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

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

#211

Post by SkyMarshal »

madeofpalk wrote: post #120
BitwiseFool wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working for one of Elon Musk's companies sounds brutal, but I can understand the appeal of burning hot and bright on something truly innovative. I would feel proud and motivated to work like crazy on something like Starship, but this is Twitter. I suspect Musk's strategy of appealing to people who want to change the world and be on the bleeding edge of technology won't hold up the same way as it did for his other com…

> on something truly innovative. like twitter? apparently elon's master plan is 2000s-era blogspot citizen journalism?

No, it's "X", the all-in-one-app he wanted to do back in the 2000s, and which WeChat is now.

That's not a terrible idea if he can pull it off and make it profitable even despite the massive debt he loaded Twitter with to purchase it.

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

#212

Post by GSimon »

mandevil wrote: post #180
GSimon wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A leaner organization could reduce reliance on advertising as payrolls go down, and if traffic increases (as Elon is claiming, who knows if true) than advertisers would pay more for greater exposure. Also FB using AI or target marketing to the extreme for their ads just ended up turning people away from the platform by sterilizing it of any actual content you’d like to see.

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

#213

Post by johannes1234321 »

epistasis wrote: post #153
johannes1234321 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't mean there is no stock. The stock isn't publicly traded, which makes it harder to sell, but Twitter has a bunch of shareholders (Saudi Prince and Jack Dorsey are known ones) and could give out shares to employees.

Having illiquid shares in a company that has already gone through most of its growth is completely unappealing. What is the value prop for a talented, high productivity employee to work at Twitter? The management hates its employees, seemingly hated the product, and doesn't even understand the business that he bought. What's the upside for employees? There's a reason people were hanging up exactly at 5pm as Musk was…

I didn't say it was attractive stock.

However if you believe in Musk's vision (is there one!?) and he's desperate he might throw stocks around and then a pivot unexpectedly might work out and a IPO might be lucrative ... but I wouldn't bet on it. All I said: stock exists and can be distributed.

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

#214

Post by [deleted] »

epistasis wrote: post #137
memish wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

These sorts of massive cuts, coupled with massively decreasing workplace quality, and with removing any chance of financial reward (no more liquidity in shares of the company!!), are going to cause the most talented people to go to greener pastures. The people who stay will be those with the least options. Musk has made employment at Twitter hugely risky, with no possibility of reward. Really boneheaded business, com…

[deleted]

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

#215

Post by paxys »

m_ke wrote: post #135
rem7 wrote: 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,…

Engineers interested in cars or rockets have way fewer exciting options than web devs working at Twitter.

Exactly. I don’t think people realize that a below average software engineer or product manager at Twitter has way better career prospects than a top rocket scientist at SpaceX.

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

#216

Post by MrStonedOne »

sorenjan wrote: post #91
UncleOxidant wrote: post #3

Interesting that none of these twitter articles are making it to the front page.

Apparently Hacker news have some kind of anti-flamewar protection that automatically downwheighs threads with a lot of activity. I don't know how it works or if it's true, but I've seen high activity posts drop like a stone in their rating and quickly go from front page to several pages down.

No post body was provided.

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

#217

Post by kenjackson »

KVFinn wrote: 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..."

And the thing is, if you're increasing the hours I need to work by 1.5 or 2x -- then you better increase my pay. Otherwise, saying you're reducing bloat seems like a lie. If you're reducing bloat then I expect my hours to stay flat -- or heck maybe even go down by reducing internal comms. I'd expect more vacation time and shorter hours!

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

#218

Post by 0x5345414e »

burkaman wrote: post #167
DeathArrow wrote: post #141

It's not like Twitter can't hire other people if they really need to. Most probably they don't need to.

Would you take a new job at Twitter right now?

I think there are a lot of people that would. Are they the people that twitter actually needs? I’m not sure. But there are people that would. Some of them are in this thread.

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

#220

Post by bdcravens »

ebiester wrote: post #166
bdcravens wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many tech companies are over-staffed: R+D pet projects, full time OSS devs, dev rel, etc. Some companies probably have staff who literally do one task like managing webpack config. I disagree with Musk about A LOT, but most companies have opportunities to trim fat before they even touch the core product.

As long as you're willing to accept a company that is not growing in revenue due to new value created, you can build a system entirely dedicated to maintenance of existing features with a small group. In Twitter's case, however, how long is it until they're sued for child porn (lack of moderation) or get 50 million euro fines for running afoul of Germany's Network Enforcement Act?

I'd consider staff in those areas core to the product. Many of the dozens of projects at https://opensource.twitter.dev/projects/, not so much. Staff whose job revolves around standing at booths at conferences and handing out swag, ditto.
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