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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

#481

Post by uxcolumbo »

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...

Did Whatsapp serve ads?

Did it have to moderate content?

Twitter is vastly more complex than Whatsapp when it comes to functionality and platforms it had to support.

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

#482

Post by hyuuu »

butterlesstoast wrote: post #15

Elon has this bizarre conspiracy in his head where he thinks software engineers don't do anything until he realizes they do everything. Btw, a dev build is in prod right now. Or someone forgot to minimize the JS. Tons of import map issues.

what dev build? for twitter?

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

#483

Post by ryanwaggoner »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #432
fknorangesite wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and didn't want to work there anyways? Who would , anymore?

I totally would. I'm tired of working in woke corporations with their fake friendliness, stupid rituals and tons of people doing nothing. You anyway end up wasting time at work so it's not like you can't go to the beach instead but you end up with nothing productive being done. The only cons is relocation and being an employee, I like my tax setup and quality of life here. Also, not being free to work remote.

So you wouldn't either...

I'm sure the world is full of engineers who would go work for Twitter if only things x, y, and z were different, but they aren't.

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

#484

Post by PuppyTailWags »

nemo44x wrote: post #369
martin_a wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the cost of Twitter Blue was to actively drive away your major revenue stream, the advertisers. When you're saddled with a ton of debt actively driving away your revenue doesn't seem like MBA-101 to me.

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

#485

Post by khazhoux »

michaelmrose wrote: post #278
khazhoux wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this hypothetical, did the staff engineer do anything besides attend meetings in the last 12 months? Did they write any code, or design docs, or actually contribute anything? Elon’s a jerk, but this thread seems to be full of people saying “I deliver value even though I can’t actually demonstrate any evidence of it.”

Do you write code?

Only at home these days. First fifteen years of my career, as engineer and TL, I wrote a ton of code — every day was for coding, and even late nights and weekends for the extra-fun projects.

Now as a manager and sometimes architect, no code from me but I still review code and spend time stopping bad ideas, getting teams to work together, and all that fun stuff. But I still regard code merged into master, as the ultimate tangible of our work.

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

#486

Post by wfaler »

I'm wondering if this erratic behaviour is Musk having some sort of breakdown over how things are unravelling?

* Currently that revenue is cratering and things are not going well. Bankrupcy is a real risk with the high debt servicing cost for the take-over. * If the value is going quickly in the direction of $0, banks will call the loans. * If banks call the loans, he has to sell Tesla stock to pay the $44bn. * If Musk starts to sell Tesla stock at that scale, the value of Tesla could quickly crater in the current climate. It's the last bubble-stock of this cycle, still 80% way to go down, if valued like its auto industry peers.

The outcome of that could be that even selling his entire holding of Tesla, Musk could end up broke, and potentially still owe money from the Twitter take-over.

It would make the wealth destruction of FTX look like a Sunday stroll in the park.

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

#487

Post by pmoriarty »

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…

"Anyone who has worked at a large enough company knows there is a solid 10-15% of folks doing nothing"

In my experience those do-nothings tend to be near the top of the pyramid.

At the engineer level it's harder to get away with doing nothing because you're constantly being told what to do and then you get evaluated to see if you actually did what you were tasked with doing.

As you go higher up the food chain, some can get away with claiming they're doing everything while taking credit for other people's ideas and work, while the only thing they actually do is order people around.

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

#488

Post by khazhoux »

qwytw wrote: post #295
khazhoux wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so that’s one person that just needs to explain his role to the new boss. But the same excuse can’t apply to everyone on the team.

And the new boss has enough time to throughly review the contributions of every employee in the company? To be fair is the number of engineers left in Twitter falls to double digits this just might become possible...

I have to assume he’ll delegate to people he trusts.

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

#489

Post by wellareyousure »

scarface74 wrote: post #462
wellareyousure wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, things like code formatting and style were really predictive of the person’s contributions to a team. I’m not saying he’s making a strategically wise move. But there are potentially another 100,000 developers in this industry who are in meaningful jeopardy over their jobs, because they are truly bad at it.

> In my experience, things like code formatting and style were really predictive of the person’s contributions to a team. How would you “measure my contributions to my team” based on my code when I spent weeks dealing with larger strategy issues as a senior developer and working with other developers and being involved in the sales process?

> ...dealing with larger strategy issues as a senior developer and working with other developers and being involved in the sales process?

I don't have any way to talk about your specific situation.

If you're asking, "how can you generalize broadly about" what sounds like big company problems. Maybe as this economic reshuffling / contraction continues, I expect those big company problems to go away via "reduction in force." Because if your folks - superior, subordinates, whatever - couldn't figure out a system to get you focused on programming, which is your valuable elite skill, for the last X years, they aren't going to to have the wisdom suddenly to do it now, in reaction to an equities crisis.

And isn't that exactly what's happening?

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

#490

Post by [deleted] »

DabbyDabberson wrote: post #20
castrodd wrote: post #9

Did Elon lead his other companies this way and we just didn’t know? Or has he suddenly lost his ability to make good decisions?

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

[deleted]
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