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

231–240 of 458 posts

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

#231

Post by babelfish »

dmitriid wrote: post #177
negamax wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me you have never worked in a large enterprise without telling me that you haven't. Elon seems completely out of his depth in handling Twitter. And so does many people endorsing him. For them, Twitter is a glorified website.

Twitter is undoubtedly overstaffed. Their website is a trash fire that fails in spectacular ways to deliver the most basic funcionality inherent in the browser : show some text and some pictures. And it's been this way for years while they are patting themselves on the back for "creating the best PWA app in the world". However, what Musk is doing is absolutely hillarious, and is a much bigger trash fire that has noth…

What are you talking about? Twitter’s resiliency program is widely known to be one of the best in the world. They’ve been around so long that they’ve literally had to invent a lot of what we consider basic modern distributed computing from scratch. It will become a trash fire with everyone who maintained these massive systems gone, but don’t imply that they created bad systems, or failed at ‘just displaying text’, because they clearly haven’t.

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

#232

Post by rco8786 »

porknubbins wrote: post #139

I don't know if you can compare SpaceX or Tesla to running a CRUD app. Engineering rockets is probably 100x harder than building twitter, but there is something very reassuring when all of the complexity of your product is embodied in a physical object you can touch and see, compared to an information context where you don't even know how many layers of abstractions you are working with.

It depends on how you view the product. The raw engineering of building a rocket is certainly a lot harder than running a "CRUD" app...but it's also pretty reductive to call Twitter that.

Twitter is a huge social network with a huge advertising network intertwined. The problems and challenges with that are very real, very difficult, and they are social problems rather than engineering problems. It seems like Elon overestimated how much his knowledge of building cars and rockets would transfer over to social networks.

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

#233

Post by negamax »

rem7 wrote: 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,…

I think the crux of the situation is that Tesla and Twitter are completely different companies. And Elon seems to be going for Twitter based on his learnings at Tesla. Manufacturing a car at scale that requires well defined components, supply chain management and production is so very different from Twitter which is a global platform where anyone can add anything.

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

#234

Post by partiallypro »

jeffbee wrote: post #79
JohnTHaller wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About $2billion is owned by the Saudi prince with a penchant for murdering journalists. So... maybe?

It's obvious why the despots of Arabia and Russia—both pals with Musk—would prefer if Twitter disappeared. Unlike Mastodon, Twitter is capable of hosting a revolution. Putin and MBS and the rest of them know they can pwn or DoS any distributed, federated piece of crap, and they can't successfully do that to Twitter.

What are you talking about? Iran's revolution is in part unfolding because of Twitter and Saudi Arabia wants nothing more than for that regime to fall.

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

#236

Post by Yoofie »

epistasis wrote: post #137
memish wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

These sorts of massive cuts, coupled with massively decreasing workplace quality, and with removing any chance of financial reward (no more liquidity in shares of the company!!), are going to cause the most talented people to go to greener pastures. The people who stay will be those with the least options. Musk has made employment at Twitter hugely risky, with no possibility of reward. Really boneheaded business, com…

> are going to cause the most talented people to go to greener pastures.

People keep repeating this trope as if Twitter is some paragon of technical excellence and innovation. It is no such thing. It is a popular website with a textbox for user input.

You don't need "talent", you simply need to people who get the job done.

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

#237

Post by PuppyTailWags »

dboreham wrote: post #154
mustacheemperor wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a leading developer on Twitter's Android app and the company's new CEO is making verifiably untrue, denigrating public statements about the architecture of the Android app that make you look incompetent, what do you do? Accept the damage to your professional reputation and roll over? Or "undermine" the CEO by explaining your app does not in fact make >1000 poorly batched RPC calls to render the timeline in…

I suspect you may be overestimating the weight that being denigrated by Musk carries in the industry. It could even be a badge of honor.

I don't think it's that Musk denigrated your work. It's that Musk claims Twitter has a horribly designed product on the specific thing you specialize in. People then spread this around that Twitter has a horribly designed thing that you specialized in building. Now there's not an off-chance that without anyone actually knowing the source, people in tech just "know" that Twitter has a horribly designed X. You, in charge of X, are now collectively understood on your resume as a horrible designer.

Think of it like this: I cannot name probably more than a handful of Google abandoned projects. But whenever Google announces a new project I'm happy to meme about how it will be inevitably abandoned. It's just something I "know" despite not hunting down some weird statistic of exactly what percentage of Google products to market survive after X years.

Reputation isn't a science. It isn't even that well correlated with truth.

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

#238

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

alfor wrote: post #189
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is doing the growing when there's no one left to make stuff and/or those that remain don't know how the current stuff works? If he's going to rehire new people, who is going to want to work in an organization where you are deemed essentially the enemy of growth and are easily expendable?

A lot of people are interested in working for him. Tesla and SpaceX fight for #1 and #2 spot for place to work. Is changing the auto industry, he is overpassing Nasa with a fraction of the budget. How much proof do you need?

You're assuming that (1) Tesla and SpaceX's missions compare to that of Twitter and (2) the people at those companies like Elon and want to work specifically for him.

Many people working at Tesla and SpaceX view Elon as a distraction to the mission, not an accelerant other than putting the pieces in place for the companies to exist.

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

#239

Post by tunap »

crooked-v wrote: post #70
djanogo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Musk played people who quit this week, he used some trigger words in his email to sus out people who are not committed to the company. And the heard mentality kicked in and more people quit.

"Played them" how? They'll find another job easily (especially with three months severance) and he's left with a company that's falling apart.

If you step back from the trainwreck and look around, the job market is not good anywhere. Some definitely will find fast employment, but > or = quality & remuneration is not a given. For the rest, 3 months may cover on-boarding time, if they strike an offer quickly. This just sucks all the way around. I wonder if EM has a master plan or a brain tumor.

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

#240

Post by kenjackson »

memish wrote: post #163
sorenjan wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Of course, but it's not binary. It's not a choice of people who hate you or love you unquestionably. There's a middle ground between those. I don't buy into the notion that the chief engineer of SpaceX, which puts rockets in space, and CEO of Tesla, which efficiently produces electric cars, doesn't know how to stay in touch with reality. The evidence is in direct conflict.

But being severely critical of Musk right now doesn't necessarily mean you hate him. He has deserved a fair amount of criticism.
Post reply on HN