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

901–910 of 1001 posts

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

#901

Post by loceng »

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 then if they need you specifically then they offer you more $ and then may offer more flexibility along with that.

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

#902

Post by r721 »

GreekLegends wrote: post #768
r721 wrote: post #375

>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

The source is a random tweet. It's incredible to see people consume such propaganda wholesale. There seems to be a derangement when it comes to Elon Musk, people will literally believe anything. Millions of people last week ACTUALLY BELIEVED that Elon Musk shut down the the microservice responsible for 2FA. The source of that story was also a random tweet.

>Covering social media cos for Insider.

>khays@insider.com

She's a senior tech reporter at Business Insider/Insider:

https://www.businessinsider.com/author/kali-hays

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

#903

Post by _8j50 »

Arathorn wrote: post #572
_8j50 wrote: post #51

Twitter isn't going anywhere because of two critical facts: a) attention whores and rage/doom scroll addicts b) Those people can easily find each other and talk to each other. Mastodon and Activitypub decentralize which means it is a lot harder to proverbialy whore yourself to the attention of the masses and and those attention whores (politicians, journalists,etc... not just celebrities and influencers) can't have t…

> On that note, Matrix can replace twitter and a lot more if they weren't chasing seemingly random features. Not just twitter but email also can be replaced by matrix, the api amd federates architecture allows for it. What random features? https://matrix.org/blog/2022/08/15/the-matrix-summer-special... is what we’re working on currently. Pretty sure the Matrix community would accuse us of losing focus if we were inve…

The core matrix team is fine except for stuff like thirdroom. But even then new features are driven by trying to compete with slack,zoom and signal all at once. It's the Vector/Element side of things I am talking about, the client/products not the core protocol.

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

#904

Post by taylodl »

memish wrote: post #895

What happens when Twitter survives despite reducing headcount by 80-90%? It's going to send a message that companies are more overstaffed than we thought. This may explain an underlying fear driving even some engineers to put their reputation on the line with confident declarations that Twitter is going to fail. Some were saying it wouldn't survive the night. It's now morning. Others saying it won't last the weekend…

If it requires more than 20% - 30% of your staff to sustain operations then you've implemented it wrong. So sure, you should be able to keep operations going having sustained large staff reductions, but you aren't going to be doing anything to expand your business opportunities. Maybe Musk doesn't think that's required, but if they lose too many key operations personnel then they may be screwed.

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

#905

Post by torginus »

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…

> By that logic Walmart is a tech company because I can buy stuff on their website.

And Uber is a tech company because its a taxi service with an app.

And Airbnb is tech company because its a house renting company with an app.

etc.

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

#906

Post by vlovich123 »

AYBABTME wrote: post #497
joshstrange wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A top reply [0] that Elon replied to: > Elon, there's a bunch of us in SV who will come up tonight to help on the infra side to keep the site up. > If you need help just ask. As if you could just drive over to the Twitter HQ, grok how all the infrastructure works, and make/provide meaningful contributions/tweaks/upkeep.... tonight That's either a level of delusion that I can't imagine and/or someone who has no idea w…

At the end of the day, most software eats the same stuff and the levers are often rudimentary and grokable, especially if you focus on a specific area. I don't think someone could meaningfully implement a new feature in a night, but could they tackle a problem in a given service and identity a rough remediation to save the next 72h? Yes, this stuff happens all the time. I've jumped on outages like this and figured it…

Are you going to be able to do it under the conditions of massive brain drain? Better hope the engineering and SRE teams had up to date SOPs that work well. Oh, and you’re new. So that means you need to probably start getting access granted to services on the fly first to even see dashboards. But it sounds like that team has also seen massive attrition…

Are you sure you can be effective coming completely cold into a company with massive attrition?

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

#907

Post by BucketsMcG »

memish wrote: post #895

What happens when Twitter survives despite reducing headcount by 80-90%? It's going to send a message that companies are more overstaffed than we thought. This may explain an underlying fear driving even some engineers to put their reputation on the line with confident declarations that Twitter is going to fail. Some were saying it wouldn't survive the night. It's now morning. Others saying it won't last the weekend…

I don't think there's any doubt that many tech companies are hideously, bafflingly over-staffed (3000 people working on just the music functionality of Alexa? What could they possibly be doing?). But maybe take a bit of time to understand what everybody is (and isn't) doing before throwing half out and alienating the rest?

This is just a masterclass in how not to do it. He doesn't look dumb because he's reducing the headcount. He looks dumb because he's going about it like an absolute lunatic.

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

#908

Post by Sophira »

memish wrote: post #472
klyrs wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Highest DAU for xx% less overhead is literally winning. That's why people have lost their minds. They want him to fail so badly and they're getting the feeling that he won't, so cognitive dissonance is through the roof.

Are you seriously suggesting that making people believe that you're running the company to the ground is a good way to build publicity?

It's true that good publicity comes from amazing turnarounds. Final Fantasy XIV is a good example, since FFXIV 1.0 was widely regarded as terrible and 2.0 was lauded for somehow miraculously turning the company's fortunes around.

But the big difference there is that it was a new management that did it. You don't get points for completely ruining your company's best-known product (to the point where some believe it to be the company's only product).

The reason people are "using" Twitter now is to watch a trainwreck. Most people by now probably have a backup plan.

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

#909

Post by tmn »

faangiq wrote: post #830
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…

Elon is finally getting exposed for having very low IQ. Quite simple really.

It's hilarious that people have convinced themselves that Elon Musk is low IQ. The coping is outrageous

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

#910

Post by [deleted] »

memish wrote: post #895

What happens when Twitter survives despite reducing headcount by 80-90%? It's going to send a message that companies are more overstaffed than we thought. This may explain an underlying fear driving even some engineers to put their reputation on the line with confident declarations that Twitter is going to fail. Some were saying it wouldn't survive the night. It's now morning. Others saying it won't last the weekend…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN