731–740 of 1001 posts
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Usually your employer has confidentiality and non-disparage clauses in your employment contract and separation agreements. So "This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules." probably would be more like "This Tweet violated your contractual agreement to your employer".
This is exactly right and it's ridiculous people don't see this. Free speech isn't equal to breaking confidentiality agreements on a platform owned and operated by the company you work for.
And so the grand experiment begins. I feel bad for the folks losing their job because that always sucks, and I hope there's a decent severance package. Now we'll see what happens to Twitter... I hardly use it, so if it implodes it won't bother me too much. But I am curious to see if all the "how do you need X people to do Y?" commenters are correct in this case. The app is simple but doing simple things at scale is h…
In a few years, if not sooner, Twitter will be right there with Tesla/SpaceX in terms of resume cachet. Everyone will see their culture has been transformed to one of rigor and performance. The "A" players will surface and they will do more with half the staff (or less even) than they ever did with 7500 people... and it will be noteworthy. Musk will be in the mix heavy for about 6 months. He'll make executive hires t…
In an environment like that, "rock stars" who can knock out projects in short order are going to see their careers skyrocket. But the trick is, they're going to pull this off by taking every shortcut they can. Code reviews are out, refactoring is out, performance and scalability concerns are out, etc. They will successfully launch the thing and then flee to the next glorious launch opportunity.
This will work very, very well for a while. The thing about taking on a lot of debt is that it allows you to accomplish big things in short order. But the debt will be hidden, and over a year or two, they will start to find that suddenly getting projects done is becoming nearly impossible, even compared to the pre-Musk days. And things will slowly fall apart.
It might be that all of the technical debt they're about to take on will have been worth it. Debt's a tool, and maybe making big changes to adjust their company's heading is worth it. And maybe to Musk, it's VERY worth it, because technical debt doesn't show up on financial ledgers, and he probably wants the company to look as solvent as possible.
But I wouldn't want to be a software engineer there in a year.
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I think there's a much simpler and less juicy angle here: someone posted a screenshot of an internal communication , and it got removed. It's not surprising or controversial that Twitter would try to contain a leak of its own internal comms (a screenshot of their slack). This isn't "Twitter took down a disparaging post about Twitter", it's that they tried to stop the sharing of internal data. That being said, I don't…
Oh, please. This "internal communication" was a bunch of blue hearts if the source is to be believed. What vital business information did that leak?
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> This is ironic if you consider all the complaining that Musk does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to) It’s not ironic or remotely unexpected if you’ve taken notice of any of his actual actions involving freedom of speech.
Elon is the type of person where action and words tell a very different story. In that way, it's expected. It's still ironic as hell, given his words.
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This is a discussion board. Therefore, commenting at all requires something to discuss, and there is nothing really to discuss specifically around the topic of empathy towards the laid off employees. It sucks, we all know it sucks, and it shouldn't be minimized but there's no "other side" to that viewpoint, so what is there to talk about? People aren't "heartless" because they choose to talk about the bigger picture…
The vast majority of the people let go were management-class silicon valley people. Not a single tear should be shed.
A lot of the tweets that are quoted in the article have been removed. For example, Twitter employee Cristina Angeli is mentioned in the story for having tweeted an image of "staff members... flooding an internal Slack channel with blue heart emojis as they wait to learn their fate tomorrow", but that tweet is deleted on twitter itself because "This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules." This is ironic if you consider all…
> "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to) Freedom of speech is not the first amendment and vice versa. Freedom of speech is an ideal that applies to all people and all spaces, public and private, while the First Amendment only applies in America and to the government. People think they sound smart when they say freedom of speech onl…
You are free to post on your website and Twitter is free to manage their website.
Elon Musk is great at building new things. Time will tell if he can re-invent an existing thing. So far, it's not looking great. Corporate raiders / PE usually have a well defined thesis and plan to hit the ground running - Elon clearly does not. His plan seems to be "I need to double free cash flow ASAP, we'll figure out how along the way". Trying to figure out how to lay off half of the company, without negatively…
He clearly does, but most people don't care to engage with it in good faith.
Something like:
- Twitter's value is its integrated GLOBAL network of professionals/leaders/celebrities
- Twitter Co has not remotely leveraged this, going for a FB/Reddit/etc content-centric advertiser model instead
- Sprinkle in some "super app" ambitions. If the new KYC subscriber model is successful, then Twitter could disrupt LinkedIn, then possibly payments too.
SV has been captured by advertisers and many people think "there are no alternatives". But there clearly are.
And so the grand experiment begins. I feel bad for the folks losing their job because that always sucks, and I hope there's a decent severance package. Now we'll see what happens to Twitter... I hardly use it, so if it implodes it won't bother me too much. But I am curious to see if all the "how do you need X people to do Y?" commenters are correct in this case. The app is simple but doing simple things at scale is h…
In a few years, if not sooner, Twitter will be right there with Tesla/SpaceX in terms of resume cachet. Everyone will see their culture has been transformed to one of rigor and performance. The "A" players will surface and they will do more with half the staff (or less even) than they ever did with 7500 people... and it will be noteworthy. Musk will be in the mix heavy for about 6 months. He'll make executive hires t…
Social media just isn't these days, from an engineering perspective. The fun parts (scaling distributed infrastructure) are already old hat and it's mostly a business rules complexity problem. Most of what all these people are doing relates to complicated and boring business details. It's a corporate job. It won't pay, for engineers, in excitement, so it has to pay in money.
So I'm not sure where all these people that are so excited to work their asses off for something that will be boring for them will come from (exciting for the businesspeople, as there are very hard business problems, but not for the engineers, as there are no hard tech problems in this domain anymore).
The only option will be to do what FAANG and hedge funds have always done, and either really overpay to force top talent to care about these boring problems, or just settle for average talent with average productivity and average outcomes.
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In a few years, if not sooner, Twitter will be right there with Tesla/SpaceX in terms of resume cachet. Everyone will see their culture has been transformed to one of rigor and performance. The "A" players will surface and they will do more with half the staff (or less even) than they ever did with 7500 people... and it will be noteworthy. Musk will be in the mix heavy for about 6 months. He'll make executive hires t…
In a way, I agree. Twitter's moving into an era where they have way fewer people but also huge pressure to release a bunch of changes on nightmarishly short schedules. I guarantee there's some senior tech lead who's just been handed a "make $8/month blue checkmarks happen, you have two weeks" assignment. In an environment like that, "rock stars" who can knock out projects in short order are going to see their careers…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to) Freedom of speech is not the first amendment and vice versa. Freedom of speech is an ideal that applies to all people and all spaces, public and private, while the First Amendment only applies in America and to the government. People think they sound smart when they say freedom of speech onl…
Conversely, people often reference "First Amendment" in situations that have nothing to do with government censorship.
It's quite akin to opposing systematic racism from private businesses. You could argue that a private business should have the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason, and it shouldn't concern any outside parties. But when these actions begin to interfere with the ability of large segments of the population to go grocery shopping, use the toilet, get a job, or get an education, it becomes a larger social issue that is deeply concerning to anyone who believes in the principles that underly a free society.