So everyone that's still left - all H1Bs quaking in their boots? What a tragic twist to their american odyssey.
Brown is the new Black
Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
971–980 of 1001 posts
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#972What happens when Twitter survives despite reducing headcount by 80-90%? It's going to send a message that companies are more overstaffed than we thought. This may explain an underlying fear driving even some engineers to put their reputation on the line with confident declarations that Twitter is going to fail. Some were saying it wouldn't survive the night. It's now morning. Others saying it won't last the weekend…
I wish companies could go lean. I had tremendous growth when working for Netflix partly because engineers there got to build meaningful systems with huge ownership and very small teams. Case in point, my coworker and I owned four or five high-traffic systems and carried a pager 24x7. It didn't bother us at all as our we got alerts maybe once or twice a month.
That said, a lean company requires strong leadership, technical depth in management, and specific types of cultures. I don't believe that most companies are up to such challenge.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#973Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not saying it's a fair metric, but when I compare Twitter's open output to similarly VC-funded-but-now-public companies, the engineering output doesn't seem particularly exciting. For comparison: Meta / Facebook: * React * PyTorch * Fasttext * Their unsung-but-indispensible-for-humanitarian-orgs Data for Good program Google: * Flutter * Go * Kubernetes * Tensorflow * BERT / Large language models generally * Mapre…
See https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1592774269733601281 for some of the examples of technical innovation at Twitter.
How many of these innovations have been open sourced?
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#974>In addition to the payroll team being gone, Twitter's entire US tax team is gone, I'm told, along with its financial reporting team. Not great. https://twitter.com/HaysKali/status/1593449877094047744
It doesn’t matter. They aren’t public anymore and Elon Musk has tons of finance and tax people across his business empire. You think a guy worth hundreds of billions doesn’t have a team of finance people?
A better question is whether he's going to listen to those people anymore so than he listened to the engineers.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#975Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Twitter employees amuse themselves by making billionaire's life difficult Where did you get that from? He immediately started firing people, so when should they have done that?
https://twitter.com/rlycalm/status/1592636069224542208 Granted, I don't know this person is actually an engineer as opposed to a troll. And she doesn't claim that she or other employees actively tried to create trouble. So there was an aspect of me reading subtext into her tweet + Elon's ultimatum. Maybe incorrectly.
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Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#976@dang - maybe let one twitter story through to the home page?
The current thread ended up spending 10 hours on HN's front page. IIRC it was flagged by users and we restored it. I didn't see your comment till just now. (@dang doesn't do anything—if you or anyone want to tell me something, the reliable message queue is hn@ycombinator.com.)
I agree that this is a major ongoing topic (MOT) and needs to be discussed. At the same time, so many of the submissions are repeats of things already posted. This is a classic situation that comes up a few times a year (the FTX saga is another going on right now).
Obviously some of the gazillion Twittermusk stories contain SNI [1], and some (most) are just follow-ups [2] or repetitive angerwars, and we have to make a distinction between the two or HN's frontpage will consist of nothing but.
With user flags and the flamewar detector also downranking stories, it's possible for this strategy to get overapplied, in which case a MOT ends up getting insufficient oxygen. That's not good for HN either! It isn't because of sinister plutocracy or anything like that—it's a failure mode of the strategy I just described. User pushback is helpful!
More on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33667968
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
p.s. HN has worked this way for a long time - coming up on a decade now: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#977Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah given paulg's tweets I'm wondering if our free speech absolutist view as a website, actually holds here.
I always found HN much more VCist than free speech. any comment criticizing plutocrats tends to get downvoted
I've seen plenty such upvoted comments. By and large, what matters is the tone of criticism.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#978@dang - maybe let one twitter story through to the home page?
It is a little strange that I have seen almost no Twitter stories on the front page in the last week. Has dang or anyone talked about why that might be? Is it getting caught in the flamewar algorithm? Are they treating this as one big story so any individual article gets removed as a repost?
A lot are getting caught in the flamewar algorithm and/or being flagged by users. Moderation basically goes by these principles:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#979Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a little strange that I have seen almost no Twitter stories on the front page in the last week. Has dang or anyone talked about why that might be? Is it getting caught in the flamewar algorithm? Are they treating this as one big story so any individual article gets removed as a repost?
they are heavily moderating it. I only saw a couple of front page stories last week, and these events have been headline news internationally. i hope the reason is because of the risk of flamewars, rather than YC leadership's desire to protect the reputation of someone who is hagified in SV circles and currently crashing and burning very publicly.
I agree with you all that some of these Twitter/Musk deserve HN threads (though many don't). That said, it's a feature-not-a-bug that stories making "headline news internationally" don't automatically show up on HN.
Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
#980Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah given paulg's tweets I'm wondering if our free speech absolutist view as a website, actually holds here.
I always found HN much more VCist than free speech. any comment criticizing plutocrats tends to get downvoted
I assure you that HN has at least as many comments (actually far more) dissing VCs and plutocrats.
Your comment may be suffering from the notice-dislike bias: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... We're all more likely to notice shit we dislike.