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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

#661

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…

Twitter's headcount doubled between 2018 and 2022. They added literally 2500+ people in the two pandemic years itself.

50% layoffs gets them back to their 2018 headcount.

As far as I can remember, Twitter was functioning fine in 2018 as well. And it certainly didn't grow enough or add enough features to warrant 50% headcount increase in two pandemic years.

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

#663

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?

Covid - if you question the efficacy of masks, vaccines, lockdowns etc then you should immediately be deplatformed.

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

#664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Companies can choose to whom and what they choose to provide a platform, can they not?

For example, Elon Musk has owned Twitter for enough time to have re-instated @realdonaldtrump, yet he has not. Why is that?

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

#665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The timeline you drew here is wack He started firing people day 1 and bragging about it online. Of course his remaining employees are going to shit talk him. The “ultimatum” sure as hell wasn’t in response to this either, I don’t know if you are implying that or not. He pulled this exact same stunt at Tesla just a few months ago. The dude is a raging asshole surrounded by yes men. If you value your health and your fa…

I searched for the Tesla ultimatum you refer to. It seems to have been different, specifically saying execs couldn't work remotely: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-01/musk-s-te... Contrast w/ Twitter ultimatum: https://twitter.com/donie/status/1592859900941852674 I think the Twitter ultimatum is the kind of thing you send if you suspect most employees don't support your leadership / are not pulling th…

What are you talking about? You are completely fabricating a narrative here.

> “Everyone at Tesla is required to spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week,”

Tesla is RTO. Quit defending this billionaires psychopathic behavior. This is not a healthy way to run a company

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

#666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And he has a history of being a chronic liar. He has no STEM degree at all! https://twitter.com/kyliebytes/status/1593391167718113280

I have no degree at all and my job is pretty advanced research and implementation of ultra low-latency software execution stack in a major market maker. What's your point?

lying is the point, innit?

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

#667
post #2

How will Musk's failure at Twitter affect market confidence in his other ventures?

It's counterintuitive but Tesla shareholders might want Twitter to fold quickly so Elon can fully focus on Tesla again.

I think that's probably a naive hope, if we carry on down the current path the only way that Musk can save face and avoid being washed out of twitter is to buy up the debt that he secured to buy Twitter. Ignoring the technical issues, the debt is the thing that really threatens twitter - if the business can't generate the revenue to service the debt the creditors might step in and take Musk's equity. So the logical move if you're all-in on fixing twitter (as Musk seems to be) would be to buy the debt, he can probably get it at 60 cents on the dollar, so that means he needs to come up with somewhere around $8Bn, and we all know where Musk will look for that kind of cash. That would be a very significant head wind for Tesla stock.

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

#668
post #559
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that this is at all significant, but these past few months of Twitter charades have erased any appetite for one day buying a Tesla, or any other Musk owned products. Luckily almost every automaker is coming out with their own EVs in the next couple years, so the market should be pretty competitive(in some ways it already is).

I was all set to buy a Tesla until the pedo-guy thing.

This is the one which sticks with me too. It's infantile bullying to make an accusation like that to tens of millions of people just because his pride got hurt. Then he even defended it in court.

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

#669
post #212
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

George Hotz is interviewing there tomorrow. https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159339146698169139... For a certain kind of engineer, this version of Twitter is far more attractive than the previous one.

Why? What complex technical problem is there to solve at twitter at this point?

Apparently uploading videos that don't degrade to unwatchable quality is a pretty hard problem to solve. A lot of artists work around this by uploading gifs, which then get converted to videos by Twitter's backend, but aren't degraded as badly for whatever reason.

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

#670

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…

> 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.

Yes like Instagram and others. It was not tech stack that was sold but community of users. I guess Musk's lenders knows this.

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