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People didn’t leave because of the bad decisions. They left because Musk said he wanted “hardcore” people who’d work 80 hour weeks. Turns out masochism isn’t correlated with great engineering.

I think there may be a disconnect between what Musk says and the reality on the ground. Enough so that I, given such a situation, would wait around a little bit to see how things played out before jumping ship. But as I said in my original comment, I’ve sprinted away from toxicity before, and will do so again if it becomes obvious.

If it was only that Elon had said it, I might agree. But he also had multiple rounds of layoffs (after lying every time and saying "this was the last!"). He had multiple horrible mandatory meetings forcing people to drop everything and fly over the country. He forced people to print out their code so he could review their work.

Nobody good stays during ALL of this.

I wouldn't say nobody, there's likely folks held captive by H1B visas with limited options/mobility

H1B people can and do jump ship. The bigger issue was Twitter laid off so many people it was a poor time to look for a new job.

If you really want I can qualify my earlier statement, I thought it was obvious:

GP wrote:

> Enough so that I, given such a situation, would wait around a little bit to see how things played out before jumping ship.

That means "nobody" is talking about the group of people who have the option of "waiting around a little bit to see how things played out before jumping ship". H1B visa holders aren't included in that earlier group, so I didn't think a further qualification is necessary.

> I think there may be a disconnect between what Musk says and the reality on the ground.

Which runs against every good piece of advice that has ever been uttered about leadership. Musk far overpaid for twitter because he wanted to be the center of attention and what better way to do that than to buy the network which gets the most attention from "important" people?

He then took the Michael Jordan trope of "I never asked anyone to do anything I was unwilling to do" and tried to turn that into reality by sleeping in his office every once in a while. The problem with this sentiment is that the only employees who are going to stick around long-term in such a ridiculous working arrangement are those who either can't find jobs elsewhere or are terrified that they won't be able to find jobs elsewhere.

So now you've got a highly toxic work environment full of people who are unconfident in their own abilities to get the work done, and Elon constantly pretend like he's some sort of business genius from the movies who just walks into a meeting, throws a bunch of turds on top of the agenda without having a firm grasp of anything, and storms off to light the next fire.

It's fucking insane.

> Enough so that I, given such a situation, would wait around a little bit to see how things played out before jumping ship.

The twitter engineers were presented with an opportunity to jump ship and also get 3 months of severance. I think the rational ones, who had a choice took it, leaving employees who didn't consider it rationally, as well as employees on H1Bs who didn't have the luxury to quit without something else lined up

yeah its correlated with getting deported from the US if you lose your employer

I bet that most, if not all, H1B visa holders working for Twitter, would be able to land a job pretty quickly if they wanted to.

Individually yes. It's less clear what happens if Twitter is shedding hundreds of engineers at the same time many other companies are freezing hiring or letting people go.

H1Bs don't actually get deported for that.

Yes, they absolutely do. There are some serious penalties if you overstay your visa.

In theory, yes.

In practice, the immigration authorities have enforcement priorities, and deporting overstating H1B is very far from being one.

As long as you don't cross a border, no one will come looking for you.

Source, my immigration lawyer when I was in danger of overstaying my H1B.

They absolutely do. I’m not sure why you’re posting this; it’s just demonstrably wrong.

The parent is technically correct, you're not deported for losing your job on a H1-B. Your permission to remain in the US ends, and presuming that you leave by the deadline, you are not deported.

Deportation is a different legal event. It's a forceful expulsion which occurs because you did something seriously negative like break the law. Deportations are a big deal and a bad thing to have on your record in any country when it comes to your future prospects with that country.

To use a super rough analogy it's kind of like an honorable vs dishonorable discharge from the military.

> Mostly because I like my job and the goals of my organization even if it makes bad decisions.

Keep in mind that Musk intentionally turned Twitter completely upside down. Anything that people there liked about it before Musk is likely gone—coworkers, WFH, perks.

Tell me you're in your 4th year at a BigCo without telling me you're in your 4th year at a BigCo.

The goals of the organization are mostly a facade. The people running the organization, and their actions, are what the goals of the organization actually are.

No, I’m not at BigCo, at least not in anything at all close to the scale of of FAANG.

But I do work in an industry where even the C-level people usually (not always) have at least a little interest in truly pursuing mission <X>

I know this for a fact because even though I am not at all C-level or even the manager of a large team, I often have a seat of the table in the meetings where such people come together. Those meeting can be ugly, they can reveal how the sausage is made, to borrow that analogy. And I’ve seen how many (not all) truly are trying to get <X> done but doing so may require a bit of ugly sausage making to get there.

And I’m not a wide eyed 4th year either. I’m a grizzled and usually cynical veteran in my field. My job is often to put out fires, or produce analytical tools or output of strategic importance, and also to sometimes to plug a major gap in operational capabilities. I’m not really a manger but I’ve earned a seat at the table when the highest people get together as well as when they interface with counterparts at other organizations.

Don’t take that that to mean too much though: I may have a voice, but it is by far, very far, the smallest voice in the room.

> The people running the organization, and their actions, are what the goals of the organization actually are.

Obviously. Are you suggesting that one can’t appreciate those? Or that this is some secret? Maybe the communication in the orgs you’ve been with has been poor?

Or as the great Stafford Beer put it, the purpose of a system is what it does.

Thanks for your good work.

> goals of my organization

What do you think they are?

The organization’s stated mission, inherent not just to it but to all places of its sort, is <X>, even though, unfortunately, we often end up chasing <Y> instead.

It’s a difficult balance: <Y> is in fact necessary to continually achieve <X> but there are times where decisions focus exclusively, or at least too much, on <Y>. But we live in the real world, and sometimes that’s necessary. (<Y> is not money though it has an impact on our financials) And also sometime people with a broader view see further than I do and those choices that seem wrong come around a few years later and it turns out <X> is actually better off for it. It keeps me humble, skeptical of my own certainty even when it seems faultless.

But I’m also at a point now where people who pop up and start shouting <r>! or <f>! or something completely random like “Well how about <~€€€~>?” I can easily deal with: I go back, do a bit of the work I do, show it to the right people, and those shouts -disappear. Sometimes one gets through and it’s annoying, but whatever, nothing is perfects.

Of course the above vastly oversimplifies things. There are many, many more variables to juggle along the way. But I hope it gives a reasonable sense of things.

And I’m sure the “<X>” style notation of things in my explanation makes it harder understand what I mean, but I value my privacy, hence the abstractions of the factors involved.

> but I value my privacy

I guess the way you abstracted will probably reduce your privacy (a tiny bit). At least I have not seen anybody write "<X>" instead of just X in this usecase.

So either this is very specific to you, or is very common in your circles so you do it too. Both of which reduce the number of potential candidate if somebody tries to doxx you.

Additional you (or your editor) uses “” over " which also reduces the number of candidates.

(Not trying to attack you here, just thought it was notable)

<*> was my own ad hoc convention in the moment. My “.” style is the default for the mobile phone I’m on, which is the US, and I don’t mind sharing that since I’ve mentioned it in plenty of prior posts. But I do honesty appreciate the analysis, those aren’t things I’d specifically considered when posting now or in the past, and it’s always useful to know what subtle signals can be picked up in that sort of detail. Heck someone observant could probably infer broad geo region (time zone) just from the fact that I am making these comments at this time.

Then you'll probably appreciate the following info. You have commented excessively on HN over the years. If you have done any publicly accessible writing with your real name attached, then it is quite easy to find out who you are by correlating writing styles. (If you don't have done so publicly then at least your employer will be able to do that using all internal writing on one hand and all your HN contributions on the other.)

Sounds far fetched, but it's really not that hard. Quite recently somebody hacked this for correlating HN accounts with each other and found alt accounts of people with high accuracy. Which people confirmed. And that wasn't even a serious attempt, just a little hack on a sunday night.

In a sense, it's all too late now since all your writing is already out there. But could be good to know for the future.

All true, but that’s a level personal detail I’m prepared to live with having it out in the world. There’s a limit to how much mental energy I’m prepared to put into worrying about doxing, and it doesn’t go this far. But it is a remarkable aspect of just how much we can be fingerprinted by so many different things we do in life.

It's unclear to me what you're meant to do about this besides never post anything, which is depressing. Hence I don't even try.

One option is to change HN accounts often. Every few posts you need to make a new one. Successfully correlating writing styles needs some data and if there are only a few sentences to go off then that's not enough.

I know that the site guidelines discourage that, but what can you do.

I guess you can try to develop two very distinct writing styles.

Or, as I do, consider everything posted to HN to be linked to me. My handle is actually an abbreviation of my full name. I consider HN to be "professional" correspondence.

You can have LLMs rewrite your texts.

And we are back to the depressing part where you can't even bother.

Writing style is also a lot more individual than people recognize.

Iirc word histograms almost uniquely identify authors. Of course this is on larger amounts of text, but I guess you could identify users over seperate platforms this way.

E.g. Intend to use ellipsis (...) to separate thoughts in online conversation a lot. But I try to not do that in reddit, where I try to stay somewhat anonymous.

Still, I assume that it would be possible to correlate my reddit and HN account just by comparing the word histograms (ie which words I use and how often).

Yes, some of my academic work in comp-ling (massively outdated by today’s advances) explored things like the perplexity scores of different Shakespeare plays to explore the controversial claim that some the work attributed to him was actually done by Marlowe.

(As a complete aside, that program of study also included Forensic Linguistics which truly fascinating. And of course the work of Claude Shannon and information theory, though not in any great depth)

What do you do when people decide to make the exact ama E mistake again?

If you can’t refer to “last time this was disaster” (aka “I told you so”) how do you prevent it.

I can share a post-mortem in a non-confrontational way and have a discussion about it. Even if it often results in an “Oh well, I guess it won’t work”, sometimes it’s a highly productive conversation on how things could have been done better, and the person or team goes off to execute some new variation to great success. And sometimes the variation fails as well, but such is life. I try to engage with people in a way where even if failure is highly likely, we go in eyes open knowing the risk is worth it. Sometime we’re wrong (or I’m wrong, it’s my fault) but such is life. Not all shiny ideas keep their shine once they’re unpacked into an attempted implementation.

Avoiding the mentality isn't the same as referring to the past. With most people, It's perfectly fine to bring up the past in a matter of fact and dispassionate way, so long as it's constructive and not meant to shove "see I was right" in their faces.