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Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

You're assuming that someone leaving immediately causes things to break down. A lot of things will take some time to see the effects of people leaving.

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).

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Also imagine job postings.

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.

> it would be a big a big boon for my career to work at Twitter..

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.

Just one brand name on your resume can entirely change the trajectory of your career compensation. I see so many people working as SWEs at these small businesses or even fortune 500 companies. Sure they make 6 figures usually but their compensation is not in the same stratosphere as even entry level big tech SWE since so much of big tech pay is in equity.

Yup, that's where i was thinking. My career is smaller startups and smaller businesses. I make enough, but a bigger name on my resume would help a lot. Especially since i'm not someone who enjoys or expects to do well in the classical interviews.

I think there's actually some risk of too much time at Elon twitter making your resume toxic. It's no secret what kind of environment he's fostering there, and many companies simply don't want to hire the type of person who thrives in that situation, regardless of how technically skilled they are.

I suspect you're right. His brand is definitely tarnished at this point.

The risk is large, but so are the opportunities. I don't do "hardcore" anymore but younger me would be tempted by the challenge of it. Plus, I imagine there would be giant buckets of money to go along with it. A short tenure with a big payout will be worth it to some people.

For any budding Douglas Couplands out there, I think there's going to be at least a few chapters, if not a whole novel's worth of stories in being at Twitter the next six months to a year. (To say nothing of the last month!)

It probably would be an absolute hell-scape as you imagine, but for someone looking to make a name for themselves, it's an incredible opportunity to jump in, carve out a solid niche and then use that leverage to push your career forward. I can understand those who are leaving as that not what they signed on for, but there's a lot of people who would gladly roll the dice for that opportunity, I would've 5 years ago.

This is essentially what happens to a startup that scales rapidly. It goes from fire to fire as it grows, scrambling to deal with each new issue that arises and hiring new people as needed. It's not pretty, but is generally accepted as far more effective than attempting to hire and build way ahead of your immediate needs (the YAGNI principle).

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.

That's true but there's some missing attraction that's present in fast-growing startups but not here - there's little room for big stock / options growth (unless Musk provides options at less than the $44b price, or a high all cash comp) and the product is already mature so lots of interesting engineering challenges are already solved (and your challenge will rather be to figure out the existing codebase and how to work with it). There's also less of a promise of lots of fast hiring and moving up the chain as I imagine Twitter wants to remain fairly lean.

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.

I think there are plenty of engineers who would find the challenge of running a massive global service with a very small team to be inherently interesting in itself, regardless of the specific tasks involved. Some folks also enjoy high stakes rescue operations--the team that saved healthcare.gov comes to mind as one example.

And knowledge drain? I mean the codebase must be substantial?

I mean, try hiring Scala engineers on a good day, and especially those who are willing to deal with this crap.

Doesn't this assume that you won't eventually just replace some of these people?

He fired badge security, deactivated all badges & then asked that guy to come back just so workers could get out of the parking garage which required a badge to do so. You can see the tweet about it. It happened YESTERDAY.

The badge employee was not real. Musk just played along. It's becoming hard to distinguish these things.

That was a parody tweet. In fact, the account name had "(Parody)" in it.

That's hilarious. And sad.

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.

That was from a parody account.

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