The Twitter Boulder Office

> So there sat this new building. Just this huge, cavernous waste of money, a monument to a corporate unwillingness to change course in the light of new information.

Kind of somes up twitter as a whole. Something someone once thought was a good idea, plowed through with VC funding, failed as a business and still treading along till it was finally acquired and taken out back.

For every Boulder office like this there are a dozen more you will never see or know about. All built pre-pandemic, all built as Googly as possible to attract young talent, and all completely empty for the last three years.

How do I know? I sit in one a few times a week in a hybrid role. The office can seat 200 and there are maybe 20 that come in. It's a colossal waste of space and energy. Nothing has worked to date to attract the WFH people that will never return. But hey, there's free beer next Thursday after work.

I'd kill for an office with a door. Instead, I look over a sea of empty open office space with bean bags and foosball tables everywhere. I feel bad for whomever has to disassemble this Airstream trailer and get it back down the freight elevator.

I love reading anecdotes like this.

I'm split. On one hand, the human factor of being unmotivated to work from a basement or an unbranded office seems understandable. Yet it seems also so pretentious, and seems to justify the impression of a culture of IT workers who thought they're owed the world simply for the privilege to be paid to sit down and type some text on a computer as a job.

As for the new office being built and never used, speaks of absent leadership.

It paints the picture of a company that grew so fast, it simply became tumor-like. Unstructured, random, aimless. And frankly the Elon mutation didn't help with that, it just made the tumor malignant.