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

Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 458 posts

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#381

Post by dredmorbius »

PKop wrote: post #376
dredmorbius wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Twitter" isn't just the technical website infrastructure, though that itself is now at grave risk: https://how.complexsystems.fail/ > It's also: - Twitter, the advertising-driven business model, which advertisers are fleeing. - Twitter, the institutional knowledge, technical and otherwise, which is now fleeing. - Twitter, a government-regulated (FTC and possibly other consent decrees / orders) enterprise. See for ex…

Musk himself has said multiple times Twitter might go bankrupt. They were already losing money and it wasn't really a sustainable business when he bought it given economic trends; something had to change. The particular melodrama aimed at Musk right now is just cope amongst the milieu he is purging from Twitter and/or hurt feelings and ressentiment of the media class over Musks stance on free speech. They want him to…

This both entirely misses the point of my own comment and negates your own previous statement. Contrast "it wasn't really a sustainable business" with "Don't really see this 'spectacular collapse'".

Your comments lack both coherence and consistency.

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#382

Post by gambiting »

cpeterso wrote: post #377
GSimon wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80% imo could so very easily be bloat. Features/services that are underutilized and haemorrhaging money don't need to be upkept, teams dedicated to curating content like twitter headlines and moderating content don't need to be there (at the scale it's currently at). Staffing for hospitality services at Twitter HQ and all the ancillary services that are unnecessary or under-utilized. As long as the servers are runnin…

For comparison, Reddit has only 700 employees. How does Reddit handle scale and moderation with only 10% of the number of employees Twitter had in 2021?

By shifting moderation responsibilities to the individual mods on each subreddit. Reddit employees do very little moderation on their own - mostly reviewing entire subreddits once they get reported enough times - and banning them entirely if they are unsavoury enough. They basically outsourced it to volunteers in exchange for a platform to have your community on(interestingly, Discord works in the exact same way - discord employees only review servers once they get bad enough and ban them, general reports go to server mods and only to them)

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#383

Post by twitter_anon »

klyrs wrote: post #344
andruby wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the salary hasn’t been cut, but the value of the stock (options) are probably very different now

As I understand it, nobody holds stock anymore, because he took the company private. He bought everybody's shares. So whatever portion of employee's comp was equity, that's now zero. Elsewhere, I saw somebody estimate that to be around half of twitter employees' comp -- I have zero confidence in that estimate, but it doesn't sound unreasonable. And while they might get a lump sum for whatever equity they held, that's…

Existing equity was converted to cash at $54.20/share, but will still be paid out on the existing vesting schedule. It's a carrot, insofar as it is promised future money, but it's a decaying carrot.

Edit:

Yes, the proportion of total comp that was equity hit about 50% at L7 (Twitter's Staff). L6 (Twitter's Senior) was usually around 40%.

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#384

Post by danenania »

sahila wrote: post #380
danenania wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is essentially what happens to a startup that scales rapidly. It goes from fire to fire as it grows, scrambling to deal with each new issue that arises and hiring new people as needed. It's not pretty, but is generally accepted as far more effective than attempting to hire and build way ahead of your immediate needs (the YAGNI principle). Musk's approach is drastic and will probably include a lot of turbulence a…

That's true but there's some missing attraction that's present in fast-growing startups but not here - there's little room for big stock / options growth (unless Musk provides options at less than the $44b price, or a high all cash comp) and the product is already mature so lots of interesting engineering challenges are already solved (and your challenge will rather be to figure out the existing codebase and how to w…

I think there are plenty of engineers who would find the challenge of running a massive global service with a very small team to be inherently interesting in itself, regardless of the specific tasks involved. Some folks also enjoy high stakes rescue operations--the team that saved healthcare.gov comes to mind as one example.

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#385

Post by rightbyte »

gambiting wrote: post #89
Moctogo wrote: post #72

Wild prediction: Twitter will continue to work as it did even after that ~80% workforce haircut. Make of that what you will.

I very much doubt that. Twitter must have had some bloat, but there's no way that 80% of the workforce was bloat. I'd be extremely surprised if Twitter(as in, the website/app, not the registered legal entity) still exists and works by the end of this year.

> Twitter must had some bloat, but there's no way that 80% of the workforce was bloat.

I firmly believe, lets say 80%, of Twitter is bloat. But sacking them like this wont prove anything due to practicalities. You just can't unwind a mess like Musk is doing. If some employees sole productive task in a week is to reset a server that still has to be done and it will take a lot of work to figure out which button to press when the site falls over.

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#386

Post by Manuel_D »

cpeterso wrote: post #377
GSimon wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80% imo could so very easily be bloat. Features/services that are underutilized and haemorrhaging money don't need to be upkept, teams dedicated to curating content like twitter headlines and moderating content don't need to be there (at the scale it's currently at). Staffing for hospitality services at Twitter HQ and all the ancillary services that are unnecessary or under-utilized. As long as the servers are runnin…

For comparison, Reddit has only 700 employees. How does Reddit handle scale and moderation with only 10% of the number of employees Twitter had in 2021?

Reddit effectively farms out moderation to volunteers. It's a lot like feudalism. Subreddit mods put in the labor of the day to day moderation of the sub in exchange for the ability to wield power over the subreddit. When a subreddit is shirking in it's moderation duties, or otherwise doing something the central power doesn't like the subreddit is deleted.

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#387

Post by bastawhiz »

djanogo wrote: post #188
bastawhiz wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "committed" look like to you? The promise of working more for the same or less? What upside is there for folks who "commit"? Besides personal gratification, is it even remotely likely that Twitter will do something at this point to pull untold riches from thin air that would somehow benefit these people? From the sound of it, no.

The engineers (don't care about non-engineers) who quit need to face the fact that were part of "company" which gave negative returns to both public and private investors for almost a decade. I think "committed" will still be 8 hours/day, like I said he sussed out people who are "triggered" by words or don't love what they do.

> I think "committed" will still be 8 hours/day

Do you work at Twitter? Do you have any reason to really believe this?

If significantly more than half of your coworkers left (fired, laid off, quit), it's very reasonable to assume that you now have twice the work to do. Moreover, we've seen in just the last two weeks people sleeping on the floor of the Twitter office(s), working more than 8hr/day, to urgently ship features that Elon personally nixed hours after launching. The language that Elon used repeatedly over the last week is "hardcore", implying that Old Twitter's way of working is "not hardcore"; if you were working 8hr/day before, what does "hardcore" mean beyond that?

> people who are "triggered" by words or don't love what they do

I love what I do, but I'm not about to start working harder without being compensated for that work. If you sign an agreement to work somewhere for a certain amount and the other party demands you work more without more compensation, no amount of "loving what you do" makes that equitable or fair. Loving what you do doesn't mean sacrificing the worth of your craft because someone said to.

Sussing out people who are "triggered" isn't a business move, it's a loyalty test. Loyalty is uncorrelated with skill or motivation. "Loving what you do" is uncorrelated with loyalty. There's a lot of companies out there doing amazing work that are hiring. Twitter isn't somehow special. If you love what you do and have been given an ultimatum by your new boss who has gotten rid of half of your coworkers and wants you to do more work, how is the logical move to _stay_ at the company?

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#388

Post by rhacker »

spoils19 wrote: post #335
paxys wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just weeks ago these few thousand employees collectively generated $44 billion worth of value for their shareholders, but now suddenly they are all useless and spoiled and don’t deserve a penny. Funny how that works.

Actually HN has taught me that CEOs generate the value for shareholders.

Well if you were to diagnose most companies there are probably 30-40 engineers that make the most value, like billions of dollars each. From there it starts dropping off like a long tail in search results. There's value, but a lot less than others. Cutting the long tail may still break huge areas of functionality - but the rest will patch and fix it over time.

Heck there might be a team of 50 that has the sole responsibility to figure out the code/algorithms that puts something on the main page automatically. Instead that can temporarily be a small team of 3 people that rotate news articles or tweets.

We tend to think "each employee generates $44B / 14000" but that's far from the truth.

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#389

Post by someNameIG »

cpeterso wrote: post #377
GSimon wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80% imo could so very easily be bloat. Features/services that are underutilized and haemorrhaging money don't need to be upkept, teams dedicated to curating content like twitter headlines and moderating content don't need to be there (at the scale it's currently at). Staffing for hospitality services at Twitter HQ and all the ancillary services that are unnecessary or under-utilized. As long as the servers are runnin…

For comparison, Reddit has only 700 employees. How does Reddit handle scale and moderation with only 10% of the number of employees Twitter had in 2021?

Reddit has something like over 20,000 unpaid mods that are active daily

Re: Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs

#390

Post by ebiester »

bdcravens wrote: post #220
ebiester wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you're willing to accept a company that is not growing in revenue due to new value created, you can build a system entirely dedicated to maintenance of existing features with a small group. In Twitter's case, however, how long is it until they're sued for child porn (lack of moderation) or get 50 million euro fines for running afoul of Germany's Network Enforcement Act?

I'd consider staff in those areas core to the product. Many of the dozens of projects at https://opensource.twitter.dev/projects/ , not so much. Staff whose job revolves around standing at booths at conferences and handing out swag, ditto.

How many of those are active? How many of those were created for the purposes of twitter infrastructure and released as a side effect?

I'm sure that you can stop supporting the open source section. However, how much of their platform team is core to the product? How much is still required?

Post reply on HN