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

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321–330 of 458 posts

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

#321

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…

> I haven't seen any indicators of Twitter failing besides 2FA failures; If you ignore everything we are hearing about mass employee exodus and critical teams having no engineers left. > Why do you guys hate Elon with your guts with such an intense passion? To put it bluntly, because he is an asshole. I honestly don’t know how anyone likes him after he called a cave diver who helped save a bunch of children a pedo ju…

> His ego is immense and he lacks the emotional maturity to not lash out at people when he is wrong.

> To put it bluntly, because he is an asshole.

A few years ago some data/articles made the rounds showing that most billionaires and high-powered executives are "psychopaths" according to the criteria for "psychopathy".

It isn't necessarily Elon specific but his public outbursts certainly put him in the spotlight, others lay low.

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

#322
post #272

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.

It's not that we're spoiled, it's that other folks are abused. I would say Elon is spoiled though, in thinking he can treat folks as fungible.

This is a weird take.

No, alot SW devs (the type that work at FAANG-like companies) are actually spoiled, relative to most other industries of the world. Perhaps, they have gotten so used to is that they don't recognize it. You can absolutely make an argument that the rest of the world's workforce is being abused, but that is speaking from place of privilege and its easy to be a "champion for the worker" from your ivory tower.

> Elon is spoiled though, in thinking he can treat folks as fungible.

That is because they are fungible, though. Twitter is not some paragon of technical excellence and innovation. Its a website.

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

#323

He is ingeniously driving up engagement with Twitter by using Twitter itself. Many people want him to fail, expect him to fail, are willing him to fail. Past evidence of his failures had yet to be found.

FSD ... ?

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

#324
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying something like this just demonstrates that you have extremely limited technical knowledge, and are willing to say anything to defend Musk. And defenses like this go a looooong ways towards destructing the myth that Musk had technical acumen, because the only people defending him are those that can't do the work.

The projection on here is getting cartoonish. John Carmack, "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."

Agreed that the projection is cartoonish, but looking at the actual actions at Twitter speak for themselves.

And discounting the scale of Twitter is also quite cartoonish projection.

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

#325

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Me too and I feel quite vindicated as I have been saying it for a long time that Musk is an incompetent fraud with incredible amounts of luck. Edit: actually less vindicated but more happy that I don't have to hear from people how great Elon is any more.

I wish I could upvote you twice. Totally incompetent fraud. I mean SpaceX was a total stroke of luck. Sometimes you just get the right mixture of methane and oxygen by accident and the rocket just blasts off by itself. And we definitely wouldn't have to go grovel to the Russians had SpaceX not been the only company in US capable of delivering astronauts to ISS. Same with Tesla and his other previous companies - just…

From my perspective, something seemed to happen with Musk roughly around 2015 or so. It seems like prior to that time, Musk was really indeed investing in some visionary tech that actually injected a kick in the pants to some industries (electric cars, space). Nothing wrong IMHO with Tesla and SpaceX. I think the super-detractors miss just what an out-of-nowhere big deal the Roadster was.

Since then, though, Musk has focused on a lot of misses that have spectacularly over-promised and/or undelivered. Neuralink seems to be based on over the top futurism and a lot of questionable promises considering current technology state (particularly considering the current overpromise of AI, with self-driving cars still way far out). Same with his Hyperloop concept. The Boring Company has so far been quite unimpressive, cars in a small one lane tunnel is not very innovative and does not seem to bring anything that existing AGT systems cover already. Then there's Twitter, where it seems there was no vision at all, and you half get the impression that he only bought it because he was miffed at the content moderation.

Tesla in particular seems to be a missed opportunity with New Musk at the helm. It seems to me that to get to the next level, Tesla could use some care to iron out the QC issues... they are not known as super reliable cars at this point on certain aspects, but it does not seem like it is insurmountable to bring quality standards up to the top brands. Were I a Tesla investor, my concern would be that Musk's constant distractions with things like Twitter are truly going to hamper the efforts of his primary companies... and looking at the post-Twitter stock price of Tesla, it seems I'm not the only one with such a concern.

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

#326

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.

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

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven't seen any indicators of Twitter failing besides 2FA failures; If you ignore everything we are hearing about mass employee exodus and critical teams having no engineers left. > Why do you guys hate Elon with your guts with such an intense passion? To put it bluntly, because he is an asshole. I honestly don’t know how anyone likes him after he called a cave diver who helped save a bunch of children a pedo ju…

Why are billionaires immoral? That seems completely backwards. They created value not by coercion, but by commerce and improved the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtJwAYJ9B08 The whole pie has gotten larger since the industrial revolution and has lifted people out of poverty at an unprecendented rate through Capitalism. The current zeitgeist in places like HN and in progressive circles is worrying. There was…

I am pro capitalism and I don't think that the creation of value by billionaires is immoral.

The immoral part comes after that when they sit on their horde of money, far too much for anyone to spend in 10 lifetimes, while they should be giving it to people and causes that need it.

The only one of the "mainstream", household name billionaires that gets it seems to be MacKenzie Scott.

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

#328
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have to agree. I’m bewildered by the (social) media reaction so far. People, the app still works. Over a thousand employees will continue to work for Twitter. As far as I understand, Twitter is financially in a terrible state. Huge changes have to happen. Let’s all just wait and see how it will turn out.

Sure, but the "collapse" is terrible management here lol. Terrible, by the metric of his own inconsistent actions. To suddenly reverse the decision of accidentally laying off 80% of your workforce is hilarious. People aren't saying the app isn't working. If you lay off all of HR will your company still run tomorrow? Of course. Lay off all of engineering will the app still run tomorrow? Of course (most likely lol). Th…

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

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 noth…

What are you talking about? Twitter’s resiliency program is widely known to be one of the best in the world. They’ve been around so long that they’ve literally had to invent a lot of what we consider basic modern distributed computing from scratch. It will become a trash fire with everyone who maintained these massive systems gone, but don’t imply that they created bad systems, or failed at ‘just displaying text’, be…

It's far more likely that Elon consulted Twitter when they were having issues and just didn't take the credit. The distributed work of SpaceX and Tesla is far more important and hardened than what Twitter has achieved.

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

#330
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the advertisers might leave.

No they wont. Its corporate virtue signalling. As one example, I remember back in 2020 1000+ vowed to leave Facebook [1], but guess what...they came back. The sad thing is that people are suckers who actually believe alot of this corporate PR. [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/business/media/facebook-b...

How many companies advertise on Tumblr or Digg? They continue to exist but are not seen as the next bastion of advertising. How will they target well when the platform is a cesspool? Sure they'll get impressions but not the clicks. Fewer celebrities will want to hang out on Twitter if anyone can easily impersonate them or if they don't have people at Twitter to give them white glove service.
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