I'm looking forward to the South Park episode(s) that this will inspire.
Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
911–920 of 1001 posts
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#912What 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 suspect you right to some extent. But "survive" has two meanings: 1) keep the site up and running, and 2) make money. A site of this size earns gobs more money with just a small fractional increase in traffic. I have no doubt Twitter can stay running on a skeleton crew, but can it earn more revenue in the long run than it would have with a larger crew.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#913Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
You say that like we trust the press to be objective and thorough when researching and presenting a topic.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#914Earlier quoted context omitted.
His mentality might be that it's too late to go back and the company is probably going to fail anyway. So he has to radically change the workforce and the culture there. So he's throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks apparently. While that might improve overhead costs eventually, I don't see how it's going to result in a platform that gets the moderation/censorship balance correct while keeping the advertisers…
Was the company really on its way to failure? It was rudderless and with no profit, but with him as CEO would he really struggle to keep finding VC funding? He could have slowly attrited the workforce over 3 months, 6 months, while defining a future vision, making sure he’s got everyone he needs and that he’s found the Jony Ives of twitter (exceptional workers who were stifled by the bureaucracy). Instead he’s nuked…
A social media company that's stagnating typically doesn't have much time to remain viable before they'll give way to the next big platform. I think they only had a few years left before they became the next myspace anyway.
This isn't to say that firing so many employees, trying to quickly roll out a change in the blue checkmark system and scaring off advertisers was the right choice of course. So I basically agree that he should have tried to fix the company over the course of a year or two.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#915How many people does it take to keep HN running?
Well, without dang this place would go to shit real quick.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#916How long before the exiting engineers realize they can just walk across the street and start their own better, more “hard core” Twitter?
I’m answering my own question, sort of. From HN this morning:
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#917Going "hardcore" can be an amazing experience. Some of the most exciting and fun times during my career were when I was on a tiger team. Elon Musk is approaching this in a horrible way though. By using hardcore as a default setting, and quiet firing anyone who doesn't sign on to it, he's signaling hard core must be forced thing. "hardcore" itself has negative connotations. Think of how different the news cycle would…
You keep using stock examples: There is no stock, Twitter was taken private.
Good point, I was primarily thinking about companies in general. You can issue private stock - it only gets issued to employees and investors, and sale is controlled. Though, not much point though if the company won't be going public some day.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#918The management is worried about internal sabotage? My Twitter friends said Twitter has been having large exodus. CSL(core systems lib?) team, blobstore team, graph platform team, and revenue forecasting team seemed have all quit. I'm not sure how robust and autonomous Twitter's infra is. Hopefully Twitter will continue to function.
>Hopefully Twitter will continue to function. When I first heard about twitter I thought 1) that’s a dumb idea and 2) it won’t last long. I was of course very wrong about #2 but feel increasingly right about #1 the more time goes by and the more (IMO) it provides net harm to society and social discourse. So I’m sympathetic to the employees stuck there but hoping my timeline for #2 was simply way off and it finally go…
Nature abhors a vacuum. Something will take its place, and I personally would bet that it will suck even worse.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#919Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the people looking at your resume later. Staying at Twitter now will need a darn good explanation, otherwise I guess the assumption is you buy into this BS, or you need your visa. If you need your visa I get it, otherwise that is a stain on your resume
I was saying the same thing to friend last night. If I saw “Twitter X-Y” on a resume where X is = 2023 then I’m going to have questions . The people attracted to that kind of company run by that kind of person set off red flags for me. H-1B is an acceptable reason, almost anything else isn’t.
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Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#920What 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 think that Twitter won't fail anytime soon. These rash HR moves probably have a mid-term goal of completely replacing the company personnel. When 95% or so of donations made by Twitter staff went to Democratic party, it is safe to say that his political stance of allowing free speech for all parties will be heavily resented by the current workforce, and might lead to demotivation, low productivity and even sabotage. Replace potentially unloyal people who don't even want to go to the office with a new skeleton crew, get everything functioning, then bring in new personnel to work on new features.