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Epilogue of my time working at Twitter

esthercrawford.medium.com

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Re: Epilogue of my time working at Twitter

#131

Post by somedude895 »

bloopernova wrote: post #42
bhauer wrote: post #21

I appreciate this considerably more nuanced and thoughtful view of the modern history of Twitter. So much coverage of Twitter since the Musk acquisition is entangled with partisan politics, ultimately in part thanks to Musk provoking such a reaction. That makes this post feel ever more illuminating and thoughtful—it avoids the partisan pitfalls and irrational extremism seen in virtually every other article on the top…

musk has a vast amount of power and influence due to his wealth, links to several corporations, links to other rich people, and his control of a social media site. I believe that someone with that much power has an obligation, a responsibility to improve the world for humanity. Whether elected or not. he instead chooses to do what he does. That is why I dislike him. he could offer so much more but messes around "trol…

> a responsibility to improve the world for humanity

> he instead chooses to do what he does

That just depends on your view of what is and isn't an improvement to the world and we arrive back at partisan politics.

Re: Epilogue of my time working at Twitter

#132

Post by somedude895 »

bentlegen wrote: post #87
cjbgkagh wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a ‘but for’ aspect, without google it’s reasonable to expect the some other search engine could have evolved into the same thing. Given the scope and scale of the investment required to get Tesla and SpaceX to a viable state it seem that only a somewhat crazy person could would even attempt that. It’s difficult to find an optimum level of crazy, and is often difficult to distinguish between crazy and…

By that logic, why couldn’t someone have done the same with electric cars and rockets? Were we never going to go into space again? Did the Nissan Leaf not already exist?

Launching Google was a low stakes endeavour. Nobody was willing to put as much on the line as Musk did with SpaceX and Tesla. It's likely all of it would have happened at some point, but certainly not as quickly and effectively as it has thanks to Musk.

Re: Epilogue of my time working at Twitter

#133

Post by sillyfluke »

kaba0 wrote: post #127
tomatotomato37 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to average finance billionaire #293 bragging to their golf buddies how they got the Toys-R-Us bankruptcy to pay for their third private yacht he has definitely done his duty for improving the world, even if he's lately been acting like a major idiot while doing it. Yes I know there are other tech billionaires who do better, but for every one of them there's a mile of those who instead actively work to make t…

Yeah, he gave us fking paypal.. Also, we surely needed some more ass-licker for Russia, as if we don’t have enough already, or some high position person shittalking about covid. Definitely a good gal..

I didn't downvote you, but you might not be aware that Paypal like Google is known to have been Less Evil back in the day. So much so that--and I'm going completely by memory so I might fuck this up--Douglas Crockford went to Paypal when he was pissed off with a patent play Yahoo made and took a moral stand, quitting in protest. It was one of those companies that had a rep of putting developers first.

Now how much genetic material Paypal retained from Musk's x.com I have no idea and whether Musk was responsible for any of "the good stuff" in Paypal during those years is debatable (See Founders At Work for the windows/linux debates).

Re: Epilogue of my time working at Twitter

#134

Post by guax »

SkipperCat wrote: post #69

This is a very well written article and I really enjoyed reading it. However, I do think the author has romanticized how a privately owned company has exploited, abused and treated their workers like objects. Looking back of the past months of Elon's tenure, its been shocking to see how he violated so many legal and social covenants regarding how an employer should treat staff. The true insult of it all is that Musk…

He's just like Welsh. And the outcome might be the same.

Re: Epilogue of my time working at Twitter

#135

Post by [deleted] »

palata wrote: post #119
bhauer wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't care for his tweets or his political thoughts, but I personally think he has done more good through his companies than most others with similar resources. In my opinion, when Gates was still running Microsoft, he did considerably less "good" for humanity than Musk is doing now. And Musk's contemporaries (Zuckerberg, Bezos, et al) don't seem to be interested in doing much good either. It's easy to be an armcha…

> less "good" for humanity than Musk is doing now Sorry, but... what is Musk doing for humanity now? SpaceX makes a business out of space, which will use more and more energy, which is exactly the biggest problem of humanity right now (fossil fuel is not unlimited, and CO2 is killing the planet). Tesla makes heavy vehicles that use a lot of energy, too. And somehow, some people think they are "green" because they are…

[deleted]

Re: Epilogue of my time working at Twitter

#136

Post by Uzza »

palata wrote: post #120
nancyhn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally who has improved humanity more this century? I ask with all seriousness. Electric cars and rockets would not be where they are if he had chosen a different and much less difficult path.

Heavy electric cars and rockets are making the biggest problems of this century worse. We don't need more rockets or space tourism. And instead of building heavy EVs, Tesla should help the US build public transports. That is, if they want to help humanity.

> Heavy electric cars

Electric cars being heavier have an impact in that it causes more wear and tear on roads. But they're absolutely dwarfed by the wear semis cause. Even when the electricity comes entirely from coal, electric vehicles are more efficient than ICE vehicles, so every EV deployed reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

> and rockets

Rockets impact on emissions is a rounding error on the global scale. The number of launched would have to increase by 1000 times to start approaching the airline industry, and with the move to methane fueled rockets it's possible to synthesize the fuel from CO2 in the atmosphere using carbon free energy, creating a closed loop.

> Tesla should help the US build public transports

It doesn't work like that. You can't just say "let's build more public transport" and it will magically happen tomorrow. There are a ton of barriers to expanding many forms of public transport, primarily public funding, which they do not control. And when it comes to thing like rail, that's compounded even more by right of way. The fact of the matter is that the US is a car heavy society, and building EVs is the fastest way to reduce transport emissions without (ignoring incentives) directly having to rely on public funding.

As an added bonus, building up an EV production line allows you to relatively easily export them to other markets around the world. You can't export a rail line to another place.

Re: Epilogue of my time working at Twitter

#137

Post by nebula8804 »

drc500free wrote: post #55

> At times it seemed he trusted random feedback more than the people in the room who spent their lives dedicated to tackling the problem at hand. I never figured out why and remain puzzled by it. I think this bit here drives the love-hate views on him. Most mature orgs are overly bureaucratic with small visions and strongly conservative views about what can be accomplished. Some play-act at having big visions for mar…

>The pitfall to me is that he extends that to all expertise - engineering, science, marketing. His opening belief seems to be that most professionals are bullshit artists who spend their whole day lying to justify their jobs. And while the professionals are often wrong about what organizations of people can achieve, they are much less often wrong about how engineering needs to work, and they are hardly every wrong about the core science.

If you see the teardowns of the Tesla cars you see engineering designs that are not done in other currently selling products. In fact now we see competitors playing catch up by copying Tesla designs. That alone disproves your theory. Whatever he is doing, Tesla/SpaceX seem to be forward thinking in terms of engineering.

Re: Epilogue of my time working at Twitter

#138

Post by nitwit005 »

nancyhn wrote: post #71
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #34

> Colleagues openly talked about how Twitter was being sold because leadership didn’t have conviction in their own plan or ability to fix longstanding problems. I think, in this case, the colleagues were wrong. Twitter was sold because an idiot offered far more money than it was worth. If I have a coffee shop that earns me $100,000 in profit per year, and somebody offers to buy it from me for $10 million, I'm going t…

The company was virtually static for a decade. It was a long running joke that they weren't able to ship and the article does a good job of explaining why.

Twitter shipped a ton of features. It's just that most of them didn't catch on.

Re: Epilogue of my time working at Twitter

#139

Post by nebula8804 »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #44

> Elon has an exceptional talent for tackling hard physics-based problems but products that facilitate human connection and communication require a different type of social-emotional intelligence. This feels like the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. The author encountered Elon working in their area of expertise, saw that Elon was wildly incompetent, and recognized that in this specific case Elon Musk was not a great leader.…

This right here is the million dollar question. I spent years following the Tesla drama and watching subs like /r/realTesla tear into Tesla's decisions. This sub was filled with "industry people" and well the naysayers have been screaming from the tops of hills since 2010 about Teslas mistakes. Most people ignored them because they are not in the auto industry. This quote from Bob Lutz explained it perfectly: https://youtu.be/GXJnS9RgKsg?t=2687

I watched how they managed to will the Model X into production when it should have never have been built. They dug themselves into a giant grave by insisting on those falcon wing doors but they survived. I watched how they totally botched the Model 3 launch when it should have been the crowning achievement that showed that Tesla was now an established car brand. The amount of drama that occurred at the time was insane: making cars in "tents" in the parking lot, having a terrible body design, trying to force automation in all the wrong areas. In all these cases, the naysayers were proven wrong by Elon's ability to outlast his/his team's mistakes but at the same time they also managed to challenge assumptions that the industry thought was "the right way" to do things. Now we have incumbents copying Tesla's approaches to solving some problems.

In the end who was right? I never really did get an answer to that. As a software guy I thought let me stay in my lane and trust the automotive industry people because thats what they do for a living. Before the pandemic I was so sure that following established industry insiders was the way to get insight. Now, I dont know anymore. But I can't reconcile the fact that as a software guy I know that the way Twitter was handled was a complete mess. Is this just another attempt at bungling along until it actually works? I guess the real deciding factor is does he have enough runway to keep plodding along until he figures it out?

Re: Epilogue of my time working at Twitter

#140

Post by pschuegr »

croes wrote: post #122
falcolas wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existence of suffering greater than your own does nothing to invalidate your own suffering. And it certainly doesn’t mean someone else should come along and shame you for expressing your own pain. That’s toxic to any form of discourse.

I don't invalidate suffering, but if your suffering isn't live threatening, you are definitely not on level 10 in Hard mode, that's more like level 8 in Medium. Especially if you can afford a sabbatical after you are fired.

I assume that by Hard Mode she meant "hard for an affluent Western democracy". I doubt she was pretending that working late is like getting shot at.

Nothing personal to you, I'm an equal offender with this stuff, but this kind of "well, actually..." nit-picking on HN drives me nuts. If you could harness the power of smart people to correct other people's lack of specificity, it would be better than fusion.

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