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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

#491
post #470

How long before the exiting engineers realize they can just walk across the street and start their own better, more “hard core” Twitter?

It takes more than just engineering talent to start a successful Twitter competitor at this stage. Platform stickiness is a real thing.

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

#492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He can't. Competent people (mostly) don't want to work for him, especially after this fiasco.

so all the satellites are being launched, and the cars are being built exclusively by incompetent idiots?

Musk hired people who wanted to change the world. His businesses at the time were the only place to push the envelope on space exploration to Mars and launching a commercial EV. Twitter on the other hand will never get such motivated workforce

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

#493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After scrolling this thread for way too long. I can say this is the top underated comment.

I'm not sure I know for certain what it's trying to say.

hes dramatically pointing out that theres a ton of exploits around waiting to be found and twitter will get hacked with no one working on it

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

#494

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.

God knows what is going on on the minds of remaining employees. I guess most of them want to quit but couldn't for variety of reasons (such as visa issues). And some may be too deep in awe of Musk to quit.

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

#495
post #470

How long before the exiting engineers realize they can just walk across the street and start their own better, more “hard core” Twitter?

Heh, no. All these centralized silos need marketing hype. Otherwise Diaspora* would have succeeded.

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

#496

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 don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore". It's been more than twenty years since the dot-com bust and people still think that just because a company is on a website that makes it a tech company. Sure, Twitter's product is twitter.com the website, but most criticism of it and ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running: t…

By that definition no tech company is a tech company. People search things on google because they want to find information , not because of the algorithms that bring that information. People use stable diffusion because they want to create images , whatever the cool ai technology behind it.

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

#497

Elon'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…

At the end of the day, most software eats the same stuff and the levers are often rudimentary and grokable, especially if you focus on a specific area. I don't think someone could meaningfully implement a new feature in a night, but could they tackle a problem in a given service and identity a rough remediation to save the next 72h? Yes, this stuff happens all the time. I've jumped on outages like this and figured it out as I went. You're not going to build a new feature but it's probably possible to get oriented enough to avoid catastrophy.

People want it all to fail out of spite, and attempt to bring their dreams to life by merely doomsdaying repeatedly and with fervor. We had 4y of Trump and no amount of wishful doomsdaying actually changed anything. The media was full of drama and we told ourselves stories of incredible disfunctions, but at the end of the day the government kept on doing its thing, the country mostly didn't change too much on the fundamentals. Reality is most often more boring than that (save FTX-like events).

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

#499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And do what with them? Completely rebuild Twitter in prod? Loyalty has nothing to do with the requirement of being one of the most exceptional programmers in existence.

It would be funny if Musk just launch a mastodon instance, points Twitter domain there and call it Twitter 2.0. He probably could run it with just a dozen staff.

Indeed, that would be funny :). But you assume that Mastodon can handle the current number of Twitter users (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33594961 <-- it probably can't).
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