Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

781–790 of 1001 posts

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

#781

Post by sciurus »

coldtea wrote: post #673
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…

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. Most…

I think you're dramatically underestimating the scope and scale of the problems Twitter had to solve. See the thread below for examples of the sort of solutions they had to build because open source or cloud-hosted solutions weren't available or viable.

https://mobile.twitter.com/danluu/status/1592774269733601281

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

#782

Post by pjc50 »

mihaic wrote: post #776

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.

> fire 80-90% of developers over the next year and just optimize the system to reduce infrastructure costs by 95%

"just"

The presumption here is that 90% of the staff weren't doing anything useful, and that 95% of the infrastructure costs were wasted, and both of those would be extremely surprising?

Also very non-efficient-markets-hypothesis, that a public company would just sit there wasting almost all of its money.

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

#783

Post by traveler01 »

eugenethespleen wrote: post #591
shp0ngle wrote: post #569

I would obviously not want to work in such an environment, but. Given that he fired so many people, yet the site is working unchanged and works exactly the same as before, maybe he’s not that crazy? I can log in to the website and see no difference; nothing is obviously broken. Maybe he’s right and most people were doing nothing? I don’t know.

Quoted post unavailable.

I think what he means is that, things are basically on hold there and nothing has broken yet.

So I think his point his kinda valid, Twitter doesn't need that much employees to work as expected. It's possibly a very low maintenance platform that can go for days without the need of any sort of maintenance.

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

#784

Post by paulgb »

mihaic wrote: post #776

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.

He sorta forced his own hand here by saddling the company with so much debt that it couldn’t afford not to drastically cut back spending.

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

#785

Post by [deleted] »

random314 wrote: post #508
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…

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

[deleted]

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

#786

Post by incrudible »

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…

It is not about engineering, it is about conformity. As you implicitly acknowledge, Twitter does not need as much engineering, nor does it need creative engineering. For engineering, Elon needs cogs, preferably those who buy into his cult of personality.

As for the hard to quantify work, Elon needs people he can trust. Even if the existing people are good, they can not be trusted. Committing to something like Twitter 2 is as good an oath as it gets. The other alternative is to just fire everyone he did not hire himself.

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

#787

Post by traveler01 »

paul7986 wrote: post #464

A lot of what he's tweeting and or replying to is completely fabricated trolling everyone stuff. Maybe he's trying to burn it to thr ground to hide something ... pardon conspiracy theory but it's just weird that someone goes and spends $44 billion and takes negative action after negative action against your new shiny toy. Though maybe he knows what and who is needed only to run Twitter and all the others were just si…

No. This is just a dirty, yet ingenious, strategy to fire the most of employees without paying severance. It's the cheapest way of removing the "dead weight" from the company without spending too much money.

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

#788

Post by paxys »

r721 wrote: post #157

>Hundreds upon hundreds of Twitter employees have technically resigned but still have access to Twitter’s internal systems, with some speculating it is because the employees tasked with managing that access also resigned. https://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1593431420587761664

But they blocked access to the HQ. That should definitely stop rogue employees (with company hardware and full system access) from doing anything malicious right?

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

#789

Post by traveler01 »

rchaud wrote: post #295
dusing wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is wild? Musk has said for a long time Twitter needs 75% less staff. What did you expect firing that many people to look like?

considering that Black Friday, Qatar World Cup and Christmas are all in the next 30 days, one might have thought he'd want to capitalize on the increased traffic and advertiser interest in his first week on the job. It doesn't even look like there will be any advertisers left by the time the dust settles.

Apparently usage of Twitter is growing, instead of decreasing. So you as an advertiser will just ignore a platform with a massive user base just because you don't like the owner?
Post reply on HN