If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now

I mean honestly, yeah?

If I was forced to take part in this absolutely idiotic exercise I’d be including descriptions of the purpose of the code along with the screenshots/printouts.

“These are the configuration files I maintain. Collectively these control the orchestration of 9,000 of our servers which make up over 80% of our infrastructure” would be be pretty compelling.

Ultimately, while he’s going about it in an insane way that I will not defend one iota, he’s trying to figure out who does what.

It’s one of those things where you have to read between the lines and figure out what the client/exec/boomer actually needs and wants, versus the nonsensical thing they actually asked for.

Your boss who wants his emails printed out every morning may actually just literally want them on paper OR they may actually want a system of triaging and responding to messages that is easy to do with paper but is difficult to achieve with software (and is still, honestly, clunkier than using paper sometimes if we’re being honest)

It's not going to stumble into a new sale or bankruptcy anytime soon (next several years).

He'll slash the costs dramatically to adjust for the loss of revenue. He just sold another $4 billion in Tesla stock the other day to most likely cover the expected losses over the next few years. Slash deep enough and you can easily run Twitter on a few hundred million dollar loss per year. He probably thinks he can get it to break-even following this approach over the next few years and go from there.

Facebook was profitable at under $1b in sales with a larger userbase size 12 years ago. Why can't Twitter get there today? Twitter was unprofitable with $5.2b in sales, it was an exceptionally bloated corporation.

What Blind shows is that for a portion of the population TC is just a game. Sure they have "skills" but a lot of those skills are grinding leetcode, creating referral networks, and otherwise becoming skilled at getting hired and surviving in a large FAANG.

In my experience leetcode has surprisingly low correlation with programming ability and most definitely software engineering.

It's not just Blind either. I've been surprised how many young people aspire to "work at a FAANG" as a goal, and software is just a convenient way to get there.

10 years ago I was at a place where a new CEO came in and fired 80% of the tech team. It was a hard scramble for the surviving engineers, including me, and we had some episodes of being down, but we pulled through it and the site survived.

I think a balanced view of Twitter right now is that Elon Musk has made some mistakes, but in the end, Twitter will be fine, and in 6 months it might be more profitable than ever before.

The pros and cons work out something like this:

con:

Musk fired people recklessly, treating a global workforce as if it could all be treated under California fire-at-will laws. As such, Musk might face lawsuits and might have to pay out some damages. This is not a big deal. He has the money. He can pay.

Musk probably violated the consent decree that Twitter had with the FTC. Again, Musk will probably face a lawsuit and he will probably have to pay. Again, not a big deal, he has the money.

Musk fired or offered resignations to key team members. As such, in a crisis, Twitter may face some downtime. With key people missing, the ability to bounce back from a crisis will be slower than otherwise. But all this means is that Twitter will become unreliable again, as it was during the first 10 years of its existence. Not a big deal: it was popular even back when it was unreliable.

Musk fired or offered resignations to key team members. As such, the roll out of new features will be slower than it might otherwise have been. In particular, his roll out of subscription features will be slower than he wanted.

Musk could have made dramatic changes over 6 months and no one would have noticed except for industry insiders (including the type of people who read Hacker News). Instead, he wanted to reinvent Twitter in less than 6 weeks. This was a mistake, plain and simple. His actions came across as erratic, he made advertisers nervous, and as he has complained "Twitter has taken a huge revenue hit." But this will probably be temporary. In 6 months all of the advertisers will have returned.

pro:

It's likely that in 6 months advertising with be back to pre-Musk levels, but the staffing will be down at least 80%, so profits will be much higher than ever before.