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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

#771

Post by narrator »

retinaros wrote: post #550

lets remember that tesla was a mess at its inception and that musk also kind of had this bossy behavior that made many people reluctant to join its vision. those who joined him became millionaires if not more and contributed to create the greatest automobile company in recent history. and that was after building paypal. the press and many people in those comments are making a mistake thinking he is a fool and behaved…

I always scroll to the bottom of the HN comments to see the non-woke take. I was not disappointed!

Elon is about the most capable entrepreneur of the 21st century. He could start from scratch and have something more awesome and profitable than Twitter in a few years. He had an extreme culture problem though it seems. The company had been taken over by ideologues and was losing 4 million a day.

He had to get rid of everyone who wasn't aligned with his new vision. He had to depoliticize the company which meant firing most of the staff. He'll probably have to move it to Texas or make it fully remote if he wants to finish depoliticizing it.

What does depoliticizing even mean? It making the company about maximizing profit, not transforming society based on the political value of its actions.

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

#772

Post by carbonatedmilk »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #759
carbonatedmilk wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying it's a fair metric, but when I compare Twitter's open output to similarly VC-funded-but-now-public companies, the engineering output doesn't seem particularly exciting. 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 * Mapre…

> Their unsung-but-indispensible-for-humanitarian-orgs Data for Good program I'm pretty sure almost all of this team was laid off (certainly the people I knew who worked on it were). > * Airflow This is actually a clone of an internal FB tool (written by the same author after he left FB).

> I'm pretty sure almost all of this team was laid off (certainly the people I knew who worked on it were).

That's really sad news. The crew I interacted with (Alex, Omari, Tobias, others) were top-flight engineers who also really understood the problem space and how to navigate the internal complexities of Meta. Hope the laid off / repositioned staff are OK, and if they're looking for new opportunities my email's in my profile.

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

#774

Post by denton-scratch »

bjornsing wrote: post #749
mr90210 wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yea, I think I’m still leaning in that direction, although I wouldn’t use those words or go all in on this. 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% naysay…

> this thing runs fine on 20% of the staff

Every place I've worked that had more than 50 staff, 90% of the productive work was done by 10% of the staff. I mean, I can't document that; it's anecdata. But I think it's a pretty reliable rule-of-thumb guideline.

But how do you identify that 10%?

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

#775

Post by Woodi »

chasd00 wrote: post #306

Pull the plug and go home. Let Twitter go dark Elon, we all know it’s the rational thing to do.

But what about all that current traffic and media attention ?! So many views ! :)

ps. Pls, somebody, tell Elon to switch to 6/7, personally too...

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

#776

Post by mihaic »

What I find so amazing about this dumpsterfire is how easy the plan to maximize Twitter revenue would have been: fire 80-90% of developers over the next year and just optimize the system to reduce infrastructure costs by 95%. Be transparent, humane and not an asshole while doing this.

When you then have a leaner organization then you can go nuts.

Musk acted like an impatiant child, all the while being mostly right.

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

#777

Post by mrweasel »

Kraftwurm wrote: post #733

I want Jack Dorsey back!

Why? He failed to make Twitter profitable for years.

If you look at Twitter, under Jack Dorsey, as what it provided, I can see the point. If you view Twitter as a business, it should have been allowed to fail years ago. Musk does seem to take the speed run approach to trimming down Twitter, with the risk of killing it altogether. Working for Twitter can't be a pleasant experience right now, but the employees where on borrowed time already.

I might be completely wrong, but my feeling is that in 5 years we'll look back and see Twitter as a novelty of the 2010s. See humor in an old ad with a Twitter handle on it, or watch a clip from a news show where they "jump to the Twitter comment" and remember that was a thing.

There is no good way out of this for Twitter. Regardless of what he actually paid, Musk vastly overpay for for the company. They've been burning a $1B a year for a decade, and now Musk is stuck with the bills for next year. It's not that I think he's doing a good job, but he has to do something. Otherwise he'll be burning hundreds of millions of dollars every year, keeping Twitter running, and that's after having wasted billions upfront.

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

#778

Post by homeland221 »

nemothekid wrote: post #34
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…

> 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…

Crypto. Twitter as an ad agency business has not much room to expand. You just have to look at the team EM assembled. EM himself was paypal founder. Many others on his investment teams are related to payment as well...even Jack has his square. Think about it, tweeter turn into like wechat with built in payment wallet especially crypto wallets managing like an exchange by a paypal founder who happen to have good access to government relationship. With expected tsunami of retrenchments coming especially for IT sectors, EM can afford to replace entire current Twitter engineers several time over - cheaper and more efficient. Most of those tweeters tech staff seems to be very obvilious of the incoming tech layoffs. FB along expected to let go about 30K (at least 2 more rounds in 2023). Google doing their 10K. Netflix and MS expected to hit that number as well before end of 2023. The labour market will be full of very good devs out of job. Can see that? When one is desperate with tons of bills to pay, no matter how much one despise EM, one will swallow the pride and work for him. Remember EM has access to vast amount of economic data (see who his friends are). He knows what is going on and how much leverage on his side vs entire tech community. It isnt lose-lose situation...mostly rank and yank situation done with maximum drama.

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

#779

Post by pjc50 »

homeland221 wrote: post #778
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…

Crypto. Twitter as an ad agency business has not much room to expand. You just have to look at the team EM assembled. EM himself was paypal founder. Many others on his investment teams are related to payment as well...even Jack has his square. Think about it, tweeter turn into like wechat with built in payment wallet especially crypto wallets managing like an exchange by a paypal founder who happen to have good acces…

If he goes in on crypto - which even Facebook couldn't touch - while the smoking crater of FTX is still being litigated? That's not going to work.

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

#780

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

rwmj wrote: post #723
westhom wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think we're going to find out in the next few days, but if you believe this graph the signs are not encouraging (NB: this appears to be self-reported outages so I'm not sure that it is trustworthy): https://downdetector.co.uk/status/twitter/

I thought this graph is just a visitor counter for the page?
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