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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

#441
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not during the code freeze. Using the same container image that worked before for a while doesn’t need dev input.

I‘ve had stuff break because of required kernel updates, software that needed to be patched, hardware breaking and no exact substitute being available, database sizes crossing critical thresholds, … - it‘s definitely less risky to run something that is well understood and no longer getting substantial amounts of updates, but every complex system has known and unknown deficiencies that are just a butterfly’s wingbeat away from being triggered. As long as you‘re on the happy path, everything will look fine. But if something pushes slightly and moves you to the unhappy path, you can find yourself very quickly in a position where you need someone with a deep understanding of some obscure component of the system that is misbehaving - and that someone is unlikely to be the infrastructure team.

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

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i'm sure everyone has a corporate card or at least a process for re-imbursement ( assuming that department still exists)

I’ve never had a corporate card in my entire career, including Twitter. I’ve been able to book via a company provided travel agency, but I’ve never had the card in my hands.

> I’ve never had a corporate card in my entire career

oh i guess that's what happens when you assume heh. i've always had a corporate card, or for at least the past 15 years. I work in consulting though so it's more common to book flights/hotels and travel individually.

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

#443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People I know at SpaceX are terrified of him. They all secretly track when he comes into the office, and actively hide from him.

Isn't that true of most CEOs though? When a CEO comes around, you have nothing to gain and your entire employment to lose. Edit: The point is not that we all reside in toxic workplaces. The point is that there is no upside to interacting with a CEO. A parallel situation might be giving a loaded pistol with a child. In that case, the upside is that they now have one thousand and one chew toys instead of one thousand.…

No post body was provided.

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

#444
What is the right way to remove 75% of staff? What selection criteria do you pick (the type of employee you want to keep), and what heuristics will strongly select for the criteria you chose? For example, metrics that measure productivity or actions that filter for loyalty. A metric could be hours of internal meetings per week!

Can anyone comment on a successful downsizing they were involved in?

The scary part about Twitter, is that the selection pressures seem to be mostly for fealty to Elon, or selecting for people that hate the new environment but cannot leave (medical insurance, financial risk, H1B, fear of applying for new job, etcetera).

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

#445
post #86

So at the end of all this, only those with visa issues or the ones that are really bad at their job and hence desperate, will be left at Twitter. I guess he’ll be able to drive them hardcore . Personally, expect for those with visa issues, I won’t have much respect for anyone who still remains. Unless of course, some of the good ones might be able to really renegotiate their comp and contract at this time.

Imagining the recruiter algorithms seeing Twitter employment contiguous from 2021 through 2023 and going... hmmm.....

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

#446

When you’re the richest guy in the world you have big enemies and friends, whose tentacles of power reach far and wide and can move populations for or against you. I have enough executive experience to be 100% sure that none of us have a complete picture of what’s going on behind the scenes, with his political or business relationships. It’s been fascinating to see how pliable public opinion is with the influence of…

> influence of these media stories

The influences are from Elon's actions and tweets as well as leaks from insiders. Media conspiracy theories are not relevant here.

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

#447
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're misunderstanding the situation. It's not that ALL software engineers don't do anything. It's that Twitter has so much staff, you start to question what can they all actually be doing. If someone had 10 people cleaning a small apartment every day, you'd question what were they actually doing. That wouldn't make sense.

Elon has clearly read enough Hacker News to ask the question we've all been asking for the last... 5? 10? years. "What do all of those engineers do at [Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Netflix/Google]". That's a fine question to ask -- it's clear that plenty of those engineers aren't contributing real value. They're working on passion projects, or side projects like React or Docusaurus, or pie-in-the-sky next-gen products,…

"...and looks like he's on the cusp of running a company that's been around for over a decade into the ground in the next few weeks."

What do you base that on? There's no evidence to point the company is going downhill or improving at the moment. You seem to be basing this on a personal hatred for Elon and nothing else.

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

#448

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…

I wouldn't give him credit for doing all this intentionally. Elon being incredibly impulsive seems to explain everything pretty parsimoniously.

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

#449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't get why corporations in this day and age still make people work long hours. There have been countless studies showing that long hours lead to more mistakes, worse productivity, decreased motivation, worse health, and burnout. Workers are also more likely to leave for a job with a better work/life balance if given the chance. It seems many corporate execs haven't gotten the message yet, and I don't know…

i suspect because there are so many bad managers. There's few tests to root out bad managers. The damage bad management is capable of is.. impressive, extensive.

Bad managers will make sure that they themselves stand out at promotion time, using whatever metric they're measured with.

Good managers help their direct reports, helping them succeed and stand out at promotion time.

Guess which will usually get the promotion?

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

#450

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…

The "whole teams doing nothing" is a giant canard. Any large organization will have groups that can't remain 100% busy 100% of the time. Projects go from development to maintenance and the teams don't necessarily jump immediately to the next project or take time planning the next project while doing relatively light maintenance work on the just released project.

Even at Apple which runs very lean engineering teams, verging on understaffed, would have times of year where most engineers were doing nothing. After an OS released in the fall there would be a month or two of planning sessions for the next OS' features. It would be a lot of meetings of middle management with little input from ICs. After the new year work would begin in earnest but from October-December most engineers were spinning their wheels or doing relatively light work chasing down bug fixes for point releases for the recently released OSes.

The idea that any team is going to put in a constant 40+ hours of typing code is farcical. Time needs to be taken to actually plan out projects even if you're doing some seat of the pants Agile bullshit. Putting everyone on a death march schedule for something as ultimately irrelevant as Twitter is just burning people out for no reason. There's no upside for Twitter's engineers to burn out. Unless they're being offered equity or bonuses or something their new "hardcore" schedule is all sacrifice and no reward.

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