Ugh, as an outsider, I originally liked the idea of Musk protecting free speech better, but this is some epic mismanagement. I can't imagine why anyone that can find a new job would want to stay there, he seems like a terrible boss.
Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
501–510 of 1001 posts
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#502Earlier 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.
when you spend your whole life acting like a genius because you made a bunch of money, then a richer guy shows how incorrect that is, you are going to squirm.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Exactly. In the real world no one cares what tech stack you use, whether it's a monolith or not. Businesses serve customer needs. Tech is the tool and is only useful to that extent.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is just so much irony all over this, at every level and every side. It’s hilarious. Musk wanted to buy it, then tried to back away. The board tried to prevent the sale, then sued to make it happen. Employees loathed the idea of Musk being their boss, but also wanted his cash for their stock. And as much good a pubic soapbox platform could have been for society, destroying the company seems to me to be the only…
I honestly want to see Twitter's financials before it goes. I have a suspicion that a lot of it's revenue was from government sources, especially after Arab Spring.
You know that twitter was a public company before all this fiasco right? If you want to see pre-Elon financials, it's all in the public domain. https://investor.twitterinc.com/financial-information/quarte...
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#505Elon'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.
There's an old tweet in Norwegian that constantly gets retweeted, or just referenced as "balloon animal". It goes something like:
> [me running naked through the library with a balloon animal on my head]
> The fact that you're talking about me means that I hit a nerve
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#506Earlier 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…
> Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product is like if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas.
Bingo. Hard-core engineering has been the lynchpin of Tesla and SpaceX's success -- they literally won via designing and manufacturing superior physical things.
It makes sense that EM would blunder by attempting to reproduce that type of success at Twitter. And it will be a blunder, unless: (a) he plans to build one or more new products (or drastically change the nature of the existing product), and (b) those new or drastically changed products will somehow "win" in a big way that Twitter isn't winning now.
But at least to me, (a) doesn't seem likely and (b) seems even less likely.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
OH WOW, LOOK! https://twitter.com/account/personalization/download_your_da...
Your point? When I go to that URL, I get {"errors":[{"code":410,"message":"You need to verify your password before you can view this content."}]}
I am actually able to download a pdf
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#508I 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…
And he has a history of being a chronic liar.
He has no STEM degree at all!
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#509The 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.
It definitely feels like internal sabotage at the moment...
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#510seems like he's using a scorched earth technique to force resignations.
it seemed to me twitter was doing more or less ok, as a business - never heard any talk of bankruptcy until this robber baron came on the scene.