11 ms·

I think its valid to ask if Jack Dorsey is the next executive to leave. The moment Anthony Noto went to Twitter, all wall street could talk about was that he w

I think its valid to ask if Jack Dorsey is the next executive to leave. The moment Anthony Noto went to Twitter, all wall street could talk about was that he was brought in to sell the company. Who ever the next CTO is, they're going to have some tough decisions to make. Twitter already has to pay out an extreme amount of compensation in stock options just to get and retain talent. I don't want this to seem inflammatory to people as twitter obviously has some serious engineering talent, but does anyone consider them to be a big name in tech anymore? They seem to be in the range of say PayPal in that they have a decent reputation but they aren't really a name that gets you any resume recognition anymore. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/business/dealbook/twitters-steep-premium-the-cost-of-employee-stock-grants.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/business/dealbook/twitters... > By way of comparison, the company reported $2.2 billion in revenue for 2015 — meaning that it paid out 31 cents in stock-based compensation for every dollar of sales it collected. You're going to be fighting several battles that aren't really engineering related, - how to finally fix harassment that seems to be much more pronounced on your platform than pretty much any other mainstream social media site. - how to get alot more advertising dollars on your site to an audience that short of reddit, seems to dislike advertising more than most social media sites. And on top of all of this, you're probably going to have to shrink your engineering head count to make yourself look more appetizing to potential acquirers. Yikes......

TheOneTrueKyle 10y ago
The moment Dick left was when I felt a disturbance in the twitterverse (but I also have a disdain for Dorsey). It kind of felt weird to me that Twitter went from this platform of literally starting revolutions to managing expectations of its users in the name "fighting harassment". I now use it simply to tweet out my latest recipes...
- SapphireSun 10y ago
  Since the US election, Twitter has been headline newsworthy nearly every day. Whether you think that's a bad thing or not, it's still a potent force in the world, surprisingly to me.
  - basch 10y ago
    twitter itself is newsworthy, or are you saying what people write on it. do you consider the email protocol or telephone newsworthy daily?
    - slouch 10y ago
      My local ISP doesn't implement Twitter
  - stonecodegump 10y ago
    I signed up specifically so I could follow Trumps tweets post election. It seems this is where government policy is going to be formed for a while.
BinaryIdiot 10y ago
> They seem to be in the range of say PayPal in that they have a decent reputation but they aren't really a name that gets you any resume recognition anymore. PayPal doesn't get you "name recognition" anymore? In fact I would expect Twitter would garner more because of their larger open source initiatives but I still hear lots of chatter about PayPal and the people who have worked there. Maybe I'm just in a weird bubble but I still consider PayPal one of the big tech names.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
grandalf 10y ago
> a big name in tech anymore Donald Trump is making headlines using Twitter every day. I think that once users/victims become immune to Facebook's dark patterns, Twitter will look pretty good. The only thing it can do to screw that up is continue censoring content and allowing botnets.
- narrator 10y ago
  What's just bizarre is that they were seriously considering censoring Donald Trump's account at one point and even announced it. From a purely business standpoint, that was a dumb idea even to propose. It makes you wonder about the rationality of management and if they view the company as some sort of hipster San Francisco hobby paid for by VCs and not as a profit making enterprise.
  - SapphireSun 10y ago
    It's amazing from a business perspective, but at a certain point ethical questions arise. Should Twitter give a world shakingly powerful lier an unfiltered platform to the public? If he had to go through the press, everything he said would be filtered by editors and fact checkers. Incredible business opportunity, but frankly, the fate of the world is in part being determined by Twitter's granting him a platform. I can understand their vacillation around this issue.
    - sumedh 10y ago
      > Should Twitter give a world shakingly powerful lier an unfiltered platform to the public? All Politicians lie. Twitter is not in the business of being a fact checker.
      - foldr 10y ago
        Not all politicians retweet white supremacists, though.
        10y ago
slg 10y ago
Was Twitter ever really about tech excellence? My perspective as an outsider who doesn't live or work in Silicon Valley, it always seemed more of a communications and media company founded on a tech backbone. Beyond their early scaling problems, which they spent a long, long time fighting, what really exciting tech has emerged from Twitter? Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook all have much more impressive technology to show for themselves over the last several years.
- nightski 10y ago
  "Tech excellence" sounds like such a useless buzzword. There is no such thing, just incrementally better.
- blackaspen 10y ago
  Twitter's Github: https://github.com/twitter https://github.com/twitter Apache Aurora, Bootstrap, Storm, Heron, Pants, ThriftMux, DistributedLog, Apache Cotton, Iago, just to name a few.
  - slg 10y ago
    Can't most of those projects be boiled down to dealing with scaling? Twitter has seemed to have been mostly focused inwards, trying to get themselves more efficient at being Twitter. The other companies I mentioned seem more ambitious in expanding their tech outwards.
    - minimaxir 10y ago
      That's a No True Scotsman perspective. Scaling isn't easy.
      - slg 10y ago
        I'm not saying it is easy or disparaging the work of the engineers there. I am saying it seems like they have a different approach to how tech fits in with the goals of the company. To oversimplify, Twitter is focused on efficiency while others are focused on growth. Maybe the actual goals are different, but that is the impression I get looking at their output.
user5994461 10y ago
> Twitter already has to pay out an extreme amount of compensation in stock options just to get and retain talent. Lay off then no need to pay it. There are 4000 employees, which is about one order of magnitude too much.
- popcorncolonel 10y ago
  You suggest they lay off 90% of their employees?
  - throwanem 10y ago
    No, just a hair over three quarters. Anyone can see that's perfectly reasonable. (...he said, not realizing it was on the close order of what someone else here is advocating. Whence comes the idea that Twitter is overpopulated? Do we hear it from current or ex-Twitter-ers?)
    - mikekchar 10y ago
      Not going to argue with you. 4000 employees is going to lead to a lot of inertia when doing development (even if only 10% of them were devs). However, the culture and process changes you need to institute in order to make such a change work is not trivial. Probably necessary for the future growth of the company, but could quite easily end up killing it in the process.
      - throwanem 10y ago
        Not asking you to argue with me. I'd just be interested to see some substantiation for the claim that Twitter is overstaffed. It seems like that claim turns up a lot, and I'm sort of surprised that no one seems to have taken the time to explain why he thinks so.
        user5994461 10y ago
        The claims come from current and ex employees. Basically, in the least offense terms, doing nothing all day and got nothing to do.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
makomk 10y ago
Twitter's problem isn't just that they have to fix harassment, it's that they have to do it without touching social justice activism that sure looks similar to it from the outside, right down to the doxing, threats, and smears. Oh, and they'll get no sympathy for getting this wrong as the difference is apparently obvious... except that everyone defines it differently (usually based on who their friends are) and simply assumes the world shares their definition. Good luck.
- angry-hacker 10y ago
  Isn't the platform just the best medium for harassing and trolling? What else can you do with 140 chars? Have you ever heard about good tweets? It's always negativity.
  - makomk 10y ago
    Twitter's popular with journalists for some reason, most likely because it's an easy way to find potential stories and promote their work. This is probably part of the problem - it means that when ordinary users are nasty to them or their friends it's personal, and the same when they or their friends get their accounts suspended.
    - redthrowaway 10y ago
      And twitter being popular with journalists makes it a fantastic platform for news junkies like myself. But that's mostly a one-way street.
    - angry-hacker 10y ago
      Because only celebrities and journalists benefit from Twitter. It's boring for regular joe's, unless you like to only consume. Or troll :)
  - inimino 10y ago
    Since the election I've been spending time on HN and to a lesser extent Twitter. Every time I visit Twitter I find myself instinctively reaching for the downvote button, but there isn't one. About the only thing you can do when someone says (or retweets) something totally idiotic on Twitter is either unfollow, or, of course, reply. In other words, there is no way to register disapproval without simultaneously calling attention to the very thing you disapprove of. One of the absolute best features of HN is the downvote button and the way it is implemented. Downvotes are stronger than upvotes, and the downvoted content gets buried. A community that lets anyone join has to work hard to maintain a high standard. Downvotes don't kick people out, but they kick bad content off. Twitter has nothing like this, so the worst content gets the most attention. You can choose who you follow but users get no negative feedback on inappropriate tweets. So the norms shift towards whatever creates engagement, which is often outrage, fear, and strongly negative emotional content, with or without any rational foundation. If Twitter wants engaging and constructive dialog, they need a way to take out the trash. Unfortunately, Twitter's problem is that their potential for social good and their potential for revenue may never align. Since they are failing at turning a profit, it is unsurprising that they seem to be giving no consideration whatsoever to social responsibility.
gotthemwmds 10y ago
Anecdotally speaking, in the last 2 years, I've seen 3 ex-Twitter (as their most recent position) people apply, and none of them made it passed the second phone interview, which was the first real technical one. I didn't do the interviews myself, but I watched them, and I was very unimpressed with the applicants. I can say this about most (70%) Amazon people too... (and am in Seattle, so we see a lot of them).
pritianka 10y ago
I think the product is solid, for a specific purpose, for a specific audience. However, they've failed to figure out the broad appeal that can lead to advertising dollars. I think their usage demographic is too narrow for a public company level of earnings. To me this is a product leadership issue. I agree that perhaps Jack Dorsey would be the next to leave. The biggest fear I, as a Twitter fan, would have is a private equity fire sale.

TheOneTrueKyle 10y ago

The moment Dick left was when I felt a disturbance in the twitterverse (but I also have a disdain for Dorsey). It kind of felt weird to me that Twitter went from this platform of literally starting revolutions to managing expectations of its users in the name "fighting harassment". I now use it simply to tweet out my latest recipes...

SapphireSun 10y ago
Since the US election, Twitter has been headline newsworthy nearly every day. Whether you think that's a bad thing or not, it's still a potent force in the world, surprisingly to me.
- basch 10y ago
  twitter itself is newsworthy, or are you saying what people write on it. do you consider the email protocol or telephone newsworthy daily?
  - slouch 10y ago
    My local ISP doesn't implement Twitter
- stonecodegump 10y ago
  I signed up specifically so I could follow Trumps tweets post election. It seems this is where government policy is going to be formed for a while.

BinaryIdiot 10y ago

> They seem to be in the range of say PayPal in that they have a decent reputation but they aren't really a name that gets you any resume recognition anymore. PayPal doesn't get you "name recognition" anymore? In fact I would expect Twitter would garner more because of their larger open source initiatives but I still hear lots of chatter about PayPal and the people who have worked there. Maybe I'm just in a weird bubble but I still consider PayPal one of the big tech names.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

grandalf 10y ago

> a big name in tech anymore Donald Trump is making headlines using Twitter every day. I think that once users/victims become immune to Facebook's dark patterns, Twitter will look pretty good. The only thing it can do to screw that up is continue censoring content and allowing botnets.

narrator 10y ago
What's just bizarre is that they were seriously considering censoring Donald Trump's account at one point and even announced it. From a purely business standpoint, that was a dumb idea even to propose. It makes you wonder about the rationality of management and if they view the company as some sort of hipster San Francisco hobby paid for by VCs and not as a profit making enterprise.
- SapphireSun 10y ago
  It's amazing from a business perspective, but at a certain point ethical questions arise. Should Twitter give a world shakingly powerful lier an unfiltered platform to the public? If he had to go through the press, everything he said would be filtered by editors and fact checkers. Incredible business opportunity, but frankly, the fate of the world is in part being determined by Twitter's granting him a platform. I can understand their vacillation around this issue.
  - sumedh 10y ago
    > Should Twitter give a world shakingly powerful lier an unfiltered platform to the public? All Politicians lie. Twitter is not in the business of being a fact checker.
    - foldr 10y ago
      Not all politicians retweet white supremacists, though.
      - 10y ago

slg 10y ago

Was Twitter ever really about tech excellence? My perspective as an outsider who doesn't live or work in Silicon Valley, it always seemed more of a communications and media company founded on a tech backbone. Beyond their early scaling problems, which they spent a long, long time fighting, what really exciting tech has emerged from Twitter? Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook all have much more impressive technology to show for themselves over the last several years.

nightski 10y ago
"Tech excellence" sounds like such a useless buzzword. There is no such thing, just incrementally better.
blackaspen 10y ago
Twitter's Github: https://github.com/twitter https://github.com/twitter Apache Aurora, Bootstrap, Storm, Heron, Pants, ThriftMux, DistributedLog, Apache Cotton, Iago, just to name a few.
- slg 10y ago
  Can't most of those projects be boiled down to dealing with scaling? Twitter has seemed to have been mostly focused inwards, trying to get themselves more efficient at being Twitter. The other companies I mentioned seem more ambitious in expanding their tech outwards.
  - minimaxir 10y ago
    That's a No True Scotsman perspective. Scaling isn't easy.
    - slg 10y ago
      I'm not saying it is easy or disparaging the work of the engineers there. I am saying it seems like they have a different approach to how tech fits in with the goals of the company. To oversimplify, Twitter is focused on efficiency while others are focused on growth. Maybe the actual goals are different, but that is the impression I get looking at their output.

user5994461 10y ago

> Twitter already has to pay out an extreme amount of compensation in stock options just to get and retain talent. Lay off then no need to pay it. There are 4000 employees, which is about one order of magnitude too much.

popcorncolonel 10y ago
You suggest they lay off 90% of their employees?
- throwanem 10y ago
  No, just a hair over three quarters. Anyone can see that's perfectly reasonable. (...he said, not realizing it was on the close order of what someone else here is advocating. Whence comes the idea that Twitter is overpopulated? Do we hear it from current or ex-Twitter-ers?)
  - mikekchar 10y ago
    Not going to argue with you. 4000 employees is going to lead to a lot of inertia when doing development (even if only 10% of them were devs). However, the culture and process changes you need to institute in order to make such a change work is not trivial. Probably necessary for the future growth of the company, but could quite easily end up killing it in the process.
    - throwanem 10y ago
      Not asking you to argue with me. I'd just be interested to see some substantiation for the claim that Twitter is overstaffed. It seems like that claim turns up a lot, and I'm sort of surprised that no one seems to have taken the time to explain why he thinks so.
      - user5994461 10y ago
        The claims come from current and ex employees. Basically, in the least offense terms, doing nothing all day and got nothing to do.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

makomk 10y ago

Twitter's problem isn't just that they have to fix harassment, it's that they have to do it without touching social justice activism that sure looks similar to it from the outside, right down to the doxing, threats, and smears. Oh, and they'll get no sympathy for getting this wrong as the difference is apparently obvious... except that everyone defines it differently (usually based on who their friends are) and simply assumes the world shares their definition. Good luck.

angry-hacker 10y ago
Isn't the platform just the best medium for harassing and trolling? What else can you do with 140 chars? Have you ever heard about good tweets? It's always negativity.
- makomk 10y ago
  Twitter's popular with journalists for some reason, most likely because it's an easy way to find potential stories and promote their work. This is probably part of the problem - it means that when ordinary users are nasty to them or their friends it's personal, and the same when they or their friends get their accounts suspended.
  - redthrowaway 10y ago
    And twitter being popular with journalists makes it a fantastic platform for news junkies like myself. But that's mostly a one-way street.
  - angry-hacker 10y ago
    Because only celebrities and journalists benefit from Twitter. It's boring for regular joe's, unless you like to only consume. Or troll :)
- inimino 10y ago
  Since the election I've been spending time on HN and to a lesser extent Twitter. Every time I visit Twitter I find myself instinctively reaching for the downvote button, but there isn't one. About the only thing you can do when someone says (or retweets) something totally idiotic on Twitter is either unfollow, or, of course, reply. In other words, there is no way to register disapproval without simultaneously calling attention to the very thing you disapprove of. One of the absolute best features of HN is the downvote button and the way it is implemented. Downvotes are stronger than upvotes, and the downvoted content gets buried. A community that lets anyone join has to work hard to maintain a high standard. Downvotes don't kick people out, but they kick bad content off. Twitter has nothing like this, so the worst content gets the most attention. You can choose who you follow but users get no negative feedback on inappropriate tweets. So the norms shift towards whatever creates engagement, which is often outrage, fear, and strongly negative emotional content, with or without any rational foundation. If Twitter wants engaging and constructive dialog, they need a way to take out the trash. Unfortunately, Twitter's problem is that their potential for social good and their potential for revenue may never align. Since they are failing at turning a profit, it is unsurprising that they seem to be giving no consideration whatsoever to social responsibility.

gotthemwmds 10y ago

Anecdotally speaking, in the last 2 years, I've seen 3 ex-Twitter (as their most recent position) people apply, and none of them made it passed the second phone interview, which was the first real technical one. I didn't do the interviews myself, but I watched them, and I was very unimpressed with the applicants. I can say this about most (70%) Amazon people too... (and am in Seattle, so we see a lot of them).

pritianka 10y ago

I think the product is solid, for a specific purpose, for a specific audience. However, they've failed to figure out the broad appeal that can lead to advertising dollars. I think their usage demographic is too narrow for a public company level of earnings. To me this is a product leadership issue. I agree that perhaps Jack Dorsey would be the next to leave. The biggest fear I, as a Twitter fan, would have is a private equity fire sale.