741–750 of 1001 posts
>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.
https://careers.twitter.com/en/roles.html#team=careers-twitt...
1. Twitter was attempting through out its history to tell this narrative and do this: Twitter's core was citizen journalists and verified journalists and being responsible enough to guide the conversation in what was allowed and not allowed as far as hate speech and misinformation.
Elon bought it and had a new vision that the Twitter product should be a free speech conversation and that advertisers should be ditched as product consumers of Twitter.
The problem for Elon is that he did not do enough of story telling about the new product vision and INVITING people on the journey
Its not a type of journey you can crack a whip to get people to sign up for that journey. And certainly his product adviser, Jason Calacanis does in fact know this from his miss-steps with Mahalo.
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.
There's reports the NOC and SREs have all left as well. Surely an outage is right around the corner.
"We'll send humans to Mars!" is something that I can feel good about working 80 hours a week on.
"We'll help trolls spew hate!" ... maybe, not so much.
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?
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…
For comparison:
Meta / Facebook:
* React
* PyTorch
* Fasttext
* Their unsung-but-indispensible-for-humanitarian-orgs Data for Good program
Google:
* Flutter
* Go
* Kubernetes
* Tensorflow
* BERT / Large language models generally
* Mapreduce / Hadoop
The much-maligned Uber:
* H3 Geospatial indexing
* Kepler.gl
* Manifold
Even AirBNB!
* Airflow
* Superset
I use most of these products (or their descendants) every day in my work. When I think of Twitter, all I think of is how they arbitrarily shut off humanitarian access to their APIs (and earlier, the Twitter firehose). There's not a single Twitter-supported open product that I use.
Am I the only one? Is there a great Twitter-supported project that I missed?
Elon's first non-reply tweet since the news broke: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593415171149791232 > How do you make a small fortune in social media? > Start out with a large one.
Good word, it gets better from there: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593455727611215872 > And … we just hit another all-time high in Twitter usage lol > Let that sink in … He literally cannot distinguish between good and bad attention. He still thinks he's winning this.
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.
One thing that’s interesting about this shakeup is that it’s a very clear statement about where Elon sees value, right? Lazy “rest and vest” engineers? Just go home. Communications department? Get out.
Perhaps what Elon wants to say is “look, this thing runs fine on 20% of the staff, and now that the 80% naysayers are gone we’re going to really get shit done”. When I’ve worked for companies approximately the size of Twitter I’ve sure felt the urge to say that. :)
Now, the question is, now aligned with “reality” is this reasoning from first principles? No doubt a lot of haters are gonna hate, like crazy. Is it enough to take the whole company down?
I think the best tweet on that thread is [0]:
"I was laid off from Twitter this afternoon. I was in charge of managing badge access to Twitter offices. Elon just called me and asked if I could come back to help them regain access to HQ as they shut off all badges and accidentally locked themselves out."
I'm not sure if it's true or not, but... sounds about par for the course.
Edit: As someone else pointed out, it's a parody account. Amazing that I couldn't infer that immediately.
[0] https://twitter.com/JWeber988/status/1593423235252723715