The Email Caste's Last Stand
compactmag.com
compactmag.com
Chris Sacco nailed this in the comments he tweeted recently. There are businesses where engineering can “get it right,” like cars and rockets, but Twitter is not one of those businesses.
It’s not clear to me why cutting back to only engineers would be a good strategy at Twitter. Twitter doesn’t make widgets for people to buy, it makes culture. Rejecting cultural topics in favor of lines of code seems like an internally-driven decision, not one that reflects a deep understanding of the customer.
Once he took possession of the company, he had to demonstrate that it was somebody else's fault that the finances make no sense.
To be honest, that's what seems so disingenuous about this article. Why, on Earth, would you fail to mention the fact that the boss is, for the most part, trying to fix losses that he, himself, incurred?
[EDIT] Better version: it's like he bought a car with a flat tire and financed the purchase by selling the other three tires.
In the US, only about half of college graduates have jobs that require a college education.
Craigslist has about 50 employees. If you really had to, you could probably run Twitter with a very small staff, and the computing outsourced to AWS.
Why didn't they though? Why did they become a monster that, as we are seeing right now, can survive easily with about half of its employees gone in a heartbeat?
Plus, you don't grow to a tech behemoth (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, et c.) by running smart & lean. You might get bought by them that way (cf. WhatsApp, and maybe even Minecraft) but you don't become one of them. So if leadership/investors thought Twitter had a shot at joining the big-boy club, maybe that's why.
Great companies focus on business performance not headcount. I'm more impressed with leaders that generate more positive metrics per dollar. Sometimes it takes headcount, but most of the time, a really great exec can make more revenue/growth/market share happen with the same or less headcount.
A bit premature to make this claim imo
> Musk is engaged in a war against “the cathedral”—that is, against the dominance of professionals who have sought to make the internet more restrictive
> Musk has now supposedly poked the first hole in the digital Berlin Wall erected over the past half decade.
> the revolt against his leadership is the last stand of a cohort of activist hangers-on
> So he proceeded to do what most executives would do in this situation: He laid off some of his workers.
> solicited a new wave of outrage from Musk’s haters. But even if you remove him from the equation, Twitter couldn’t have gone much longer without massive layoffs.
And this is just the first three paragraphs.
If you read the whole thing and came away with "this is neutral and objective" then I don't know what to say.
> In many accounts, Musk is engaged in a war against “the cathedral” [...] Musk has now supposedly poked the first hole in the digital Berlin Wall erected over the past half decade.
This is couched in the language of describing reports which are in circulation ("many accounts", "supposedly"), but without endorsing them. Indeed the author is going to present a different view. The next paragraph continues.
> Yet there is another aspect of the Musk takeover that has little to do with free speech or even ideology [...] As a recession looms, Silicon Valley is shedding the non-essential workers it acquired when unlimited venture funding made turning a profit an afterthought. Musk happens to have taken the helm at Twitter just as this reality is asserting itself.
The author downplays the previously presented narratives. Musk's role is minimized and the titular trend (the "Email Caste's Last Stand") is brought to the fore.
> Musk paid $44 billion to acquire Twitter, and all indications are that the platform isn’t worth anything close to that.
This is rather the opposite of a fawning endorsement.
> So he proceeded to do what most executives would do in this situation [...] The abrupt firing of thousands of employees solicited a new wave of outrage from Musk’s haters. But even if you remove him from the equation, Twitter couldn’t have gone much longer without massive layoffs. The same thing is happening across Silicon Valley.
Again the author downplays Musk's agency; his actions are an inevitable result of the current environment.
There are lots of us "diverse" engineers who wouldn't have been given a first shot without such sensitivities.
So is every other diverse engineer.
Circumscribing these concerns as somehow fake or inauthentic, just some mandarins and policy wonks, is gutting. But that's just another day in this industry.
pre·oc·cu·pied (prē-ŏk′yə-pīd′) adj. 1. a. Absorbed in thought; engrossed. b. Excessively concerned with something; distracted. 2. Formerly or already occupied. 3. Already used and therefore unavailable for further use.
Capitalism insists you be preoccupied with yours, as well.
My survival depends in part on diversity & inclusion efforts. As much as they can seem to cut against the grain of output, the industry was Not Okay Without Them.
...and, good lord. Bringing a dictionary definition to an idea-fight.
Diversity should be normal, I agree and indeed perhaps some efforts should always be spend on such matters. But when is it enough?
You simply have no idea how strong we've all had to be. In part, because of patronizing attitudes like you've expressed here.
The author take on French revolution is bullshit. And i don't even understand where it came from? I assume a lot here, because i cannot be in the author head.
The author read about Louvois for whatever reason, let's say an army fetish? (i'm projecting maybe). Then he misunderstood the impact of this army size on coordination and cooperation, especially at the time. Read about Autrichian war of succession and the fact that the biggest european army did not handle itself as it should have. Then he extrapolated a lot without reading any academic discussions and made himself an opinion.
I understand, i do that a lot in my HN comments, but if i wrote in a journal, i would be very careful about being correct about historical parallels. To me it's disqualifying the whole article, and this put "compactmag.com" in the "might be untrustworthy" category.
skilled workers for a proprietary platform should learn that they work against their interests since anything they create is bound to the owner so instead of creating technical value they'll keep reinventing the wheel a company after another with small differences between them since all of those are interested only in trapping users inside their service model. As a result preferred workers are those with less skill who knowing that accept limited compensation and being treated like human-robots;
the lesson users should learn about proprietary platform is that they are at the mercy of the platform so NOTHING done with it should have a value since it might change or vanish overnight.
The juice of this note is simple: IT MUST BE FLOSS, services must be open protocols anyone can implement and keep up not tied to any company or developer in particular. That's is.
Beside that the sole comparison I see with the French Revolution is the fact revolutionaries / innovators in both cases are betrayed by those who led/hire them and in both cases such cohort of people allow betrayers to betray them.
"Once he got access to the company’s finances, the Tesla boss realized it was losing millions of dollars every day [...]"
He knew it would be losing $millions/day because he forced the situation that created the debt.
I stopped reading at that point, not interested in dissecting how a beat-sweetener slides into obsequious myth building.
No. He knew about the company's finances because that's part of M&A due diligence.
https://morganandwestfield.com/knowledge/due-diligence-check...
> Musk and his co-investors collectively cut a check for more than $30 billion of their own money for the Twitter deal. That money would be at risk if Twitter required a debt restructuring down the line.
0: https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/twitters-massive-reven...
Word was prior to the takeover, their debt was on the order of $200M.
> It's not clear how much of the $5.29 billion debt Twitter had before the acquisition was refinanced or remained with the company. It's also not clear how much of the $2.7 billion in cash that Twitter held as of the end of June it got to keep once it went private.
0: https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/twitters-massive-reven...
Secondly: Not to say that Twitter, or other tech firms, don't have a bunch of people who are not very productive/contributing - but is this a problem unique to tech companies and not every other company that grows beyond a point?
Are pharma companies, car manufacturers, utilities, CPG, etc etc all running a perfectly well oiled machinery. Or, is it just that the people who have been on the outside looking in with jealousy suddenly get to vent their rage during times of such correction since it gets them eyeballs.
For anyone in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley is some ways south of San Francisco.
That said, a lot of startups are in SF, because Silicon Valley is too expensive (though SF itself is catching up because of the second dot com boom/bubble), so it's not surprising that outsiders lump the two of them together as a hub of Bay Area tech activity (which they are.. but they're just two distinct geographical areas).
> I mean you can die on that hill, but I'd hazard a guess that nearly everyone considers SF a part of Silicon Valley
Well, unless you're from the SF Bay Area (or just Bay Area). SF is a city. SF Bay Area (or just Bay Area) is a broad region. Silicon Valley is San Jose, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Redwood City, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Cupertino.
Also: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=SF+vs+silicon+valley&ia=web