Before, it was "healthy for everyone" when Twitter went down (search hn.algolia.com for pre-Elon Twitter downtime threads)
Now it's an episode of Real Housewives just like any other Elon thread on HN.
No need to pull out terms like gaslighting to justify creating more drama.
A 1 hour downtime is nothing.
If it’s nothing, why is Musk on Twitter saying the whole codebase is brittle for no reason, and needs a complete rewrite? Sounds like a pretty big deal to me.
As far as the drama comment, you’re free to disengage from this thread at any time. No need to continually interject how against the drama you are. Just leave if you find it distasteful.
Brittle code means it's hard to change, and causes issues when changed, but other than that it's stable when running.
And I have every right to point out the drama here. People here do somewhat have the right to create drama, but it is distasteful and unprofessional and I will continue to call it out.
Glad for you to admit there is drama here though :)
Perhaps the takeaway is that we should get our shit together. The opposite of r/antiwork.
What was the reason when Twitter went down pre-Elon?
I really don't see the reason for this artificial drama. Do other "X service is down" threads go this way?
People say Elon is dramatic, but this thread is honestly ridiculous and way more dramatic than anything I've seen him post.
I don't interpret a lot of "drama" as you put it, but interest. Many observers here are in this field, and follow the "chaos engineering" discipline. Some of them use tools like "chaos monkey" that simulates a metaphorical monkey running through your server room turning off random things, to see how well your resilience systems cope. It's a rare and greatly interesting sight to such practitioners to get to see what happens when the monkey "disconnecting the more sensitive server racks" is a more literal one.
To use a tennis metaphor, good players minimize unforced errors and recover quickly from forced errors.
This is a very clear unforced error that could likely have been prevented by just waiting to roll out the new feature.
To extend the tennis metaphor, it would be like Serena Williams losing a set on 50 double faults. Sure, she's lost other sets before, but it would be notable for her to lose in such a unique way, even if she still went on to win the match.
That's why people are talking about this, it's a very weird way for a site to fail and it's interesting how it happened.
Musk's cost-cutting may yet pan out from a business perspective, but it seems to be a pretty risky move.
If they had frozen features and left the existing policies in tact, I suspect we would have a dramatically different narrative about the layoffs. If brief interruptions like this are the worst that happens when you cut engineering to the bone, it's a good argument that is Twitter was indeed wildly overstaffed.
Instead, though, we have a company in crisis due to its mismanagement of other areas, so we're primed to view stuff like this through the lens of that broader failure.
Overstaffed in order to maintain Twitter as a static service that never ships new things, sure.
I guess they've been able to ship some things that the old Twitter had already implemented and/or a/b tested. But I'm not sure those count. Meanwhile people have been paying in advance for Twitter Blue features that were promised 3 months ago.
I'm probably not the ideal person to write this down, there was so much stuff going on, some people probably made a whole blog-article series on this. This is just a few of the things that I'm able to remember right now.. and with everything on hn here it gives you some ideas and things to think about. Hope that Helps.
... mostly around the hope they can jump ship before the Titanic pulls them under.
The only cases I can think of for staying:
- Unfortunate H-1Bs tied to the job. (We really need to make it easier for these folks to switch jobs and keep their visa!)
- A feeling one needs the job and can't easily get work elsewhere. Perhaps living paycheck to paycheck, haven't interviewed in awhile, imposter syndrome... (If you're worried you'd not be able to get hired, instead ask why you weren't fired.)
Or we could reduce the hoops & cycle time for legal immigration. The US has an opportunity right now to cement itself as the leader in technology for the next 2-3 decades and stave off the impending population growth crisis if we could find a way to enable people who want to live here to live here.
Also, there is no population growth crisis. A decreasing population means less stress on the environment and lower housing costs. Yes, there will be economic effects, but it's hardly catastrophic. Japan is managing just fine.
They become Americans and rise to your level of comfort and compensation. By working here in the US, they increase the wealth, tax base, and culture of our country. Immigration is a good thing. Skilled immigration even more so.
The alternative is that they stay in their home country, and that country grows a tech industry that rivals the US. Those workers will work for even cheaper than in the US, putting an even wider delta on price and creating an incredible arbitrage opportunity for talent.
Much like the automotive industry, foreign competition will drive margin out of our comfortable tech industry that has enjoyed being peerless for decades.
We're only going to see more `TikTok`s and `Spotify`s arise.
At some point, talent won't want to come to the US anymore. That should scare you.
I say all of this as someone who wants everyone to enjoy wealth and prosperity regardless of where they live. I still want opportunity and the ability to capitalize on it to be accessible to any American that would take it. And for that to continue, we should keep growing our talent pool and increasing the scope of what we can achieve together.
Even if number of engineers is decisive, we will never stop it by immigration. China + India have more than 8x the population of the US. We would never be able to deprive them of enough engineers via immigration.
Yes, there will be economic effects, but it's hardly
catastrophic. Japan is managing just fine.
Of course, you can find a lot of "experts" saying anything. Economics is an area where I haven't got the chops or the hubris to tell shit from shinola.
Be careful what you wish for.
Clearly not for everyone given the amount of opting out and controversy.
"It says here you were terminated for breaking into a vending machine in the lobby and distributing snacks to your colleagues while dressed as Robinhood."
"Yeah it was an act of protest because management threatened to take away our lunch breaks."
"Well... it... sounds plausible I guess."
I worked for a different eccentric billionaire early in my career. It was stressful, demanding, and unpredictable as he tried to micromanage everything by himself in short bursts of 5 minutes before moving on to the next thing.
The hook was an idea that it was a famous company and he was a [not quite] famous billionaire and that we were sitting on a once in a lifetime opportunity to build our resumes. He was going to reward us greatly at some future date when everything was working well again, and we’d be able to work anywhere else we wanted after this.
Didn’t really pan out for us as everyone got burned out, the billionaire’s micromanagement and constant product churn diminished the company’s reputation, and he eventually laid most people off in favor of even cheaper foreign labor.
But there'll be one or two people who get cozy with Elon and win the lottery and will write articles on how hard work always pays off (neglecting the other 99.9% of Twitter that gets fired when it all gets shipped to India).
They can switch jobs. H-1B doesn't force you to stay at your job.
You forgot the bootlickers, I'm sure not all of them have been fired yet.
If they actually make it all the way to the end, maybe being the last man standing there actually does have some perks we don't yet know about?
Seems to be related to a query param in my case (if I remove the ?lang=en, the page loads properly).