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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

#711

Post by watwut »

ShredKazoo wrote: post #681
SilverBirch wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regular people have been trying to explain this to the "center-right" for a while now: Twitter's moderation policies weren't primarily dictated by their political views, they were primarily dictated by building an advertiser friendly platform. Which Musk exploded almost immediately by endorsing a far right homophobic conspiracy theory about a violent attack on the family member of an elected politician. You can say "…

From what I understand, Twitter's moderation is noticeably more left-wing than that of Facebook. And yet Facebook makes a lot of ad dollars. So I do think there's a discretionary element there. I agree that Musk hasn't been behaving in a way that's advertiser-friendly. Jack Dorsey is super familiar with Twitter and said Elon was the best solution for it if it was gonna stay a company: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/2…

Facebook seems to be literally biased toward right wing and intentionally so.

But, they do contain nazi in their own private bubbles, so the risk of your ad being next to that content is significantly smaller.

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

#712

Post by piva00 »

randyrand wrote: post #538
JohnTHaller wrote: post #264

"Twitter hasn’t responded to requests for comment, likely because its communications staff has been included in the layoffs." - TechCrunch

I always appreciate their random speculation, thanks TechCrunch!

Twitter has no PR department left, it's not random speculation [1]

> GroupM didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment. Twitter no longer has a communications department to reach out to with such requests. The internal message seen by Platformer says that Twitter is “working through” GroupM’s requirements with leadership.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23459254/twitter-high-ri...

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

#713

Post by luckylion »

low_tech_love wrote: post #694

This one goes for those who are positive towards EM right now (honest question, no ill intentions here): is there any way at all to look at his actions in the past weeks in a positive light from an administrative perspective? I mean, ok, you could argue that Twitter was in a bad shape and so on, but anyway, is there any real objective justification for such a messy, chaotic approach to its reorganization? Can anyone…

I'm neutral because I don't care, I'm only watching it when I'm exposed to it through others, so essentially like a popular TV show.

What I've read some say is that it's a strategy to drastically reduce head count and keep only those people on who really want to be there and are not just there because it's a well-compensated position and they've figured out how to appear busy without doing much. Those people might leave when it becomes a chore to keep up appearances ("this feels like work, if I wanted to work I could've just done my job"), they're self-identifying and you're not paying severance when they quit. Of course, you're probably also bleeding out some talented and productive people. I don't know if "it's a mess, but it's the challenge of a lifetime" and the chance to work for Musk is enough to recruit good people, but it might be, not everyone has a family and needs to be home by 5pm and wants work-life-balance.

Trump was elected president riding on a wave of lots of people hating him and the media covering him 24/7 in a constant scream of GOTCHA and it worked out for him. Musk has claimed that Twitter usage is peeking among all of this. It kind of looks like a Wrestling show with lots of crazy things happening, only that not all participants are aware of what's happening or willing to participate. I have no idea whether it works out in his favor.

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

#714

Post by piva00 »

convery wrote: post #570
nso95 wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok but what if they can't

Then the company can hire more engineers? Even if devs in SF virtue-signal on Twitter about how they'd never work under Musk, a competitive paycheck attracts outsiders.

Who is gonna onboard those new engineers? I subscribe to Peter Naur's view of programming as theory building, the knowledge of what these applications running inside Twitter do is being lost on a fast pace, the code itself doesn't tell the whole theory behind the code.

Institutional knowledge is necessary to sufficiently onboard any new hire, without that you have headless chickens running around trying to figure out what exactly are they working with. How do you solve Chesterton's Fence when there's no one around to tell you why the Fence is there?

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

#716

Post by watwut »

dale_glass wrote: post #695
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…

Here's my own understanding: * Musk didn't really want to buy Twitter. He screwed up and got locked into a contract he couldn't figure out a way out of. * Having figured that he vastly overpaid, he panicked and tried to cut down the fat. Problem is that he hasn't spent enough time there to figure out where's the fat. * Musk fundamentally doesn't understand what he has bought. He doesn't understand that Twitter's busi…

> He doesn't understand that Twitter's business relies on pleasing advertisers, who don't give a crap about free speech ideals and are very risk averse.

Musk does not care about free speech either.

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

#717

Post by westhom »

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 makes me wonder how much “infrastructure runway” a company like Twitter has. If every engineer resigns, how long will it take before the infrastructure stops working autonomously… server/DB hard drives fill up or crash, PSUs die, high maintenance processes grind to a haunt, network capacity stops scaling, etc.

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

#718

Post by mrleinad »

valeg wrote: post #54

Why Elon insists on actually running a company? He should hire competent people and stick to PR/bullshit thing. It works wonders in his other ventures, mostly. And no, competent doesn't mean Kimbal.

With what money? He alienated all sponsors because anyone can successfully impersonate any brand in there now, and he's already spent >40b just to buy the damn thing.

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

#719

Post by piva00 »

jonstewart wrote: post #116
andrewinardeer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jack Welch at General Electric. Granted it wasn't a tech company though.

He was fawned over at the time, but Welch is finally being assigned his share of blame for gutting GE.

GE became profitable, it was just not GE anymore but some monstrosity that became a finance firm instead of an engineering one.

You can see some similarity to Boeing after having MD's management taking over, accounting-wise it's working, engineering-wise it's fallen deep into a pit of issues.

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

#720

Post by piva00 »

jbeam wrote: post #164
rmatt2000 wrote: post #115

I'm a little bit confounded that Twitter's current culture is such that a large number of people contemplate sabotage as an appropriate response to changing employment conditions. I mean, maybe the company culture really is broken.

Layoffs are fine, but not mass resignations?

Workers are serfs to these people, the neoaristocracy-supporters that love CEOs don't really like to be challenged by the peasantry.
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