Bye Twitter – Manu Cornet
ma.nu
ma.nu
Manu is exactly the kind of engineer Musk should want to retain. He's very product focused and a hard worker. Not surprised to hear that he was volunteering for the long hours and sleeping at the office. Of course he is very expressive but he's also extremely reasonable.
Looking forward to seeing where Manu ends up going next.
https://mizrahilaw.com/california-personnel-file-request-lab...
Also, the "Confidential: do not forward. We just shared on our public blog today … please help us by astroturfing on LinkedIn" emails.
Lots of people got laid off, I don’t think it will be a problem to find a new job unless this turns into something crazy.
That Musk couldn't interpret this right, and acted in his usual rash and vindictive way says more about him than it does about Manu. Also consistent with the way he lashed back at Gary Kasparov, clearly unaware who he was speaking to ("what have you ever done" indeed).
Any person truly laying claim to the crown of king of nerds would be respectful to both of these people and it says a lot about Musk that he wasn't. Taking over a Silicon Valley company without recognizing its culture and then firing someone who helped build it -- because they made jokes -- is beyond crass, it shows complete obliviousness to what he just bought.
FWIW Google used to have his cartoons mounted on walls around campus. Including ones that were (gently) critical of leadership and culture. How come Larry&Sergey&Eric could handle his gentle critique, but Musk cannot?
Leaders don't behave this way.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/03/elon-musk...
Anyways, this convo right here -- along with the thread one over where people are rushing over themselves to complain about someone going after Copilot with a lawsuit -- is peak what orangesite seems to be becoming. Deference to authority and ego, and lack of recognition of the nerd community and actual hacker culture and its history. Ew.
Being accused of pedophilia by a top tier celebrity is a very dangerous position to be in. Not even Larry Ellison does things like that.
It seems really doubtful considering he was getting up-to-speed on a sizeable company bought almost entirely with his own money.
Just like how we colloquially refer to mortgaged houses as being owned by the buyers and not by the bank.
This is Musk worship at another level. Active rejection of facts to make up some story about how he's some great businessman. He bought into a bad deal with no research and now he's scrambling
Banks have financed the buyout through 13 billion dollars of debt financing. There's also billions raised by others with Musk financing about 27 billion in his own cash that he raised by selling Tesla stock[0]
[0] https://www.businesstoday.in/latest/trends/story/elon-musks-...
And the article linked does not list where it got the information from, nor is it a reputable outlet for tech/finance news in the U.S., so it's questionable whether you bothered to actually read the entire article.
I've only been able to find rumours and so on for specific numbers, not anything a major outlet is willing vouch for.
If you genuinely don't understand that different sources can have different degrees of trustworthiness then it appears you need to do some self-reflection instead of accusing others of ignorance.
Trawling through the hundreds of actions of thousands of individual employees in a search for subversive contrarian views is a qualitatively different thing with respect to the notion of someone “having the time”.
At best, someone was afraid Musk would get wind of this guy and wanted to take care of the problem before that happened.
Manu Cornet worked for Google for a decade, making these comics and getting famous for both them and (by all accounts) being a very good engineer. One of the comics leaked and was read by Satya Nadella, who cited it as an inspiration to turn Microsoft's corporate culture around.
So there's at least some people even in Big Tech who can tolerate a bit of very gentle chiding.
Seriously, Cornet is very tame in his comedy. If he didn't actually work in Big Tech, most of his comics wouldn't be considered all that clever or funny - but they get that little boost from nervous laughter of his colleagues. It's transgressive by corporate standards, but barely.
Who wants to work in a hellhole where even that isn't tolerated?
Hopefully it was scored like golf.
My last real coding job, i was in tough competition with another guy for the most lines of code removed...
One of our managers was going to tout how productive the different teams were.
One team moved two years worth of their code into the repository just after the reporting period.
So I generated a buttload of comments, because they were counted too, and my team came out the most "productive".
"Computers are useless. They only give answers." - Pablo Picasso
I think you missed the point of philosophy. It's pretty much all about pondering questions you can't answer. Once you manage to answer them, you're not doing philosophy any more but have moved into the realm of science.
However, this discussion about philosophy and freedom is the reverse: people are already fighting and in many cases dying for what they think is this thing called 'freedom', and yet it proves elusive to find a definition.
The real-world, societal impact is already there. So it's worth studying.
And if you study it and find that it's elusive and nearly impossible to pin down... well now that's interesting, and should make you think critically about anyone who uses the term as a low-nuance bludgeon in an argument.
(In the other article around Twitter here today - this thread - https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1586955288061452289 , I think this point is made pretty clear early on by the spam example: perfectly legal, yet "bots" are a self-professed problem for pro-whatever-speech-is-legal,don't-get-involved-further Musk...)
All definitions are ill-defined if you're willing to question the words in the definition.
Maybe the point of philosophy is to uncover the weaknesses in our understanding of the word, rather than gain confidence in understanding it. So, asking "am I free?" helps me uncover my assumptions about the world and find out exactly how many levels deep I'm willing to go before I trust that the words in the definition are true.
Sounds to me like the outcome was pretty positive, you came out the other end way smarter than most.
“Freedom” is always “freedom to X”. The real debate is about the X, not how to define the word “freedom” itself, which is comparatively trivial, and doesn’t have much bearing on the X part.
So, I think OP is saying, please don't shout simple slogans about complex issues.
Realistically, the level of effort I'm going to put forward to defend some person on the internet's right to make a particular comment is limited approximately to "writing a comment myself."
Defending to the death? As in risking my life? Maybe if someone's violently asserting a right to regulate what everyone says, or even some particular group says, if I don't think they can defend themselves. But one person under non-violent threat? I'll surprise myself if I make it off the couch.
That's my take on it.
I will say though that I find authoritarians and their sycophants far worse, hypocritical and dangerous.
His cartoons and the way he distributes them is really quite distasteful to me.
Many of them criticize the organization he works for which okay is arguably not bad if it is measured and constructive, but I also think it can be destructive for morale and pointless. Everyone bitches and gossips and dramatizes about work, it's part of being in the trenches together, but you don't generally publish that on company-wide or public forums. Which is bad enough.
But actually much worse is his singling out individuals for criticism. Repeatedly. This meets textbook definitions for workplace bullying, and I don't think that's okay. Setting aside the other subjects of his cartoons, I don't think it is okay even to target the CEO this way. He may affect the entire company, but imagine doing a weekly cartoon criticizing your line manager and sharing in among her direct reports. Horrible, and certainly bullying. Parag is a human too, and should not have to be subject to that in his workplace. So is Musk, whatever you think of him, and the other executives in the cartoons for that matter.
Just because you're playing the whacky eccentric artist with hip cartoons that criticize those terrible corporations and hated billionaihs and CEOs and everyone on social media gives you lots of likes and shares... does not absolve you from the effect of your speech on others. And the calculus actually changes radically when you're not just some random comedian commentating on a public figure, but actually a colleague commenting from a position of knowing a lot of private details about these people.
I'm actually amazed this person lasted as long as he did. I feel sorry for colleagues of people like this who are affected by them, because often people are scared to speak out, and often the companies themselves seem to be scared of the backlash from disciplining or terminating them because of their cult followings.
Damn!
So yes, there are shareholders, and there are creditors, it's just that in the private equity world, "caveat emptor" applies, they are expected to be sophisticated and wealthy enough to not need the protections given to investors in publicly traded companies.
Whatever that means or if it's ever actually happening though remains to be seen.
Often, these are the same people that get pissed when a workplace penalizes someone for some racist or sexist behavior. So, don't make comics that make fun of company or its culture, you deserve to get punished you baby, but do celebrate a Mad Men-style environment ala Activision, because people who complain about say, sexist behavior, are just fragile woke babies.
Why should we celebrate asshole bosses? Steve Jobs was an asshole? Ok. But Tim Cook isn't. Sundar Pichai isn't. There's a lot of examples of successful companies with non-asshole CEOs and culture.
We shouldn't tolerate this idea that success is somehow correlated with being an asshole CEO who treats employees with total disrespect and that employees need to be kept in a state of terror that they could lose their job at any second due to a capricious CEO on an off day.
Maybe it'll take Musk losing his $44b investment before fans stop seeing him as some kind of infallible genius.
> ...
> On the same day, I was fired and that post was taken down.
So were you fired or laid off? This seems like a relevant distinction in this case. Either way it's a shitty thing though :(.
The information held by Twitter could place the physical safety of thousands of people at risk. It could place millions of people into other concerning situations, such as ostracism, bullying, and legal quagmires. Whether a fired employee loses access to internal systems at 2PM or 5PM is utterly irrelevant by comparison.
To me, it would come off as insincere, passive-aggressive, and demeaning if someone talked to me like this, especially at work. And before I see a "you must be fun at parties" comment, there is a very distinct difference between friendliness and patronizing.
However:
>Survivor of late stage cancer [1]
I have no idea what this sort of thing does to the psyche, outlook, and communication style of a human being, so I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt here.
I guess it's cathartic for the one fired, so there's that.
A big quirk of firing situations is that the company can’t (or won’t) tell their side of the story. As a result, fired employees often feel like they can take control of the narrative by posting their version of events without worry about the company telling their side of the story.
In this case, the author casually mentioned that they believed they were among the top 5-10% of stack ranked engineers at Twitter as a way to get ahead of any assumptions that they were laid off for performance reasons.
I’ve seen other cases where fired people try to take advantage of this asymmetry to tell outright lies. A friend had a remote employee who gradually became less and less responsive until they couldn’t be reached for entire weeks at a time. They fired the employee, who immediately took to social media to fabricate a story about being unjustly fired for some other trivial situation at work that had no bearing on the firing. Of course, the failure to communicate or get any work done wasn’t mentioned at all, leaving readers to believe that the only contributing factor was the trivial, unrelated work situation stated in her posts. And it worked phenomenally well! She had a number of invitations to join other companies from people who thought they were helping right an injustice that had occurred to this person. (Note: I’m telling this story as a response to the parent comment, not implying it’s what’s happening in the linked blog post). So there can be some weird upside to taking control of the narrative if (and only if) one has a social media audience to share the narrative with.
Seems mostly immature and passive-aggressive to me.
Aside from the criticism of the company, if I'm a manager I'm probably saying we don't need immature, passive-aggressive people on the team.
Personal opinion, but I'd probably not complain publicly about being terminated, unless the company broke the law regarding my termination.
Also,
>I have better things to do
Of course you do, pal. :^)
"Q: What do you mean by stack-ranking engineers? What were the criteria? A: Raw number of lines of code over a certain period (a year I think)."
Is correlation of line count and employee performance still a thing? I thought that went out of fashion decades ago.
Also, in a situation where the owner is hostile to the employees, and the employees are hostile to the owner, how are you going to perform more accurate assessments? Code output may be the least bad heuristic they can use.
And of course, let's not forget this whole thing is meant to be a spectacle.
Here I've been writing code concisely like a sucker!
Nonsense. This is standard stuff that can be accessed by reaching out to HR of your former employer
I hadn't considered that Google are a competitor to Twitter at this point (at least, not since Google+ went away). And I guess they are happy to host some of their infrastructure on GCP as well...
Manu is anything but naive.
So the dude publishes a tool for downloading internal communications (and making the intended use of the tool very explicit). It reaches some legal person in the company who gets to decide what to do about it.
So option A, do nothing. If in a month from now somebody uses it to leak a confidential email, others will remember your inaction, you lose your job. Option B, terminate the dude, block the tool. You get a pat on the back for doing your job, dude leaves.
It's really a no-brainer. If a company has someone who is literally paid to minimize liabilities, painting a big red "liability" sign on your back in front of them is not a good idea. Might as well pull out a gun in front of a cop, and then complain about police brutality (if you survive).
It is also a weird tantrum from the loyalty perspective. The corporate game is all about pretending to trust each other, while looking for multiple backstabbing opportunities at the same time. If you publish a tool saying "hey, if the corporate screws you over, here's how you fight back", you publicly show that you don't trust the company anymore. So unless the company immediately shows that they don't trust you, it's almost like they let you win the round, confirming that they shouldn't be trusted.
> I am doing fine. I am very lucky: I have citizenship of another country with good health insurance, I have a green card, I am fine financially (that may have allowed me to speak up more than others). I don’t hold any grudges against people who were just doing their job when confronted with a naive and mildly idealistic troublemaker like me, and I loved my time at Twitter, especially my coworkers.
This sounds more like someone looking for an exit, and who got it along with a severance package.
There may be a couple exceptions but I haven't seen any proof for those.
This could be considered cause, or it may not - not a lawyer, just a guy who writes code sometimes interacting with various legal precedents
> Q: Will you get a severance package?
> A: I doubt it.
Funny enough, OP (Manu Cornet) created this very famous catoon called "Org Charts"
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/%22Org_c...
I hope now he can now add Musk and TWTR to this panel LOL
Sounds like he could easily afford the consequences, and is enjoying the opportunity it gave him to cast light on what is happening at Twitter. More power to him.
Choosing the former you will always lose, that's the entire point of power.
But this is the exact point of choosing to stand up to power. It's knowing that you'll lose and asserting that perhaps there is another power that stands above the person standing over you.
I've been in this position, stood up and lost. But I can assure you that there is something you do take away from this that stays with you far longer than anything you might gain by submitting.
FWIW I read Manu's cartoons at Google -- to be honest I found them to be hit or miss, though I think they got better over time. As one other person here said, I do feel like a few of them unfairly called out a single person.
But this blog post makes me more of a fan! It's great when people have an agenda other than keeping their jobs, and when they recognize their right to be fired too :)