Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Anecdote time: I have an acquaintance who’s an engineer who works on nuclear power plant technology. They’ve wanted out of their current employer for over a decade now.
Why have they stuck around? Because their current employer is the only one in a several thousand kilometer radius with any use for their expertise, one of only a couple they could work for without leaving the country, and one of only a handful whose primary language of business is one that they speak.
Tesla, SpaceX, and perhaps even the Boring Company have much more in common with that situation than they do with Twitter.
I think smaller companies and upstarts have a chance to get some great talent that will be strongly considering their living situation and looking for something more stable, but I'm not so sure that Twitter is going to have its pick of the litter for a long time until it demonstrates a stable and mature environment to work in.
I have no doubts some persons will be very nervous and take the opportunity, and I wish them luck. I'm not so sure others will be as eager.
But replacing all of the random but critical bits of knowledge in the heads of the people walking out the door is much harder.
Twitter? I'm sure twitter employees were proud of their work and doing things they believed meaningful, but not "halve your effective comp', in a company with all the joy of an abattoir, for a narcissistic egomaniac.
And if you're a rocket engineer, the field is way smaller. That means less competitors, but also less places to work at.
Software?
And also work double time for the indefinite future. So effective comp is quartered, by my accounting.
And while they might get a lump sum for whatever equity they held, that's money in the bank and no longer a carrot.
Edit:
Yes, the proportion of total comp that was equity hit about 50% at L7 (Twitter's Staff). L6 (Twitter's Senior) was usually around 40%.
Even more materially, many of those employees are likely spending over their base on their lifestyle and investments. So say they were making $300k all told and they're now down to $150k base, If they were spending even near the base they've just massively changed their income trajectory even to the point of obvious insolvency. Eg "I can't afford this house anymore". I've talked to some people that are smart on investing and I've talked to others who say they're spending 67% post tax on their "lifestyle" of total comp which is insane to me. Stock moves any which way and you are eating into savings which likely also just dropped.
Anyone in that situation would be out like the rats.
Taking an $80k/year pay cut for a SWEII ($70k stock, $10k bonus - I'm assuming no bonuses for a while) is, well, that's a lot.
With no future stock or the ability to sell it... and there are certainly other places that pay at least as much as Twitter's base alone, there are options out there.
If you happen to be hitting your cliff soon, that is the only case you might be going down to base only.
I think that you are saying that if you had future vests that will turn into shares at the aquisition price ($53/share or somthing). But only your remaining outstanding vests exist.
I have no idea how far out twitter gave shares. Amazon does them to 3 years. So everyone who remains at twitter has some amount of time till they run out of all veests, depending on comp the latter vests may be big or small.
They all still go to base only and my point still stands tho they'd have till near when my final vests were coming up to tell me WTF my comp looked like.
I think this is largely why he fired everyone. He wants all his employees to be musk sycophants so he pushed everyone else out.
I wonder how many of them are still fanboys.
Meanwhile we are a years into total disenfranchisement with entire concept of social media. The sell just isn't there like his earlier ventures.
Edit: I don't use twitter but this is what I've been able to parse from HN articles being posted.
Judging by other things discussed on HN that I do understand well, it is likely highly inaccurate picture.
It reminds me of Knoll’s law of media accuracy: “everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true, except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge” and especially The Gell-Mann amnesia effect https://effectiviology.com/knolls-law/#The_Gell-Mann_amnesia...
He might think he knows the employees, based on his prejudices and clichés. Nothing more.
The big challenges create big opportunities.
What's most amusing to me is Elon takes the advice from Youtubers & Influenceers but won't listen to his own engineers.
Like, I like Steve Jobs, he could be a dick sometimes but I think he had the right idea and the right vision overall, but if he came in and bought my employer and then just started firing whole teams and fucking up the product while taking away perks and demanding more work, I would have soured on him pretty fast.
Isn't that pretty much what Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple as CEO?
"Ultimately, Jobs axed more than 70 percent of Apple’s hardware and software products."
"His product cuts resulted in the layoffs of over 3000 employees"
"Jobs managed to force the resignation of most of Apple’s board members"
https://www.macworld.com/article/219225/steve-jobss-seven-ke...
I assume, for example that Apple didn't need as many finance people after the cuts, but he didn't manage to make the whole department quit in disgust.
He kinda did in that he slashed entire product lines, but Apple was not a single-product company.
Apple was also going very very badly, Amelio had already done a lot of cutting (reduced headcount by a third), and the company was still sinking (because it had nothing to float).
That's a big difference with what looks to be 75-85% of Twitter's pre-acquisition workforce in total.
And what's so hardcore about Payroll system? Shouldn't we demand quality instead and I'm not sure if working 80 hours a week would lead to better quality of the system.
I do wonder has his idea of how people think about him been skewed by a decade or so of really only working with people who are really into him. Like, this mostly felt absolutely inevitable to me (though I'm surprised how far he pushed it so quickly), but then I never thought much of him.
> I assume a lot of the engineers have the “millennial” mentality of “I work not live, I don’t live to work”.
Not sure what's _particularly_ millennial about that. Hours worked in the US per year now is pretty similar to the period from 1970 to 1990, when there were no millennials working. There was a spike peak between 1990 and the early noughties, but not a huge one; to find big increases you're going back before 1970.
But firing everyone immediately, with no chance to transfer knowledge? Funny!
I know if I was in his position I would be trying to fire more people than I actually think I need to right now just to make sure I don't have to prolong the bad press with later layoffs and to ensure there are roles to fill in three to six months when I get a full handle on the business and know what I actually need. This would accomplish both generating good press and ensure I can fill positions with people aligned with my vision and work ethic.
"Stay at Twitter because we're moving to 80 hour work weeks and cancelling Christmas" can't be the argument by itself, right?
It's got to be something like "Stay at Twitter because we're building exciting new project X, but we'll need 80 hour work weeks to pull this off..."
like twitter?
apparently elon's master plan is 2000s-era blogspot citizen journalism?
What's wrong with 2000s-era blogspot citizen journalism.
But doing what happened 20 years ago is hardly "truly innovative"
That's not a terrible idea if he can pull it off and make it profitable even despite the massive debt he loaded Twitter with to purchase it.
WeChat succeeds because it caters to a less mature market with a simple integrated product. American network service users have demonstrated repeatedly that they are OK with bundling products but less enthusiastic about bundled services.
Incidentally I just glanced at the AOL website to remind myself how it's doing, and their ad banner offers a service to reduce the amount of paper junk mail you receive by signing up for AOL's managed unsubscription service. Less Information Age and more Irony Age.
For Tesla, it was one of a handful of places in the world where you could work on electric cars. SpaceX was one of what -- maybe 3 places in the world? -- where you really could work on rockets. If either of those inspired you, Tesla and SpaceX are premier employers.
If your interests are building large distributed systems, that has lots of choices.
Of all the problems I see with what's going on, this isn't one of them. Most of the current internet (and beyond that as well) exists solely on the premise that we give away power freely, with no expectations of proportional responsibilities in return.
If Twitter survives and, somehow, flourishes, all it takes for people to forget and sign up is a benefit to them, and blaring you opinions into a bigger void may just be enough already.
Not sure that even Mr. Musk can fix that.
Not only that, but "... and they'll receive larger compensation and/or share of the company."
The company has no vision, no real captain, nor is it public.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221112000701/https://www.nytim...
Elon's previous companies are populated by true believers (albeit because of a shared vision ie: colonizing Mars) who behave more like serfs when pushed. With Twitter, it's like Elon started governing a democracy and didn't realize that almost everyone (except H1B holders) can just leave and do something else.
Even if we agree that company is 80% bloated, you probably want the best 20% to stay.
---
In referring to a bunch of employees laid off, he said "I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses. Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere"[1]. About another specific employee he said "A tragic case of adult onset Tourette’s"[2].
Why would talent ever want to work for a CEO who will fire you on the spot for whatever reason, turn around and say this about them publicly (or privately!). If I was still working at twitter, this would make me quit.
[1]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592569305941807104
[2]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1592582828499570688
And no, I don't gamble on events or crypto.
It says that 80% of the results come from 20% of the sources. That's not 8/10 people are doing nothing, but rather 8/10 people are doing things that only contribute to 20% of what makes Twitter Twitter.
On any given team of ten, it's likely that the entire team is in either the 80 or the 20 bucket, by virtue of what they're working on, not by virtue of how hard they're working or how talented they are.
> Derek de Solla Price, a British physicist, historian of science, and information scientist, discovered something about his peers in academia. He noticed that there were always a handful of people who dominated the publications within a subject. Price recognized a pattern which was later named after him.
> What is Price’s Law?
> 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.
https://expressingthegeniuswithin.com/prices-law-and-how-it-...
The people who stay will be those with the least options.
Musk has made employment at Twitter hugely risky, with no possibility of reward. Really boneheaded business, completely incompetent cutting off the workforce, honestly. Hard to imagine a worse way of pruning the workforce.
People keep repeating this trope as if Twitter is some paragon of technical excellence and innovation. It is no such thing. It is a popular website with a textbox for user input.
You don't need "talent", you simply need to people who get the job done.
And defenses like this go a looooong ways towards destructing the myth that Musk had technical acumen, because the only people defending him are those that can't do the work.
John Carmack, "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."
And discounting the scale of Twitter is also quite cartoonish projection.
There no way in hell that this 80% of workforce was actual bloat.
If your advertisers go away, then a whole lot of the iceberg of complexity underneath the bird app goes away.
But Twitter is not a software and servers company -- it's a media company. It has more in common with Hulu than Microsoft. The ability to post 240 chars of content is not a business. The users aren't the customers. As you say, the Twitter platform is not ground breaking tech -- that was never where the value was.
> Teams dedicated to curating content like twitter headlines and moderating content don't need to be there
This is where I think you and Elon are wrong. The "content" is the product and the advertisers are the customers. The assumption is that that these teams are not helping bring in advertisers but you and I don't know that. Elon didn't even care to find out because he fundamentally misunderstands the business he's in.
https://polymarket.com/market/will-twitter-report-any-outage...
I firmly believe, lets say 80%, of Twitter is bloat. But sacking them like this wont prove anything due to practicalities. You just can't unwind a mess like Musk is doing. If some employees sole productive task in a week is to reset a server that still has to be done and it will take a lot of work to figure out which button to press when the site falls over.
People that claim "brand safety" honestly kind of make me laugh, look at all the World Cup sponsors...don't you think Qatar using slaves (some of which have died) to build the stadiums would be...not safe for your brand to associate with? I would, but they still are advertising, because the audience is massive. I think people dying from something you're helping to fund through advertising is probably worse to be associated with than a tweet saying "own the libs" is 3 pegs down from your ad. Call me crazy.
The sad thing is that people are suckers who actually believe alot of this corporate PR.
[1]:https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/business/media/facebook-b...
Regardless of what you think of Twitter's future prospects, none of these destructive antics make it stronger. Twitter could still be saved, but it could have been saved even easier without all of this pointless and public display of arrogance and incompetence.
Once he gets to stabilize the cash flow, Twitter can provide a comp model to attract talent. About that, let's just say Geohot would not have worked for Parag, as an example. https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159295542717976576...
I ultimately feel like Musk went too hardball too fast. Twitter can definitely recover of course, but I think the road to doing so is going to be much longer and harder than it had to be.
Now chance of such teams having fully out is anyone's guess.
However, what Musk is doing is absolutely hillarious, and is a much bigger trash fire that has nothing to do with optimizing the head count, or figuring out how to correctly reduce staffing etc.
Steve Jobs returning to a flailing Apple he is not.
With only 20% of your workers, there is no way these problems will be addressed with equal ease.
In Twitter's case, however, how long is it until they're sued for child porn (lack of moderation) or get 50 million euro fines for running afoul of Germany's Network Enforcement Act?
I'm sure that you can stop supporting the open source section. However, how much of their platform team is core to the product? How much is still required?
For all of the high-minded free speech town square rhetoric from his camp, this looks much more like the game plan from worst PE actors from the 1980s. I guess it’s good there isn’t a pension fund to raid?
Fire your entire payroll department. No one will notice... until the biweekly paychecks don't go out, and now your employees aren't getting paid.
Fire badge security. No one will notice... until you need someone to make a new badge for a new employee.
Fire your IT staff. No one will notice... until the server crashes and no one can reboot it.
Fire your system reliability engineers. No one will notice... until the World Cup is on and you have 10x regular traffic and now the site is crashing under the load.
Fire your lawyers. No one will notice... until you're now being sued for violating all the laws in all the countries for posting child porn (because you previously fired all the content moderators who were preventing that from being posted).
Ignoring Elon for sake of discussion, it would be a big a big boon for my career to work at Twitter.. but when 80% of the staff left? I'd be worried onboarding would be a mess. That i'd be handed several projects that no one knows how they work or what the ramifications are.
Ignoring all the red flags and focusing solely on onboarding sounds like misery.. not sure i'd want to take that job.
I imagine many will.. but .. oof.
And I'm not even sure it would be a big career boost to join twitter at this point. The way things are going there you'd probably be burned out pretty quickly which would mean a shortish tenure.
Musk's approach is drastic and will probably include a lot of turbulence as you say, but it's probably also the fastest way to find the minimum number of employees required to run Twitter.
You couldn't use this strategy with any kind of critical service, but ultimately nobody is really hurt that much if things break at Twitter, so there is more latitude to take risks.
I'm not saying I like or agree with Musk's approach, but I see the logic.
Of course there's plusses too including working a large impact product with little bureaucracy and being on a even playing field versus your peers with little institution knowledge.
I guess what I'm trying to say is it's dissimilar to a fast-growing start up in important ways that attract people wanting to work for you.
Reminds me of a cleaners strike were after 2 weeks everyone suddenly realised that those invisible men and women do important work. A corporation is a machine in which even the tiniest cog matters.
I have no doubt Twitter and most companies could be run in maintenance mode with 20% of the current staff. However figuring out which 20% is the tricky part.
Typically I only need 20% of the lights in my house to do what I need, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea for Elon Musk to come into my house and just randomly remove 80% of my lightbulbs.
To successfully pull off such a major change in staffing in such a short window would require knowing the ins and outs of the company extremely well.
I'd further guess that 10-20% of their workforce was staying on top of regulations. If twitter works, but does not comply with the FTC consent order and gets fined out of business, that is not a technical failure but still is failure.
Large enterprises, especially those under consent orders, spend a TON of effort in compliance. Given that environment is constantly changing, there is net new work needed in almost a Red Queen effect.
But, if not, absolutely no harm will come of it. What would be the worst part of losing twitter entirely?
It's hard to argue that Twitter wasn't incredibly overstaffed. Maybe even 80% overstaffed. But ripping 80% of the humans out of the equation basically overnight is not a recipe for a successful transition.
Not only that.
If Elon succeeds that opens a new era in Sillicon Valley. An era where programmers are like steelworkers and coalminers in 1980s. You can raid large tech company (think Google or Apple), make workers redundant, cut costs mercilesly and return value to shareholders.
I think people may be underestimating Elon's ability to bring in folks from the "secret guild of silicon valley" [2] to help him in this task. Of course, some of the Twitter employees who left are probably already part of it, but George coming on, even temporarily, might help bring in replacements.
[1]:https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159339146698169139...
[2]:https://medriscoll.com/2011/08/19/the-guild-of-silicon-valle...
Often done in the game dev world.
Let's look at the admin/security teams. These are the people that literally keep things running. If a significant percentage of people from those teams quit, the others have to immediately pick up the slack (much longer on calls...) the added workload then leads to an avalanche where more and mor epeople quit. And it is always in the most business critical teams where these dynamics play out.
Twitter certainly had bloat, but separating the fat from the critical healthy connective tissue requires care, which has clearly not been spent here.
People are leaving or algorithms are failing to promote tweets.
Something very similar is also written in Cal Newport's Deep Work book, where Jack Dorsey's typical day is outlined just as a series of interruptions.
I guess that tweeting between these interactions is not that time-consuming for him, + he actually sleeps at the workplace and is 100% focused on work.
Edit: actually less vindicated but more happy that I don't have to hear from people how great Elon is any more.
Same with Tesla and his other previous companies - just an accidental stroke of luck for an incompetent fraud.
But last week has shown his true colors. He's no visionary. Just your neighborhood slavedriver with mastery in storytelling. At this stage I am willing to use deceptive to describe Elon. On a public square he broke his persona. He's weak and dangerous as far as I am concerned.
Since then, though, Musk has focused on a lot of misses that have spectacularly over-promised and/or undelivered. Neuralink seems to be based on over the top futurism and a lot of questionable promises considering current technology state (particularly considering the current overpromise of AI, with self-driving cars still way far out). Same with his Hyperloop concept. The Boring Company has so far been quite unimpressive, cars in a small one lane tunnel is not very innovative and does not seem to bring anything that existing AGT systems cover already. Then there's Twitter, where it seems there was no vision at all, and you half get the impression that he only bought it because he was miffed at the content moderation.
Tesla in particular seems to be a missed opportunity with New Musk at the helm. It seems to me that to get to the next level, Tesla could use some care to iron out the QC issues... they are not known as super reliable cars at this point on certain aspects, but it does not seem like it is insurmountable to bring quality standards up to the top brands. Were I a Tesla investor, my concern would be that Musk's constant distractions with things like Twitter are truly going to hamper the efforts of his primary companies... and looking at the post-Twitter stock price of Tesla, it seems I'm not the only one with such a concern.
How so? If anything, things that he promised had an over-optimistic timeline. He promised a reusable rocket that can land itself - and it did, late, but so far it's the only one that can do so.
> his Hyperloop concept
It's a concept - something he specifically said none of his companies would be implementing.
> current overpromise of AI, with self-driving cars still way far out
I was quite skeptical, however, the current state of self-driving is quite good. The vehicle requires practically no intervention. Still a long way to go, but I am super impressed by how far they've come. Check it out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbYuuu0G9Ko
> Tesla could use some care to iron out the QC issues
I am sure, there is always room for improvement. So far, my wife's 2020 Model 3 has been reliable. No issues as yet.
Maybe he's always been this way but his profile was lower? The first thing that sticks out to me is the the submarine pedo-guy incident of 2018. Somehow he went from an eccentric inventor who I honestly believe was genuinely making a real effort on a longshot solution to "How dare you joke about my submarine!" a few days later. So weird.
https://www.arabianbusiness.com/public/images/2014/09/03/alw...
https://www.businessinsider.com/prince-alwaleed-supports-dor...
This prince ran afoul of the prince you are thinking off and spent some time in a hotel in KSA pondering what is more important: his health or his money. And let history record he was sensibly more concerned with his health.
https://peakoil.com/publicpolicy/prince-alwaleed-finally-rel...
> Monty Brewster is a Minor League Baseball pitcher with the Hackensack Bulls. He and his best friend, Spike Nolan, the Bulls' catcher, are arrested after a post-game bar fight. A man offers to post their bail if they will come to New York City with him. At the Manhattan law office of Granville & Baxter, Brewster is told that his recently deceased great-uncle Rupert Horn, whom he has never met, has left him his entire $300 million fortune but only if he can complete a challenge with several conditions.
> Brewster can choose to receive $1 million upfront or attempt to inherit the whole estate by spending $30 million in 30 days. In the former case, the law firm becomes the executor of the estate, collecting a fee for performing this service and dividing the remainder among several charities. In the latter case, Brewster may not own any assets that are not already his at the end of the 30 days. He must get value for the services of anyone he hires, he may not give it away (except for 5% in gambling losses and 5% to charity) nor may he willfully damage anything bought with the money. Finally, he must keep it secret. If he fails to meet all terms, he forfeits any remaining balance and inherits nothing. Brewster decides to take the $30 million challenge, and Angela Drake, a paralegal from the law firm, is assigned to accompany him and keep track of his spending.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster%27s_Millions_(1985_fi...
Richard Pryor stars, along with John Candy playing his best friend.
Have a nice weekend!
please post improvements if there's easier ways... ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster%27s_Millions
Most recently it appears to be a popular theme in China and India.
And that goes back further to the The Million Pound Bank Note by Mark Twain.
It isn't a difference in kind from calling a rescue diver a pedophile, or pretending he's going to take Tesla private, or any of the million bad decisions he's made over the years. It's just a difference in outcome.
I think Elon Musk's character as we've publicly known him last few years explains this behavior elegantly and comprehensively enough. As someone else in this thread said, he's a "techno-feudalist", he gives the orders and peasants comply. He's been operating on this mode for a decade now.
I’d guess an international company like Twitter had several hundred people on H-1B, L1 and similar visas. After these voluntary layoffs it seems like there might be 2,000 employees left, so at least 10% of them would be on work visas by this napkin math.
https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...
Another way to look at it is: Too many are making it.
You do realize you're commenting on a story about Twitter that made it, right?
Which is proof by counterexample that the statement is false.
Yet, I only made mine after clicking at the story in the front page.
At the rate it's going, Twitter may be spared all of the lawsuits coming its way simply by virtue of not existing by the time the lawsuits can come to fruition.
As far as I understand, Twitter is financially in a terrible state. Huge changes have to happen. Let’s all just wait and see how it will turn out.
People aren't saying the app isn't working. If you lay off all of HR will your company still run tomorrow? Of course. Lay off all of engineering will the app still run tomorrow? Of course (most likely lol).
The collapse is the implied result of all these terrible decisions. Terrible decisions which imply terrible leadership. And companies can only survive terrible leadership for so long.
I put in the request to download my data last night -- not because I'm leaving Twitter, but just as a precaution -- and I wonder if it will be fulfilled. I'm sure it's an automated process, but will the systems be running by the time it gets to my request?
<https://how.complexsystems.fail/>
It's also:
- Twitter, the advertising-driven business model, which advertisers are fleeing.
- Twitter, the institutional knowledge, technical and otherwise, which is now fleeing.
- Twitter, a government-regulated (FTC and possibly other consent decrees / orders) enterprise. See for example: <https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/05/...>
- Twitter, the contributors community, now rather noisily debarking for other pastures.
On all these counts, Twitter is in the process of collapsing, and/or approaching a state where such collapse is inevitable.
Pedantic limited-scope literal reading would be a flawed assessment.
The particular melodrama aimed at Musk right now is just cope amongst the milieu he is purging from Twitter and/or hurt feelings and ressentiment of the media class over Musks stance on free speech. They want him to fail and will go overboard at every little attempt he makes to change direction of the company.
This is a good take here. It's all performative outrage:
Your comments lack both coherence and consistency.
A certain cohort of the tech and media industry is in chaos because they fear Musk will get away with it.
That is not a universally accepted assertion, by any stretch.
Again, you're now ignoring my initial response in this thread.
I doubt further engagement will be fruitful for either of us.
Edit, links:
I'd be interested to hear dang explain how the ranking mechanics are at work in these posts, but I hunch it may simply be because there's not actually much there to engage community interest for very long. The downspiral has been very rapid but it's essentially just been one headline after another. There's only so much speculation to be made about how and why this is happening and only so many jokes to crack about it. And if the discussions are mostly cruft I wouldn't be surprised if they're being downranked.
I look forward to seeing some in depth post-mortems and discussions about them here when the dust has settled, but for now it feels more like we're standing around a bonfire and nodding at one another.
It's mostly schadenfreude and naysaying. Which may even be justified, but it kinda makes for dull reading after a short while.
Twitter is a huge social network with a huge advertising network intertwined. The problems and challenges with that are very real, very difficult, and they are social problems rather than engineering problems. It seems like Elon overestimated how much his knowledge of building cars and rockets would transfer over to social networks.
Again, these are brand new problems that Elon is solving, so they may be hard to parse due to how forward-looking he is.
Doesn’t look good.
Given that a social media company is almost invariably going to be caught in complicated negative stories like "$PLATFORM was found being used to coordinate genocide against Rohingyas in Myanmar" or "$TERRORIST posted manifesto on $PLATFORM before $TERRORIST_EVENT", not having anyone available to officially comment on those kinds of stories is... not a good idea. Even worse would be if you decide to let a shitposter be the point man...
But they're not, which is why this information is being reported by the media. And the media has questions which Twitter hasn't addressed, and those questions are going unanswered because Twitter no longer employs the people that answer those questions.
Moreover, the "media middlemen" that you're describing are also looking at this from the perspective of the Twitter employees (and former employees). Do you really expect Twitter (the nebulous entity which communicates directly to people, as you imply) to reflect accurately on what their employees have to say? Of course not. If it was up to Twitter, none of this would be reported on and the public would be no wiser. These journalists are reporting information that wouldn't be reported otherwise; they _obviously_ add value beyond being middlemen, because there seems to be nobody to be a middleman _for_.
Who is Twitter?
I haven't met a single defender of Musk that has the slightest inkling of business or tech, and this is a great example.
You want to have random engineers talking to the press through their Twitter accounts? Sounds great! Especially if there's no way to tell who actually even works at Twitter because verification is now purchased for a tiny amount of money, rather than reflecting any sort of trust based verification.
There will be some hiccups, attacks and slanders pieces in the news.
It will become the place where corruption get exposed if the government don’t manage to close it down.
Quite a show for sure.
Tesla and SpaceX fight for #1 and #2 spot for place to work.
Is changing the auto industry, he is overpassing Nasa with a fraction of the budget. How much proof do you need?
Many people working at Tesla and SpaceX view Elon as a distraction to the mission, not an accelerant other than putting the pieces in place for the companies to exist.
His priority is not to preserve the business - the business is broken as defined by cash flows.
Can it be more 'broken'? Sure. Elon is taking that risk in exchange for increasing the probability (in his opinion) of reinventing Twitter as a sustainable business. That is a risk that each Twitter employee needs to decide if makes sense for their situation.
So this unfortunate in many regards, but I don't think the core of this is materially different in scope than the type of situations which could develop at just about any one of our employer's (albeit it at a much larger scale than most).
No wonder everyone gets burned out and is desperate to retire at 40.
We will again have peace through strength. We will protect our people from the unthinkable threat of nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles, the United States must also build a state of the art next generation missile defense shield, we need it, the power of these missiles and the power of a word that I refuse to say, nuclear, we have to have it, we need a defense shield. And we have to do it and we actually have the technology and we're gonna build it. Just as I rebuilt our military, I will get this done.
We will plant our beautiful American flag very soon on the surface of Mars, which I got started. But we need everyone involved. We need everyone's help. We need to look out for one another. We need to be friends. And we need every Patriot on board. Because this is not just a campaign, this is a quest to save our country, talking about saving our country. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
Most Republicans including DeSantis also support the program. I think Elon believed the Senate would go Republican last week and he could be called a kingmaker.
Also your intro doesn't match your refs.
You may need to read some background to get a clear picture.
If you want to change the world, are ready to push yourself, work with the most dedicated people, it is.
It’s a place for very few. I would really like to work in one of his company, but I don’t think I have the stamina for it.
Stop drinking the kool-aid.
- Break up the cartel that is mass media + tech giants + democrats
- The control on the narrative determine what people think, how they votes, where the world goes.
- Making this open and transparent will disrupt many entrenched interests.
Huge potential
What get promoted, what get shut down.
It’s clear for most people moderately conservative.
We can agree to disagree. For my part I think we will see massive changes for the better, time will tell either way.
Nah.
1. Work long "hardcore" hours for no increase in pay merely to dig Musk out of the financial hole he put himself in.
2. Clone existing services. Musk's grand ideas for Twitter 2.0 are simply to clone WeChat/TikTok/YouTube/Instagram/OnlyFans.
Yikes.
Maybe for SpaceX.
For Tesla 5 years ago.
For Twitter 10 years ago.
But now "change the world" is only true for SpaceX.
Also maybe don't say your employer is a "petulant man child" in Slack or otherwise undermine them and you'll be fine. The idea that an employer should keep people that actively dislike like him or her is insane.
They're a private company now.
What is the value prop for a talented, high productivity employee to work at Twitter? The management hates its employees, seemingly hated the product, and doesn't even understand the business that he bought.
What's the upside for employees? There's a reason people were hanging up exactly at 5pm as Musk was giving his pitch to try to keep employees from bailing. He's offering a shit sandwich and he's not even good at selling it.
However if you believe in Musk's vision (is there one!?) and he's desperate he might throw stocks around and then a pivot unexpectedly might work out and a IPO might be lucrative ... but I wouldn't bet on it. All I said: stock exists and can be distributed.
There are lots of reason to own stock besides speculative growth. Taking part of profit as dividend is the most obvious reason.
It's not insane. Only keeping people that kiss your ass is how you get echo chambers and lose touch with reality.
I don't buy into the notion that the chief engineer of SpaceX, which puts rockets in space, and CEO of Tesla, which efficiently produces electric cars, doesn't know how to stay in touch with reality. The evidence is in direct conflict.
That's the example I'm thinking of, and I would guess that even if that dev fully expected to be terminated for making that correction they viewed it as a price worth paying to spare their professional reputation.
Think of it like this: I cannot name probably more than a handful of Google abandoned projects. But whenever Google announces a new project I'm happy to meme about how it will be inevitably abandoned. It's just something I "know" despite not hunting down some weird statistic of exactly what percentage of Google products to market survive after X years.
Reputation isn't a science. It isn't even that well correlated with truth.
Also don't factually and politely correct your CEO in a reply on Twitter when he lies.
Twitter is a private company now. Not sure if you missed the news that this guy named Elon Musk bought the whole company.
> Also maybe don't say your employer is a "petulant man child" in Slack or otherwise undermine them and you'll be fine. The idea that an employer should keep people that actively dislike like him or her is insane.
I think the issue most people are taking with this is that the same standards aren't being applied. Elon is publicly deriding his employees, and then firing them when they respond in kind.
One should let go of idols past their teenage years.
Are they still giving equity in the chance that it goes public again someday?
Other than a good salary, where’s the financial upside?
What kind of a shitty place has this become? Supposed to be "Hacker News". Not a whole lot of hackers here.
I can't see this going well on HN if he said the same thing, verbatim, but posted it as an anonymous comment.
I've been searching for last few years, I read HN every day and haven't found anyone pro-hard work and celebrating perseverence.
I think "committed" will still be 8 hours/day, like I said he sussed out people who are "triggered" by words or don't love what they do.
Most people don't like these sorts of ultimatums, especially those with the most options and flexibility.
Do you work at Twitter? Do you have any reason to really believe this?
If significantly more than half of your coworkers left (fired, laid off, quit), it's very reasonable to assume that you now have twice the work to do. Moreover, we've seen in just the last two weeks people sleeping on the floor of the Twitter office(s), working more than 8hr/day, to urgently ship features that Elon personally nixed hours after launching. The language that Elon used repeatedly over the last week is "hardcore", implying that Old Twitter's way of working is "not hardcore"; if you were working 8hr/day before, what does "hardcore" mean beyond that?
> people who are "triggered" by words or don't love what they do
I love what I do, but I'm not about to start working harder without being compensated for that work. If you sign an agreement to work somewhere for a certain amount and the other party demands you work more without more compensation, no amount of "loving what you do" makes that equitable or fair. Loving what you do doesn't mean sacrificing the worth of your craft because someone said to.
Sussing out people who are "triggered" isn't a business move, it's a loyalty test. Loyalty is uncorrelated with skill or motivation. "Loving what you do" is uncorrelated with loyalty. There's a lot of companies out there doing amazing work that are hiring. Twitter isn't somehow special. If you love what you do and have been given an ultimatum by your new boss who has gotten rid of half of your coworkers and wants you to do more work, how is the logical move to _stay_ at the company?
Sounds like a blast.
https://www.newsweek.com/tantrum-twitter-reveals-how-privile...
We're pretty damn spoiled.
Heck there might be a team of 50 that has the sole responsibility to figure out the code/algorithms that puts something on the main page automatically. Instead that can temporarily be a small team of 3 people that rotate news articles or tweets.
We tend to think "each employee generates $44B / 14000" but that's far from the truth.
>there are probably 30-40 engineers that make the most value, like billions of dollars each. From there it starts dropping off like a long tail in search results. There's value, but a lot less than others. Cutting the long tail may still break huge areas of functionality - but the rest will patch and fix it over time.
If this is true, then have companies like Microsoft, Apple, all just missed the big insight Elon has caught onto first? If the best engineers are generating a few billion in value each and can completely patch up the long tail, then Microsoft ought to be able to cut its staff down to about 200 such engineers, 300 if they want a lot of extra margin. 1.8T / 3bn per high performer. There's over 100k SWEs currently employed there, needless to say that's a big reduction in salary overhead.
Here's the analogy - lots of startups with 50 employees have sold for billions right. Once the company sells the payout potential is OVER which at that point those 30 of those 50 leave (within a year) and are replaced with 1000 people to take over and slowly add new features. Now remember the codebase still exists that has revenue potential that can feed 1000 or more people, but they did it with 50.
So the code is paying for the product, it's just stable and maybe making a little profit per year. That's enough to justify it.
But startups prove all the value is in those 50 people. The other 1000? they're all replaceable but in a union. The union is that idea that ANY headcount reduction is bad press. Why'd you fire Zak, I'm leaving too!
rant over
I would say Elon is spoiled though, in thinking he can treat folks as fungible.
No, alot SW devs (the type that work at FAANG-like companies) are actually spoiled, relative to most other industries of the world. Perhaps, they have gotten so used to is that they don't recognize it. You can absolutely make an argument that the rest of the world's workforce is being abused, but that is speaking from place of privilege and its easy to be a "champion for the worker" from your ivory tower.
> Elon is spoiled though, in thinking he can treat folks as fungible.
That is because they are fungible, though. Twitter is not some paragon of technical excellence and innovation. Its a website.
>Hammering in railroad spikes
Today hammering in railroad spikes is typically done by big machines like this one made by Unimog.[0] So do you think the SWEs are generating less value than the people operating the Unimog machines? And/Or that SWE jobs rely on less skill and effort than operating the Unimog machine? Should SWEs unionize like railroad workers so that a leader like Elon couldn't unilaterally declare changes to their working condition requirements and tell them to hit the curb if they disagree?
Are the Unimog operators too lazy and cozy in the machines? Should they be paid less than they would be to hammer the spikes, because hammering the spikes is harder work?
>I can't believe we need someone to define spoiled
Well, we do. I've walked through my attempt to grok your point above, and I can't. So if you can overcome your disbelief and post that definition, it might clarify what you are trying to say.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_fastening_system#/media/F...
The benefits and salaries that Twitter employees get are just the free market at work. Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple don't pay big bucks and give huge perks because they're liberal, they do it because it's the only way to retain talented employees.
The take is hypocritical at it's core. Musk himself is an extremely privileged billionaire. Under the same principle that Musk deserves his wealth, Twitter employees deserve every penny of compensation and every hour of time off that they get.
Musk doesn't get that. He's going to utterly fail because the engineers at Twitter have other options. They don't have to work there. They worked there because they were getting competitive benefits and salary. Musk is cutting that just because he doesn't like the rate. Ok, fine, but don't be surprised when your company falls apart and you can't hire anyone as a result.
Why do you guys hate Elon with your guts with such an intense passion?
2. Linking to an article that claimed Paul Pelosi's attacker was involved in a gay love triangle and it was a lover's quarrel.
3. Pedo guy
4. Making blue check marks paid leading to many parody accounts mimicking companies making offensive tweets. Then when those companies cut advertising claiming without evidence activist groups are conspiring against him.
Etc
I switched to Republican party since 2020 election, I wouldn't vote for election deniers [1] but plenty of people are doing the right thing. Rationality and reason seems to have shifted from liberals to conservatives. We can't even say biological facts. Many others are leaving the woke non-sense, I want my damn liberal party back from the 90's that was pro free speech and had a kernel of reason. Not this CCP-like authoritarianism path that we're heading towards.
That said, party preference shouldn't be the reason to hate someone with passion like this. I admire plenty of progressive leaders and conservatives alike.
Regarding 2/3/4, these are not the reasons to pick up pitchforks and hate someone with guts. He has done so many positive things for the world that completely outweight these quibbles.
[1] That includes democrats:
Isn't it the Republicans that are still saying homosexuality is a choice? Aren't they the ones aligned with QAnon woke-conspiracies? Aren't they ones that pushed that Obama was born in Africa?
What biological facts do Democrats say you can't say? At worst, Dems maybe bend over too much to be inclusive to those that historically haven't been included.
I'll just hold my breath for that moment.
<dies>
https://twitter.com/LPofDelaware/status/1583078489430798336
What would be helpful is if you try to, with good faith, head over to r/conservatives and see what the discussion is like. They will welcome progressives and disagreeing views. They'll upvote you. The same cannot be said about the reverse. Conservative opinions here are completely unwelcome, not even downvoted but flagged. Turn on the show-flagged filter on HN and I'd wager atleast half of them are totally legit, not rude and not bigoted. They're just offering a different perspective.
Both sides are equally consumed and spineless. Republicans caved into Trumpism and the liberals caved into woke ideology. Both sides instead of rejecting extremism, adopted it and dug their heels in. We lost truth and rationality in the process. At this time in history, centrist republicans are the most rational.
and...instantly downvoted. Care to please comment below? What do you disagree with what I just said here?
I think that there are fringe elements on both sides. I do think there is a legit difference though in that the mass of the conservatives hold views that are to me far worse.
For example, there might be a fringe of liberals that think that women and men are the same height on average -- or think there are no physical differences. But the VAST majority believe there are differences. But I think a far higher percentage of conservatives think that homosexuality is a choice. That's a very mainstream belief I've seen -- even in my own family.
I think what liberals struggle with, IMO, aligns with my values, even if the positions that arise I disagree with. For example, trans athletes. I think its unfair to women to compete against people who were born men. At the same time, I sympathize with people who really feel like they were born the wrong gender and are doing everything they can to change genders. I don't have a satisfactory solution, but I empathize with the liberal response. The conservative response doesn't even seem to recognize that trans people have any struggle at all.
Centrist Republicans today might be the most rational. But they are even getting run out of the party. I never thought I'd say, "Wow, I miss George Bush".
There is a more balanced take than the standard conservative and liberal positions: the left-wing feminist response.
With this, trans-identifying people are supported with regards to universal rights, i.e. ones that everyone should have, according to left-wing viewpoints. For example, it should not be permitted for someone to be fired from their job for revealing their transness (or for being otherwise gender non-conforming). Same for access to housing, health care, and other public services, no prejudice must be imposed.
However, they should not be treated as if the opposite sex in law and policy. This is particularly important in areas where we have sex segregation for a good reason. You mentioned athletes, another example is the safeguarding of women in prisons - women's prisons should be female-only, and no males should be incarcerated there, no matter how they identify.
This overall approach helps to protect gender non-conforming people (including trans-identifying), while maintaining sex-based rights, particularly those that protect women.
George Bush started a war based on the lie of WMD that resulted in a massive cost of lives and money for the US. Even base level Republicans are horrible
This is absolutely untrue. I generally do not engage in political discussion on hackernews so politics entirely aside, from a reddit content moderation standpoint this is just a falsehood. It is one of the most tightly moderated subreddits on the website and users are banned rapidly and constantly for posting dissenting views or sharing information contradicting the prevailing narrative for any given issue. Anyone who attempts the exercise you suggest will learn that right away. There are certainly subreddits on both sides of the political aisle moderated in that manner but you are just making an absolute fabrication to say /r/conservative is not, and I'm assuming that's why you were downvoted. That and because you bring this falsehood up instead of answering the direct questions the user you're replying to asked you, and it doesn't address their questions at all.
For what it's worth, I didn't downvote you.
So you're accusing me of making it up? malice? I am just stating what I've experienced for over a year of browsing and participating on r/conservative.
Instead of trusting me or you, I'll just leave the link here for people to decide: https://www.reddit.com/r/conservative
And to add to the accusation, I've found the opposite on Reddit and HN. Stating conservative opinions are not welcomed at all. It's not even slightly off. The situation is completely lop-sided.
Next time you accuse some of "absolute fabrication", consider the best interpretation of their experience.
>a place on Reddit for conservatives, both fiscal and social, to read and discuss political and cultural issues from a distinctly conservative point of view.
And the further explanation linked in the sidebar:
>We are not a debate forum for left wing people. Conservatives can debate one another...We are not a place for explanation. /r/Conservative is for conservatives to discuss and share news with other conservatives
>We are not fair and balanced. We don't pretend to be unbiased. We don't pretend to give all commenters equal time. This is by conservatives and for conservatives.
I think that description contradicts the characterization you made of this community in your earlier reply as "welcoming progressive and disagreeing viewpoints." That's why I think you may just be mistaken about what you see being discussed, because by its own definition that community is not actually exposing you to equitable discussion of progressive or contradictory viewpoints.
I would agree Reddit and HN do skew to the left overall but that's entirely beside the point of whether or not /r/conservative is a community openly welcoming discussion from both sides of the aisle. I agree people can and should reach their own decision but in my opinion the subreddit's sidebar makes its purpose readily apparent and anyone's experience participating in discussion will likely line up to it. And again, this is all really tangential to that commenter's original reply to you, and I'm going to bow out now with the postscript that I would have liked to read your answer to their question.
The people who create the laws have the power. What laws they create and their policies is what matters. They are also voted in, meaning people support their views.
Anyone can just say ,"I'm a Democrat and all kittens should be killed" hell, someone could lie to make a particular side look bad. However a person who has support behind them, like a politician, pundits, etc, those people matter and define what represents a political ideology.
For example Biden doesn't support defunding the police nor has that happened I believe anywhere (there might be 1 or 2 exceptions). Republicans, by that I mean politicans, on the other hand have enacted their views into law
What laws have the Democrats pushed or enacted for woke ideology?
The Republican party is moving us towards Facism.
You are complaining about woke culture but that's something people do. What laws have Democrats proposed that has to do with being "woke". Let me ask that in another way. How does voting for Republicans change woke culture?
The election deniers are being supported by the Republican party,including financially. They could kick them out at anytime. It's a two way relationship, a person has to be a republican and they must accept that person. By allowing people like MGT to be in the party it's a tacit approval of their views
As for free speech , the Republican party had put into law multiple restrictions on freedom of speech in the last four years, give me an example of one law the Democrats created that restricted speech?
If you need sources from me let me know
If you ignore everything we are hearing about mass employee exodus and critical teams having no engineers left.
> Why do you guys hate Elon with your guts with such an intense passion?
To put it bluntly, because he is an asshole.
I honestly don’t know how anyone likes him after he called a cave diver who helped save a bunch of children a pedo just because he said that Musks proposed submarine rescue wouldn’t work.
His ego is immense and he lacks the emotional maturity to not lash out at people when he is wrong.
On top of all that he is a billionaire, which is an inherently immoral thing to be IMO.
A good person cannot amass that much wealth and not give away 99% of it to help people who need it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtJwAYJ9B08
The whole pie has gotten larger since the industrial revolution and has lifted people out of poverty at an unprecendented rate through Capitalism.
The current zeitgeist in places like HN and in progressive circles is worrying. There was just a recent thread about how India lifted people out of poverty and people were downvoting pro-Capitalist comments even though that's the truth no matter how you twist it.
The immoral part comes after that when they sit on their horde of money, far too much for anyone to spend in 10 lifetimes, while they should be giving it to people and causes that need it.
The only one of the "mainstream", household name billionaires that gets it seems to be MacKenzie Scott.
I commend him for donating $6 billion, that is an objectively good thing, but what the hell is he going to do with $10 billion in cash? He can live a life of lavish luxury with 1% of that.
This is just elementary misunderstanding of "billionaires".
> To put it bluntly, because he is an asshole.
A few years ago some data/articles made the rounds showing that most billionaires and high-powered executives are "psychopaths" according to the criteria for "psychopathy".
It isn't necessarily Elon specific but his public outbursts certainly put him in the spotlight, others lay low.
Compare him to some similar cases. Larry Ellison is a cutthroat executive, huge Republican donor, and is known to make abrasive and belligerent public statements. He was even temporarily the richest man in the world (there was a week in the early 2000s where Microsoft's stock dipped, putting Gates at #2). But he doesn't get the irritation that Musk gets because he stays off Twitter. He doesn't try to stick himself and his brand everywhere. Brian Armstrong banned activism at Coinbase and that also attracted backlash, but he's not seen as a hugely toxic figure. That's because that announcement was in the form of a long dry company policy statement, not by declaring himself to be a free speech absolutist or some sort of protector of not being political in the workplace.
So long story short is, beyond Musk's corporate actions and political stances, he has made himself to be a public irritant. People who don't like his actions and stances are going to be extra-aggrieved by it. I think in some ways there is a certain strategy to it, as we've seen since 2015, to use the negative emotions stirred up in social media to bolster one's aims. Musk has embraced the mantle of a universal celebrity, one who can produce infinite amounts of admiration from his devotees... and infinite amounts of annoyance from those who disagree strongly.
A pretty good video likening that public style to magician's tricks here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkvvAQxxo_0
It’s right there on his Wikipedia page, he was fired from the CEO job at x.com and again after it became PayPal.
Not to mention the boring company, hyperloop, that time he called a hero cave diver a pedo for no reason, his relationship with his many children, etc.
It's not like he was laid off or the company floundered afterwards, they fired him because they thought he was incompetent and then the company was acquired for $1.5 billion like 1.5 years later.
Of course, he still netted like $175 million or something from his stock so I don't think he cares much that he failed.
If only all failure was so lucrative.
It doesn't matter how good you are, even if you find another job in today's market, you will have to take a haircut.
Harder thing would be getting same or better pay maybe.
Also he sent a letter that people had to sign about intensive work, if you didn't you get three months severance.