Live data from Hacker News

Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

twitter.com

451–460 of 1001 posts

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#451
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. And for the right financial upside. I completely understand going hardcore at a startup in which you have equity. But hasn't Twitter going private removed a lot of the incentive for employees? What is the upside for a Twitter engineer dedicating themselves to the company? Making one of the richest peo…

I once worked for an adtech company that had profit sharing instead of RSUs. The early employees were compensated very well because it was unsurprisingly very profitable. I joined after they raised money so they switched to "phantom equity" in a LLC instead of RSUs. When they went public I was granted 1 stock for every piece of phantom equity plus about $5. These weren't options, I didn't have to pay anything to exer…

At this point, I find it extremely doubtful that Musk realizes he actually needs willing employees in the first place.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#452
post #375

>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

The Big Four are licking their lips at the thought of swooping in at hazard pay to the tune of hundreds of accountants.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#454

I hope that the wheels stay on sufficiently to get an idea of where EM wants to take Twitter and find out what kind of value it can bring. Having said that, he really made it obvious to me as an eng that the severance is the option I would be taking. Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. But somebody who takes over the company and accrues…

A culture where being smart gets you social debt may be part of the problem

Arguably, failing to factor human emotions into your leadership techniques does not qualify as smart behavior.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#455
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The legal system still exists though and your changes would need to not be auditable or else you're going to get thrown in jail. And no matter how much you think you're smarter than the average bear, you're probably going to leave traces. And if Musk gets personally pissed off at some bit of particularly bad sabotage he's got enough money to hire some actual expert outside talent to manage the incident and nail your…

"In the chaos of layoffs, firings, and resignations our security team was entirely gutted and as a result my login must have hacked by one of the literal billions of people on the planet with an interest in taking down this company, even if only for the lolz. The proof of our security issues, staffing woes, and public animosity has been extensively documented. Whatever traces of sabotage you may have found cannot rea…

Seems like self-sabotage rather than employee sabotage.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't intend to be mean, but I think your statement is trivially disprovable: $4.8B annual revenue, even if every advertiser spent $1M annually, that's 4,800 advertisers who all require inside reps. If each rep can handle 100 clients (unlikely; that's less than 1 hour / month attention), they would need 480 inside reps alone just to keep ad agencies happy.

No they don’t all require inside sales reps. Most advertising can be automated. 95% of clients can self serve. They ran this website 12 years ago with the same number of users and like 200 people.

Both of your statements are just absurdly wrong that they're not even worth engaging with.

12 years ago we didn't have stuff like GDPR or CCPA or any number of data compliance laws that require a full team around to prevent getting fined into oblivion.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#457
post #251
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. This is a death march - no question about it. The book by Edward Yourdon should be required reading for any who are still at Twitter. One of the things that is in the book had in it that I recall was a four quadrant grid of 'morale' and 'likelihood of success'(?). There are indeed high morale high ch…

One of the things I do to ground myself in situations where I'm facing a death march, or find myself working at a company that does a pivot is listen to the song "Road to Nowhere" by the Talking Heads. If the intro lyrics cut too deep, I start looking. Well, we know where we're goin' But we don't know where we've been And we know what we're knowin' But we can't say what we've seen And we're not little children And we…

This reminds me of this saying:

We, the unwilling

Led by the unknowing

Are doing the impossible

For the ungrateful

We have done so much

For so long

With so little

We are now qualified

To do anything

With nothing

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#458

I hope that the wheels stay on sufficiently to get an idea of where EM wants to take Twitter and find out what kind of value it can bring. Having said that, he really made it obvious to me as an eng that the severance is the option I would be taking. Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. But somebody who takes over the company and accrues…

> Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore". It's a lose-lose situation; I don't think Twitter's problems would be solved by engineering harder; and you will spend 80 hrs/wk where you can end up fired because people aren't as deterministic as cars. It's a comp…

> What's most surprising it seems he has no thesis for the company or how it can be made better or what was so terrible about it.

Have you ever used Twitter?

To someone who has used Twitter in the past weeks this reads like deliberate trolling.

Twitter was absolutely terrible to use and the pace of noticible change within days/weeks under Elon is mind blowing to me. He's clearly going fast with things like getting rid of (shadow-)banning for no apparent reason, getting rid of banning anything of a certain political flavor, making Twitter faster (both in browser as well as on Android), getting rid of fake scammer accounts who deliberately impersonated famous people and companies to scam people, getting rid of bots and spam which where a HUGE problem (still are until the transition to verified is done) and so on.

I mean getting rid of politically flavored sensorship alone will have a massive impact globally for something like Twitter. That alone was obviously very terrible to many people before Musk.

PS: since you said you don't understand what his vision is. My best guess: it's to create a platform that competes with click-bait sponsored propaganda journalism. In the form of citizen journalism on Twitter. I think it could work and I also think there's a huge need for it as traditional journalism is dead in my opinion.

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#459
post #392

Elon's first non-reply tweet since the news broke: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593415171149791232 > How do you make a small fortune in social media? > Start out with a large one.

Good word, it gets better from there: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593455727611215872 > And … we just hit another all-time high in Twitter usage lol > Let that sink in … He literally cannot distinguish between good and bad attention. He still thinks he's winning this.

That link works fine, site still up, and you yourself linked to it. He wins a chuckle out of me. :)

Re: Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended

#460

Elon's first non-reply tweet since the news broke: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593415171149791232 > How do you make a small fortune in social media? > Start out with a large one.

A top reply [0] that Elon replied to: > Elon, there's a bunch of us in SV who will come up tonight to help on the infra side to keep the site up. > If you need help just ask. As if you could just drive over to the Twitter HQ, grok how all the infrastructure works, and make/provide meaningful contributions/tweaks/upkeep.... tonight That's either a level of delusion that I can't imagine and/or someone who has no idea w…

> As if you could just drive over to the Twitter HQ, grok how all the infrastructure works, and make/provide meaningful contributions/tweaks/upkeep.... tonight

The infra is just too clever for anybody to grok in a million years. These clowns probably don't even have fedoras, no way they'll ever figure it out.

Post reply on HN