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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

#521

Post by generj »

b112 wrote: post #269
drchopchop wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would make more sense if 1) he had a coherent plan 2) he could motivate the good 20% to stick around 3) he had some way to differentiate high vs low performers. Instead, he now gets an effectively random layoff, with potentially whole/important teams vanishing, and biased so that the best people (who can easily find jobs) are most incentivized to leave.

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?

Yes?

The CEO’s role is to articulate a vision to workers (particularly to middle management). If it’s a secret plan, then functionally there is not a plan.

Good plans can be executed even if competitors know it because they rely upon competitive advantages the firm has. Even if this is only true in the short to medium term, by the medium term when competitors can pivot the company is executing on another plan.

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

#522

Post by bumby »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #385
JansjoFromIkea wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The game industry manages it because a lot of people dream of making games, in the same way as I'm sure Tesla and SpaceX have a lot of extremely dedicated employees because the work they're doing is literally a life long dream. There's some very interesting things to solve and achieve at a platform like Twitter but I doubt very many people have had them as life long targets for themselves to achieve.

That's the thing... Tesla and SpaceX were revolutionizing electric cars, batteries and launching humanity into the stars. Twitter allows hot takes and racism, not exactly comparable.

Also: SpaceX and Tesla were heavily subsidized with taxpayer money. To date, something like 98% of SpaceX contracts are govt. I’m not sure about the Boring company but I suspect its business model is heavily dependent on taxpayer funds too.

Although he's often held up as a paragon of free market capitalism, it looks like a lot of his business ventures are actually the result of crony capitalism.

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

#523

Post by jef_leppard »

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…

> solid 10-15% of folks doing nothing

Where are you getting these numbers? You got any real studies or data to back this up?

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

#524

Post by cloverich »

orwin wrote: post #453
hnarn wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Salient” is not a synonym of “fancy”.

In case of code, isn't it basically the same? I mean, i spent 20 months working on a project for a bank recently. I had a lot of salient code at the beginning, fun little algorithms and cool regex. The last iteration of the code i committed, the salient part was basically a lisp interpreter (if lisp was formatted like json), but everything else was plain and boring. The last issue i had is that the ES version was upg…

Spending days figuring out a few boring lines of change that has an outsized impact would, imho, be a fairly compelling bit of code to show off. IMHO while he might be crazy and way out of line, he's effectively asking people to reinterview for their jobs, except instead of doing blind code tests he's asking them to show off the best work they've done recently.

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

#525

Post by arrrg »

nemo44x wrote: post #339
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?

He's not doing anything unusual - he's just doing ti very aggressively and quickly. He dropped the bottom 50% as reported on by managers and now he has identified the best of that 50% and asked everyone else to either commit or get out. This is standard operating procedure but it is usually done over the course of many months to over a year instead of like 1 month in this case. If it works then I think senior manager…

How did he identify those bottom 50% within a couple of days? That seems like an impossible task.

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

#526

Post by Animats »

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…

That's more reasonable.

Microsoft once had an internal rule that anyone in engineering who supervised less than 100 people had to code. Is that still the case? This looks like a way to find the people who aren't doing that.

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

#527

Post by cloverich »

albertopv wrote: post #451
erulabs wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Changes to a system can come in many ways, e.g. we had a noticeable increase in our db size because of a new customer data, what was ok. before wasn't after. Of course it's different for twitter. And what about security? Update to libraries, dependencies...?

Of course but this is also twitter, not a startup in its infancy. I'm not saying new stuff won't happen (etc), but they have a very mature infra org.

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

#528

Post by lesuorac »

andreysolsty wrote: post #331

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from this whole debacle, it’s that US employment law is fucked. I can’t believe worker protections are so poor in such a forward thinking, modern country. The things he’s getting away with sound like something out of a Victorian factory.

Well, it's more of you can move fast and break things and then next decade the regulators will catch up with you.

In this case it looks like it'll be Dec 8th when he'll have to show up in court about all of this.

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/65680829/cornet-v-twitt...

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

#529

Post by s1artibartfast »

greatpostman wrote: post #179
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?

This is what everyone is afraid of. His firings are an assault on the professional credibility among a lot of people

I think this is exactly it. Elon and the possibility of his success threatens the worldview of a lot of people.

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

#530

Post by lesuorac »

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 didn't get to 55 employees by having 2000 and then randomly firing 97% of them.

The argument is not that twitter can't be ran leaner, it's that the current process of leaning twitter is bad.

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