Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

951–960 of 1001 posts

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#951

Post by mrguyorama »

MikeRichardson wrote: post #292
minimaxir wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately it may no longer be an option as some have said the 2FA SMS needed to download the archive is not responsive.

Mine had an option for e-mail or SMS. Never got the SMS, but e-mail worked. I love how it says "To protect your account" it can take 24 hours or longer for your data to be ready.

"It takes 24 hours" is a clear sign that it's a human being looking up an internal documentation page and running the scripts it points to.

Unless I'm just not creative enough to reason why you can log into twitter from a country you've never been to with no 24 hour verification wait but fulfilling legal obligations takes 24 hours.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#952

Post by mrguyorama »

sensanaty wrote: post #735
1letterunixname wrote: post #69

EM->sr engs: "Why did so many good engineers leave?" Sr engs: ... (Because you're an a.h.) People without equity should refuse to work like indentured servants for peanuts only to be told "they're not working hard enough". It's the only way to teach EM a lesson about hubris. $50 says Twitter will die down to a skeleton staff and be kept afloat by third-rate MSPs. No one will want to work on that creaky, steaming pile…

>... work like indentured servants ... I'm sorry but are you reading what you're putting down here? These people are making ridiculous swathes of money doing piss easy work, let's not go overboard with the hyperbole here I do hope Twitter dies a painful death, however, so I'm with you on that bet

Working for musk is NEVER piss easy work. That's the point. You could be a god-tier coder, able to literally rebuild twitter in a weekend, but elon is one of those managers that will try and micromanage every little thing you do, get pissed if you tell him no, not understand when you try and explain to him, and yet still find a way to call you stupid after saying literal technobabble to the aide next to him.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#953

Post by tim333 »

MBCook wrote: post #94
techolic wrote: post #84

The next outage will have a good likelihood of being the last outage.

Yeah. Multiple entire teams that run critical systems have reportedly left. It’s over. Dead site running. Such a horrible loss. Glad the stockholders are happy. This was clearly better than the lawsuit. /s

Running fine just now. I waste a fair bit of time on HN and Twitter and remain unsure why Twitter needs 7000 people when HN does similar stuff with maybe two.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#954

Post by reducesuffering »

EMM_386 wrote: post #389
zeruch wrote: post #42

Didn't Elon demand everyone back to the office?

It's been rolled back, as long as your manager says you are producing "exceptional output" or however he phrased it, remote is ok it seems.

Elon: "No more remote work"

Everyone: "stupid idea"

1 week later...

Paul G: "It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX." https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961

Elon: "Ok that was a stupid idea"

The emperors have no clothes

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#955

Post by mkipper »

ryandrake wrote: post #925
BucketsMcG wrote: post #907

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's any doubt that many tech companies are hideously, bafflingly over-staffed (3000 people working on just the music functionality of Alexa? What could they possibly be doing?). But maybe take a bit of time to understand what everybody is (and isn't) doing before throwing half out and alienating the rest? This is just a masterclass in how not to do it. He doesn't look dumb because he's reducing the…

> What could they possibly be doing? People constantly underestimate the size of the support staff needed to keep the engineering team productive. For every ten or so software engineers you hire to work on a new product or feature, you're going to need 5-10 QA engineers, another project manager, another product manager, maybe another build engineer, maybe more internal IT staff... You need these people. Software does…

There's a difference between saying "I could bang that out in a weekend and replace the whole department" and recognizing that 3,000 people supporting a relatively small feature is a sign of bloat in an organization. Surely there's _some_ point where the headcount becomes a sign of a problem -- would it be okay to make OP's comment if 100,000 people were working that feature?

I agree with your general point that a "software team" in a big org requires a lot more people than just engineers developing new features, and that the headcount doesn't necessarily scale linearly. That doesn't change the fact that in a normal business, if 3,000 full-time staff (support staff and all) are working on something, it's probably something pretty big that generates enough revenue or has enough growth potential to justify that cost. Even if a team is working hard and "doing stuff", they can still be grossly overstaffed.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#956

Post by edmundsauto »

zuminator wrote: post #433
edmundsauto wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't intend to be mean, but I think your statement is trivially disprovable: $4.8B annual revenue, even if every advertiser spent $1M annually, that's 4,800 advertisers who all require inside reps. If each rep can handle 100 clients (unlikely; that's less than 1 hour / month attention), they would need 480 inside reps alone just to keep ad agencies happy.

4800/100 = 48, what am I missing?

Yes, good catch! Add in maybe 20% for management and it's still a manageable amount of headcount. The $1M/advertiser does a lot of the lifting here - so I looked into it a little more. In 2016, Twitter had 130k advertisers[0], some can self-serve but many need inside sales reps.

Fermi estimates are crude, but the point is there are many non-engineering functions that are absolutely critical. Many HN folks seem to think like Elon, that these roles are unnecessary. I disagree.

[0] https://www.marketingdive.com/news/twitter-increases-number-...

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#957

Post by belthesar »

paxys wrote: post #792
mr90210 wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But seriously, how can someone burn down something he just bought for 44 billion so fast and consequently? The fan boys would say: It’s Elon, he is playing 3D chess and no one is smart enough to understand his end goal.

This is 100% going to happen. Twitter will crash and burn, and then fanboys will go "This was Elon's plan all along! He hated Twitter, and just wanted to kill it to own the libs. Everything he was doing was an act. What a genius!!"

I'm not even a sycophant, and I'm starting to wonder this, only because it somehow makes more sense than to pull a Dark Knight Joker and light a pile of money on fire.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#958

Post by mrguyorama »

wasmitnetzen wrote: post #638
convery wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He announced that he will not take any action against that account as it's free speech. So need to find a new "gotcha" / narrative / joke.

He also said that comedy "was now legal again" on Twitter and then banned a bunch of Musk parody accounts.

Including an actual comedian making an actual joke lol

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#959

Post by NavinF »

JoeyPriceless wrote: post #807
christophilus wrote: post #750

Between FTX and Twitter, I've run out of popcorn, and the local grocers are out of stock. I think the best tweet on that thread is [0]: "I was laid off from Twitter this afternoon. I was in charge of managing badge access to Twitter offices. Elon just called me and asked if I could come back to help them regain access to HQ as they shut off all badges and accidentally locked themselves out." I'm not sure if it's true…

But Musk replied to the Tweet so I'm not quite sure what's real. > Thanks for helping out. You’re a lifesaver! [0] [0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593447646470889473

He's obviously joking.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#960

Post by mrguyorama »

nostromo wrote: post #536
locallost wrote: post #477

If I was Facebook or any other competitor, I would swoop in and poach everyone that is actually still there, mostly people afraid to leave because of visa issues etc.

Facebook just laid off more than an entire Twitter’s worth of employees.

Because visa employees are basically shackled to their organization. They stupidly cheap compared to a fare market value. There's probably like 1000 at most, and not all of them will bite. It would be a cheap way to get really reliable and CHEAP devs to replace the 10k they just dropped.
Post reply on HN