If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now

Can he code.to save his life? Does he know anything about engineering from Tesla or SpaceX, beyond catchphrases?

So a decent amount of devs get a nice six-figure salary (RSU, equity), pretty good benefits, kush perks, and more to mess with a template? Órale...

Do you actually need thousands of people to run a blog engine? How does the website continue to work with so few employees left? Am I wrong to think the right person could write and run a blog service alone?? If we (like Musk) look at everything wechat does Twitter is rather silly. Specially in the US coders should be able to do the thinking for a company. It was not on its way to become a super-app, it took 2 years to do an edit button? He just wants people who can chop wood.

If he turns out to be right only time will tell. He made success from things that don't work often enough. We should expect that to be plan B?

Qualifications make the people suffer less but historically have never been required for leaders in any venue. In Europe awful kings were simply born to the throne and people had to accept it, for example. We remember ‘X the Cruel’ but none of their subjects.

The victors write the history books.

While I'm usually not in favor of professional unions for programmers, I think that's the only option at Twitter at this point unless people are ready to quit en mass.

A recent example from tech is Adam Neumann (the WeWork guy) who came up with an absurd business model for commercial real estate, led a widely-ridiculed IPO, and lit a billion dollars of other people's money on fire. A couple years later a16z announces they're giving him a third of a billion dollars to fail again because (paraphrasing from memory) he was the only person who made a profound effort to transform the real estate market.

You can also see smaller-scale examples in media. There are New York Times op ed columnists who have been wrong about everything for decades, but they keep getting invitations from talk shows and universities and publishing companies because of the prestige of being a NYT columnist. But a big reason they're still a columnist is because of all the prestige they get from doing that other stuff.

It's a circular process, and it seems to be hard to fall out of unless you fail publicly and catastrophically. Sometimes it takes multiple such failures. These people all run in the same social circles, which probably also helps. I suspect an awful lot of elites would fare poorly in a real skill-based competition for their official jobs, and consciously or unconsciously act to prevent such a culture from developing.

I don't know any of these people personally, so take this with a large grain of salt. But in the case of Musk, it's clear to me that nobody who spends that much time being a flamboyant asshole on Twitter can be getting any real work done, much less running 2-4 different companies at a time. His real job is prestige development. I'm not sure he has anything in his playbook that doesn't rely on a pre-existing desire to work with The Great Elon Musk and his Great World-Changing Companies. Like many elites, when forced to focus on his official job, he is mediocre at best.

Why don't you think someone at that level could be so incompetent? Megalomania and being out-of-touch reinforce each other. History, from ancient to the present, is full of wealthy, powerful, and paranoid people acting incompetently and thereby doing tremendous damage in the process.

I have no idea how many people get through the code interviews at Big Tech and then think they've proved their value and just phone it in, but I guarantee it's not zero.

If I have any particular concern it's that this sort of thing misses some real unsung heroes in any big technical project, i.e. the people who write good documentation and the people who chase down bugfixes. This is important work, but won't be captured by screenshots of code very well. "Here's a screenshot of where I fixed an off-by-one error, but it took two weeks of unraveling 137 microservices to find which RPC was guilty." Important, but not exactly impressive in the way one might think.

Shouldn't that have been the idea *before* they laid off half the employees?

How fucking idiotic of a leader do you have to be to lay off half the company and *then* try and figure out who is producing literally nothing of value?

In my experience those do-nothings tend to be near the top of the pyramid.

At the engineer level it's harder to get away with doing nothing because you're constantly being told what to do and then you get evaluated to see if you actually did what you were tasked with doing.

As you go higher up the food chain, some can get away with claiming they're doing everything while taking credit for other people's ideas and work, while the only thing they actually do is order people around.

Where are you getting these numbers? You got any real studies or data to back this up?

Microsoft once had an internal rule that anyone in engineering who supervised less than 100 people had to code. Is that still the case? This looks like a way to find the people who aren't doing that.

The goals which you wrote can be achieved with far superior tools, which wouldn’t have alienated developers, whose skills are really-really valuable on the market. In such environment, as what Musk created, they are the first who will abandon the ship. They have every possibility to work in any kind of environments what they want.

Instead, he now gets an effectively random layoff, with potentially whole/important teams vanishing, and biased so that the best people (who can easily find jobs) are most incentivized to leave.

Instead of starting with 50% layoffs, you could have started with the ultimatum to stay for 'hardcore twitter' or not. Then you have a loyal set of employees AND reduced headcount.

First they dropped orgs and teams they just didn't find useful any longer like large swaths of the HR team, marketing, etc. Then they asked leaders to identify the bottom ~30% of performers and culled them.

Now you're left with the "better half" of the company. But Musk isn't through yet - he needs to identify of that remaining 50% who the top performers are. So he created a variety of things to do to locate the people that get things done and those that have silently quit or are just resting on their reputations from previous accomplishments.

Now that you've identified the top talent you let everyone else know they can stay or go. This is the loyalty test to see who is culturally compatible and is invested in the mission. to many it comes off as crass and hurried and unplanned, but the entire point is to create an easy exit for people.

Musk has done all this rapidly and aggressively, but none of it is weird. He is unique in that he has access to resources others don't and answers to no one which can be good or bad. The end goal is he must believe that there's a solid core and a lot of rotten culture around it. Get rid of that and give that core the resources they need to succeed. Twitter will be hiring a lot of people in the coming months and this core of people will be doing the recruiting.

We'll see if this plan works!

Have you seen any move these past weeks that can potentially be constructed as a good idea, without invoking a brilliant master plan that nobody else understands?

Occam’s razor, etc.

That's presumably what he thinks he's selecting for, but is it really? In my experience on sinking ships the least useful people are the ones who often stick around longer, simply because they're worried they can't easily find another job.

That aside, I'm not sure that willingness to submit to the whims of Musk (and be really hardcore or whatever) correlates in any way with actual capability to contribute. Even if it does, the trait is unlikely to be distributed evenly across the myriad departments in Twitter, so in the best case it's going to impact certain parts of the business disproportionately.

But realistically, my gut check is that selecting for sycophants and masochists is more likely to leave you with a bunch of dysfunctional psychopaths than it is to leave you with highly competent contributors.

1. Bought the company at an overinflated price and tried to back out, but was ultimately forced by the court to buy it

2. Half baked rollout of the twitter blue which caused brands to flee the platform after major reputation damage.

3. Laying off half the company, and then having an uncapped layoff of remaining individuals (probably violated labor law, by placing the voluntary layoff days after the top down layoff, he had 0 control over the effects, which by some reports has meant 88% of people no longer work at the firm)

5. Company was purchased with 12B in debt, meaning he has 1-2B/year in debt payments alone, meaning a path to profitability is challenging.

6. Has had to go back to critical workers to try and retain them.

outside of the leveraged buyout, I’m not grading him on assumptions, but rather the ways in which his actions don’t seem to align with his stated goals.

He wanted a reduction of 75%, may have gotten 88% He wanted no WFH, he had to roll that back He wanted to verify for money, he (effectively) had to roll that back. He wanted to grow revenue, and it’s declined. He didn’t want to buy the company and was then forced to do so.

Nope. Strongly doubt that Twitter is that kind of place either, bet its closer to no more than 20% that do almost nothing, and maybe 60% who work inefficiently because they have to. And firing more than half the people won't make them any more efficient, it just means that now you start doing things like using zero code review or oversight and everyone gets swamped with 40 hours a week of CI failures because it turns out that team everyone liked to hate on actually did a whole bunch of work nobody ever saw and now all the internal tooling is completely broken.

Even at Apple which runs very lean engineering teams, verging on understaffed, would have times of year where most engineers were doing nothing. After an OS released in the fall there would be a month or two of planning sessions for the next OS' features. It would be a lot of meetings of middle management with little input from ICs. After the new year work would begin in earnest but from October-December most engineers were spinning their wheels or doing relatively light work chasing down bug fixes for point releases for the recently released OSes.

The idea that any team is going to put in a constant 40+ hours of typing code is farcical. Time needs to be taken to actually plan out projects even if you're doing some seat of the pants Agile bullshit. Putting everyone on a death march schedule for something as ultimately irrelevant as Twitter is just burning people out for no reason. There's no upside for Twitter's engineers to burn out. Unless they're being offered equity or bonuses or something their new "hardcore" schedule is all sacrifice and no reward.

I've been on there a long time, but have never been a heavy user.

Twitter seems like it was mostly complete a long long time ago. It's changed far far less than say facebook over the years. I'm sure stuff has changed but I would struggle to remember what's different than say 10 years ago.

They had 2000 people when they IPOed. But that was 5+ years after launch. If a hundred people had 90% of the functionality working the first couple of years it really does make you wonder how they got to 7500 employees.

From the outside it doesn't look like that much to show for 7500 employees. It makes me wonder what the infrastructure looks like. Is the software to sell ads that most of us don't see much bigger and more sophisticated than Twitter itself? How many people are taking care of data centers and doing "toil" ???

It's perfectly possible (even common, I might guess) that most people do understand that this is a realistic scenario and that it might be the case at Twitter, and that the goal of cutting the fat might be for the best even though it's harsh - but also that Elon's behavior is absolutely absurd.

I think you're spot on about most tech companies. But I don't believe this kind of behavior will incentivize high performers to stick around. In fact, I would guess that the best employees have already left. With this kind of uncertainty and the threat of working long hours and then being fired on a whim if you disagree with Musk... ask yourself, who would stick around?

The only people I can imagine are the Musk cult worshippers and those with no other speedy alternative -- H1B holders and other similarly "stuck" people.

So basically Musk is trying to kick everyone out of the company except for his cultists (who will worship him no matter what) and the people who can't leave otherwise.

Open to alternative explanations... but even if I truly believed in a leader, I don't think I would stick around for this kind of abuse. Perhaps I'm just not "hardcore" enough to work at a social network, though.

For a long time tech was eating the world and the more engineers you had the more likely you were to accidentally walk into a massive piece of the pie (the google model). Now things are more mature and there’s probably just less opportunity to do that.

But really I think leadership styles have to match the leader. Most leaders can’t get away with this because they fundamentally don’t want to.

It will be really hard to take the right lessons away from this situation. 90% of what Elon is doing that is successful is probably below the surface, if the lesson is, come into a company and fire 90% of people and you’ll thrive, I think you’re going to have a bad time.

Most important Edit: you have to have fuck you money for this to work so you can sell $4 billion in stock to keep the company afloat after you tank the revenue.

Perhaps a union or guild of some description would be in order.

I suppose that we would need to first decide whether (in this scenario where he succeeded) Elon had actually fixed Twitter, or whether he tore it down to the studs and built a different company out of it, one which happened to be called Twitter, but did something completely different, with new people and new leadership. It feels like that's what he wants to do, and maybe that's why he's not backing down as everybody in the company leaves.

If it works then I think senior managers will be more willing to reorg quickly and build from the solid core.

However, I'm not sure it will change most things at most places. Managers love headcount more than anything. Each person under them makes them more important. Managers love this. I've had roles where I don't need anymore headcount but I was forced to add it because my managers wanted more headcount.

Worst case, we'll have profitable tech companies far earlier in the lifecycle.

That said, I do think it's very likely that 80% of the present value of any given company is derived from work that was done on the very first version. Twitter the product can likely coast as is for a long time. However I think the reason for having large product teams at mature companies working on marginal projects is because the stock price depends on it. Your potential for discovering new S-curves is priced into your revenue multiple. So while a private twitter might be able to find profitability as a 700 person company, theres (probably) no way for them to achieve meaningful growth. As a result, public companies probably wouldn't view this as a viable playbook.

However I feel like Elon's public statements (and track record as an eng focused leader) make me doubt this will happen. He seems much more enamored of Hardcore Engineers who can ship new features (ie fart pillows[1]) rather than the ops/business side, so I don't think creating a glorified lifestyle business is something he's interested in pursuing.

[1] https://electrek.co/2021/01/19/how-to-make-your-tesla-fart/

Look, Twitter was over-hired, no doubt about it. I have no clue how you would need as many engineers as they had. That said, Twitter did/does have hard problems. People joke about how simple Twitter is but it's just not. The ability to search across all tweets alone in realtime is a massive undertaking at their scale. Even with that they had more employees than they problem needed. My issue with how Elon has managed this is more about how ham-fisted these multiple rounds of layoffs/firings are coupled with how inconsistent he is. Just 18 hours ago they said not to come in till Monday and then with only a few hours notice you need to be in the building with a list of achievements and screenshots (!?) of your code.

I've produced a lot of code over the last 6 months, I'd want more than a couple hours (including traveling) to put together a "portfolio" of sorts. Though has I worked at Twitter I'd have taken the layoff yesterday rather than continue to be jerked around by this... jerk.

To me it matters less if Twitter survives this and more about what that means for the employees that are left. Are they going to see any of the "success" if they turn it around? As it stands they have been asked to work longer hours/weekends but their salaries aren't changing (that we know of). The company isn't public and I've yet to hear of any sort of profit-share/equity/etc that's being given out to those who are going to stay. Also Twitter succeeding != Twitter being a good place to work at. Currently the only person that benefits from Twitter succeeding is Elon. I can't imagine putting my life on hold to enrich a billionaire, especially since Twitter itself isn't a noble cause, no matter what some people deluded themselves into thinking.

I'm not anti-hard-work, I'm anti-hard-work if I'm not going to get something in return which as of now Twitter/Elon has not outlined any rewards other than "being part of Twitter 2.0".

But yeah likely if Twitter does well then we'll also see a bunch of copycat douchebaggery at the C level because "it worked for Elon". For whatever reason, history seems to show us that any time some douchebag succeeds, all the wannabes come out of the woodwork to emulate it.

Now, I don't really believe that will happen because software and technology is mind numbingly complex now, and I think only through large bodies of software engineers are we able to tame it, but it is one distinct possibility. Obviously it is the outcome Musk believes in.

Issue is, people kill themselves to make awesome electric cars and rockets straight out of scifi, but to make a better twitter? I'm not seeing it.

But I'm often (usually?) wrong!

The degree you would buy into this probably depends on how much you believe that Twitter is a good representation for the rest of the industry. I imagine a number of people would prefer to believe it is not in the case of success if it is their self value in question.

It seems minor now but at the time he was pushing for PayPal's tech stack to ditch Linux and use a Microsoft stack instead. Peter Thiel backstabbed him to oust him for that.

I know someone that works at Tesla and they say that when Elon comes around there's an aura of terror. They've personally seen him firing people on a whim during one of his "visits".

With Twitter he is an outsider coming in to a company serving a very different market, with existing structures and projects he can't know about.

I guess we have different definitions of what's actually demeaning.

I'm sure he'll succeed in building it. The game industry manages it, for example. You can abuse and burn out engineers if that's what you really want.

That said, I wouldn't say abused engineers are particularly more productive. He can work them 9/9/6 while he's at it, I don't think that'll help Twitter succeed.

This “code printout” talking point is just… obnoxious.

I hire this way - I don’t care about a coding interview, I care about how you think about my your work and your ability to speak to it.

I have yet to see concrete evidence of malfeasance here and yet… the circle jerk continues.

> With 14 hours notice.

Also, into an office building that he just declared to be closed to all access until next week.

Also, how does Twitter handle approval for travel if one's manager is gone?

Twitter's software developers make a lot of money. The only similarity to a Victorian factory worker is that they have two arms and legs (but all of their fingers and toes).

If the government cares so much about workers, why don't they take care of them themselves, like with a guaranteed job or training program, instead of forcing other individuals to do so?

In this case it looks like it'll be Dec 8th when he'll have to show up in court about all of this.

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/65680829/cornet-v-twitt...

Hiring people is ridiculously expensive (their salary and even health care/benefits are a small fraction of the total cost), and the last thing small businesses need is even more expense to hire. Large companies can amortize with economies of scale (e.g. HR departments).

You could try to play a cat-and-mouse game (e.g., make laws that apply only to companies with more than X employees, so companies restructure so it applies to them), which then leads to laws so complicated that only large companies with dedicated lawyers could afford to navigate.

And here we are now. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" combined with "I'm from the government and I'm here to help".

The movie is going to be great.

In the dotcom era, I was in the middle of a mass layoff. At the meeting, "everybody go back to your desk and dial extension 1234, and you will get a message with your employment status, instructions and next steps".

PBX crashed.

PBX took a while being brought back up because, well, the people responsible for supporting it wanted to find out whether _they_ were some of those laid off before deciding whether they wanted to bring it back up.

The influences are from Elon's actions and tweets as well as leaks from insiders. Media conspiracy theories are not relevant here.

FWIW, what I've heard from friends inside Twitter matches the reporting.

Musk's words and actions have been very public indeed. What additional context can we gain by speculating about his private thoughts and back-room dealings?

Ultimately, twitter will be judged by its users, and whether they find value in the site, and whether its financially viable - income meets expenses. I think twitter's free speech & openness virtually guarantees the former, since everyone will be able to find something that they like on the platform and ignore the rest. The latter will be opaque for quite a while, since twitter is now private and, I assume, won't be disclosing its financial data except as required by taxes / regulation.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/11/12/23452396/elon-musk-twi...

The only person allowed to smoke weed at a Musk company is Musk. Everyone else better piss clean.

If you're earning 100k a year and the most important code you show is how you turned a link colour from light blue to blue -- then your $100,000 a year job has now become questionable.

It's hardly losing the plot to ask someone "What have you achieved and what do you think your best work is?"

Elon needs technical architects and technical direction more than just developers if you ask me.

I don't think Twitter will completely fail, but I'm pretty sure it will stumble quite publicly/visibly a lot in the coming weeks.

use the opportunity to prove how undervalued you were, and how essential you will be to restructuring.

If someone had 10 people cleaning a small apartment every day, you'd question what were they actually doing. That wouldn't make sense.

That's the way it works. Maps aren't uploaded to production so they fail to load for you.

He's trying to decimate the workforce on purpose, although it's not going as smoothly as he hoped from outside appearances. He wants huge numbers of Twitter employees to quit, and he has been very clearly laying out the terms for behavior for the type of people he would like to run Twitter with. He's intentionally shaking the tree violently. He's hoping that the types that remain will be his types of employees. He's going to try to rebuild the workforce starting from those, so it's his company in ethos / function.

He thinks Twitter can run with far fewer engineers, and drastically fewer staff overall, than what it was operating with previously. He knows the value of engineers, he has made that part clear: he plainly said that engineers are most of what is important about Twitter, not the rest of the staff, he said it should be an engineer heavy company.

Not the first time this has happened: https://twitter.com/NilsIRL/status/1479065003684765697

not sure if this is normal but tons of resources link to ton.local.twitter.com which NXDOMAINs against quad-8

also you're totally right; none of the JS is minified!

There is nothing more he can do to control Twitter. He is at maximum Twitter control.

I hope a historian is following Musk around and taking notes, because this will make a delicious movie about hubris and its limits.

Not if all the big advertisers leave...

> In 6 months all of the advertisers will have returned

Why? If the economy declines ad spending will fall and the industry is more competitive than ever, it's a buyers market. Also most seem to have left because they didn't want to be associated with Musk rather than due to technical/policy issues with Twitter itself.

> his roll out of subscription features will be slower than he wanted

Which is probably a good thing for Twitter, would move it to the pros parts.

If Elon really is a business genius and is playing 5D chess here that the rest of us just can't understand (like Trump was, lol), then maybe in six years, but not in six months.

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/217489/revenue-per-emplo...

Its changes to the world that require code changes. Ex: when the new spam-companies figure out the new anti-spam techniques Twitter implemented last month, then those spam-companies will shoot up to the top of Twitter. And there will be no one to stop them, analyze the new spam or figure out how to stop it.

Electric cars and SpaceX are intrinsically cool to work on, but it remains to be seen whether working on "Twitter 2.0" will be interesting enough for Elon to attract enough talent.

This is anecdotal of course, but pretty much every single one of my friends - even the staunch Muskovites - are really scratching their heads at his behavior and choices. He may well be the awkward genius that was his prior image, but right now he is being widely perceived as a tantrum throwing privileged man child who had success fired at him from a high speed rotary cannon and he managed to avoid destroying it by the skin of his teeth.

The way he publicly talks about his employees and how his approach seems to be to human beings can only be described as sociopathic. Again, there may well be an army of overpaid engineers at Twitter just twiddling their thumbs, but the expectation that people will somehow fall over themselves and sacrifice their personal life so that Elon Musk can add another couple of dozens of billions to his wealth is preposterous.

He went from being an advocate for humankind to coming across as a robber baron who cares nothing for the wellbeing of those who work for him. As if it was somehow a privilege to work for him.

In the past, I respected him a fair amount. He did, in my mind, earn respect.

However, his behavior over the last several years, has burned that respect to the ground. His behavior over the last several months has dug a deep pit into the earth. And his behavior over the last several weeks has dumped the ashes of that respect into the ground and covered it with concrete.

You can earn respect, but you can also lose respect. He's done so much to lose every ounce of respect he ever earned.

I personally think he wants to move Twitter mostly on maintenance mode until he has cleaned house, and then slowly rehire when new features are more clear. For that, running on 20% staff might be actually ok.

The key would be to retain the right people. And I'm not sure which filter I'd use.