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Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

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Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#741

Post by tempnow987 »

idiotsecant wrote: post #578
bentt wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

SpaceX and Tesla have no 'resume cachet'. They are widely known in engineering circles as hiring huge numbers of entry level or just barely above entry level engineers, exploiting their interest in technology to work them like rented mules until they burn out, and then discarding them. It's not a negative having worked at one of these places necessarily but unless the next employer is looking for an engineer with sou…

Is this a real statement? At least in SV the last few years, ex-tesla and ex-spacex in terms of getting funding for projects was a big win. Some went to apple et al as well for pretty good money.

I know of a few folks from what I would call older line engineering (thinking boeing / SLS type places) actively looking to get onto a musk company (younger folks generally pretty eager to do work).

It's pretty visable when you see NASA administrators doing presentations and then SpaceX folks (who all seem like they are in their 20's to me). Pretty clear you are getting a lot more experience at SpaceX then in the big SLS subcontractor stack for example. I'm adjacent to this space a bit and I think most of the senior folks leaving tesla / spacex (plenty of them) have all landed pretty well despite your claims.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#742

Post by robotresearcher »

edderly wrote: post #301
losvedir wrote: post #180

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…

I think it'll be fine. You don't need 7000 people to run a micro blogging service. It's really that simple.

I've seen this statement a lot, and I think it's missing something.

Public companies typically have growth as a goal. Twitter was not making a lot of money. Some of these people were working on building a future Twitter that would grow bigger and richer. I'm not saying they were on the path to success, just that I expect a lot of the activity there could be described that way.

Five years ago you could say of Uber 'You don't need 5000 people to run a freelance taxi app', when they had hundreds (thousands?) of people working on autonomous driving. Amazon didn't seem to need scores of backend engineers to run a web store, but now AWS is a huge business. Google employs vast numbers of people but has a relatively small number of impactful products, only some of which make money.

Again, not claiming they were doing it well, just that they were trying stuff beyond maintaining what we see.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#743

Post by brtkdotse »

CrazyStat wrote: post #726
neel8986 wrote: post #614

The way employees were treated was beyond disgraceful. Really feel sorry for my younger self who believed that Musk truly cares about Humanity. Never ever hero worship a billionaire while thinking he will change the world. They are all ego manic pos hungry for more and more control. Small things you can do a) If you care about environment don't buy an over expensive electric car. Think about efforts to improve Public…

Starlink's total bandwidth is about the same as a small regional ISP. There is no way it will ever "control the world's internet". Starlink will serve many places where terrestrial wired or wireless access doesn't make sense, including oceans, very rural areas, uninhabited areas, airplanes, rockets, etc. It will never be able to serve 1% of a high density city. It will never control anything on the scale of the world…

Can't find the article now but it made an interesting point that Starlink is just busywork for SpaceX to keep launching rockets.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#744

Post by rednerrus »

losvedir wrote: post #180

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…

My guess is that very few Ops people are going to be part of this layoff.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#745

Post by havblue »

ankurdhama wrote: post #88

> print out the code you wrote in the last 30-60 days This is either a joke or Musk (or his team) doesn't know about something called version control and how it can be used.

Is everyone using the same version control system? I wouldn't be surprised if some people have code that would get missed if they just had IT pull everything.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#746

Post by codeslave13 »

kweingar wrote: post #553

One thing I’m surprised to see such little commentary on is the fact that Musk violated California’s WARN Act by not providing appropriate notice of layoffs.

From posts elsewhere. They are still employed till feb. Just do not report for work. So no violation

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#748

Post by philjohn »

nostromo wrote: post #534
john-radio wrote: post #402

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…

The Town Square metaphor is equally strained. If you act like an objectionable fool you'll soon be chased out of it.

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#749

Post by pookha »

losvedir wrote: post #180

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…

Twitter is a toxic clown party lama joust. It's nothing but a means for millions of narcissistic people to decorate themselves with signifier quotes and feel-good platitudes. twitter is where progressives go to sniff each others farts... So good for Elon for charging them 8 dollars a month for their little blue checks. What an embarrassment to my generation twitter is and it makes me ashamed that people in my industry created such a heinous (platform).

Re: Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

#750

Post by compiler-guy »

john-radio wrote: post #402

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…

Many of the child posts assume that Twitter deleted these tweets. That isn't clear to me. It's possible the original authors did (happy to see proof either way).

When one is laid off, there are often clauses in the severance agreement that forbid disparaging the company or leaking secrets, or similar things.

If I wanted that severance check and someone pointed out to me that the tweet may be in violation of the severance agreement, I would delete it too.

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