George Hotz signs on for 12 weeks at Twitter | Hacker News Reader

George Hotz signs on for 12 weeks at Twitter

techcrunch.com

20 pointsTuldok8 comments

I don't know how good he is at making search engines for micro blogs, but he sure is good at self promotion.

Geohot and Musk coming together to save the day, it's like a super hero story. Maybe they can hire Neil deGrasse Tyson as chief scientist too.

“also trying to get rid of that nondismissable login pop up after you scroll a little bit ugh these things ruin the Internet”. That would be a great improvement.

Musk will do anything but hire people who have any experience in social media and web systems. Twitter s problem is not that it is missing self-driving car tech.

I really wonder how many of Twitter's problem are actually engineering problems versus how many of the problems are more about decisions and direction of the platform.

Though of course, it's good to have talented engineers but I would be surprised if Twitter already didn't have that.

I think no matter where you the platform simply wasn't worth the price Elon Musk paid for it, so it seems to me like it's going to be a very big struggle to recoup that kind of money without maybe coming up with something new. From what I've seen, I think maybe there could be an interesting space to revive Vine which afaik is still owned by Twitter, Vine has a good name and when it closed many people thought that to be a mistake. It would have a hard time competing against Tiktok but maybe you could use Twitter itself to influence the debate a little bit... I mean, you own the platform now.

In that regard, it would be interesting to put people like George Hotz and others in that kind of project; instead of trying to "do something with Twitter". Idk, maybe I'm a little jaded but Twitter just doesn't seem like a product you could improve too much. It kind of is what it is and does what it does very well already and the problem to me seems to be that what it does just isn't all that great.

Maybe having a lot of engineers and no major engineering problems was the problem. Once you take care of all the base needs you get into the self-actualization phase where people tend to make up things to worry about. Better to try and refocus that energy by making it about doing some real engineering work

From what it looks like, Twitters revenue was advertisements and a huge chunk of Twitter's workforce was appeasing advertisers (ensuring that Disney / Mars wouldn't be shown next to porn) as well as sales reps who sold such packages to advertisers.

These sales people are now gone (or in the process of leaving) and suddenly Twitter finds it's $5 Billion/year ad revenue in danger.

It's not engineers who need to go out there and convince Disney / Mars / GM / Honda or Kellogg to run $million ads on Twitter. It's just sales.

So far Musk has been very busy "fixing" the code, although it's unclear what the problem is, and creating actual product and business problems. Advertisers fleeing, the weight of the Blue Checkmark decimated - in just a few days.

This has all the hallmarks of the new CTO rolling in hard with his old Crack Team and declaring that "everything here sucks, full rewrite, bitches".

I have zero tolerance for this bullshit. The last time that happened to me, I started looking for work right away and quit within weeks.

He did not pay $44B for Twitter. He paid $31B and dumped $13B of interest rate payments on top of the heads of twitter engineers. The interest on those loans amount to $2.74m PER DAY out of the supposed $4m PER DAY that twitter is losing

Imagine you are working at a company and 30% of its capital evaporates overnight. If you are holding onto that capital, or warrants (such as stock options) for that capital, now would be an awesome time to quit, because you were just given a 30% pay cut in your capital compensation (for mid-level engineers this translates to 15% gross pay cut on entire salary package). And your pay cut happened because the founder is super-greedy, stupid, and caustic.

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