans are swimming in sympathetic media coverage of Ukraine.

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#96

Post by lamontcg »

toss1 wrote: post #11
labrador wrote: post #4

Kylie Robison (Tech reporter for @FortuneMagazine): What I’m hearing from Twitter employees; It looks like roughly 75% of the remaining 3,700ish Twitter employees have not opted to stay after the “hardcore” email. https://twitter.com/kyliebytes/status/1593391167718113280

That brings it down to under 1000 employees So Elon paid $44B for a company now with 900-odd employees. For a 10-year ROI, that's $4.4B per year profit, or $440 million/per employee For contrast, Netflix has the highest revenue per employee at $2.63 million/person, and Apple is second at $2.38 million, and Alphabet & Meta next at $1.64, and eBay at $0.9 million per employee. So, he'll need to get 200x the profitabili…

I can't wait to see the GDPR lawsuits from the EU.

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#97

Post by Ekaros »

erk__ wrote: post #91
cratermoon wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a hunch that over Thanksgiving the increased traffic will break something, and there will be nobody around to fix it, so more stuff will break. I have a hunch that most of SRE people that would normally be watching the metrics ready to jump on anything starting to look dicey are gone.

Not just thanksgiving, by the world cup is starting next week as well and that usually drives a lot of traffic

And World Cup traffic will be bursty. Big game, big event in game. Could really peak message volume and this is even geographically distributed.

So fun times for those left there to fight the fires.

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#98

Post by randomsearch »

toss1 wrote: post #11
labrador wrote: post #4

Kylie Robison (Tech reporter for @FortuneMagazine): What I’m hearing from Twitter employees; It looks like roughly 75% of the remaining 3,700ish Twitter employees have not opted to stay after the “hardcore” email. https://twitter.com/kyliebytes/status/1593391167718113280

That brings it down to under 1000 employees So Elon paid $44B for a company now with 900-odd employees. For a 10-year ROI, that's $4.4B per year profit, or $440 million/per employee For contrast, Netflix has the highest revenue per employee at $2.63 million/person, and Apple is second at $2.38 million, and Alphabet & Meta next at $1.64, and eBay at $0.9 million per employee. So, he'll need to get 200x the profitabili…

If he needs more than 900 employees, he can just hire more. He is not fixed at "900 employees", so the premise of this argument is invalid.

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#99

Post by randomsearch »

mikkergp wrote: post #16
partiallypro wrote: post #12

I think there are going to be two levels of shock: 1) Never give people an ultimatum. It basically never works in your favor. That was such a dumb thing by Elon and his team. I don't think Elon expected the numbers to be so high. 2) Workers often overestimate their own worth within a company or how easily they can be replaced. It's likely that all the people leaving saying Twitter is going to majorly break soon won't…

https://mobile.twitter.com/nitashatiku/status/15933997046366... !!! “I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers," "There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.” Could be fake, but assuming true, can Elon take it back? Is a webform like legally binding for seve…

This could be meaningless hyperbole without detail. What are those systems, why are they critical, how many staff did they have and how many staff do they have now and what type of staff are they?

They have great reason to be hyperbolic - they've just basically been fired, Elon is accusing Twitter of being an inefficient, lazy, engineering organisation. He has insulted them, they will insult him back and want him to fail.

Re: 100s of Twitter employees leaving after Musk's 'extremely hardcore' work demands

#100

Post by randomsearch »

throwaway23597 wrote: post #49
musesum wrote: post #46

Extreme commitment makes sense if you believe in the mission. Such as saving the planet with EVs. Not sure what Twitter's altruistic mission is. Giving up family life to enable trolls may not seen like a good trade.

+1. Musk needs to offer a compelling vision for what this platform should be. As of now I primarily know Twitter as the home of cancel culture, whiny journalists, and idiotic flame wars. That's not something I would devote 80+ hours a week of my life to, not by a long shot.

_This_ is the real existential threat to Twitter. From the outside, before Musk bought it Twitter already looked like a stagnant company making short-term decisions to boost kpi's without a real mission.

I'm just not sure Elon is the man to fix a business that isn't really going anywhere. It was pedestrian, maybe it was hard to see a vision in that space, and the company culture became one of "maintain".

Even if he sells a vision of the "Everything App" like WeChat, is he going to find enough people at Twitter and enough new recruits to buy into that? Wouldn't you rather go put man on Mars or fight climate change?

If he _does_ manage to turn Twitter into the Western WeChat, it will be one of the most remarkable events in tech history. That said, I'm not even sure we want him working on a social network rather than loftier goals, so perhaps it would be better for humanity if he fails fast here.

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