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

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

#361

Post by short_sells_poo »

dsugarman wrote: post #303

Man, people are so assumptive and negative about one of the world's greatest innovators today. Hasn't he earned any respect? I know layoffs are really tough but does anyone really believe there was no reason for them at Twitter? He's got a tough task in front of him and getting to the barebones team of mission driven people seems like a plausible first step towards a better tomorrow. The assumption that only the wors…

I'm sorry but the only thing Musk has shown in the last couple of years is blatant market manipulation, kneejerk reactions and poor choices. It's great that he "supports" enterprises like SpaceX and Tesla, but more and more evidence points to these companies succeeding despite him, not thanks to him.

This is anecdotal of course, but pretty much every single one of my friends - even the staunch Muskovites - are really scratching their heads at his behavior and choices. He may well be the awkward genius that was his prior image, but right now he is being widely perceived as a tantrum throwing privileged man child who had success fired at him from a high speed rotary cannon and he managed to avoid destroying it by the skin of his teeth.

The way he publicly talks about his employees and how his approach seems to be to human beings can only be described as sociopathic. Again, there may well be an army of overpaid engineers at Twitter just twiddling their thumbs, but the expectation that people will somehow fall over themselves and sacrifice their personal life so that Elon Musk can add another couple of dozens of billions to his wealth is preposterous.

He went from being an advocate for humankind to coming across as a robber baron who cares nothing for the wellbeing of those who work for him. As if it was somehow a privilege to work for him.

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

#362

Post by [deleted] »

crooked-v wrote: post #350
helen___keller wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's trying to build a culture of engineer abuse. I'm sure he'll succeed in building it. The game industry manages it, for example. You can abuse and burn out engineers if that's what you really want. That said, I wouldn't say abused engineers are particularly more productive. He can work them 9/9/6 while he's at it, I don't think that'll help Twitter succeed.

The problem for him here is that instead of boiling the frog, he's gone straight to chasing the frog around with a blowtorch.

[deleted]

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

#363

Post by kibwen »

ceres wrote: post #202
kibwen wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, if you had 7,000 people cleaning an apartment occupied by a few million people across the globe, that might make some sense. There's no doubt that Twitter could be leaner than it was as of September, but haphazardly firing employees at random and alienating the most employable of the remainder into resignation is not the way to go about it. He could have spent a few months getting to know the place, but d…

And yet WhatsApp had 55 employees at acquisition. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/whatsapp-bought-for-19-b...

WhatsApp is (was) an instant messenger, not an ad-supported media company.

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

#364

Post by danesparza »

crooked-v wrote: post #350
helen___keller wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's trying to build a culture of engineer abuse. I'm sure he'll succeed in building it. The game industry manages it, for example. You can abuse and burn out engineers if that's what you really want. That said, I wouldn't say abused engineers are particularly more productive. He can work them 9/9/6 while he's at it, I don't think that'll help Twitter succeed.

The problem for him here is that instead of boiling the frog, he's gone straight to chasing the frog around with a blowtorch.

Unless he didn't want frogs. Then he's right on schedule.

But damn that's a lot of money to burn just to chase frogs away.

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

#365

Post by wellareyousure »

MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #28

The thing I don't get is the hyper-focus on salient or "fancy" code. We're not all Jeff Dean and most code is bland and boring plumbing work anyways. Even in awesome ML powered systems, it's still 99% bland foundation, 1% cool algorithms. Hell, as a manager, you don't want only "rockstar" developers because they'll become bored working on the plumbing code, which again, is most work. From datascience there's the phra…

No post body was provided.

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

#366

Post by crooked-v »

errantmind wrote: post #223

I'm no Elon fan, but why does essentially everyone in these threads automatically assume he is wrong? Has no one here worked at companies where there was more dead weight than talent? Where 80% of the work being done is by 20% of the people, and there are whole teams that do almost nothing? What if there is no clean, efficient way to discover who should be fired and so Elon's fallback plan is to test for who really w…

Well, there's that part where he's telling people to fly in to the office with 14 hours notice the week before Thanksgiving.

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

#367

Post by Ekaros »

haolez wrote: post #58

What if Twitter actually succeeds after this? I'm not saying that it's likely, but what if? Let's imagine it as a thought exercise. What will this say about the current state of software engineering in startups and big techs?

What even is success for Twitter? And is this really a sensible way to work towards it?

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

#368

Post by erulabs »

Xylakant wrote: post #325
erulabs wrote: post #270

I think people miss the point with the "tell me what code you've written in the last 6 months" task. The idea is hopefully not to qualitatively quantify anyones work - the idea is to find folks who have nothing whatsoever to show, and yet have titles like "staff software engineer". Anyone who has worked at a large enough company knows there is a solid 10-15% of folks doing nothing. The new leadership probably asked t…

No sane infrastructure team will answer „easily“ to that question. Things break, all of the time. And infra will need developer input to figure out some of the breakage, let alone fix it. And that‘s not even considering deliberate attacks, fixes for critical security/stability issues etc.

I disagree strongly, and I currently run an infrastructure team. Things break because of changes to the system. Assuming the entire infrastructure team wasn't fired, it should be dramatically easier to keep the service online assuming all development has stopped.

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

#369

Post by nemo44x »

martin_a wrote: post #314
b112 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he had a coherent plan So if he doesn't share his actual plan with you, the media, and his competitors, he doesn't have a plan?

You read the news that he cancelled working from home and then locked everybody out of office? Does that look like a plan to you? Does anything that happend in the last weeks look like a plan to you? The blue checkmark disaster for example?

It looks like MBA-101, just accelerated a lot. Drop the bottom, identify the best of the best, ask everyone else to commit or get out. The solid core replaces them with the top performers in their network they want to work with.

I'm convinced Twitter Blue was a test to see who gets shit done there, to help identify the top performers.

Obviously the trick is keeping the top performers.

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

#370

Post by bena »

CrypticShift wrote: post #220

IMHO (my first and I hope last Elon comment), at a higher level of cognition, Elon is just playing two simple games: maximum buzz (media game), and maximum control (politics game). All his public persona, including all that pre-acquisition drama, is just for maximum buzz (Who cares about a few hundred millions ?) All this post-acquisition drama is just for maximum control (over Twitter and ?). If this is the case, so…

He already has maximum control of Twitter.

There is nothing more he can do to control Twitter. He is at maximum Twitter control.

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