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Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

#31

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

Spivak wrote: post #28
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #23

This part caught my attention: > Davis, previously a director of product design at Facebook, joined Twitter in 2019 to lead its design team. He is Black and Asian, and was the first Black executive at Twitter to report directly to the CEO. The company had touted him as a hard-charging leader who would detoxify the platform, but he was also criticized by some employees for what they said was a blunt, aggressive manage…

That’s the best part about recognizing that people of all different races, genders and creeds as people. They have exactly the same capacity to be shitty as anyone else. If this was a white executive this wouldn’t even move the needle but a black CEO is naturally held to a higher standard. Progress is measured by having their shitty behaviors reflect on them as an individual instead of their class.

Your comment seems to imply that anyone taking issue with Davis' racism is racist themselves, because they wouldn't otherwise notice if Davis were white. Please let me know if my interpretation of your comment is inaccurate, but if it isn't, then that's a pretty horrific rhetorical device that you're employing.

Personally, I noticed this part because — according to the article — Davis was outspoken about diversity, and indeed one of the explicit reasons for hiring him was for him to "promote diversity". That's the context — not his skin colour.

> Two years ago, the company brought in a blunt executive to make things move faster and to promote diversity. Then the problems began.

> Twitter employees who were aware of the episode said they expected better from Mr. Davis because of his outspokenness about diversity.

Re: Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

#32

Post by Traster »

It's about time, Twitter has failed to deliver for far too long and it's pretty clear things had to seriously change. I think the details of the structure are probably unimportant - these reorganisations are more about moving people up or out. It's all a bit academic since it'll all change once Twitter is acquired anyway.

Re: Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

#33

Post by theturtletalks »

gotoeleven wrote: post #30
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #23

This part caught my attention: > Davis, previously a director of product design at Facebook, joined Twitter in 2019 to lead its design team. He is Black and Asian, and was the first Black executive at Twitter to report directly to the CEO. The company had touted him as a hard-charging leader who would detoxify the platform, but he was also criticized by some employees for what they said was a blunt, aggressive manage…

When you're divying free stuff up by race, you've got to maintain some standards. I believe the "sunglass test" was first proposed in one of David Duke's early books "Practical Segregation for Racists."

Ah yes, David Duke, an early pioneer in this space

Re: Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

#34

Post by tmule »

Spivak wrote: post #28
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #23

This part caught my attention: > Davis, previously a director of product design at Facebook, joined Twitter in 2019 to lead its design team. He is Black and Asian, and was the first Black executive at Twitter to report directly to the CEO. The company had touted him as a hard-charging leader who would detoxify the platform, but he was also criticized by some employees for what they said was a blunt, aggressive manage…

That’s the best part about recognizing that people of all different races, genders and creeds as people. They have exactly the same capacity to be shitty as anyone else. If this was a white executive this wouldn’t even move the needle but a black CEO is naturally held to a higher standard. Progress is measured by having their shitty behaviors reflect on them as an individual instead of their class.

“ If this was a white executive this wouldn’t even move the needle but a black CEO is naturally held to a higher standard.” There’s zero evidence of this. But spout away.

Re: Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

#35

Post by aeze »

md2020 wrote: post #5
imchillyb wrote: post #2

> The changes include moving to a "General Manager model" for teams in the product and technology organizations, which will mean having one person lead the work in those divisions. "This will allow us to operate more cross-functionally and enable faster, more informed decision-making," the spokesperson added. In other words: We now have an Overseer role. Individual contributions no longer matter to management. Overse…

As a sidenote, "This will allow us to operate more cross-functionally and enable faster, more informed decision-making," is just completely devoid of substance. Do the people crafting these corporate statements actually believe that people don’t see straight through them? Nobody is going to read this and think, “Oh, thank god, they’ve assured us that the change isn’t going to communication worse and decision-making l…

I'm not sure it's completely devoid of substance. Obviously there's no detail provided, but it is stating the goals/benefits of a general manager model for those who aren't familiar with it.

Re: Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

#36

Post by DantesKite »

tyingq wrote: post #8

I know little about how Twitter works, but it's interesting that a new leader would make such sweeping changes just a few days into the job. Usually, you would want at least a little time viewing and understanding the org from your new job/perspective before changing anything major. It sort of implies a CEO decision coming from solely a CTO perspective.

Scott Adams talks about how it’s a common tactic amongst CEO’s.

The new Twitter CEO has also worked at the company for over a decade so it’s probably been planned for a while.

Re: Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

#37

Post by cblconfederate »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #23

This part caught my attention: > Davis, previously a director of product design at Facebook, joined Twitter in 2019 to lead its design team. He is Black and Asian, and was the first Black executive at Twitter to report directly to the CEO. The company had touted him as a hard-charging leader who would detoxify the platform, but he was also criticized by some employees for what they said was a blunt, aggressive manage…

Incidentally i hate the new redesigns of everything to have black and white buttons only. I end up constantly double pressing them because i never know which one is pressed. Same with youtube. Whoever started this trend should be fired.

Re: Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

#38

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

trjordan wrote: post #6

Contrast to Apple, which uses a fully functional model: https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovatio... I find this evolution fascinating. It makes sense to me that the GM model worked for so long. If much of a company's advantages were cultural, you could put together teams that could out-compete startups within a large organization. Procter and Gamble needs to enter new markets with new products to…

> If much of a company's advantages were cultural, you could put together teams that could out-compete startups within a large organization.

Only if you can make that small team culturally independent from the parent company, which IMO is unlikely, not least because first you have to create the team and hire or find (internally) people for it, both of which tend to imprint the parent culture, and then management has to be sufficiently hands off, which again could happen but what are the odds?

Re: Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

#39

Post by ditonal »

_coveredInBees wrote: post #27

The CEO has been with twitter for 10 years and been CTO and actively involved at top-level decisions for quite some time. This isn't some sudden decision pulled out of a hat. Not sure why some commenters seem to have such knee-jerk reactions to this change. Most of it seems to be sensible. The CEO came up through the ranks from starting off as an individual contributor at Twitter. He probably has a good grasp for wha…

They were both fired because they were very expensive and a net negative on the company.

Dantley has an enormous ego, and that ego led to a bunch of fluff PR pieces commissioned where he bashed other employees which started a civil war. The guy who did the Google comic for years went to Twitter and made a comic about the civil war and HR accused him of racism (the comic was not racist) and made him take it down.

Montara made like 20 million a year but did absolutely nothing but send an email about the important of diversity every few months.

Only reason these guys weren’t fired a long time ago is that the previous Twitter CEO was totally checked out and obsessed with bitcoin. New CEO knows what’s going and and is cleaning house.

I don’t work at Twitter but I’m close to many who do so this is grapevine gossip.

Re: Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

#40

Post by FredPret »

zzzeek wrote: post #19

Boy is for-profit operation a downer. We get so much from Twitter, but of course, that doesn't make enough money, so the march towards locking it down into a closed pipeline of corporate marketing/ads/curation/tracking for the product (us) at the expense of whatever made twitter great continues on. Like, my third party Twitter clients have less and less functionality as Twitter removes public API features. My ability…

Turns out smart people who do hard work providing a massive public platform want to be paid for it. Who knew.
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