Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 1001 posts

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

#481

Post by tstrimple »

ALittleLight wrote: post #474
joshstrange wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think Twitter is becoming a place for high risk reward employment. Maybe it crashes and burns, maybe you quickly ascend the ranks in the turmoil and reach a point in your career that would have taken substantially longer in a more traditional route. If Twitter does something like what Tesla did, you might even get filthy rich. Or, hey, maybe it doesn't work out and you get nothing but an interesting story, Twitter…

> high risk reward employment.

I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. Has there been literally *any* indication that this "hardcore" attitude will result in more reward?

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

#482

Post by parker_mountain »

phire wrote: post #70
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. The first time? It really looks like it was the result of a disagreement with the Twitter board. They wouldn't accept his advice or help on how to make twitter better after he became a 9.1% shareholder. The offer to buy the company outright might have been more spite than anything else. I think he calmed down and realised what a bad idea his o…

>They wouldn't accept his advice or help on how to make twitter better after he became a 9.1% shareholder

In retrospect, seems like a wise decision.

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

#483

Post by [deleted] »

generationP wrote: post #71
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…

Looks like EM is riven between "make Twitter an open platform for all opinions" and "burn Twitter down". Both good aims, but a mixed strategy does not lead anywhere good.

[deleted]

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

#485

Post by bushbaba »

locallost wrote: post #477

If I was Facebook or any other competitor, I would swoop in and poach everyone that is actually still there, mostly people afraid to leave because of visa issues etc.

…why? Twitter much like Reddit has never been profitable. It’s a sinking ship.

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

#486

Post by lazide »

rednerrus wrote: post #100
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…

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…

Right, it’s all 4D chess instead of the more obvious answer - he’s overwhelmed and embarrassed, and like many workaholic insecure bosses, it lashing out at folks and cutting his own throat?

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

#487

Post by Eji1700 »

phire wrote: post #70
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. The first time? It really looks like it was the result of a disagreement with the Twitter board. They wouldn't accept his advice or help on how to make twitter better after he became a 9.1% shareholder. The offer to buy the company outright might have been more spite than anything else. I think he calmed down and realised what a bad idea his o…

He bought it because he was sued for specific performance and was legally screwed in every available way. He literally waived due diligence and signed a contract with a specific performance clause.

Companies couldn’t prove a MAC in the middle of the 08 housing crash, musk sure as hell wasn’t having screwed every legal argument he had available weeks in advance.

His options were buy now for 44 billion or buy maybe a month later for 44 billion plus whatever the court decided to tack on for hellishly bad faith dealing and arguments.

His legal team tried every truck available and even a lousy “well we said we’d buy it so they should drop the lawsuit “ play. The court saw right through and said “you get 4 weeks to buy and if not then the suit continues”

So they paid up because to claim you’re going to but then to not go through with it would have seen the most wrathfully phenomenal court proceeding in history.

Discovery was just an added bonus of embarrassment and very unlikely to be related at all. Every sound legal mind working for musk was probably screaming at him to shut up and eventually told him he was going to have to go through. The ONLY way this current situation could be worse is if he had continued to try and fight it after his last Hail Mary because that specific court exists almost solely to VERY quickly mitigate multi billion dollar deals and would absolutely make a very clear example out of anyone who thought they were too rich to touch.

Musk may be one of the most wealthy men in the world but Delaware deals with companies with MUCH higher net worth and resources constantly.

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

#488

Post by lostlogin »

dehrmann wrote: post #388
tjpnz wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Must be fun to truly believe you're a Bond villain.

If someone has a secret volcano lair, it's Larry Ellison, but I'm sure Elon has something too.

Tech bro libertarians like to buy hideouts in New Zealand. I’ll keep an eye out.

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

#489

Post by dbmkn »

threeseed wrote: post #281
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?

Paul Graham and some of the YC partners have been surprisingly defensive of Musk's actions. It's been massively disappointing to watch since Musk's behaviour has been abhorrent and has resulted in a lot of unnecessary hurt and despair for innocent employees. The same employees who may end up running future startups.

Lol one of his tweets aged well, https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961?s=20&t=...

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

#490

Post by tstrimple »

dilyevsky wrote: post #196
fotta wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The TLS cert expires on December 12.

There is absolutely no way in hell those aren’t autorenewed. I think the answer is “quite a long time” actually. Eventually disk/machine rot in DCs will take over but it can take many months or more

> There is absolutely no way in hell those aren’t autorenewed.

Pretty sure a number of AWS and Azure engineers believed the same thing.

Post reply on HN