Hacker News Reader

On that last point. It’s incredible that as one crab is about to climb out of the bucket (tech workers becoming financially independent) and is pushed back down, the others take so much joy in it. While idolizing the fisherman that pushed that crab back down.

They never, ever, seem to think — wow someone almost escaped this bucket, maybe we should try too.

It’s incredible how self sabotaging we humans are.

I think a lot of middle America sees a tech crab kicking blue collar crabs down to get themselves out of a bucket (true or not).

Having spent all of my career outside of SV (worked remote for a company in SV for a while), but having spent a reasonable amount of time interviewing technical people from SV, I came away with a general sense of hubris that was not justified that I never saw from other parts of the country (n = several hundred at a FAANG and unicorn startup). Perhaps I was unlucky, but 9 times out of 10 I was astounded to find individuals commanding 6-figure engineering salaries who couldn’t code or even seemed put out that I was asking them to write code in an interview… for a role that required writing code.

From an outsiders perspective, if one was laid off from Twitter (with a generous severance package), they either will find themselves in a new role fairly quickly and it’s Twitter’s loss, or they were dead weight and may or may not want to consider adjusting their career path. In either case they’ll have more job opportunity than a laid off factory worker typically has. The whining about it only reinforces the perception of petulance.

> I think a lot of middle America sees a tech crab kicking blue collar crabs down to get themselves out of a bucket (true or not).

This is a deliberate tactic used by the people actually kicking us all down. People who make $40M/yr have gotten very good at convincing people who make $40K/yr that it's those snooty, elitist tech workers making $400K/yr who are the big problem in the world. Divide and conquer.

>People who make $40M/yr have gotten very good at convincing people who make $40K/yr that it's those snooty, elitist tech workers making $400K/yr who are the big problem in the world.

These same people have convinced the people making $40k/yr that Starbucks workers making $30k/yr demanding a union are also part of the problem, as well. Just call them millenials, woke, or coastal elites and people will be chomping at the bit to hate them.

It's not as absurd a proposition as you think. The people making 40K are not competing for resources with the people making $40M - their consumption likely has relatively few overlaps (and the people at the $40M/year level are likely in a different social class altogether - so they are not seen as competitors). Additionally, the number of people making $40M/year is relatively tiny - probably less than 1% of those that make $400K/yr.

You will notice that in Europe, the good social fallback systems / health insurance / safety net in place are at the expense of the people that make $400K a year (in the US), not at the expense of the millionaires.

Your first observation is very apt. We are competitive with those in our league and not outside.

And your second is a deep cut Europeans aren’t ready to hear if I understand correctly n

I’ll Push on your thesis and argue that maybe you were not in the superior position you thought you were.

Many times I’ve seen small (often midwest) firms try to engage me when I worked in FAANG and what they were tackling and how they were doing it lacked sophistication or experience to a degree that wasn’t even worth me engaging with. Their goals were small, their technology was unambitious, and their business lacked scale. They thought I was being smug, even when I was polite and said none of this out loud — but honest to god they were actually a bit insecure about the reality that they didn’t have much to offer and slowly realized it.

I’m sorry but it’s really rich when someone from a small firm barely making millions would lecture me on how to do it right when I ran multi billion dollar programs. But that didn’t stop them from lecturing to feel superior. And the more I didn’t engage with that the more they seemed to think I was being “smug”.

I completely agree with the lack of sophistication. A lot of that comes from (imho) not being around a culture of software engineering and typically being a small group inside a non-software business. Seattle is an example, at least when I was there, where people knew what they were doing and could get things done without the arrogance. Night and day from SV in my experience.

I agree, but I don't know if it's fair to say that people just never thought "maybe we should try". See for example the Mined Minds program. This self sabotaging goes the other way too also, remember "learn to code"?

Christopher Nolan's Interstellar had a line of dialogue from Matt Damon's character that went something like: "As a species, we can care deeply, selflessly about those we know, but that empathy rarely extends beyond our line of sight."

Still resonates with me.

As a tech person, I’m failing to see what’s wrong with cutting bloat? I’ve always felt much more productive on smaller teams, and while not quite at the scale of Twitter, have worked on teams with 10s to 100s of millions of active users with only 10 or so technical staff and another 10 or so business and managers. That team got increasingly less efficient as it grew towards 50 or more people over several years.

I don’t really have an opinion about Musk one way or another (except coincidental his involvement in the 90s with Rocket Science Games), but I’m unsure where the animus has originated. For example, I don’t care much for Bill Gates because under his watch Microsoft was relentless at putting competitors, several of which I was a fan, out of business and his foundation funding experiments gone wrong in poor counties. Besides outspoken political stances and firing people, what has harm has Musk caused?

“Cutting bloat” isn’t the only thing going on here. That happens regularly and we have laws to regulate the process.

> I’m unsure where the animus has originated

He didn’t pay his workers what they were due in their employment contracts. Is it moral for a multi-billionaire to not pay his workers what they agreed upon?

It’s too bad that labor laws are so weak in this country that this isn’t considered a crime with real jail time.

That’s the current story and I completely agree that employees must be made whole. However, the disdain for Musk started long before his acquisition of Twitter.

Probably stayed when he called a guy rescuing kids a Pedofile.

The problem here is you think the current story is the start of his abuse, this crap has been documented for years.

If it’s animus now, might it be possible that people were too impressed with him 10 years ago? Maybe building him up into something that he wasn’t, then enjoying seeing him fall from ”grace”?

Folks really love that kind of story, and Musk seems happy to play the part.

That’s certainly reasonable, and I’m hearing enough anecdotes that I wouldn’t have grouped them together to form an unfavorable opinion (or at least no less favorable than Larry Ellison, Richard Bronson, or any of the other socialite billionaires).

> However, the disdain for Musk started long before his acquisition of Twitter.

Before his acquisition of Twitter I could attribute it to jealousy and a certain childishness on Musk’s part.

But all the messages sent out by him surrounding the Twitter acquisition (and everything that happened around it) have made him seem like a slightly smarter Trump.

It’s ideological and not rational. Once you understand that, everything makes sense.

A lot of people here on HN seem to have an almost religious belief that large corporations are rational, lean and efficient at every level.

If you believe everything has already been cut to the bone, or pay for themselves, or are vital to the company's long-term strategy - you might believe there isn't any bloat to cut.

After all, what rational company would have 80% of the staff doing nothing of importance?

I think its cause Musk is the richest person in the world (eat the rich, etc), isn't lock step with popular narratives, and engaged in the culture war stuff. "Cutting bloat" doesn't sound very empathetic either and is "anti-worker/pro management", thus the left leaning tech crowd disapproves. In his oppositions perspective, companies have an ethnical obligation to doll out corporate welfare and support causes they believe in. Musk isn't really into that. tl;dr - he's a Capitalist

> cutting bloat

There’s lots of different ways to put it, and getting fired sucks regardless of the circumstances. Organizational bloat is a common phrase for groups that are larger than their utility, it doesn’t reflect on the individuals in that group in any way (except for maybe executives and middle managers who allowed it to get that way).

If a private company is continuing operations to the satisfaction of its owner without a portion of its employees, whose prerogative is it but the owner’s? If I hire someone to do work on my house or do my taxes I expect them to do the agreed upon work for the agreed upon price. What right would those people have to complain about (or worse, demand) me not putting them on retainer for work I don’t need? The only one in a position to determine corporate welfare is the one who writes the checks, whether you like that person or not.

I agree. Over hiring in tech has been an ongoing trend. Playing devils advocate, paying for a service as an individual (like taxes or home improvement work) varies from employing people as a company. Even more reason to take hiring seriously because it has financial consequences. Having been part of many conversations surrounding hiring and headcount planning, its very messy and can change week to week. Even more reason to stay lean, and perhaps leverage contractors/consultants for busy periods or bursts of work.

As more of an operator type, people in my crowd are more curious than anything. It's obvious that you could take a car company, fire everyone except for the sales, marketing and people working in the factories, and things would keep going for a while with significantly improved margins. However, that's not a recipe for long term success. Your competitors cars will continue to improve while yours will stay the same, and your systems slowly (and sometimes quickly) break down.

The real test will be when Twitter needs to move fast in response to market changes (VR maybe?)

AKA,the GE approach to doing business

Does the fact that Twitter is wildly financially unsustainable under Musk's leadership ever come up in these executive conversations? Because if not, I'd say it doesn't reflect well on those folks.

The purchase agreement was an objectively terrible deal for Musk. Axing all of those workers is directly related to how much revenue has fallen.

Elon has increased costs (via debt) and slashed revenue. In any other context this would be a laughable failure, but I guess his weird charisma has a lot of appeal for certain people.

Maybe in a few years when Tesla has declared bankruptcy or Elon has had to pump $xxB into the company to keep it afloat those people will reevaluate. I'm joking, of course they won't.

This is a serious generalization in all three categories.

Executives: I am a tech executive and work with other executives. Lots of them are far from impressed by Twitter and what has been done. If the "overwhelmed lawyer stuff" as you call it turns into an actual fraud settlement (ie if the lawyers for the employees on the landlords win) I think you'll struggle to find executives with much good to say about it.

Normies: My wife and all her friends are normies. Small sample, but a typical talking point is how twitter has become a bit worse since the takeover but that most of the stuff they follow hasn't changed that much.

Tech people: There seems a sharp division (like with Tesla) between people who admire Elon and people who don't.

Noone seems to have changed their minds much over this issue other than some of the people who were publicly in favour of the takeover (eg Jack Dorsey) beforehand are now publicly against it. I can't think of an example of someone who's flipped the other way but I'm sure they exist.

> Executives are truly impressed with Twitter these days from an operations stand point. The mass layoffs, the strategic regrouping, and the fact new features are being added with reduced staff. They don't see the technical issues behind the video platform or even this kinda of overwhelmed lawyer stuff as major issues. These are just part of the growing pains.

> Twitter didn't go down, is still getting new features

For how long? Twitter is sitting on unpaid Cloud bills. GCP and AWS can cut them off at a minute's notice the moment their legal department judge they won't be able to recoup the losses.

Rumor has it the reason they killed the API is they lacked the manpower to actually keep it running and it was a last-ditch attempt at getting rid of bots. Same bots who flocked to the platform after the layoffs started since people in charge of mitigating these were fired.

Firing abuse and content moderation teams meant there was a lot more unsavory spam on the platform and advertisers didn't want any of it near their brand. In a few week Twitter lost half of it's top 100 biggest advertisers [0] and it doesn't seem they are coming back.

> The Tech people seem to driven from a strong place of fear. I think they are right to feel afraid too. I've been asked repeatedly about plans to reduce headcount, with Executives quoted Twitter's success or emerging AI.

It'll be funny to see it happen (and to short the stocks of the companies that will imitate Musk). Let's keep in mind that pre-layoffs Twitter had profitable/break even quarters. Now it probably won't happen for a long time thanks to advertisers leaving the platform en-masse. Also, what most people don't get thanks to sloppy reporting, is that the great majority of layoffs of "tech workers" were actually "tech-adjacent" positions. Think HR, recruiters, Managers, tech evangelists... Very few actual engineers. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-lost-half-top-advert...

[1] https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-24/tech-layo...

[3] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3690309/about-those-te...

[4] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-03-0...

[5] https://techreport.com/news/3493451/microsoft-layoffs-ethics...

Look at the dates for those articles, It all sounds like "the sky is falling" while Twitter hasn't collapsed and is delivering new features.

> Twitter hasn't collapsed and is delivering new features.

Their API is gone, breaking every third party client out there. Bots using screen scrapping are fine and there are more than ever on the platform.

Half of their pre-acquisition top 100 advertisers are gone.

Twitter PR and legal just respond to any external email with a poop emoji.

Site stability has gone down. They had multiple partial outages since the acquisition.

Maybe these are the features you are referencing?