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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

#641

Post by ShredKazoo »

consumer451 wrote: post #634
ShredKazoo wrote: post #602

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 know…

> modern liberals against freedom of speech Can you please give me specific examples of speech that modern liberals are against?

An obvious bone of contention would be whether Trump should get to have an account or not. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33652055

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

#642

Post by solarkraft »

neogodless wrote: post #252
personjerry wrote: post #170

So who's building Twitter 2.0 right now, featuring decentralization?

ActivityPub has been around since 2018, Mastodon 2016. If you mean something else, how would it differ?

Maybe they need a blockchain in there somewhere.

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

#643

Post by bodge5000 »

zarzavat wrote: post #277
7e wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Elon was fired from PayPal. He failed at Boring Company and Neuralink. He faked his educational credentials and was in the country illegally. He failed at Full Self Driving, the Roadster is nowhere to be seen, the Cybertruck is MIA and the Tesla Semi is years late. 95% of predictions he has made has failed to pass. As far as I can tell, he lucked out during the .com boom, then invested in Tesla and almost drove i…

That may be true. But the guy also landed rockets from orbit (on ships!). And then flew them again. The implications of having easy access to space to our civilization really cannot be overstated. SpaceX is the real deal, and will probably be worth more than Tesla eventually. Musk clearly isn’t successful in everything he does, but he’s not a failure either.

> But the guy also landed rockets from orbit (on ships!). And then flew them again

But the guy also had money to hire talented people who landed rockets from orbit (on ships!). And then flew them again*

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

#644

Post by implements »

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?

Out of interest, how do you?

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

#645

Post by Un1corn »

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…

I'm using Firefox but if you are that paranoid you should be using Chrome. Firefox is a child play compared to Chrome in term of security (but not privacy).

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

#646

Post by Fricken »

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…

Unlike with Tesla and SpaceX, nobody at Twitter signed up under the auspices that taking it in the ass from Elon will help humanity get to Mars.

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

#647

Post by ActorNightly »

spuz wrote: post #620
ShredKazoo wrote: post #602

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 know…

You're missing a significant bullet point which is that in-between Musk arriving and Twitter employees resigning, Musk fired 50% of the workforce. That seems like a much more significant factor in whether systems can be maintained.

If you need half of 7500 people to maintain a system like Twitter, something is fundamentally wrong with the tech stack and the tech people that work there.

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

#648

Post by pjc50 »

r721 wrote: post #375

>In addition to the payroll team being gone, Twitter's entire US tax team is gone, I'm told, along with its financial reporting team. Not great. https://twitter.com/HaysKali/status/1593449877094047744

Don't need a financial reporting team if you're not going to make it to the end of the tax year.

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

#649

Post by joe-collins »

ShredKazoo wrote: post #627
zarzavat wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His biggest mistake was saying that he would allow Trump back. In the minds of many left-leaning people that makes him a sympathizer in a coup attempt, and those left-leaning people succeeded in creating an extreme amount of pressure against Twitter’s customers (the advertisers) to starve the company. Musk clearly thinks of himself as creating a platform for free speech, but when it comes to coups there is really no…

Can you provide a source for Musk saying that he would allow Trump back? Last I heard, he formed an advisory board, and said account reinstatements were pending discussions of advisory board. In any case, I think you're correct that this is an important subthread.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/05/elon-musk-would-...

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1524881263470993435

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

#650

Post by ShredKazoo »

ActorNightly wrote: post #647
spuz wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing a significant bullet point which is that in-between Musk arriving and Twitter employees resigning, Musk fired 50% of the workforce. That seems like a much more significant factor in whether systems can be maintained.

If you need half of 7500 people to maintain a system like Twitter, something is fundamentally wrong with the tech stack and the tech people that work there.

Agreed. I used to work at a top 200 website (also social media) and we had about 30 engineers and another 30 non-engineer staff.

I think cutting workforce was the correct move for an acquirer, but he probably should've moved just a bit slower (e.g. using a more sophisticated metric for employee productivity than "# lines committed"). And of course try to make cuts in a way that doesn't harm the morale of those who aren't cut.

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