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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

#601

Post by rsynnott »

Aaron2222 wrote: post #509
hintymad wrote: post #175

The 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...

Weird new CEO fires half the company, then demands a _loyalty pledge_, like a common Henry VIII. Sensibly, everyone quits. I mean, the only saboteur there is the leadership.

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

#602

Post by ShredKazoo »

So here's my understanding of what happened, appreciating corrections:

* Twitter was known for liberal corporate politics, most employees liberal

* Purchased by center-right billionaire in the name of freedom of speech (modern liberals against freedom of speech)

* Twitter employees amuse themselves by making billionaire's life difficult

* Billionaire delivers ultimatum, many employees out

* Unclear if sufficient knowledge to maintain systems will survive

It seems like with the benefit of hindsight, the correct play for Elon would've been to avoid major moves at first, let far left employees quit, replace them with new hires excited by working at a Musk company. Then eventually, maybe, deliver an ultimatum once new Musk-enthusiast hires had absorbed enough knowledge to maintain systems.

I think the hard-charging approach Elon took was likely the correct one for Tesla/SpaceX, since employees at those companies mostly knew what they had signed up for, but Twitter was a much different management challenge since the existing workforce has/had an active dislike for Elon.

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

#604

Post by mcv »

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…

> where EM wants to take Twitter

I know people joked about him wanting to destroy it, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that that's the only rational explanation for what he's doing. Even Dilbert's PHB seems mild compared to Musk. Either he's a massive idiot, or he wants to destroy Twitter without looking like he intended to destroy it, and so prefers to look like a massive idiot instead.

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

#605

Post by DesiLurker »

choeger wrote: post #548
DesiLurker wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I have been saying even if you don't log off from twitter completely at least do houseclean your old tweets with tweetdelete.net (or something IDK). I do not trust Elon to use my posting history responsibly, period.

But you do trust them to delete the data you gave them when you ask nicely?

its better than leaving it out there, also there are compliance laws like GDPR in some jurisdictions (similar in California) where they have to be more careful with data. overall I'd rather ask them to delete it & have them try to jump through hoops to resurrect it.

further as GP mentioned, this should provide some protection from unintentional breaches. push come to shove I am prepared to delete the account and ask my friends to follow me on mastodon, its really not that much of lock-in with twitter.

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

#606

Post by arkh »

Animats wrote: post #528
andyjda wrote: post #419

Earlier 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…

> the great distributed system that runs behind the scenes As someone is reported to have been asked in a Twitter job interview, when a celebrity with 10,000,000 followers sends out a tweet, how do you deliver them all within 3 seconds?

> how do you deliver them all within 3 seconds

Hire The Flash then it's "just" a traveling salesman problem which is left to solve by the reader.

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

#607

Post by ShredKazoo »

rsynnott wrote: post #601
Aaron2222 wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It definitely feels like internal sabotage at the moment...

Weird new CEO fires half the company, then demands a _loyalty pledge_, like a common Henry VIII. Sensibly, everyone quits. I mean, the only saboteur there is the leadership.

[flagged]

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

#608

Post by LAC-Tech »

1attice wrote: post #92

I need everyone to think very carefully about the attack surface, and how long it has been left unprotected, and how long it will be unprotected. Now, I need you to consider the following proposition: that eyeballs are to codebases, dashboards and telemetry as floss is to tooth and gum. Then, I need you to go to your phone and uninstall Twitter. Also, when you do visit it, visit it in Firefox. Use a Firefox Container…

Way ahead of you - I deleted twitter after interacting with twitter users 2 years ago.

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

#609

Post by rhaway84773 »

I don’t understand how anyone here can be supportive of the idea of the richest man in the world coming in, immediately firing half the staff, trying to get another significant portion of the staff to resign by demanding they switch from the promised permanent WFH to working from the office in 2 weeks, and then encouraging them to resign by giving them a highly fishy spammy/pushing email with an external link to a form to decide whether they want to work with this company or not within 48 hrs.

This is horrible and destructive. We should be against this on principle. For us to not be against this is making us the ultimate Beta Cucks who are willing to take it WM the throat as long as the pretend Alpha is showing it to us.

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

#610

Post by gscott »

guax wrote: post #590
memish wrote: post #402

A couple weeks ago 50% were laid off and nothing happened. Now I read on Twitter that Twitter died and it's at a record high DAU. Make it make sense! It may be bumpy in the short term, but then all of the supremely confident naysayers are going to look ridiculous and spiteful if it turns out that Twitter can operate with 80-90% fewer employees.

I can pretty easily keep a mysql instance running. I cannot easily do that while adding features to it. Scale that up a lot and you can see how Twitter can keep running with much less people while not delivering anything. The fact that a site that big hasn't broken yet shows how good they actually were and in the end he did fire good engineers while not even tackling Twitter main problems which none were technical. B…

At scale things break in weird and unexpected ways.
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