Musk’s Twitter reign magnified his brutal management style
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Both were started at the right times yet it’s not obvious whether the engineering would’ve happened without his at-all-costs method and the vision/mission driving it.
Even then everyone understood the enormous pressures the workers were under but one could admire what was being acheived as the trailblazer.
I just don’t see any vision or mission to admire for Twitter especially with Musk at the helm.
Trying to force this on an existing culture will be hard, and doing the “extreme pressure” bit with no vision beyond “more free speech” seems impossible.
Maybe he will get there and in a few months the remainder will have coalesced around the joy of shipping good features fast. But things like labor laws and the FCC consent decree will provide a strong legacy drag.
You know you're on the "bad side" when labor laws are computed as a nuisance.
That's a serious problem. But he has said the plan is to turn it into X, the everything app. Like WeChat.
What's questionable is the objectively bad lead up to the current situation. It's one thing to overhaul a company - it's another to massively over pay for a company, be under immense pressure from added debt, and then fire a whole bunch of people in a very short amount of time.
There's no question here that he would've been better off starting his own company, building up experience while burning a few hundred million, and then buying out twitter at 20bn. He was on the board, he knew what the company was like, he had direct connections with important figures like Dorsey, he had all the information necessary to know that he wanted to make such sweeping changes.
I do agree that he could have handled the situation a lot better. But some things are outside his control.
There are reasons $TSLA is down by half and is still over-valued: Look at the bulls like ARK. Their short-medium term projections for Tesla are 60% based on the value of robotaxis, which is currently a $0B business at Tesla.
The majority of mass SpaceX has lifted to orbit is Starlink sats. They have saturated the market of outside customers and they have to generate their own demand. To value SpaceX at $150B, you have to believe that, unlike every other attempt ever, this time LEO internet will make money.
Overvalued market caps are good for the company, bad for late investors. It means the company received much more funds than they otherwise would have. A huge win for the CEO, and early investors.
If you have a startup with a true value of 1B, but sell shares at a 100B valuation, this is a huge win for you and the company
But that does not make Cathie Wood right, or prevent Starship from being the Space Spruce Goose (say it three times).
This stuff doesn't happen organically. It needs constant self-promotion and over-exageration of everything that the company does. And in turn such culture starts from the top. Musk is no 80s rockstar. He has no manager dragging him to do media, it's him who does media on his own volition to self-promote himself.
I could care less what's best for Musk and Tesla. I care what's best for me. In this case the consumer. Consumers are using many times per day the products and services of all the other top 50 companies in the Sp500. You look at the stats about penetration of Tesla cars and it's basically none, nobody is using them except for rich people in rich areas.
There are 1.6bn cars in the world and Teslas are some 2 millions? The backbone of the industrial economy. Not.
Koch Industries provided American consumers with way more quality of life than Musk ever will. The sane people who could care less about politics, techno-utopian hope, Mars and all the other unsubstantiated stuff that Musk sells, have no probelm admitting this simple fact.
I'm not going to directly contradict you as I don't have data to do it (and I didn't look up the data you claimed here) but I will point out that the average new 'car' in the US is an SUV with a price of around 50K. That is more than the price of a base level Model 3.
In other words they're not 'rich people cars' due to their price. A market penetration to a wealthier demographic must hinge on a different variable that correlates. Maybe interest in the environment, or technology, or geographical area, or something.
I'm starting to see Tesla taxis, so it's getting somewhere.
The likeliest outcome is Elon hands it to the banks and says "Oops. Uh... good luck?"
Twitter revenue was ~5B for the year before takeover. If Elon can keep costs <3 billion and bring back the add revenue, that would work. Firing 80% of workers goes a long way to cutting costs.
Alternatively, if he can somehow grow revenue, that would be another solution.
The same people who think Rick of Rick and Morty is a hero worship Musk, for the same reason - because his intelligence is (supposedly) so astronomical that he is no longer bound by decency or morality.
I'm going to explain what Elon Musk is likely doing over there at Twitter. This is not a discussion on whether it's RIGHT OR WRONG; just what's happening.
If I'm wrong, I'm sure he'll pop up and say so.
What Elon is engaged in is something called "Whaling and Culling."
First, the "Whaling":
It's a common refrain that you've probably heard at some point or another "10% of people do 90% of the work." That's what that tight 2 week deadline for Twitter Blue was for; he was perfectly aware that it was an unrealistic time frame. It was a test.
By pushing for such an extremely tight deadline, Elon got to see who is actually doing work and who is resting on their laurels. Furthermore, it proved who could actually perform under extreme pressure.
You know, the whole "get this done or you're fired" level of pressure.
Hence, Elon was looking for the whales at the company. The heavy hitting, actually producing and hard people who have been there for a while. When the whales don't have to carry dead weight, they perform like the equivalent of 10 people.
Second is the "Culling." When you've got 90% of the people not performing, they're actually negatively impacting the 10% who ARE performing above and beyond. And that's why the layoffs happened. Paraphrased, 'shit is gonna change around here, get on board or get out'
So by culling unproductive staff, he actually untied the hands of the PRODUCTIVE staff. Fewer obstacles to getting in the way of getting things done. It also revealed to him who was there to make Twitter a better product, versus who was there to be 'activists'.
So now you've chopped your workforce down to people who actually perform, but they're not enough to run everything.
This is why after all those people are let go, there's going to be a surprise hiring of a new bunch of people. Why?
Because the productive people actually know WHAT THEY NEED to get things done. Don't be surprised if the people that are left get to be part of the interviewing process for the new people. They'll be looking for efficiency and people who don't make THEIR jobs more difficult.
So, when you continually slice away the bad portions of something, all that you're left with is 1 of 2 potential outcomes:
1) Nothing usable. It was rotten at the core.
2) Some substantially good bits you can salvage and build on.
Elon is gambling on 2.
This is what he was talking about with 'Twitter 2.0.' It's likely not a 'new twitter.' Not for us. It's a new Twitter INTERNALLY. How things get done, how things get rolled out, rebuilding the company with productive and more efficient people.
What I'm saying is, take a look at the reactions: The people that are staying at twitter are hunkering down and working. The people he let go are the ones calling doom and gloom. And they're not wrong. The way "things were done" is OVER at Twitter.
So, from the outside, this looks like a giant cluster.
But it what's going to surprise you is that a great number of businesses are run exactly like this.
There's a reason layoffs happens every single year across the world. Whaling and culling. Elon is just being VERY VOCAL.
And like I said at the START OF THIS POST. I didn't say this is RIGHT OR WRONG. Just what is likely happening.
But if you never thought about it before, now you have something to think about.
Those 10% quit the moment they were offered an ultimatum. If you're one of the 10% of people who are holding up a company, you quit when an asshole boss comes around. You got plenty of other companies who you'd rather work for.
If you're an engineer of any caliber, even in this economy, you simply don't have to put up with any of this crap at all. And there's no reason to sign on (or stay on) to a company that treats you like this.
> So, when you continually slice away the bad portions of something, all that you're left with is 1 of 2 potential outcomes:
False dichotomy. There's #3.
#3: Everyone who was holding up the company, the "10% who do all the work", switched jobs and is now working for Facebook across the street.
Yeah "Want to go hardcore, click 'Yes'.". Hardcore to where, doofus?
You mean Meta? The company that froze hiring and just laid off 11,000 employees?
See the Twitter Android engineer / accessibility team guy who got fired publicly on Twitter last week, instantly got a bunch of job offers.
Some engineers like George Hotz seem onboard with the new approach. I have no doubt some there are a couple hundred talented developers in the USA who would not only be fine, but enjoy the challenge.
My company has a "special operations task force" of disagreeable highly technical 10x to 100x engineers who come onto failing projects, fix them, and leave. These guys enjoy (almost unbelievably) extremely hard projects, and working 18-20 hr days to fix messes. They once took over a conference room for 2 weeks, and slept and showered in the company while fixing a major product.
I'm a manager for a high performance team but not that high performance. I have list of at least 100 names of high profile performance developers we keep an eye on.
https://twitter.com/peterclowes/status/1593458225533313025
> Finally, there was no retention plan for those that stayed. No clear upside for sticking it through the storm on the horizon. Just “trust us” style verbal promises. But tweeps overall were untrusting after the 7 months of acquisition drama, recent tweets, and leaks etc.
> So my friends are gone, the vision is murky, there is a storm coming and a no financial upside. What would you do? Would you sacrifice time with your kids over the holidays for vague assurances and the opportunity to make a rich person richer or would you take the out?
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What's Elon Musk's vision here? Does he even have a plan? That's the most outstanding part of this all. It has become blatantly obvious that Elon _HAS NO PLAN_.
Its one thing to work for 20-hour days when you know what to do. But what is the plan for Twitter? The plan was "Come to the office on Friday to give Elon Musk a rundown on the code".
For anyone who has worked in difficult circumstances, this has to be one of the worst "visions" offered to "Hardcore" engineers ever. Or is the "vision" seriously just "keep Twitter running over the weekend" ??
And then what? Next week comes, and you'll need that herculean effort to once again keep Twitter open for just another week.
You're not getting paid any extra. All your friends have left. Institutional knowledge and trusted friends are gone. The boss is a nitwit who doesn't even understand the code, and there's no plan for what Twitter will be next week, let alone next year. (Shadowbans? Or not? Paid $8 blue checkmarks? Or not? There's a distinct lack of mission here).
Its not worth it to put in 20 hour days when the boss can't even decide if $8 blue / grey checkmarks are a good or bad idea.
A job that engages will get the best out of people, whether they are internally or externally motivated. Even internally motivated people will stop living up to their potential if their job role doesn't change to keep them engaged.
The problem might not be the people, the problem might be the roles. Yet Musk, like most others, is firing the people instead of firing the roles.
This idea of 10% and 90% is fundamentally wrong. It’s like saying the only meaningful part of a gear system is the meshing teeth. That’s after all where all the magic happens. But the interior of the gear is importing to position the teeth correctly. Where the gear attaches is more crucial - you can function fine with a few broken teeth but if the attachment is too tight or too lose it won’t work. More importantly the empty space in the system is crucial to the function.
I think the ratio is generally reversed - 90% of the people are making the magic happen, and 10% are redundant. It’s true there’s always a small percentage of folks that demonstrate remarkable effectiveness, but they can’t do that without the rest of the team essentially carrying out the work they are too valuable to be distracted from. They provide the cover, the headroom, and while the exceptional performers are force multipliers, there must be a force to multiply. They can’t multiply themselves alone. A good manager knows how to integrate those people into the rest of the gear system such that their force multiplication is magnified to its maximum. But the force itself is not redundant.
Due to their rarity the force multiplying engineers make more money and receive outsized recognition. The same is true for say a star quarterback (I know nothing about sportsball fwiw). The quarterback is famous and compensated better than the rest of the team if they’re amazing. But they can’t win the game alone.
The other thing to note about exceptional engineers, which I modestly count myself as one after many years of impostor syndrome, they can’t stand bullshit and absurd decision making. They also respect and even love their coworkers and team and will go to no end to see them individually successful. They are generally not mercenaries nor are they obsessively driven by a vision at all cost. There are very competent engineers who are like that. But they tend to be poisonous to the team and largely ineffectual because they’re not force multipliers. More than anything, no one trusts them - not even other engineers like them. They usually get stuck midcareer and either become bitter and withdrawn or end up as the star at some small shop that couldn’t afford a truly amazing engineer.
Now, I don’t work at twitter and never have. They might not be a serious engineering shop and his strategy is to dynamite the existing culture and rebuild it as a more serious engineering shop. But that won’t be successful if he can’t recognize the value of the 90%. And he shouldn’t fool himself that his force multipliers clicked yes. He ended up with people in precarious personal situations that can’t afford to lose their job and mercenaries that were bitter how they were marginalized while the force multipliers were magnified.
He will have a lot of rebuilding, and building of trust once lost is the hardest to rebuild of all. These events can haunt recruiting efforts for decades.
This is incredibly difficult and I think more represents the ideal, rather than a consistently achievable reality (at least I have never actually seen this in my own experience). Inevitably your upper leadership becomes infiltrated and then taken over by people who's primary skill is gaming the system of incentives. Once entrenched, they are difficult if not impossible to remove, and jealously gatekeep against anyone more competent that might threaten their position from below. New ideas and reforms are seen as threats, as most of the leadership is only interested in these things to the extent that they might provide an opportunity to increase their own social status, wealth, or power. In a company, this is takes on the form of the depressingly banal, but it is as true at the highest levels of power in every state and such things are behind many of the human-initiated catastrophes we see throughout recorded history.
To your point about the 90/10 ratio, I really don't get the sense that Elon thinks this way at all, however. I also agree that I don't think he is really getting the people he wants. As you said, those that would be most likely to stay under these circumstances are those who can't really go somewhere else (like those with a visa) or who are workaholics. Neither of these neatly intersect with the group of productive and skilled engineers and support staff. Instead of gross competency you are selecting for the desperate and the pathological.
This is why most of us could never be in the kind of position like Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. They see things for what they are and make the cold calculations. They still make mistakes but are directionally correct.
Power laws like the Pareto principle assert themselves unless you actively push against them. Twitter was not. Everyone knew they were overstaffed for years. The 50% cut when Elon took over had little effect. They were not a lean machine where the 90% were pulling the weight.
I also said if the goal is to rebuild twitters culture in a different mold then this is a way to do it. But it is not about identifying the 10%, it’s about identifying the people who map to the intended culture. That’s fine too. But they are driving away the force multipliers by doing this, and creating a reputation that will drive them away. That’s because force multipliers necessarily love the people individually they work with. They aren’t making the cold calculations you’re talking about, and they are generally repulsed by them. And you can’t have an excellent engineering culture based on mercenaries.
You don’t have to believe me. This is just my observations after decades of being involved in these things directly and being the one making the cold calculations.
What she also ended up doing is to smooth over tense situations between very competent people who are working in a high-stake environment where the urge to lash out/to fight for your vision above others' is getting increasingly strong as fatigue sets in.
That value isn't written down in her performance review. Yet, she's diffused a number of conflicts, allowing easier/quicker resolution of issues in a business where a mistake can (will) cost thousands of dollars. Because she's more approachable than her cross-shift, her subordinates are also more susceptible to ask her if they don't know something, instead of doing a potentially costly mistake or letting suboptimal situations carry on.
Personal skill-wise, she's not a magical 10% -- she's decently skilled, still learning her trade. However, she does help multiply everyone's performance.
As parent said, a gear needs many parts to turn.
"Get here in 3 hours or you're fired" is just trying to humiliate people, it's not even pretending to be a technical challenge.
Sad to see someone so non understanding add the "ah yes the people who are 10x as strong as others, just only held back" shtick and then to see it echoed as "yes, I think that IS what is going on"
This is someone who believes they are part of the 10% failing to see the value of the 90%, arrogantly mistaking their own ignorance for insight.
John Carmack and George Hotz have a different perspective.
Corporate structures, job roles and freedoms, and management, have a pronounced impact on how productive individual employees are. It's not just the employee's traits themselves.
It is true that US culture tends to place responsibility on individuals to manage their lot in life. This should be the case, but I think the US goes overboard.
"You're responsible for your performance as an employee, I'm not responsible for what I did to make your performance as an employee easy or difficult. Except, of course, I am responsible for unleashing the talent of the arbitrarily chosen top 10%."
Who is going to do the tasks that Carmack is too smart and important to do?
As others have said, that 10% has already left. If you know your value, you simply don’t accept bad working conditions (i.e., 100% on-site work, long working hours, etc.)
That 10% will have zero problems finding a decent job.
The company will stay up and the app will work fine ultimately. Everyone will claim this is because the best engineers who left wrote unbreakable code.
A lot of hardworking, smart people are gone.
I think it is quite surprising how little people work at a job.
In most companies, you can get rid of 50% of the company and things will still keep running and even improve.
He just wants people to do a good job. Is that too much to ask?
Add in the general leftist messaging which are popular in tech companies about mental health and taking time off, it is quite easy for those who want to take advantage of it to not work really hard and hide and keep getting a fat paycheque for a really long time.
The amount of money tech workers get paid is ridiculous. Compared to a librarian let's say. Do you think a tech worker is working as hard as a librarian? Hell no.
So I think its time to make sure that the work matches up to the hundreds of thousands of dollars they are taking home every year.
Aside: I really hate how news has become opinion pieces. "Brutal management style" is an opinion. The news should report the news. "X happened at Y". I have seen a lot of this lately. "X happened. This should make you angry." Don't tell me how to feel or second derivatives of events. Just present the event.
Maybe. But you have to take a few months to figure out which 50% if you have half a braincell. Especially if it is a complicated company in field outside your expertise, which for Elon this is (although he might have seen this different when taking over).
By this point you could have picked up a random person on the street and they easily would have done a better job than mister impulsive over there.
I mean the guy accidentally bought a company — a company to whose product he is addicted to. My speculation how that happened: his right leaning followers got constantly banned, so he wanted to proof to then, that the liberal snowflakes at Twitter HQ will not take his generous offer because they are against free speech and have political motives. So his prediction was that they would say no, because in his mind that is who they are and he could then take this No as ammunition to his followers. But the twitter people were not lefty liberals but mostly business people and so they said yes and from that point onwards everything mister impulsive did was pure and utter panic.
What we have observed here is not how someone in control looks like, even if we generously assume he is pretending not to be in control for stupid 12-dimensional chess reasons us mere mortals are just too simple to understand. He is giving orders people will not follow, that makes him look weak. He makes impulsive decisions he has to wheel back hours later. He wants screenshots of source code to make hiring ad firing decisions.
You could literally make a wet towel the CEO of Twitter and it would be running better than under him.
And even if we generously assumed that this is part of an painful restructuring the company might have needed, nobody remotly in control would plan to do it that way in a company that relies on money it gets from advertising and has workers who are heavily sought after and can literally pick a new job hours later if they choose to do so.
He sent out an email saying all offices were closing immediately due to his concerns of being sabotaged, then a few hours later sent another email that software engineers needed to meet with him in person the following day, even asking remote people to fly in immediately.
That’s chaos, but his sycophants are so devoted they’ll delude themselves into thinking this is genius.
No, but that's not what he has asked for. What he asked for is this:
----- From: Elon Musk
To: Team [at Twitter]
Subj. A Fork in the Road
Date: Nov. 16, 2022 [time stamp removed]
Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.
Twitter will also be much more engineering-driven. Design and product management will still be very important and report to me, but those writing great code will constitute the majority of our team and have the greatest sway.
At its heart, Twitter is a software and servers company, so l think this makes sense.
If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below:
[Link removed]
Anyone who has not done so by 5pm ET tomorrow (Thursday) will receive three months of severance. -----
Doing a good job is a very different request from "extremely hardcore", "long hours at high intensity", and "only exceptional performance counts". It's especially onerous to ask people to commit to this without specific details (weekends too? I assume yes), no mention of pay raises for working more hours, no mention of equity rewards (in fact, they were getting equity and now aren't, which is effectively a pay cut), no severance agreement to review before deciding, and 1 day to decide. Brutal fits IMO.
Every company/boss has this sort of management speak 101 sort of speeches they give. I think Amazon also has some principle of management which they told me during the interview which was basically the corporate speak 101 sort of material. In my own experience I've heard quite a bit of these boss speeches.
These are not the things you quit for. You just neglect it and do you job. There is no management police who walks around the cubicle like a beat cop to enforce this.