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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

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saagarjha

> Notice how things have gone quiet around Twitter lately.

This was today: https://twitter.com/iamharaldur/status/1632843191773716481

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I hate the attitude, the language and the fact that these people are running this world.

"Approved, you go ahead"

Just drains my energy and hope for the future.

I wonder what he thinks people think about him when they read this real life satire? There is an employee who doesn't know if he got fired or not and the CEO of his company now publicly wants him to explain what kind of work he was doing. Nobody even knows why: Will Elon decide whether this guy will be fired for real or get back his work pc access depending on his answers? Why is there no company internal way for Elon to figure out what someone does? Why does Elon engage publicly?

This is stunningly bizarre and such a bad look, the definition of a "shitshow".

I think Musk is a breath of fresh air from the sterile, managed, corporate-speak drones. He already proved a lot of... "experts" wrong about the imminent implosion of twitter after he got rid of a bunch of people. I'm very interested to see how things go in the next few years. Here's his side of the story on that.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1633011448459964417

I have worked in companies with a lot of dead wood in relatively senior roles. They may have done good work in the past, but they seem to stop doing much actual productive work and instead just kind of insert themselves into important projects and meetings and set about trying to make themselves sound indispensable. Yet they produce very little tangible output and their work can't be explained without vagueness and buzzwords. Leading efforts and driving changes and steering modernization and managing the paradigms, bringing stakeholders together, architecting solutions.

They're hard to get rid of for whatever reason. They've built little fifedoms, they have a reputation, they're very good at hobnobbing with middle management, or other dead wood.

Some orgs absolutely could benefit from a fresh pair of eyes to come in and have people justify their positions, and have the confidence and risk appetite to make some calls.

Now I don't know if Musk is telling the truth here, or anything about that ex-employee, his work or background. He might be a great worker who was well worth his salary in value created for Twitter. He could also be one of the other kinds, that failing orgs desperately need to rid themselves of. His twitter pitch is not highly confidence inspiring.

Twitter allegedly shed about 80% of its staff since Musk took over. Which is frankly staggering that it is still able to operate with 4 in 5 people in the company gone. Maybe that is cutting too far down to the bone but there has been no immediate implosion or collapse. Things still have a long way to play out, but clearly he did not throw darts at a board and fire random people or all the most productive ones if it could get that far.

Are you somehow unaware of the regular reliability issues (6 incidents in 2023 alone), downtime, collapse in revenue, advertisers erosion of trust, etc?

Personally, I couldn't classify that as 'operational' - but maybe I just have high standards and expectations

Twitter used to not work for me. I would actively avoid clicking on links to tweets as they would reliably not load on the first try, refreshing wasn't reliable either, and was quite slow.

I am today an active user of Twitter, and never have these issues anymore.

I don't use twitter much but I've always found it quite incredibly unreliable (for what it is and how many engineers they had working on it). Something was always "going wrong" with it. I haven't actually noticed any difference post-Musk. I'd easily believe if you pulled up stats showing it did get worse, there's simply been nothing you'd call an implosion of the service. It used to kind of work most of the time, and it still does.

I haven't really looked at financials. It's never been what you'd call healthy though, sans SV-bubble. I have heard they lost a lot of revenue since Musk took over but I'd imagine there has been a collapse in opex too so it's difficult to judge that one way or the other.

As for trust, I think a lot has been gained as well due to more transparency about their involvement with government censorship programmes. Again hard to really chalk that up one way or the other.

I'm not saying Twitter has suddenly become the golden goose under Musk, or that no technical operational aspect of it suffered after laying off 80% of their staff though, so this doesn't really address my point. My point is Twitter must have had a vast amount of positions that were not providing value and its actually refreshing to see a CEO go in and ask people to explain what they do, take bold action, and take ownership of those decisions.

The meek, managed, MBA, CEO style is to release a canned statement saying how sorry they are and how horrible they feel, and delegate salary or head count reductions down the line which actually doesn't help much with the dead wood situation and can even entrench it because they're often in lower level executive positions themselves.

My company has recently been through a round of these job cuts and we fired good, productive, very long term experts and immediately had to move people in other places to fill their exact positions (badly, because they barely worked with that code before and have to learn it all). Why? Because they worked in different branches of the organization. They fall under different VPs, and the edict said that everybody had to trim X%. It had nothing to do with what work they did, targets had to be hit so they had to go.

I would have killed to be able to take it to the CEO and be asked to explain what those people did to justify why they should stay on. That's why I find Musk a breath of fresh air. Not because he posts infantile memes on twitter or is rude to employees -- I don't think that twitter convo was very tasteful, he could certainly stand to improve how he goes about things. I just think his approach to running companies has some merit.

It’s not operating very well. Multiple public outages each weeks, 40% drop in income, and people are literally sleeping in bathrooms.

Works more or less the same as before really. There may be some differences but let's not pretend that many alleged experts were completely wrong in their predictions of imminent implosion. And I wonder how much expenses have dropped.

Corpspeak sucks and Twitter probably had more people than it needed. That being said, the solution to that is definitely not to hire someone who decides the final word for an exec is to post offensive memes on your account and shame individual employees after you fire thousands of them. The cuts weren’t quite random, but they were pretty haphazard, and a large part of why Twitter is still standing today is the work that went into improving it in the last decade, rather than smart decisions from Elon.

I think the problem with this take is that even though he's "shaking up" corporate culture, it's not, like, in a good way. Just randomness. More fun for the public to watch but I don't think we have many signs that any results are good.

I disagree obviously. I think it has merits and it's not "just randomness", whatever that means.

Twitter sucks now. Even its boosters are using “the service didn’t permanently collapse within 80 days of settlement, see?” as their metric of its success.

If it sucks now it sucked before. And the self-proclaimed "experts" who were certain it would imminently implode don't get to avoid being wrong by indefinitely stretching what imminent means or watering down what implode means.

The cruelty is the point.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1633253950198624257

And he apologises for firing him after humiliating him in public!

Probably realized there’s a multimillion severance contract in place.

Seems expected that he was fired. Elon is firing anyone who doesn't write code. He doesn't seem to be writing code, just a manager.

When does Elon realize he doesn't write code himself and fire himself?

Watching a grown man beg Elon musk for his job on a social media platform is not something I expected to ever see. It's been two weeks- if his paycheck didn't come through, he has his answer. Obviously a s-show led by Elon, but on LinkedIn especially I am seeing a lot of posts where these ex-FAANG employees, who usually score severance measured in months rather than days or weeks, and who were already raking in a $250k+ salary anyway (if you count bonus/RSUs), are so desperate to find another job "ASAP" as to make a post on LinkedIn to... try to get other people to find a job for them? The entitlement is rampant and I see no real difference between this Twitter conversation (if you can call it that) and the posts I frequently see on LinkedIn.

I'm out of date but in the past if your company was acquired and you were retained, you had to stay X years at the new company in order for the acquisition to be considered complete and you to get your complete payout. Dude probably wanted to know am I actually fired, because, then you need to, you know, pay me for my company? Elon tried to ghost dude, but old boy's got receipts is my guess. Elon just spent $$$ to save ¢¢¢. But maybe acquisitions/retained founders is different today. Elon rules though fake 'Twitter transparency' that lacks all nuance and detail but does have 200% more memes so who knows.

I agree. The Twitter exchange was cringey from both sides nonetheless.

I’m not sure why you find it strange that people who have lost their jobs look to their network for support?

It's strange. I know the colloquial wisdom is that it's not only NOT strange, but a good idea... but it's strange. It's usually ex-FAANG who are likely millionaires from a net-worth perspective, who were given weeks or months of severance, who would realistically have little trouble finding another job given their resume, yet they will compose a giant LinkedIn post about how woe is them and they need help finding another job - before they've even lifted a finger to find a job themselves. It belies everything they purport to be (e.g. "good enough to get a job at FAANG"- churned leetcode to pass the interviews, etc.), if you ask me.

> Watching a grown man beg Elon musk for his job

But that is not what is happening here at all.

Sure it is. He was asking Elon whether he still had a job, after being locked out of his account and not being paid for 2+ weeks, then he tweeted a litany of contributions he was making to the company to sell himself to Elon, whether that was his intent or not.

I'm not defending Elon, the whole thing has been a dumpster fire.

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