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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

#671

Post by safog »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #506
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…

> 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 attempti…

(a) seems very likely to me. Didn't he already speak about making Twitter a "super-app"? super-apps are a bit new to the American audience but in China / India they are surprisingly commonplace.

I won't be surprised if he churns through a bunch of different ideas: Subscriptions, Deals with news companies, short form videos + creator tools, different kinds of ad experiences, the edit button, better spam filtering etc.

There's a lot of potential things Twitter could be doing if they didn't limit themselves to their core product.

I don't think (b) is unlikely. Their current product is already highly valuable. You don't need their short form video product to succeed in a way TikTok did but there's enough of an audience to capture there to improve the company's valuation.

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

#672

Post by mmmmmbop »

unity1001 wrote: post #320
areoform wrote: post #173

I am chalking this up to Russia syndrome. Personality types driven to do great things aren't easily satisfied. Most are perpetually dissatisfied & they need to raise the stakes. They win the war of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th coalitions. For the first time, they find that things are going fine. All they have to do is nothing. Pull back and consolidate. Maybe refine some things, tinker a bit. But it's not enough. It wi…

> They win the war of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th coalitions. For the first time, they find that things are going fine. All they have to do is nothing. Pull back and consolidate Pull back and 'consolidate' as Britain keeps propping up Russia to attack the French from both sides. Meanwhile making use of the aristocrats and their still present economic and political power inside the continent. That wasn't a viable strat…

Same with Hitler, really.

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

#673

Post by coldtea »

andyjda wrote: post #419
nemothekid wrote: post #34

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…

I mean, their original setup during early years (and I'm not making this up) required them to restart their Rails service every day, else it would crash/stuck because of memory leaks.

That's not a "tech startup" based on "hardcore engineering", that's a startup based on a social idea and implemented with some trivial tech.

Scaling this to hundreds of millions is not exactly a "hardcore engineering" thing either. Mostly regular engineering with some good practices (like share nothing) and devops. Tons of companies do just the same, today you can even do it from your bedroom by building on top of AWS, GAE, etc, there are even templates for this...

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

#675

Post by bandrami »

mpweiher wrote: post #512
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…

> company is on a website that makes it a tech company Well, we generally consider social media companies tech companies. And since they don't really have anything else other than the tech stack (and the users on it, but they don't "have" those), not sure as what you would characterise it. > ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running What makes you think that the d…

> and the users on it, but they don't "have" those

Buzz. Not only do they "have" them, those users are literally the product the social media companies market and sell

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

#676

Post by Havoc »

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

I bet the SEC is thinking “not this guy again”

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

#677

Post by watwut »

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…

1.) Twitter was not biased for liberals. That part is just not true, no matter what grievance machine says.

2.) Musk intentions were not free speech by any meaningful sense. He does not have track record of valuing it. He values only speech of those he agrees it and is super eager to punish whoever disagree with him. The first departments that had to go were the ones where actual free speech issues are dealt with.

Like, human rights team. Free speech is more then just saying n-word or ability to harass your opponents. It is also not giving your details to law enforcement and policies related to nonwestern countries.

3.) Twitter employees making it difficult for him is just not true. The worst that happened was few people disagreeing with him about technical matters. The free speech advocate was unable to process even technical disagreement.

4.) The idea that it ia far left employees leaving or that there was even that many of them is bonkers. Conservative people think about their employment conditions too. They dont necessary like being humiliated, they are not all doormats and natural born yes men.

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

#678

Post by mr90210 »

hef19898 wrote: post #635

How does one follow a come-back-to-office police while being simultaniously being locked out from said office? Is this an employer lockout, the employer version of an employee strike? So many questions! Maybe one of those blue checkmarked Elon's on Twitter can answer! But seriously, how can someone burn down something he just bought for 44 billion so fast and consequently?

> But seriously, how can someone burn down something he just bought for 44 billion so fast and consequently?

The fan boys would say: It’s Elon, he is playing 3D chess and no one is smart enough to understand his end goal.

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

#680

Post by im3w1l »

brookst wrote: post #181
oska wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> somebody who takes over the company and accrues so much social debt so quickly What is 'social debt' and how is it (objectively) measured?

Think of it as negative goodwill. It is not objectively measured, in the same way that goodwill on balance sheets is not objectively measured. But it’s a real thing. Qualitatively it is the impairment from people not wanting to do business with you. In Twitter’s case, that manifests as decreased advertiser demand, which results in lower ad prices. And to the extent Twitter is losing MAU, that impacts ad inventory.

Goodwill on balance sheets is a technical thing and is quite different from common parlance "goodwill". It's the fudge factor introduced when doing an acquisition to make the numbers balance up correctly.
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