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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

#491

Post by whateveracct »

giantrobot wrote: post #450
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…

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, v…

Also, engineering is not solely about output. In fact, for something as big and established as Twitter, output is probably secondary to availability.

Good managers ensure their teams have "slack." Because if something is on fire, or a pressing deadline appears, etc..you need to not be at 100% to absorb that.

People disrespect maintenance work & being available. Even here on HN.

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

#492

Post by ryanwaggoner »

lkrubner wrote: post #240

10 years ago I was at a place where a new CEO came in and fired 80% of the tech team. It was a hard scramble for the surviving engineers, including me, and we had some episodes of being down, but we pulled through it and the site survived. I think a balanced view of Twitter right now is that Elon Musk has made some mistakes, but in the end, Twitter will be fine, and in 6 months it might be more profitable than ever b…

There is a 0% chance that in six months Twitter will be collecting $5 billion in revenue with 20% of the staff they had before. This would be about $3.5 million in revenue per employee, which is way more than anyone else [1]. They simply can't get there without a lot of headcount for eng, infra, sales, account management, legal, etc. Pipe dream, especially in six months.

If Elon really is a business genius and is playing 5D chess here that the rest of us just can't understand (like Trump was, lol), then maybe in six years, but not in six months.

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/217489/revenue-per-emplo...

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

#493

Post by jerlam »

martijnvds wrote: post #419
orange_joe wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt, but his decision making around twitter has basically been disastrous from the start. 1. Bought the company at an overinflated price and tried to back out, but was ultimately forced by the court to buy it 2. Half baked rollout of the twitter blue which caused brands to flee the platform after major reputation damage. 3. Laying off half the company, and then ha…

Almost sounds like it's a spite thing. "You made me go through with the deal, now I'll destroy your toy after torturing it."

Spiteful against who? The previous owners and shareholders got paid well above market value when the company went private. The resigning employees aren't being "tortured", they're getting a fresh break. Musk appears to love Twitter and constantly tweets to his fans, it's his own toy that he's destroying.

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

#494

Post by danans »

rchaud wrote: post #81

Even as long-time skeptic of Musk's ballyhooed business/engineering acumen, I have no clue what's going on here. Surely nobody at this level could be this brazenly incompetent when it comes to communicating a vision and building some sense of unity. Even the biggest fakers in the world are self-aware about the importance of maintaining the illusion of power and control. If you had told me that these emails were being…

> Surely nobody at this level could be this brazenly incompetent when it comes to communicating a vision and building some sense of unity.

Why don't you think someone at that level could be so incompetent? Megalomania and being out-of-touch reinforce each other. History, from ancient to the present, is full of wealthy, powerful, and paranoid people acting incompetently and thereby doing tremendous damage in the process.

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

#495

Post by ben7799 »

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…

I keep trying to figure out how many employees actually built twitter in the first place.

I've been on there a long time, but have never been a heavy user.

Twitter seems like it was mostly complete a long long time ago. It's changed far far less than say facebook over the years. I'm sure stuff has changed but I would struggle to remember what's different than say 10 years ago.

They had 2000 people when they IPOed. But that was 5+ years after launch. If a hundred people had 90% of the functionality working the first couple of years it really does make you wonder how they got to 7500 employees.

From the outside it doesn't look like that much to show for 7500 employees. It makes me wonder what the infrastructure looks like. Is the software to sell ads that most of us don't see much bigger and more sophisticated than Twitter itself? How many people are taking care of data centers and doing "toil" ???

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

#496

Post by gilbetron »

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?

It's a question I've been thinking about during this. The current narrative is that Musk is destroying value, which he probably is, but what if Twitter was as bloated as he thinks it was. What if he gets a core of 500 people working hard and twitter not only stabilizes but grows and innovates and becomes worth 10x. That's honestly a pretty scary notion for a lot of software engineers. CEOs will (and some already have) look around and realize that maybe they can get rid of a lot of the people around them, save a lot of money, and end up with a team better able to make product.

Now, I don't really believe that will happen because software and technology is mind numbingly complex now, and I think only through large bodies of software engineers are we able to tame it, but it is one distinct possibility. Obviously it is the outcome Musk believes in.

Issue is, people kill themselves to make awesome electric cars and rockets straight out of scifi, but to make a better twitter? I'm not seeing it.

But I'm often (usually?) wrong!

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

#497

Post by khazhoux »

deckard1 wrote: post #266
khazhoux wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s probably more of a filter to see who can’t even come up with 10 examples of work they’ve delivered over the course of a year. I do a lot of code reviews, and it’s very obvious who on the team barely churns out useful code —- even just from the low density and volume of their code.

run a git blame on any file and you're likely to see a dozen or more people touching it. You would need a large chunk of freshly-written code unmolested by your coworkers. And what's that even going to prove? You're not inventing any novel algorithm. You're going to write whatever code your PM wanted written to support whatever stupid features or A/B test they wanted done. And Elon's going to sit there and judge the…

While fully acknowledging that Elon is a jerk…

Most engineers should be able to run “git log -p —author=myname —since=‘12 months ago’” and find 10 examples of non-trivial code.

And those that can’t, should be able to provide a good explanation of what they contribute instead.

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

#498

Post by maxbond »

Teandw wrote: post #447
dont__panic wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They give various reasons for their view based on observations of recent events at Twitter, in the comment you are responding to. What reasons do you have for attributing their views to personal animus? It's hard for me to imagine a way you could know the contents of the mind of a stranger on the internet, and I wonder if maybe you would make this remark about any comment expressing a similar sentiment, regardless of the evidence they provided or what their motives may be.

I submit that people who make this type of comment should be prepared to offer up not only what evidence they have that criticism of Musk (or whatever is being discussed) is insincere, but what sort of evidence they would need in order to accept the criticism.

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

#499

Post by roflyear »

jimbob45 wrote: post #52
DabbyDabberson wrote: post #20

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.…

Nah I worked for a fortune 50 company and loved when I was able to interact with the CEO. I was able to often as I headed up some important infra. The local (CEO was stationed overseas but visited occasionally) execs were also fun to work with. Unless you like assaulted them or were extremely rude they would never go and try and get you fired for a mistake or for being off. Not that they were probably exceptional people or anything but more likely they just didn't care.

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

#500

Post by happytoexplain »

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…

>Has no one here worked at companies where there was more dead weight than talent?

It's perfectly possible (even common, I might guess) that most people do understand that this is a realistic scenario and that it might be the case at Twitter, and that the goal of cutting the fat might be for the best even though it's harsh - but also that Elon's behavior is absolutely absurd.

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