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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

#801

Post by dsfyu404ed »

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…

>I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore".

There is no opportunity to "go hardcore" for the kind of devs that build greenfield crap at lightning speed and leave spaghetti in their wake.

Elon appears to intend to slice and dice his way to profitability like a textbook MBA. In order to support that there is opportunity for architects, engineers and process specialists who are skilled at hacking existing stuff together to make square pegs fit in round holes well enough to work and with minimal expenditure of engineering man hours. There are few of these people because it's not a skillset that the traditional software engineering trade really values and pushes people toward and fewer still who fit that category and want to work 50+hr weeks, and fewer still because pre-Elon Twitter isn't the kind of place these people thrive and so most would have self-selected out.

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

#802

Post by kranke155 »

Here’s what I don’t understand.

Elon has offered no vision for twitter 2.0, only the promise of hard work towards a nebulous goal.

He then offered no equity in return for that hard work rebuilding the platform.

Why would anyone stay? “Hey, do you want to work triple the amount of hours for me for the same pay?”

I wonder if seeing Chinese companies and Chinese factories work has warped his judgement.

Without a vision of “this is how we’re going to change the world” and the shared commitment of “whoever helps me will get a big piece of the pie!” How does he expect people to stay motivated exactly ?

I finally understand why brilliant people like Karpathy leave Tesla.

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

#803

Post by HeavyStorm »

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…

Engineering, for most digital products, is as good as much you can ignore it exists.

I remember the dread that must be dealing with their process load when I get to a whale page, not when I'm tweeting successfully.

Anyway, the thing here is that since EM wants to enact that much change in a short time frame as possible, and guessing he's likely to make mistakes along the way, he'll need engineering work as hard as possible.

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

#804

Post by irthomasthomas »

It's hard to follow this story. Do I have this right?...

Twitter had a permanent WFH policy, and staff arranged their lives based on this.

Musk gives 24hr notice to staff (those lucky 30-40% not already sacked) to return to the office for a hardcore 7 day week, or be resigned.

Musk panicked about sabotage and closed the offices.

But would-be-saboteurs still have systems access, as the people would revoke access have, themselves, been resigned.

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

#805

Post by enkid »

saghm wrote: post #321
kibwen wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same energy as the following article on the Twitter layoffs: "Twitter hasn’t responded to requests for comment, likely because its communications staff has been included in the layoffs." https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/04/twitter-faces-a-class-acti...

At this point it just seems like a matter of time before Musk and/or his fan club start trying to change the narrative to him purposely running the company to the ground, and the fact that he wasted billions of dollars doing it somehow is noble.

People are already saying this.

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

#806

Post by jsiepkes »

carbonatedmilk wrote: post #747
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…

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…

Twitter developed Finagle, which led to Linkerd. Twitter did a whole bunch of pioneering of service mesh related technologies.

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

#807

Post by JoeyPriceless »

christophilus wrote: post #750

Between FTX and Twitter, I've run out of popcorn, and the local grocers are out of stock. 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…

But Musk replied to the Tweet so I'm not quite sure what's real.

> Thanks for helping out. You’re a lifesaver! [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593447646470889473

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

#808

Post by jpeter »

klyrs wrote: post #392
minimaxir wrote: post #32

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.

Tweet is not available lol. Had to reload a couple of times. First cracks showing?

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

#809

Post by nikau »

bagels wrote: post #214

I was really thinking about this sabbotage thing yesterday. In these large companies, to make changes to a lot of systems, you have to have someone else also sign on to the changes (eg. code review). If your aim is sabotage, you would have to find a like minded saboteur to work with you. In normal times, at most places, this is risky, because most others would not want to assist you, and would likely report you. The…

It doesn't even have to be active sabotage, techs notice abnormalities and incorrect requirements all the time, you can sabotage by just ignoring issues you see and not correcting people doing things wrong.

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

#810

Post by michaelcampbell »

Publius_Enigma wrote: post #790

I find it curious that Musk has simultaneously demanded that all employees cease working from home and return to the office whilst also locking them out of the office.

Do you really? Even when couched in terms of "this was a panic emergency measure"? It seems blindingly obvious.
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