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

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

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet 20% of their workforce was support + inside sales reps for advertisers. I'd further guess that 10-20% of their workforce was staying on top of regulations. If twitter works, but does not comply with the FTC consent order and gets fined out of business, that is not a technical failure but still is failure. Large enterprises, especially those under consent orders, spend a TON of effort in compliance. Given that e…

When has the FTC ever levied a fine that put someone out of business for an internet privacy related consent decree? I don't think it's ever happened.

Facebook was fined $5 billion dollars in 2019-ish, that would put most companies out of business. If Twitter doesn't have people actively working to keep up with new privacy directives in every jurisdiction they are in (every country in the world, every region/state in each country has different requirements), they will get hit with fines all day every day.

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

#402
post #72

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

This is equivalent to saying "I've decided not to go to the mechanic anymore. And look, five days later, my car is totally fine!"

5 days is good enough time to find a better mechanic that does a high quality job, for less, and doesn't want to collude with federal agencies [1] about where you can drive and where you cannot: https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...

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

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Republican party who I hate I switched to Republican party since 2020 election, I wouldn't vote for election deniers [1] but plenty of people are doing the right thing. Rationality and reason seems to have shifted from liberals to conservatives. We can't even say biological facts. Many others are leaving the woke non-sense, I want my damn liberal party back from the 90's that was pro free speech and had a kernel of…

"Rationality and reason seems to have shifted from liberals to conservatives. We can't even say biological facts. Many others are leaving the woke non-sense," Isn't it the Republicans that are still saying homosexuality is a choice? Aren't they the ones aligned with QAnon woke-conspiracies? Aren't they ones that pushed that Obama was born in Africa? What biological facts do Democrats say you can't say? At worst, Dems…

I know how crooked some of the Republicans are and some of the conspiracy shit that's going around. But, it's not like Democrats are clean, this is what is cooking in the progressive circles, especially in colleges and academia:

https://twitter.com/LPofDelaware/status/1583078489430798336

What would be helpful is if you try to, with good faith, head over to r/conservatives and see what the discussion is like. They will welcome progressives and disagreeing views. They'll upvote you. The same cannot be said about the reverse. Conservative opinions here are completely unwelcome, not even downvoted but flagged. Turn on the show-flagged filter on HN and I'd wager atleast half of them are totally legit, not rude and not bigoted. They're just offering a different perspective.

Both sides are equally consumed and spineless. Republicans caved into Trumpism and the liberals caved into woke ideology. Both sides instead of rejecting extremism, adopted it and dug their heels in. We lost truth and rationality in the process. At this time in history, centrist republicans are the most rational.

and...instantly downvoted. Care to please comment below? What do you disagree with what I just said here?

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

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I have friends who work at SpaceX and seems to be doing just fine. The zeitgeist on HN is basically if you ever do anything challenging, don't even think about it, it is bad for your mental health. You probably should just concede in life, don't work hard, regress into resentment for "rich people" and make sure no one else succeeds. What kind of a shitty place has this become? Supposed to be "Hacker News". Not a…

This tells me you’ve never worked 80 hour weeks.

I wish I could deanonymize myself, @dang probably knows who I am. I hold 2 jobs. So, sorry, you're wrong.

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

#405
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's says something when the greatest living hacker, George Hotz, now wants to work at Twitter. But so many of the readers of "hacker news" can't even imagine why.

John Carmack is still probably the greatest living hacker.

John Carmack on hard work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJitSreSL78

I can't see this going well on HN if he said the same thing, verbatim, but posted it as an anonymous comment.

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

#406
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80hr+ in-office work weeks with no equity and the threat of being instantly fired for appearing disloyal in Slack or correcting the CEO... sounds fun!

They don't have stock? Also maybe don't say your employer is a "petulant man child" in Slack or otherwise undermine them and you'll be fine. The idea that an employer should keep people that actively dislike like him or her is insane.

If you already have no respect for the new boss, calling him a petulant man child to his face and getting 3 months severance isnt the worst thing that could happen.

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

#407
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have stock? Also maybe don't say your employer is a "petulant man child" in Slack or otherwise undermine them and you'll be fine. The idea that an employer should keep people that actively dislike like him or her is insane.

> The idea that an employer should keep people that don't like him or her is insane. It's not insane. Only keeping people that kiss your ass is how you get echo chambers and lose touch with reality.

Twitter's biggest risk at the moment, IMO, is that Musk's layoff process may have over-selected ass kissers to the detriment of focusing on aptitude.

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

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Rationality and reason seems to have shifted from liberals to conservatives. We can't even say biological facts. Many others are leaving the woke non-sense," Isn't it the Republicans that are still saying homosexuality is a choice? Aren't they the ones aligned with QAnon woke-conspiracies? Aren't they ones that pushed that Obama was born in Africa? What biological facts do Democrats say you can't say? At worst, Dems…

I know how crooked some of the Republicans are and some of the conspiracy shit that's going around. But, it's not like Democrats are clean, this is what is cooking in the progressive circles, especially in colleges and academia: https://twitter.com/LPofDelaware/status/1583078489430798336 What would be helpful is if you try to, with good faith, head over to r/conservatives and see what the discussion is like. They wil…

First, I didn't downvote you (actually I can't).

I think that there are fringe elements on both sides. I do think there is a legit difference though in that the mass of the conservatives hold views that are to me far worse.

For example, there might be a fringe of liberals that think that women and men are the same height on average -- or think there are no physical differences. But the VAST majority believe there are differences. But I think a far higher percentage of conservatives think that homosexuality is a choice. That's a very mainstream belief I've seen -- even in my own family.

I think what liberals struggle with, IMO, aligns with my values, even if the positions that arise I disagree with. For example, trans athletes. I think its unfair to women to compete against people who were born men. At the same time, I sympathize with people who really feel like they were born the wrong gender and are doing everything they can to change genders. I don't have a satisfactory solution, but I empathize with the liberal response. The conservative response doesn't even seem to recognize that trans people have any struggle at all.

Centrist Republicans today might be the most rational. But they are even getting run out of the party. I never thought I'd say, "Wow, I miss George Bush".

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

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would guess, though I don't know for sure, that having your hero buy your company and then fire a bunch of your friends and valued colleagues seemingly arbitrarily, including entire teams that exist for actual reasons, probably would dampen your opinion of him somewhat. Like, I like Steve Jobs, he could be a dick sometimes but I think he had the right idea and the right vision overall, but if he came in and bought…

> if [Steve Jobs] came in and bought my employer and then just started firing whole teams and fucking up the product while taking away perks and demanding more work Isn't that pretty much what Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple as CEO? "Ultimately, Jobs axed more than 70 percent of Apple’s hardware and software products." "His product cuts resulted in the layoffs of over 3000 employees" "Jobs managed to force…

Apparently that was a total of 31% of the workforce: https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/08/29/1997-apple-bites-the-...

That's a big difference with what looks to be 75-85% of Twitter's pre-acquisition workforce in total.

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

#410
post #109

In my opinion Elon miscalculated the type of people at Twitter. These aren’t people like the ones in Tesla or SpaceX where there is some sort of idealization of Elon. The number of fan boys he has at Twitter must be super low. None of the Twitter employees signed up to work for him, it’s pretty obvious from the public tweets that most of the staff has posted that they don’t have much respect for him. On top of that,…

> None of the Twitter employees signed up to work for him, it’s pretty obvious from the public tweets that most of the staff has posted that they don’t have much respect for him.

I do wonder has his idea of how people think about him been skewed by a decade or so of really only working with people who are really into him. Like, this mostly felt absolutely inevitable to me (though I'm surprised how far he pushed it so quickly), but then I never thought much of him.

> I assume a lot of the engineers have the “millennial” mentality of “I work not live, I don’t live to work”.

Not sure what's _particularly_ millennial about that. Hours worked in the US per year now is pretty similar to the period from 1970 to 1990, when there were no millennials working. There was a spike peak between 1990 and the early noughties, but not a huge one; to find big increases you're going back before 1970.

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