Hacker News Reader

Comment by COGlory | Hacker News Reader

Why? What has Musk actually done?

To date there's:

- Reports that he had Tesla engineers with him when they interviewed some Twitter engineeers. Currently the biggest arguments against that are: Tesla engineers belong to Tesla (we have no idea in what capacity they were they) and "that's an ineffective strategy to review a codebase" (we have no idea if that's what they were actually doing.

- Reports that he gave a team until Nov 7th to roll out a paid subscription

- Reports that he may lay people off (unverified)

- Carried in a sink.

None of these things are particularly unreasonable - Twitter owes something like 1 billion in debt payments this year and brings in close to $500 million, so layoffs were probably coming regardless.

I don't really see what the big deal with Musk buying Twitter is, except as cover for being mad about him unbanning people.

View on HN

> Reports that he gave a team until Nov 7th to roll out a paid subscription

> None of these things are particularly unreasonable

Six business days to come up with a system to process $6m per month of income.

Nothing unreasonable indeed...

Yes, by historical Twitter standards it may seem unreasonable to write a Stripe API integration with simple UI and account history in six days. In the real world, however, a single developer can do it in less time than that.

Twitter (and really, BigCo in general) engineers are accustomed to their foosball tables, catered meals, wine bars, beer taps, rooftop gaming session, and endless meetings and code reviews.

It's possible that Musk is trying to set the reasonable expectation that a total comp package worth $400k should be exchanged for actual productivity, rather than playtime and busywork.

Ah yes, go ahead and create a stripe account that will allow $6m flow in less than a week, hit me up when you're done, that alone would probably require more than 6 days of back and forth with Stripe

I too thought I could rewrite twitter and instagram in 10 days with a few JS and PHP framework when I was fresh out of uni

> Twitter (and really, BigCo in general) engineers are accustomed to their foosball tables, catered meals, wine bars, beer taps, rooftop gaming session, and endless meetings and code reviews.

Tell me you've never been hired at Twitter without telling me you've never been hired at Twitter, lol. Every company has some dead weight, sure, but what you describe isn't remotely applicable to most people.

> In the real world, however, a single developer can do it in less time than that.

Which single developer can rollout payments globally in 6 days? How much time do they set aside to ensuring regulatory compliance with dozens of jurisdictions that have occasionally conflicting rules?

twitter already has payment within their systems (super follows + twitter blue).

They already have the payment system in place. This is just adding verification as a feature to the already existing subscription service.

What? How would you feel if someone announced they were buying your company after breaking M&A laws and messing around with a significant portion of your net worth, tried to back out, further messing around with your net worth, started talking shit about your company, takes it over because they are forced to, then within days, is threating 25% layoffs.

Would you want to be in that kind of situation?

I'm not sure if my perspective is warped or yours is, but from my standpoint this is all pretty common in corporate America. Companies are acquired or merge and most everything changes - polices, training, perks, and almost always significant layoffs. Similar things usually happen to divisions and groups within a company as leadership changes. Has this really not been a thing at places like Twitter?

The difference is that usually it's not covered minute-by-minute on all the major news outlets.

No one would want to be in this situation yet it happens every day. Where I'm at, new VPs take over our division every couple years and every time they reorganize everything, rename everything, promote some people, lay off a bunch of people, bring in their "people", change polices and procedures, etc. It sucks but it's part of business as far as I can tell. If I walked out every time this happened I think I'd be hard pressed to keep a steady job.

> How would you feel if someone announced they were buying your company after breaking M&A laws and messing around with a significant portion of your net worth, tried to back out, further messing around with your net worth, started talking shit about your company, takes it over because they are forced to

As a salaried SE, why would you care? Or is that about SV's love for paying in stock instead of cash?

> then within days, is threating 25% layoffs.

That's an unconfirmed rumor at best, a lie most likely.

> Reports that he gave a team until Nov 7th to roll out a paid subscription

> None of these things are particularly unreasonable

I see you're not an engineer according to your bio. Can you explain how you came to the conclusion that having one work week to roll out a brand new feature is reasonable so I can tell you how completely wrong you are?

The feature was in development for far longer. The real question is, will it exist on Nov. 7th?

> The feature was in development for far longer.

You know this?

This is false.

Most of these people don't have to work for Twitter. They ended up working there because it used to be a nice company to work for.

New ownership seems to have changed that, not only in the things that were rumored they would do, but also in the abysmal communication during the whole thing.

This kind of thing happens all the time and it's always a risk, but that doesn't mean that people have to like it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com