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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

#931
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.

There's an old tweet in Norwegian that constantly gets retweeted, or just referenced as "balloon animal". It goes something like: > [me running naked through the library with a balloon animal on my head] > The fact that you're talking about me means that I hit a nerve https://twitter.com/kaffekjele/status/586625003661197312

In English, I've heard something similar used as a cheesy pickup line.

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

#932

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm giving Elon the benefit of the doubt, A. he's intelligent B. He has 20+ years of corporate experience running companies, I would assume that there was some method to this madness. If I had to guess, he came in with the assumption that forces in the company would be hostile to him based on their beliefs. In order to weed those forces out, he engineered some of this madness to shake those people out. Unfortunate…

Twitter's headcount doubled between 2018 and 2022. They added literally 2500+ people in the two pandemic years itself. 50% layoffs gets them back to their 2018 headcount. As far as I can remember, Twitter was functioning fine in 2018 as well. And it certainly didn't grow enough or add enough features to warrant 50% headcount increase in two pandemic years.

Yes but which 50% left matters. Engineers in a big complicated system like that are NOT replaceable and NOBODY properly manages their bus-factor. If you spent the past five years basically babying the twitter infra and making sure it stays working and understanding it and building on it and convincing yourself at night that it's okay how stupid and poorly engineered it is because it gets the job done and now elon comes in and spends his time calling you incompetent and overpaid and offers you a 3 month severance, you aren't staying.

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

#933

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…

Musk has also been lying about his college degrees. He has no STEM degree at all

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33651188

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

#934
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope it implodes. He has been so childish throughout, he deserves to lose the 44 billion. Sucks that thousands of people are out of work, but maybe this is better for them than a slow painful death of a once okayish company.

What about all the poor people on visas who are now desperately looking for jobs to avoid having themselves and their families deported?

Maybe we shouldn't allow the US government to chain people to a company with no way out.

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

#935

Earlier 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.

What about simply "I had a mortgage to pay, we were going into a recession and all the other tech companies stopped hiring"? I've clinged on to crappy jobs out of desperation during bear markets. This should not be a red flag.

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

#936

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…

You know the butterfly effect where one small decision affects tens of thousands of other things? That must have been the day that things were going to well at Tesla, record profits, etc, that Musk got bored and decided he only likes to work under unbearable pressure. So, he made a couple of insulting tweets and now here we are. I really can't believe he didn't put any escape clauses in his contract, no due dilligenc…

[deleted]

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

#937

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-...

Always funny how those who have never really worked a day in their lives are the ones who scream "work harder (for me)" the loudest.

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

#938
post #321
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.

There are tens of examples of this in this very comment section

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

#939

How does one follow a come-back-to-office police while being simultaniously being locked out from said office? Is this an employer lockout, the employer version of an employee strike? So many questions! Maybe one of those blue checkmarked Elon's on Twitter can answer! But seriously, how can someone burn down something he just bought for 44 billion so fast and consequently?

He's only playing with 22% of his next worth, it's not like this is a "serious problem" for him if the thing drops to 0 value.

I wouldn't discard the possibility that Twitter affects his other assets, though. It seems like he's using his other companies' talent and money to try to prop up Twitter (like borrowing engineers from Tesla and committing SpaceX to Twitter ad-spend) and Musk himself is distracted from running his other companies. On top of that, a lot of Tesla's stock price hinges on speculative value instead of current cash flows. If public perception starts to believe that Musk is damaging his brands and mismanaging his companies by spreading himself too thin and commingling profitable businesses with unprofitable ones, his other holdings will become less valuable.

I mean, he'll always have food on the table at the end of the day, but there's a good chance he won't have the kind of wealth and influence in the future that you'd need to make a big-balls move like buying a large tech company.

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

#940

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's reports the NOC and SREs have all left as well. Surely an outage is right around the corner.

The first deployment from a newly hired SRE with no old heads to explain all the undocumented sharp edges. Oh boy.

Even better, how the fuck do you triage a system you've never touched before, that most likely is overengineered to hell and back, while the guys responsible for getting you splunk creds are still trying to find out who can give them THEIR creds to get in themselves.
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