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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

#921
post #2

How will Musk's failure at Twitter affect market confidence in his other ventures?

It's counterintuitive but Tesla shareholders might want Twitter to fold quickly so Elon can fully focus on Tesla again.

Musk dumping lots of Tesla shares to reimburse the loan may well crash Tesla price.

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

#922
post #307
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Elon was fired from PayPal. He failed at Boring Company and Neuralink. He faked his educational credentials and was in the country illegally. He failed at Full Self Driving, the Roadster is nowhere to be seen, the Cybertruck is MIA and the Tesla Semi is years late. 95% of predictions he has made has failed to pass. As far as I can tell, he lucked out during the .com boom, then invested in Tesla and almost drove i…

If you think the CEO of Tesla and Founder, CEO, Chief Engineer of SpaceX is a failure, I'm dying to know: What have you accomplished?

I have not had a joke backfire that caused me to buy a company at several times its value. I have not fired people, cutting off their healthcare, during a recession. I have not made my family hate me. I have not lied repeatedly and without punishment in public. I have not been sued by the SEC, Twitter, and countless other parties.

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

#923
post #808
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.

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

Works for me without issues.

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

#924
post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Must be fun to truly believe you're a Bond villain.

If someone has a secret volcano lair, it's Larry Ellison, but I'm sure Elon has something too.

He is working on his space station lair. From the looks of it, he is quite successful in building it.

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

#925
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…

> What could they possibly be doing?

People constantly underestimate the size of the support staff needed to keep the engineering team productive. For every ten or so software engineers you hire to work on a new product or feature, you're going to need 5-10 QA engineers, another project manager, another product manager, maybe another build engineer, maybe more internal IT staff... You need these people. Software doesn't just leap from developers' fingertips directly onto store shelves. And now that that program's engineering manager has so many more direct reports, that manager needs another manager to split his duties up... And now that there are so many managers, their Director maybe needs a personal assistant to help keep her schedule better organized. All that extra staff eventually requires more HR support, more people working in facilities/building management, more janitors. On the business side, this product is going to need a few more marketers, maybe salespeople to sell it, business analysts to track its effectiveness, and so on. After a couple rounds of this, the company looks up and somehow has 3,000 people and HN sneers about what could they all be doing...

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

#926
post #683
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.

To be fair for Twitter any sort of eyeballs are eyeballs. Doesn’t matter that they’re just there to watch the carnage

Funny thing about running an internet service. Every visit costs you money. With advertisers dropping like flies, more eyeballs isn't always a good thing.

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

#927

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…

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

Elon Musk has publicly praised the Chinese work ethic of "burning the 3am oil"[1], and dunks on the idea of a 40 hour work week[2]. He's made it abundantly clear where he stands on labor norms.

1: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/12/elon-musk...

2: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-says-80-hours-per-...

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

#928
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…

That could happen, but if you were running, say, a grocery store, and 90 of your 100 employees walked out the door in a single swoop, everything would look pretty good for a little while, maybe even a day or two. There's still merchandise on the shelves, customers are still able to check out because you've routed your staff there. But over time things will start to cascade. The freezer breaks. Someone breaks a bottle of wine in aisle 10. A customer can't find anything and walks out. Etc etc.

But yeah, for that little bit at the start, everything "looks" fine.

Point being: it's way too soon to say twitter is surviving.

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

#929
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 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…

[deleted]

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

#930
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…

It "survived", but apparently with some minor disruptions [1], which isn't a good signal at all. Any social media site should be able to survive a Thursday night with no major news events, celebrity deaths, natural disasters, or scandals.

What will be the true test is the world cup. If it can survive the final game (estimated 1.5 to 2 Billion viewership), that will be impressive. Historically, that's been a major engineering challenge for any "public" social network. With 90% less staff, it might not be possible to monitor, triage, test, fix, etc. on the fly.

[1] https://downdetector.com/status/twitter/

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