The chaotic way this has all this has all been done, though, seems like an extremely risky way to run any of kind of business.
The chaotic way he is doing it is one of the reasons he said the company needed to go private. If you made these sweeping changes to a company that is public you're getting fired.
Also, I think doing a massive sweeping changes all in one go and changing the culture straight away is better than the other option. I've been part of companies while they've changed cultures slowly. Everyone left, just slowly and it was a constant reminder how much things had changed and how bad things were in comparison because everytime someone left it was a "yea, they finally see it".
Right now, Twitter will have lots of people who are quite simply unhappy because Musk. From a HR and company view, these are people you want/need to get rid of. Disengaged employees are a massive drain, actively disengaged are an even bigger drain. They affect the ones who are engaged and can drag a team/company down.
What annoys me is, every time Musk tweets something about the tech at Twitter people think he's gone in and had a look at things and came to that opinion instead of being told it.
For example, the 1200 RPCs for the timeline to be loaded in the app. Everyone jumps on the fact those requests are done server-side instead of the app. Basically jumping on a technicality. If they are making 1200 RPCs via GraphQL that is still completely nuts. And the performance of Twitter isn't exactly good.
Another example, he said they were turning off 20% of the microservices. The sms microservice got disabled or something. People act like he was the one deciding which ones get turned off. Instead of it being someone whose job it is to know this screwing up.
Another thing that grinds my gears, people care more about the Twitter tech team making 300k a year not getting a free lunch than they do about Bezos and his army of people having to pee in bottles for 30k a year.
What does that have to do with my points?
Twitter is probably the most performant platform at its scale. The timeline experience is unparalleled. Reddit cant do it. Facebook cant do it. Gmail cant even let me see an email and go back to where I was in my search query half the time.
Also, Elon touts himself as "technoking" who's sole engineering prowess is responsible for Tesla and SpaceX. If someone tells him 1200 server side service calls are making the app slow in one country and not another, he deserves to be clowned on. He's the one making the claim he's some sort of Tony Stark, so he can catch flak for being dumber than the average mid-level web developer.
Oh also
> Disengaged employees are a massive drain
Why is it the employees fault for being disengaged but not Elon's for being an absolute clown and bullying/firing everyone via twitter that calls him on his bullshit. He's the one being toxic, but people responding negatively to toxicity are the "drain".
Another corporate simp acting in bad faith. Nobody cares more about twitter devs making 300k not getting lunch more than Amazon abusing warehouse workers. Nobody has said that. Nobody has implied it. The same people who are decrying workplace toxicity in elon's takeover of twitter, ime, are in favor of Amazon Unions and better workplace practices.
However, you know who isn't a fan of unions and workplace happiness? Your boy Elon. It's the same side of the same coin.
If you give a shit about Amazon and it's mistreatment of employees I have literally no idea why you're doing so much work defending Musky boi.
Who says it's their fault? If you fall out of love with your SO and want a divorce, is it their fault? No. But you still need to get a divorce.
It's a business. You shouldn't take anything personally. And employees were posting shit about Musk on Twitter before he even took over.
> If someone tells him 1200 server side service calls are making the app slow in one country and not another, he deserves to be clowned on. He's the one making the claim he's some sort of Tony Stark, so he can catch flak for being dumber than the average mid-level web developer.
On the same note, the Twitter tech team needs clowned on for telling him that. As well as, the fact they have a GraphQL making 1200 calls.
> Another corporate simp acting in bad faith. Nobody cares more about twitter devs making 300k not getting lunch more than Amazon abusing warehouse workers. Nobody has said that. Nobody has implied it. The same people who are decrying workplace toxicity in elon's takeover of twitter, ime, are in favor of Amazon Unions and better workplace practices.
The same people decrying Twitter and moving to Mastadon and other platforms are the same ones still buying from Amazon.
Amazon go union busting and people did nothing really. Musk fires people for publically disparaging the company and I hear about it non stop for days and days.
> If you give a shit about Amazon and it's mistreatment of employees I have literally no idea why you're doing so much work defending Musky boi.
There is a big difference between almost slave labour and firing people who make a lot of money.
The so-called defence of Musk here is merely pointing out the facts.
Facts:
* Making sweeping changes and have a month or so of chaos is better than months of chaos.
* Getting rid of disengaged employees is good HR.
* 1200 RPCs via GraphQL is still crap.
2. How do you know that Twitter employees were disengaged?
Some are posting "kiss my ass Elon" on Twitter. Other's tweets mocking the code review and "hardcore" engineer stuff. I'm sure you're going to say "But that doesn't mean all of them" but Musk hasn't fired all of them.
Twitter runs impressively quick (or it used to at least) for what it does. Judging a system by something like "Woah 1200 calls, that's a big number" without contextualizing it just telegraphs your naivety.The "tech team" that told him that are literally the group of Tesla Engineers he brought in on week 1. So idk why the twitter team needs to be clowned on. He's been installing his own people the entire time.
Also, his sweeping changes are still causing chaos because they have a whole system in place now to re-hire people that were accidentally fired because Musk is firing people so much. It's been more than a month and people are still having to randomly fly to the office and do unscheduled group code reviews with like 4 hours of notice.
"People did nothing really" shows how disengaged you are from Amazon's criticism and the action people are taking against it. Christian Smalls is still out there working to Unionize Amazon, people are still supporting him and people like him. It's a long boring fight and just because it isn't flashy doesn't mean nothing is happening.
"People have a penchant for talking about recent news, I'm shocked"
They're not mutually exclusive topics. Billionaires exercising unilateral control over people's lives is generally a bad thing, whether that's musk or bezos.
He created the conditions where anyone and everyone left in the company is likely to screw up. Because they are stressed. Or worried. Or tired. Or angry. Or doing a job that's not theirs. Or taking over stuff they don't know, because those who did know were fired in a rush, and there was no transition, no handoff, no training.
And who decided the timeline?
I am curious to see the outcome, difficult to predict, I don't know if there are any precedent.
I believe that software only companies can be run with a relatively small staff, but this is not easy and should be built in the company culture from the start.
My intuition is that company culture can only change quickly when it is degrading.
Had he hired an adult and done all of those changes with some thought instead of what he did I doubt anyone would have batted an eye.
It does seem like they were heavy with staff but that reduction could have been thoughtfully and with more tact. At the point that you fired half of the staff and then the next day started asking those some people back speaks volume to the chaos HE is causing and probably killed motivation/morale of the staff left.
Publicly firing someone on twitter for disagreeing with you is also just wrong. He just purchased the company and the amount of arrogance and gall to think you know more than someone who had been working on it for years is just staggering... misguided... hubris. There are really not enough words to say bad the optics appear.
He absolutely should have talked to that person privately and said look do not attack me in public. Now tell me why I am wrong. But that would require some humility and humanity, which HE seems short of.
Then that grade school letter that HE sent at midnight. Do you love me? Do you want to stay and work in super hard core mode? Again it is hard to fathom how stupid of a move that was.
Engineering is needed and is core to keeping the place running and moving forward but that alone is not enough. He needs real product people who understand the product. HE clearly does not.
All of it is fixable but HE needs out of it day to day. Immediately.
Get/keep your core staff you need to keep things running. Step out of the visible light and let and adult run the company. Get some good product people and brainstorm and vet ideas for making it better in private. Then execute.
I'm pretty sure he has a bunch of "adults" working on this making these decisions.
It is hard to reconcile that though with the actions. The actions are bad and seemingly not well thought out.
I hope there is someone advising him maybe he is just not listening.
I think that would probably have been a better plan, but people would still have absolutely lost their minds over it, because it's Elon.
There is no bad PR if you live off page views!
There are good eyeballs for sale, and someone will buy them.
It might take some time to shift over to a new advertiser cohort.