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Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

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171–180 of 458 posts

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#171
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

I mean, it's possible, but the organisation would need to be extremely disfunctional for that to be the case - that's the level of bloat I'd expect out of a government agency not a private corporation. If you have teams where 8 out of 10 people do literally nothing or pretend, it should be obvious.

That's not what the Pareto Principle says, when reasonably applied to the engineering department [or employees in general] at Twitter.

It says that 80% of the results come from 20% of the sources. That's not 8/10 people are doing nothing, but rather 8/10 people are doing things that only contribute to 20% of what makes Twitter Twitter.

On any given team of ten, it's likely that the entire team is in either the 80 or the 20 bucket, by virtue of what they're working on, not by virtue of how hard they're working or how talented they are.

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen any indicators of Twitter failing besides 2FA failures; but every time I read anything on HN, it is doomed to fail. I feel like some of the resentful people here will try to hack into Twitter possibly get caught and see jail time? May be they will do something bad because this kind kind of irrational hate for a billionaire is not normal. Hell, even Peter Thiel doesn't get this vitroil. It reminds me of…

1. Supporting the Republican party who I hate for lying about or supporting people who lied/are lying about election fraud. 2. Linking to an article that claimed Paul Pelosi's attacker was involved in a gay love triangle and it was a lover's quarrel. 3. Pedo guy 4. Making blue check marks paid leading to many parody accounts mimicking companies making offensive tweets. Then when those companies cut advertising claimi…

> Republican party who I hate

I switched to Republican party since 2020 election, I wouldn't vote for election deniers [1] but plenty of people are doing the right thing. Rationality and reason seems to have shifted from liberals to conservatives. We can't even say biological facts. Many others are leaving the woke non-sense, I want my damn liberal party back from the 90's that was pro free speech and had a kernel of reason. Not this CCP-like authoritarianism path that we're heading towards.

That said, party preference shouldn't be the reason to hate someone with passion like this. I admire plenty of progressive leaders and conservatives alike.

Regarding 2/3/4, these are not the reasons to pick up pitchforks and hate someone with guts. He has done so many positive things for the world that completely outweight these quibbles.

[1] That includes democrats:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjnX4IUt_eo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX2Ejqjz6TA

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#173
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want money, work life balance, comfortable pace it’s not the place. If you want to change the world, are ready to push yourself, work with the most dedicated people, it is. It’s a place for very few. I would really like to work in one of his company, but I don’t think I have the stamina for it.

What part would be changing the world? Seems like at the most hes going to eventually do a lap and twitter will end up where it started, just saddled with 900 million dollar a year debt fees. At worst just a place where saying the N word is more acceptable.

"What part would be changing the world?"

- Break up the cartel that is mass media + tech giants + democrats

- The control on the narrative determine what people think, how they votes, where the world goes.

- Making this open and transparent will disrupt many entrenched interests.

Huge potential

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone not familiar, this movie is worth checking out: > Monty Brewster is a Minor League Baseball pitcher with the Hackensack Bulls. He and his best friend, Spike Nolan, the Bulls' catcher, are arrested after a post-game bar fight. A man offers to post their bail if they will come to New York City with him. At the Manhattan law office of Granville & Baxter, Brewster is told that his recently deceased great-uncle…

The man's living in New York City? Just buy a 2 bedroom apartment and call it a day.

He cannot own anything at the end.

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#175
post #72

Wild prediction: Twitter will continue to work as it did even after that ~80% workforce haircut. Make of that what you will.

I bet 20% of their workforce was support + inside sales reps for advertisers. I'd further guess that 10-20% of their workforce was staying on top of regulations. If twitter works, but does not comply with the FTC consent order and gets fined out of business, that is not a technical failure but still is failure. Large enterprises, especially those under consent orders, spend a TON of effort in compliance. Given that e…

When has the FTC ever levied a fine that put someone out of business for an internet privacy related consent decree? I don't think it's ever happened.

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#176
post #62

Did Musk describe 'Breakthrough Twitter 2.0' in a separate message that hasn't been made public? "Stay at Twitter because we're moving to 80 hour work weeks and cancelling Christmas" can't be the argument by itself, right? It's got to be something like "Stay at Twitter because we're building exciting new project X, but we'll need 80 hour work weeks to pull this off..."

yeah if there's no roadmap or direction then what are they doing differently than before? heh just spending the extra 40hrs twiddling their thumbs in the office in the middle of the night? like what exactly does Musk plan to do with that extra effort? I've said it before, Twitter is a cancer and no one is immune. It certainly got a hold of Musk, I hope it's not his downfall but it's not out of the realm of possibility.

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#177
post #72

Wild prediction: Twitter will continue to work as it did even after that ~80% workforce haircut. Make of that what you will.

Tell me you have never worked in a large enterprise without telling me that you haven't. Elon seems completely out of his depth in handling Twitter. And so does many people endorsing him. For them, Twitter is a glorified website.

Twitter is undoubtedly overstaffed. Their website is a trash fire that fails in spectacular ways to deliver the most basic funcionality inherent in the browser: show some text and some pictures. And it's been this way for years while they are patting themselves on the back for "creating the best PWA app in the world".

However, what Musk is doing is absolutely hillarious, and is a much bigger trash fire that has nothing to do with optimizing the head count, or figuring out how to correctly reduce staffing etc.

Steve Jobs returning to a flailing Apple he is not.

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#179
post #109

In my opinion Elon miscalculated the type of people at Twitter. These aren’t people like the ones in Tesla or SpaceX where there is some sort of idealization of Elon. The number of fan boys he has at Twitter must be super low. None of the Twitter employees signed up to work for him, it’s pretty obvious from the public tweets that most of the staff has posted that they don’t have much respect for him. On top of that,…

An other component is that if you're working on rockets or EVs you might consider that rewarding in and of itself, and accept lower comp or worse conditions. Twitter? I'm sure twitter employees were proud of their work and doing things they believed meaningful, but not "halve your effective comp', in a company with all the joy of an abattoir, for a narcissistic egomaniac. And if you're a rocket engineer, the field is…

My kids are out of college and working. I'd totally consider going to space-x as a fun-tirement if I had that option, work hard do cool shit, have low downside if I burn out or quit. But twitter, that just isn't as fun as space and explodey bits. Games and Space... that's where I'd take the cool part as compensation.

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#180
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much doubt that. Twitter must have had some bloat, but there's no way that 80% of the workforce was bloat. I'd be extremely surprised if Twitter(as in, the website/app, not the registered legal entity) still exists and works by the end of this year.

80% imo could so very easily be bloat. Features/services that are underutilized and haemorrhaging money don't need to be upkept, teams dedicated to curating content like twitter headlines and moderating content don't need to be there (at the scale it's currently at). Staffing for hospitality services at Twitter HQ and all the ancillary services that are unnecessary or under-utilized. As long as the servers are runnin…

A lot of the teams support advertisers (the actual customer, not the users). They would be either a) keeping conversations such that advertisers want to have their brands next to them b) keeping relationships with advertisers or c) running machine learning to match ads with users.

If your advertisers go away, then a whole lot of the iceberg of complexity underneath the bird app goes away.

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