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

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331–340 of 458 posts

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

#331

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.

A Tesla has to work for the driver, passengers, the others on the road, pedestrians, the road itself - these are new problems never encountered before that Elon is tackling head-on. If you consider every person on the world to be connected (if they are physically touching the ground), a Tesla has to literally work for those billions of people.

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

#332
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"halve your effective comp" And also work double time for the indefinite future. So effective comp is quartered, by my accounting.

I was thinking of double time (hence talking about effective comp), I didn't see mentions of salary being cut but mayhaps I just missed it?

I think the salary hasn’t been cut, but the value of the stock (options) are probably very different now

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

#333
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.

Sure, Twitter can probably find new engineers to hire.

But replacing all of the random but critical bits of knowledge in the heads of the people walking out the door is much harder.

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

#334
post #68

It would be interesting to know what portion of Twitter employees are on work visas and can’t easily take the offer to quit. I’d guess an international company like Twitter had several hundred people on H-1B, L1 and similar visas. After these voluntary layoffs it seems like there might be 2,000 employees left, so at least 10% of them would be on work visas by this napkin math.

Seems the # of employees left is close to or under 1000. About 230 of those are on H1-Bs, I didn't look up others. There's additional information per table entry or you can download the data.

https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...

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

#335
post #258

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.

Actually HN has taught me that CEOs generate the value for shareholders.

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

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A Tesla has to work for the driver, passengers, the others on the road, pedestrians, the road itself - these are new problems never encountered before that Elon is tackling head-on. If you consider every person on the world to be connected (if they are physically touching the ground), a Tesla has to literally work for those billions of people.

A Tesla in Los Angeles does not have to work for a pedestrian in New York.

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

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2000s-era blogspot citizen journalism What's wrong with 2000s-era blogspot citizen journalism.

Absolutely nothing! Early blogging was great! But doing what happened 20 years ago is hardly "truly innovative"

This is Elon Musk MO. He invents nothing, just repackages and markets - the electric car (the very first kind of car invented over a hundred years ago) and going to space in a rocket? These are his big things and people eat it up. Why?

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

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[citation required]

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

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See also: Compuserve, AOL, Facebook WeChat succeeds because it caters to a less mature market with a simple integrated product. American network service users have demonstrated repeatedly that they are OK with bundling products but less enthusiastic about bundled services.

WeChat succeeds because it's a state sponsored monopoly. It would not have existed in a free and mature market in any western capitalist style economy.

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

#340

Seeing Elon flail about so publicly like this is just hilarious to me. I feel like we're way off track right now from his original purpose of buying twitter (more free speech or something??? then it was bots then 8$ checkmarks and I can't even keep up anymore)

I've been eating sooo much popcorn, watching this. No, I am not at all happy for the people directly affected by this, or even for my own enjoyment of the platform, but because seeing what Musk is doing to himself is such a spectacle.
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