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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

#621

Post by bagels »

Balgair wrote: post #340

Now he's saying that he wants people to fly in to present their code to him by midnight. On the Friday before Thanksgiving. Into one of United's big hubs. With 14 hours notice. And a lot of cold fronts over the eastern seaboard. Likely more like 10 hours with travel times and the line of potential people that are presenting. I'm honestly gobsmacked. Look, if you're on of those engineers and are unfortunate enough to…

Source? If that were true, and I was one of the people that moved because of Twitter's announcement that I could work from home forever, I would: expense plane tickets to the office, find or create the ten best relevant memes, and bring those in with me.

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

#622

Post by lamontcg »

ben7799 wrote: post #495
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. Bu…

> I'm sure stuff has changed but I would struggle to remember what's different than say 10 years ago.

Didn't have to comply with the GDPR because it didn't exist. Wasn't scrutinized as much over issues of speech and harassment (GamerGate hadn't happened yet). Didn't have nation states attempting to manipulate the platform for propaganda purposes.

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

#623

Post by bagels »

colechristensen wrote: post #203
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…

I think what happens is his strange behavior is proportional to how little he sleeps. He has a spectrum between mildly unusual to full Kanye. While I'm usually not in favor of professional unions for programmers, I think that's the only option at Twitter at this point unless people are ready to quit en mass.

All of us should be considering it. If it (hostile takeover and or maniacal management) could happen at Twitter, it could happen almost anywhere else. Better before it happens again. I used to think it unnecessary for software, but I was wrong.

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

#624

Post by bagels »

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 think you will find much more support for the idea that Twitter could operate with fewer people than the idea that Musk's execution of this idea is the right path to get there.

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

#625

Post by bagels »

dorkwood wrote: post #603
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…

Couldn't these all be part of the plan, though? Make himself look incompetent so that people underestimate him?

What value does he derive from us underestimating him?

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

#626

Post by bagels »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #593
b112 wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless those advertisers won't be coming along into the new, changed twitter anyhow.

That still doesn't look good to your future revenue stream, because you've costed at least one client over a billion dollars. Why would your future revenue stream pay you?

The client didn't lose a billion dollars. Their investors did.

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

#627

Post by Jensson »

hamburglar wrote: post #615
Teandw wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He did specify. He asked for most salient. Salient means "most noticeable or important." He hasn't played any mind games. He's asked for exactly what he wants.

That is completely a mind game. Salient according to what criteria? Is he going to be happy to see wonderful high level distributed designs? Great coding practices at the micro level? Unit tests? Performance-oriented code? Ops greatness? CRUD boilerplate that any junior IC could jump into without much understanding (seems like this might be a stealth winner if he’s gearing up to build a skeleton crew of low-seniority…

> That is completely a mind game. Salient according to what criteria?

Is what you do worth your salary? That is a pretty simple criteria, if you deliver significant value in basically any way that should be enough. Why do you think this is would be so hard? We had to write down reasoning like this to motivate our job at Google 1-2 times a year, it isn't hard to do.

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

#628

Post by alsodumb »

ahahahahah wrote: post #607
alsodumb wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone who actually worked for him say that he understands all the engineering intricacies. Karpathy said that. Tom Mueller publicly defended Elon on multiple occasions: https://mobile.twitter.com/lrocket/status/151291923068914892...

Considering that he lashes out at the smallest slight, I'm rather unsurprised that people depending on him for their livelihood sing his praises.

Tom Mueller is a highly respected engineer, and just because what he says doesn't align with your narrative or belief doesn't mean he is singing praises.

Oh by the way, Tom Mueller made that tweet after he left SpaceX.

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

#629

Post by Balgair »

bagels wrote: post #621
Balgair wrote: post #340

Now he's saying that he wants people to fly in to present their code to him by midnight. On the Friday before Thanksgiving. Into one of United's big hubs. With 14 hours notice. And a lot of cold fronts over the eastern seaboard. Likely more like 10 hours with travel times and the line of potential people that are presenting. I'm honestly gobsmacked. Look, if you're on of those engineers and are unfortunate enough to…

Source? If that were true, and I was one of the people that moved because of Twitter's announcement that I could work from home forever, I would: expense plane tickets to the office, find or create the ten best relevant memes, and bring those in with me.

https://twitter.com/ZoeSchiffer

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

#630

Post by mortehu »

belligeront wrote: post #552
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…

He's also acted with hubris with his engineering claims. For example claiming that the reason twitter is slower in india is that there are 1200 RPC calls, which is pretty absurd. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592176202873085952

Why do you think that's absurd? With a microservice architecture you can easily hit that rendering a personalized feed.
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