Elon is engaged in something called “Whaling and Culling.” | Hacker News Reader

Elon is engaged in something called “Whaling and Culling.”

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13 pointsTerretta25 comments

This is the Emperors New Clothes [0] all over again, no-one wants to say straight up that based on what they've observed that Elon's a complete moron, so it's always got to be some kind of 'genius' that the rest of us can't see.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes

I mean it doesn’t have to be genius or complete moron, it’s most likely neither.

But if it has to be one of the two extremes and I start with 50/50 odds, what would I lean towards with the limited information I have as an outside observer? This is a rhetorical question but I think it gives a hint of how this whole topic has become such a shit show.

Elon’s tactics have been to eliminate positions regardless of individual strength - e.g. his recent “hardcore” email. That is culling but it is not whaling. In my experience, whales have the most freedom to leave and will be the fastest to employ it. So, one could argue, this is anti-whaling.

Whatever the case, it’s clear he’s not in on some master scheme us mortals can’t understand. He’s just a man with an inflated ego who wants to feel above the rest. Just like the Twitter poster here.

Or maybe...

Just maybe...

Twitter was a bloated and poorly-run company that was in serious need of an enema.

This is bouyed by the facts. Employees did very little actual work, each had multiple bosses who haphazardly lead their teams to accomplish nothing in 12 years, and oversaw mountains of wasteful corporate spending that produced nothing but losses in 10 out of the last 12 FY. Upwards of $4,000,000,000.

Musk could drag himself into the office, guzzle down 2 smoothies and "relax" ...and do nothing else till 4pm and still do better than the last decade of Twitter leadership.

Instead of an enema the patient has been pared down to a lobotomized quadriplegic.

That was my initial thought too about this theory. In any tech company competent people are always the first ones to leave on first signs of trouble. They already have new opportunities lined up and they are just waiting for an excuse to leave and probably get a pay rise on their way out. High functioning people in general tend to have each others backs because they have more to give and it's just more fun to work being surrounded by capable people rather than use your time instructing people who never seem to get it and just leech your time.

In case I sound elitist, I don't think those competent people have any inherent trait that makes them that way, it's more to do with whether you know how to do deep work, it's something you can learn.

That's just not true - most competent/valuable people have an 'ownership mentality' - that is they invest serious mental effort into making every feature as good as it can be, to tackle hard challenges rather than moving - this unfortunately is not always optimal for either career progression or rising through the ranks internally and gives management some leverage to fleece these people.

> By pushing for such an extremely tight deadline, Elon got to see who is actually doing work and who is resting on their laurels. Furthermore, it proved who could actually perform under extreme pressure.

Very dumb take. It implies that all the engineers at twitter work on the exact same feature at the exact same time, which obviously they don't, which invalidates the rest of this guys argument

What features though? The color of buttons? Innovation at twitter died 10 years ago. The old team literally accomplished nothing but censorship and banning 500,000 people who didn't agree with their politics.

Or banned 500,000 people to stop twitter going the way of voat.co

FWIW, here are two useful features released just within the past few months.

In July 2022: Unmentioning to leave a conversation entirely, preventing others from mentioning you (not just muting), https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1546555047630159872

In October 2022: Community Notes (aka Birdwatch), to facilitate crowdsourced clarifications and corrections to misleading tweets, https://twitter.com/CommunityNotes/status/157800457599020237.... This uses some intriguing algos to surface 'best' contributions, such as when accounts that often disagree, agree on these, as well as on earned-over-time reputations for reviewers.

Gosh... Managing 101: no one lives in a bubble.

Your so-called "whaling people" are highly contextual, in skills, but also in time: who is pulling all the work on one occasion may have been/become a drag.

The "A-players is a thing" discourse too easily overlooks all the enabling/support coming from the so-called B-C-whatever-players/non-critical functions as well.

No one operates in a vacuum.

Absurd management theory. If this sort of selection takes place, it's for delusional "heroes" and true believers, not for productive and competent people.

A more likely scenario:

1) I'm a "whale".

2) You make me angry.

3) I leave.

4) Fail Whale forever.

I have no doubt this what he is trying to do. Whether it will work is another question. I worked at a start up that got acquired and went through the same thing. First most people left, and then the whales (I was one of them) left too because life is too short to work in unhealthy environments. Pretty soon he had no one but the people he brought in and the tech debt just got worse as there was no one who understood the problems left to help fix them.

Can it be done? sure. Is it a smart business decision? open question.

It is brilliant. Twitter was a poorly run company. He'd be better off firing just about everyone and bringing in his own people. He should also move the HQ and may just do that next year after debt restructuring.

It is way too soon to say if it is brilliant. If the company tanks and can't recover, then it's not brilliant. This is not at all out of the realm of the possible.

It's not like it would have been that hard to do the same thing more carefully, many other executives have taken over distressed companies and managed dramatic cutbacks better.

Nice theory.

But what will actually happen in practice is that the "productive 10%" will dangerously flirt with mental health issues, which will cause productivity to drop close to 0% and then when a outage happens the platform will simply collapse, because nobody will be available to deal with it anymore.

Always 6-D chess with this guy, isn’t it?

Same with Trump.

The possibility of people in power being just guys who are aimlessly winging it never crosses the minds of those who have an inferiority complex

Nobody successful has ever truly winged it. Your moves are deliberate, calculated, and based on what you observe, not what you think or believe. You may take a guess and come out on top, but in the end, you didn't get lucky, you make a calculated move and it went in your favor because you calculated correctly.

Ah yes the theory of the 4D chess player, I know it

cool theory, except elon has gone in like Arnold Schwarzenegger in commando and strafed indiscriminately at 90% of the workforce.

The skeptical comments here reminds me of the apothegm "people don't know what they don't know"

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