Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by strikelaserclaw » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 6:44 PM UTC

memish wrote: post #71

JohnTHaller wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80hr+ in-office work weeks with no equity and the threat of being instantly fired for appearing disloyal in Slack or correcting the CEO... sounds fun!

They don't have stock? Also maybe don't say your employer is a "petulant man child" in Slack or otherwise undermine them and you'll be fine. The idea that an employer should keep people that actively dislike like him or her is insane.

but he is a petulant man child, the day everyone becomes a fearful bootlicker is the day democracy dies.

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

#292

Post by bee_rider » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 6:45 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #248

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,…

There’s a flip side to this: the act of surviving all this culling and thriving afterwards is going to be one heck of a resume addition. The big challenges create big opportunities.

Maybe? Some employers might value the trait of “will go down with the ship” but I’m not sure the ones you want to work for would…

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

#293

Post by macintux » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 6:45 PM UTC

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #45

hackandtrip wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way a person in his position has any time for focus. CEOs of big companies (especially in case they manage multiple companies!) usually act as firefighters and mainly mentors to top-management. They need to be able to quickly jump between calls, board meetings, press, Q&A, in matter of minutes. Something very similar is also written in Cal Newport's Deep Work book, where Jack Dorsey's typical day is outli…

Nah, he is just yet another incompetent person who became rich mostly due this parents. He cultivated an image in f being a genius and it worked for a long while, but with Twitter he showed his true capabilities because he had no one who did the actual work.

There’s an interesting dive into his educational and work background floating around Twitter right now; it sounds like he lied about his college degree and was working in the U.S. illegally for a while as a young adult.

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

#294

Post by csydas » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 6:46 PM UTC

partiallypro wrote: post #227

m_ke wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

While true, engineers ae SpaceX are much much harder to replace that web devs/engineers at Twitter, which are a dime a dozen. With so many in the Valley cutting jobs, if Twitter needs to hire new engineers, I don't think they'll have issues finding them.

For me it's not so certain; I think that most of the devs/engineers at Meta, Twitter, et. al., might get a bit of cold feet with the biggest tech companies and with Silicon Valley in general.

I think smaller companies and upstarts have a chance to get some great talent that will be strongly considering their living situation and looking for something more stable, but I'm not so sure that Twitter is going to have its pick of the litter for a long time until it demonstrates a stable and mature environment to work in.

I have no doubts some persons will be very nervous and take the opportunity, and I wish them luck. I'm not so sure others will be as eager.

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

#295

Post by memish » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 6:47 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #240

memish wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, but it's not binary. It's not a choice of people who hate you or love you unquestionably. There's a middle ground between those. I don't buy into the notion that the chief engineer of SpaceX, which puts rockets in space, and CEO of Tesla, which efficiently produces electric cars, doesn't know how to stay in touch with reality. The evidence is in direct conflict.

But being severely critical of Musk right now doesn't necessarily mean you hate him. He has deserved a fair amount of criticism.

I agree.

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

#296

Post by strikelaserclaw » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 6:47 PM UTC

memish wrote: post #163

sorenjan wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea that an employer should keep people that don't like him or her is insane. It's not insane. Only keeping people that kiss your ass is how you get echo chambers and lose touch with reality.

Of course, but it's not binary. It's not a choice of people who hate you or love you unquestionably. There's a middle ground between those. I don't buy into the notion that the chief engineer of SpaceX, which puts rockets in space, and CEO of Tesla, which efficiently produces electric cars, doesn't know how to stay in touch with reality. The evidence is in direct conflict.

i mean, he owns SpaceX, he can put whatever title under his name as he wants to. Elon Musk has an excessive desire to make it look like he is a technical genius and a genius engineer/scientist, but he most likely is technically very competent but his true strengths lie in his long term vision, manic energy, great PR skills and work ethic. He is more akin to Edison than he is to Tesla.

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

#297

Post by time_to_smile » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 6:47 PM UTC

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.

This is exactly the point I was going to make.

I have no doubt Twitter and most companies could be run in maintenance mode with 20% of the current staff. However figuring out which 20% is the tricky part.

Typically I only need 20% of the lights in my house to do what I need, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea for Elon Musk to come into my house and just randomly remove 80% of my lightbulbs.

To successfully pull off such a major change in staffing in such a short window would require knowing the ins and outs of the company extremely well.

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

#298

Post by anigbrowl » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 6:49 PM UTC

SkyMarshal wrote: post #211

madeofpalk wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

#299

Post by babelfish » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 6:50 PM UTC

porknubbins wrote: post #139

I don't know if you can compare SpaceX or Tesla to running a CRUD app. Engineering rockets is probably 100x harder than building twitter, but there is something very reassuring when all of the complexity of your product is embodied in a physical object you can touch and see, compared to an information context where you don't even know how many layers of abstractions you are working with.

Depth vs Breadth. A Tesla is much harder to engineer, but only needs to work for 4-5 people at any given moment. Twitter is a CRUD app, but needs to work for hundreds of millions (billions?) of people.

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

#300

Post by bee_rider » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 6:50 PM UTC

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.

Advertising is basically their whole business, right? Technically I guess most companies can employ fewer people and do less of their core business but that isn’t a great trajectory to be on…