Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 458 posts

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

#251

Post by tedunangst »

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,…

Kinda weird. He spent half a year convincing his followers that everybody at twitter was a lazy liberal who would rather woke than code. From his perspective, now he's "right". Congrats on the win!

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

#252

Post by [deleted] »

alfor wrote: post #173
westpfelia wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

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

#253

Post by MildlySerious »

pavlov wrote: post #82
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..."

No such vision exists. “Twitter 2.0” is still vaguely about free speech, somehow making lots of money from verified users, and also WeChat-of-the-West style payments (as if anyone would trust their money to this company).

> as if anyone would trust their money to this company

Of all the problems I see with what's going on, this isn't one of them. Most of the current internet (and beyond that as well) exists solely on the premise that we give away power freely, with no expectations of proportional responsibilities in return.

If Twitter survives and, somehow, flourishes, all it takes for people to forget and sign up is a benefit to them, and blaring you opinions into a bigger void may just be enough already.

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

#254

Post by partiallypro »

dboreham wrote: post #136
Moctogo wrote: post #72

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

For sure Twitter could continue to function as before with 20% of staff. Problem is : not the 20% that they actually have.

How can we definitely say that though? We don't even know what staff has left, nor what the plans are to replace them if they were critical.

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

#255

Post by klyrs »

GSimon wrote: post #212
mandevil wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's one thing I fully believe Musk on. Twitter is the hottest news in the industry right now. There's no better place to read about it than Twitter itself. Thing of it is... most of the traffic I've seen is rubberneckers. He can only crash his gigayacht so many times before it's no longer a spectacle.

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

#256

Post by rajeshp1986 »

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,…

Not just that. Elon forgot the basic rule of modern management "Treat your workers with respect". Moreover, Engineers are knowledge workers and need to treated with respect.

What's most amusing to me is Elon takes the advice from Youtubers & Influenceers but won't listen to his own engineers.

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

#257

Post by jcranmer »

madeofpalk wrote: post #226
orangepurple wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine going to jail because someone uploaded a file to your computer

Which, by the way, is exactly what "Section 230" prevents.

Child porn is explicitly carved out from the section 230 immunity.

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

#258

Post by paxys »

rhacker wrote: post #235

I've been reading the left and the right sides on this whole thing... and I kinda agree with this one: https://www.newsweek.com/tantrum-twitter-reveals-how-privile... We're pretty damn spoiled.

Just weeks ago these few thousand employees collectively generated $44 billion worth of value for their shareholders, but now suddenly they are all useless and spoiled and don’t deserve a penny. Funny how that works.

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

#259

Post by memish »

systemvoltage wrote: post #60
GenerocUsername wrote: post #5

I've always wanted to work for Musk, but never felt like I was skilled enough to work on spaceships or cars... But Twitter? I am thinking about applying, so go ahead and quit.

Yea, I have friends who work at SpaceX and seems to be doing just fine. The zeitgeist on HN is basically if you ever do anything challenging, don't even think about it, it is bad for your mental health. You probably should just concede in life, don't work hard, regress into resentment for "rich people" and make sure no one else succeeds. What kind of a shitty place has this become? Supposed to be "Hacker News". Not a…

It's says something when the greatest living hacker, George Hotz, now wants to work at Twitter. But so many of the readers of "hacker news" can't even imagine why.

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

#260

Post by kenjackson »

djanogo wrote: post #188
bastawhiz wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "committed" look like to you? The promise of working more for the same or less? What upside is there for folks who "commit"? Besides personal gratification, is it even remotely likely that Twitter will do something at this point to pull untold riches from thin air that would somehow benefit these people? From the sound of it, no.

The engineers (don't care about non-engineers) who quit need to face the fact that were part of "company" which gave negative returns to both public and private investors for almost a decade. I think "committed" will still be 8 hours/day, like I said he sussed out people who are "triggered" by words or don't love what they do.

Rather he kept people who don't feel like they have other options. Either due to immigration or feel they can't easily find another job or have financial obligation that don't allow the risk.

Most people don't like these sorts of ultimatums, especially those with the most options and flexibility.

Post reply on HN