I'm curious about the HN algorithm and why this post hasn't been closer to the top of the front page? It seems like there are so many comments and votes, it should be higher
Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
861–870 of 1001 posts
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#862I 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…
> He failed to make Twitter profitable for years.
Well if you've read Jack's interaction with Elon about Twitter (part of the lawsuit), it's because the board was very risk adverse and against big changes. Jack actually supports what Elon is doing now, because it's not something he could do while he was in charge.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#863I 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…
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Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#864Earlier 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…
> company is on a website that makes it a tech company Well, we generally consider social media companies tech companies. And since they don't really have anything else other than the tech stack (and the users on it, but they don't "have" those), not sure as what you would characterise it. > ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running What makes you think that the d…
> engineering solutions to, for example, stop the spread misinformation without censorship.
I really don't think this is an engineering problem. If I was a tech lead and a product manager came up to me with this, I'd tell them they need to figure out what they mean before they start talking to engineers. Software-Development is not concerned with the nature of truth and misinformation, it is concerned with what works given precise goals. Nobody in engineering school or at an engineering job gets taught or learns what counts as misinformation and how to assess it: you need people with humanities expertise for this.
The "Do you want to read..." prompts are actually a good example of what I mean, because the engineering that goes into making those is quite trivial. But the idea of using them, trying to make them effective at their goal, and determining how much they're working, these are all things that fall outside of engineering, and have more to do with product-design and sociology.
Creating a feature is not as important as getting people to use it, and use it the right way.
Based on the features Elon has rolled out so far (Twitter Blue), it seems to me they're putting more emphasis on just building it, rather than figuring out how people will use it and whether it will be beneficial
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#865Earlier quoted context omitted.
The TLS cert expires on December 12.
I had a job once, when TLS was new and half the internet was not using some form of SSL. We had to manually do keyswaps on a stack of machines to create a trust network for all the certs. IT really sucked. I made a note of the certificate expiry data and a calendar reminder 3 years into the future to start looking for a new job if I hadn't already.
I hope you don't end up in a job where someone left on cert calendar reminder.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#866I 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 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. He was pretty clear. The bar kicked out the Nazis, and he wants them back in.
If you redefine "the Nazis" to include everyone who isn't 100% on board with extreme leftist woke propaganda, sure.
Thousands of women banned for not agreeing that men in dresses should have full access to women's spaces for one example.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#867Earlier quoted context omitted.
On principal, I hope it crashes and burns and ruins him. And I know this will cause a lot of people to suffer some. I am so sorry for that. But these piss ant billionaires need to start facing real consequences when they behave so abhorrently. I hope all of his ventures fail similarly. Fuck him and his petulant behavior forever.
Wow. The guy who started sending more rockets to space than NASA and almost single-handedly made electric cars cool is suddenly the most evil man alive. Yikes.
We had electric cars before Tesla and they worked just fine. With better build quality too.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#868Well, we'll have to see how this plays out. "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.
If people are working 80 hours a week on sending humans to Mars, I definitely don't want to be one of those humans. People do not do their best work when they are tired and stressed.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#869Here’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…
right? He wants engineering wage slaves, he shoulda bought TikTok. Or maybe he'll just end up moving engineering to China as his big brain billionaire flex.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#870Earlier 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…
Around 2012-2015 we had someone on-call over the holidays do a redeploy every few days because of Rails memory growth at our now-IPO'd ecommerce giant.
This growth impacted every rails app back then, the popular ones more quickly is all..