10 ms·

Twitter’s new CEO announces major reorganization

89 points by sim_card_map 5y ago

spoonjim 5y ago
I honestly wonder if a CEO who grew up outside the US is going to be a good steward of the uniquely American attitude towards free speech. Honestly, I don’t have a lot of hope for it.
- zxspectrum1982 5y ago
  Towards free speech? Twitter is not pro free speech. Twitter has long been pro free woke speech. In other words: Twitter is censorship. Remember that's the social network who allows talibans to spread their propaganda and hate speech.
imchillyb 5y ago
> The changes include moving to a "General Manager model" for teams in the product and technology organizations, which will mean having one person lead the work in those divisions. "This will allow us to operate more cross-functionally and enable faster, more informed decision-making," the spokesperson added. In other words: We now have an Overseer role. Individual contributions no longer matter to management. Overseers will ensure the company's decisions are followed through at every level of employment. Now even the design teams will 'be on board' with the changes, or be gone. No more dissent. No more questioning of the leadership. No more discussions. The Overseer's word is law, people!
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Live by the sword, die by the sword. Twitter employees are getting a taste of what has been dished out on Twitter users for years.
- md2020 5y ago
  As a sidenote, "This will allow us to operate more cross-functionally and enable faster, more informed decision-making," is just completely devoid of substance. Do the people crafting these corporate statements actually believe that people don’t see straight through them? Nobody is going to read this and think, “Oh, thank god, they’ve assured us that the change isn’t going to communication worse and decision-making less informed, this is good stuff!”
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    It's the emperors new clothes. Nobody wants the be the guy saying "But what the hell does that really mean?" so everyone pretends it means something.
  - aeze 5y ago
    I'm not sure it's completely devoid of substance. Obviously there's no detail provided, but it is stating the goals/benefits of a general manager model for those who aren't familiar with it.
- jmacd 5y ago
  Many larger b2b companies operate with a GM model. Why? Their businesses are a portfolio of products that essentially need a CEO rather than a PM. True P&L accountability and control. Different products within the company will have different needs at different times. Without a GM the Twitter Blue team ends up head to head with the Ads team during planning, and you can guess who wins. Small products will get overly influential GMs who can move mountains within the company to get them what they need. It's less overlord and more political air cover, if done right. GMs are almost always the first to get fired as well. It's a sort of end-stage of your career at a company. Few GMs can become CEO, so once you take that GM role you are on borrowed time.
- saagarjha 5y ago
  I’m genuinely confused how you arrived at that? I just read it as “there’s now one person in charge of each of these divisions”, which seems like a pretty standard way of organizing things? Do you have a specific reason you think this would shut down discussion?
- syshum 5y ago
  If that is the case then I would actually encouraged by it, Twitter social activist employee's are a problem for the platform. sadly though I dont believe this will be the case,
- _coveredInBees 5y ago
  This is such a weird take and makes me question if you've ever worked in a large company to begin with? I think ICs would much rather be part of a cohesive team with an engaged leader that is advocating on behalf of the product the IC is involved with. That's a hell of a lot better than the typical dysfunction in large orgs/companies where ICs are just lost in a sea of confusion and politicking with no clear higher-level management structure to support the projects and products they are involved with.
  - drewbug01 5y ago
    I’m not sure if I agree that the take is “weird” or not … but one thing did stand out to me about your comment: the idea that this would result in helpful structure and clarity for ICs. We don’t know the complete extent of the reorg, but my experience at large companies and living through multiple reorgs (10? 15? I’ve lost track) is that they usually don’t actually mean much for ICs on the ground. The reorg usually is limited to VP level folks - they get moved around, but usually their teams stay with them. It’s usually not a big day to day difference for the folks at the bottom of the org chart. Edit: I’ve also never experienced reduced confusion or politicking as a result of a reorg. Those things seem inherent to large power structures.
Invictus0 5y ago
The URL should be changed to cite the Wapo's story: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/03/twitter-agrawal-restructuring/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/03/twitter...
trjordan 5y ago
Contrast to Apple, which uses a fully functional model: https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovation https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovatio... I find this evolution fascinating. It makes sense to me that the GM model worked for so long. If much of a company's advantages were cultural, you could put together teams that could out-compete startups within a large organization. Procter and Gamble needs to enter new markets with new products to grow -- there's only so big a market for soap or razors or drills. But lots of tech companies today have a significant scale advantage. Google ads is most of their revenue; Netflix has a single product. Functional expertise that drives a 2% gain across the entire business is possible and valuable. So ... why does Twitter want to go to a GM model? Are they watching Meta have success diversifying from Facebook? Or is there something else?
- prpl 5y ago
  Netflix isn’t quite a single product anymore. They have a huge studio/content arm who likely knows or cares very little about the streaming side - and there are several of them per continent. From a consumer perspective, it may come off as one company though.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  > If much of a company's advantages were cultural, you could put together teams that could out-compete startups within a large organization. Only if you can make that small team culturally independent from the parent company, which IMO is unlikely, not least because first you have to create the team and hire or find (internally) people for it, both of which tend to imprint the parent culture, and then management has to be sufficiently hands off, which again could happen but what are the odds?
- jwogrady 5y ago
  Avoiding the humiliation of senate subpoenas seems to be motivating the most recent rash of FAANG restructurings. No founder, deserved or otherwise, would willingly subject themselves to the indignation of senators making names for themselves. Google saw the stitches on the fast ball and had Pichai prepped and ready go, but apparently Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Zuckerberg were far more confident, and the results of their testimony spoke for itself.
tyingq 5y ago
I know little about how Twitter works, but it's interesting that a new leader would make such sweeping changes just a few days into the job. Usually, you would want at least a little time viewing and understanding the org from your new job/perspective before changing anything major. It sort of implies a CEO decision coming from solely a CTO perspective.
- nicce 5y ago
  In the reality we have no idea how long this has been planned already. Another name just takes responsibility from that.
  - pier25 5y ago
    Exactly. I'm sure this has been discussed for months in the board. Maybe even was the reason he was appointed CEO.
    - saagarjha 5y ago
      Or perhaps an opportune time to make a change like this.
      - nicce 5y ago
        CEO does not have that much power unless he owns major part from the company. Board controls the company.
- dangoor 5y ago
  I'm assuming that, as CTO, Parag had been in the room for all major company decisions for quite a while. I'm also guessing that the C-level conversations about this reorg had been happening for a while already, while Jack was there.
- yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
  IIRC from Dorsey's departure announcement, his successor has actually been at the company for a long time.
zzzeek 5y ago
Boy is for-profit operation a downer. We get so much from Twitter, but of course, that doesn't make enough money, so the march towards locking it down into a closed pipeline of corporate marketing/ads/curation/tracking for the product (us) at the expense of whatever made twitter great continues on. Like, my third party Twitter clients have less and less functionality as Twitter removes public API features. My ability to read Twitter without ads/paid tweets injected into my feed will likely go away, etc.
- FredPret 5y ago
  Turns out smart people who do hard work providing a massive public platform want to be paid for it. Who knew.
  - the_gipsy 5y ago
    Well then don’t bait and switch.
    - FredPret 5y ago
      If they charged a subscription fee from day one they would have zero users. This is a valid business model
      - the_gipsy 5y ago
        If you do a bait and switch, then don’t come with the “they deserve to get paid” bullshit.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    There is no evidence these changes are instigated by regular employees. This sort of stuff is usual driven by the the owners with larger stakes.
    - FredPret 5y ago
      No profit = no business = no pay. Huge profits = rich business = famously huge FAANG pay.
spaetzleesser 5y ago
I always feel that most reorgs are done not because they lead to a fundamentally better structure but just to shake up things and break some managers' fiefdoms that are causing political problems. You could almost pick two or three structures and rotate every three years (which basically happens when leaders get replaced). After some decades in the industry I think any organizational structure will work if people are honest with each other and leadership proactively addresses problems. I have had countless situations where I pointed out to a VP that certain functions aren't performing and are causing problems for other projects but the VP just shrugged and basically said "there is nothing we can do". Considering that corporations are basically internally run like communist planned economies they share the same pathologies like counterproductive metrics, people pretending things are great and leadership ignoring glaring problems.
- robbintt 5y ago
  > Considering that corporations are basically internally run like communist planned economies This is interesting not because of accuracy but because thinking of counter examples is really interesting. I don't study businesses much, do you know of any counter examples?
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    You’ll find more of the independent moving parts thing in larger orgs that Katamari Damacy like Cisco. But Coase’s Nature of the Firm postulates that a reason for a firm is to reduce transaction costs. Running as a planned economy inside is intentional. Since Twitter is large, you’ll see that they’re counteracting this with the GM structure. Smart imho.
yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
This part caught my attention: > Davis, previously a director of product design at Facebook, joined Twitter in 2019 to lead its design team. He is Black and Asian, and was the first Black executive at Twitter to report directly to the CEO. The company had touted him as a hard-charging leader who would detoxify the platform, but he was also criticized by some employees for what they said was a blunt, aggressive management style. Since they've clearly gone for the "diversity" angle here, I decided to read more[0] about Davis. > The comment occurred during a meeting in which Liz Ferrall-Nunge, who led Twitter’s research team, shared concerns about diversity at Twitter and referred to her experience as a woman of color. Mr. Davis seemed to dismiss her, telling Ms. Ferrall-Nunge, who is Asian American, that if she wore sunglasses, she would pass as white, three people familiar with the investigation said. …Wow. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210816090522/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/16/technology/twitter-culture-change-conflict.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210816090522/https://www.nytim...
- Spivak 5y ago
  That’s the best part about recognizing that people of all different races, genders and creeds as people. They have exactly the same capacity to be shitty as anyone else. If this was a white executive this wouldn’t even move the needle but a black CEO is naturally held to a higher standard. Progress is measured by having their shitty behaviors reflect on them as an individual instead of their class.
  - yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
    Your comment seems to imply that anyone taking issue with Davis' racism is racist themselves, because they wouldn't otherwise notice if Davis were white. Please let me know if my interpretation of your comment is inaccurate, but if it isn't, then that's a pretty horrific rhetorical device that you're employing. Personally, I noticed this part because — according to the article — Davis was outspoken about diversity, and indeed one of the explicit reasons for hiring him was for him to "promote diversity". That's the context — not his skin colour. > Two years ago, the company brought in a blunt executive to make things move faster and to promote diversity. Then the problems began. > Twitter employees who were aware of the episode said they expected better from Mr. Davis because of his outspokenness about diversity.
comeonseriously 5y ago
New CEO: "<Hitches up britches> Welp, time to put muh stank on it."
_coveredInBees 5y ago
The CEO has been with twitter for 10 years and been CTO and actively involved at top-level decisions for quite some time. This isn't some sudden decision pulled out of a hat. Not sure why some commenters seem to have such knee-jerk reactions to this change. Most of it seems to be sensible. The CEO came up through the ranks from starting off as an individual contributor at Twitter. He probably has a good grasp for what organizational changes can help the company and it is also very likely that this has been in the works for a while.
- ditonal 5y ago
  They were both fired because they were very expensive and a net negative on the company. Dantley has an enormous ego, and that ego led to a bunch of fluff PR pieces commissioned where he bashed other employees which started a civil war. The guy who did the Google comic for years went to Twitter and made a comic about the civil war and HR accused him of racism (the comic was not racist) and made him take it down. Montara made like 20 million a year but did absolutely nothing but send an email about the important of diversity every few months. Only reason these guys weren’t fired a long time ago is that the previous Twitter CEO was totally checked out and obsessed with bitcoin. New CEO knows what’s going and and is cleaning house. I don’t work at Twitter but I’m close to many who do so this is grapevine gossip.
  - _coveredInBees 5y ago
    Good to know. I knew Parag (the CEO) a bit from college (we both graduated the same year) and he was a very nice, humble and ridiculously sharp guy. Not at all surprised to see him rise to CEO and honestly, it feels like a much much better pick than your traditional MBA old-boys-club career CEO. Time will tell but I found it refreshing to see someone immensely technical (Parag won Gold in the international Physics Olympiad as a high schooler) being promoted from within and making it all the way to the top.
    - daqhris 5y ago
      It's infuriating how information about his track record is less saught for and discussed publicly. With what you've just added about Parag, I now see him as someone mistakenly judged, someone who's not given a chance or the benefit of doubt. Can't wait to marvel at the good decisions this stellar and technically-fit person will take as Twitter CEO. Jack Dorsey may have selected the most logical executive in the board room with a decade's worth of familiarity with the company and its products.
Traster 5y ago
It's about time, Twitter has failed to deliver for far too long and it's pretty clear things had to seriously change. I think the details of the structure are probably unimportant - these reorganisations are more about moving people up or out. It's all a bit academic since it'll all change once Twitter is acquired anyway.
FredPret 5y ago
"New hire announces that they intend to do their job"
User23 5y ago
Implicit in all these diversity pushes is a fixed-sized pie mentality. In that world-view, the only way to increase diversity is to replace white[1] executives with non-white ones. I'm not keen on the long term prospects of a company that is making its senior leadership hiring decisions based on a fixed-sized pie mindset. Frankly, while I'm not a fan of the racial discrimination aspect either, the lack of a growth mindset is what really predicts failure. [1] The status of South and East Asians isn't entirely clear to me here. In my time in big tech I never noticed a shortage of South Asian senior leaders, so I suppose maybe they're no longer considered diverse? As for East Asians, every single one I've personally worked with is a big fan of meritocracy. Perhaps that's because they believe they will do well under those rules.
- KKKKkkkk1 5y ago
  > The status of South and East Asians isn't entirely clear to me here. You must have heard the term "white-adjacent".
- robbintt 5y ago
  If you consider a certain threshold of match interchangeable then it makes sense. You're going to have bad hires no matter what. Complaining about fixed-pie replacement because one is a minority is not acceptable. The hiring committee probably worked hard to vet them, but things still go wrong, particularly if the organization trashes the person's incentives. Furthermore, a large part of most orgs is fixed-pie.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kk58 5y ago
Paywall
bob332 5y ago
Twitter is cancer and needs shutting down
waynesonfire 5y ago
Sucks, enjoy your silos.

89 points by sim_card_map 5y ago

I honestly wonder if a CEO who grew up outside the US is going to be a good steward of the uniquely American attitude towards free speech. Honestly, I don’t have a lot of hope for it.

zxspectrum1982 5y ago
Towards free speech? Twitter is not pro free speech. Twitter has long been pro free woke speech. In other words: Twitter is censorship. Remember that's the social network who allows talibans to spread their propaganda and hate speech.

imchillyb 5y ago

> The changes include moving to a "General Manager model" for teams in the product and technology organizations, which will mean having one person lead the work in those divisions. "This will allow us to operate more cross-functionally and enable faster, more informed decision-making," the spokesperson added. In other words: We now have an Overseer role. Individual contributions no longer matter to management. Overseers will ensure the company's decisions are followed through at every level of employment. Now even the design teams will 'be on board' with the changes, or be gone. No more dissent. No more questioning of the leadership. No more discussions. The Overseer's word is law, people!

Mountain_Skies 5y ago
Live by the sword, die by the sword. Twitter employees are getting a taste of what has been dished out on Twitter users for years.
md2020 5y ago
As a sidenote, "This will allow us to operate more cross-functionally and enable faster, more informed decision-making," is just completely devoid of substance. Do the people crafting these corporate statements actually believe that people don’t see straight through them? Nobody is going to read this and think, “Oh, thank god, they’ve assured us that the change isn’t going to communication worse and decision-making less informed, this is good stuff!”
- willcipriano 5y ago
  It's the emperors new clothes. Nobody wants the be the guy saying "But what the hell does that really mean?" so everyone pretends it means something.
- aeze 5y ago
  I'm not sure it's completely devoid of substance. Obviously there's no detail provided, but it is stating the goals/benefits of a general manager model for those who aren't familiar with it.
jmacd 5y ago
Many larger b2b companies operate with a GM model. Why? Their businesses are a portfolio of products that essentially need a CEO rather than a PM. True P&L accountability and control. Different products within the company will have different needs at different times. Without a GM the Twitter Blue team ends up head to head with the Ads team during planning, and you can guess who wins. Small products will get overly influential GMs who can move mountains within the company to get them what they need. It's less overlord and more political air cover, if done right. GMs are almost always the first to get fired as well. It's a sort of end-stage of your career at a company. Few GMs can become CEO, so once you take that GM role you are on borrowed time.
saagarjha 5y ago
I’m genuinely confused how you arrived at that? I just read it as “there’s now one person in charge of each of these divisions”, which seems like a pretty standard way of organizing things? Do you have a specific reason you think this would shut down discussion?
syshum 5y ago
If that is the case then I would actually encouraged by it, Twitter social activist employee's are a problem for the platform. sadly though I dont believe this will be the case,
_coveredInBees 5y ago
This is such a weird take and makes me question if you've ever worked in a large company to begin with? I think ICs would much rather be part of a cohesive team with an engaged leader that is advocating on behalf of the product the IC is involved with. That's a hell of a lot better than the typical dysfunction in large orgs/companies where ICs are just lost in a sea of confusion and politicking with no clear higher-level management structure to support the projects and products they are involved with.
- drewbug01 5y ago
  I’m not sure if I agree that the take is “weird” or not … but one thing did stand out to me about your comment: the idea that this would result in helpful structure and clarity for ICs. We don’t know the complete extent of the reorg, but my experience at large companies and living through multiple reorgs (10? 15? I’ve lost track) is that they usually don’t actually mean much for ICs on the ground. The reorg usually is limited to VP level folks - they get moved around, but usually their teams stay with them. It’s usually not a big day to day difference for the folks at the bottom of the org chart. Edit: I’ve also never experienced reduced confusion or politicking as a result of a reorg. Those things seem inherent to large power structures.

Invictus0 5y ago

The URL should be changed to cite the Wapo's story: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/03/twitter-agrawal-restructuring/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/03/twitter...

trjordan 5y ago

Contrast to Apple, which uses a fully functional model: https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovation https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovatio... I find this evolution fascinating. It makes sense to me that the GM model worked for so long. If much of a company's advantages were cultural, you could put together teams that could out-compete startups within a large organization. Procter and Gamble needs to enter new markets with new products to grow -- there's only so big a market for soap or razors or drills. But lots of tech companies today have a significant scale advantage. Google ads is most of their revenue; Netflix has a single product. Functional expertise that drives a 2% gain across the entire business is possible and valuable. So ... why does Twitter want to go to a GM model? Are they watching Meta have success diversifying from Facebook? Or is there something else?

prpl 5y ago
Netflix isn’t quite a single product anymore. They have a huge studio/content arm who likely knows or cares very little about the streaming side - and there are several of them per continent. From a consumer perspective, it may come off as one company though.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> If much of a company's advantages were cultural, you could put together teams that could out-compete startups within a large organization. Only if you can make that small team culturally independent from the parent company, which IMO is unlikely, not least because first you have to create the team and hire or find (internally) people for it, both of which tend to imprint the parent culture, and then management has to be sufficiently hands off, which again could happen but what are the odds?
jwogrady 5y ago
Avoiding the humiliation of senate subpoenas seems to be motivating the most recent rash of FAANG restructurings. No founder, deserved or otherwise, would willingly subject themselves to the indignation of senators making names for themselves. Google saw the stitches on the fast ball and had Pichai prepped and ready go, but apparently Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Zuckerberg were far more confident, and the results of their testimony spoke for itself.

tyingq 5y ago

I know little about how Twitter works, but it's interesting that a new leader would make such sweeping changes just a few days into the job. Usually, you would want at least a little time viewing and understanding the org from your new job/perspective before changing anything major. It sort of implies a CEO decision coming from solely a CTO perspective.

nicce 5y ago
In the reality we have no idea how long this has been planned already. Another name just takes responsibility from that.
- pier25 5y ago
  Exactly. I'm sure this has been discussed for months in the board. Maybe even was the reason he was appointed CEO.
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    Or perhaps an opportune time to make a change like this.
    - nicce 5y ago
      CEO does not have that much power unless he owns major part from the company. Board controls the company.
dangoor 5y ago
I'm assuming that, as CTO, Parag had been in the room for all major company decisions for quite a while. I'm also guessing that the C-level conversations about this reorg had been happening for a while already, while Jack was there.
yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
IIRC from Dorsey's departure announcement, his successor has actually been at the company for a long time.

zzzeek 5y ago

Boy is for-profit operation a downer. We get so much from Twitter, but of course, that doesn't make enough money, so the march towards locking it down into a closed pipeline of corporate marketing/ads/curation/tracking for the product (us) at the expense of whatever made twitter great continues on. Like, my third party Twitter clients have less and less functionality as Twitter removes public API features. My ability to read Twitter without ads/paid tweets injected into my feed will likely go away, etc.

FredPret 5y ago
Turns out smart people who do hard work providing a massive public platform want to be paid for it. Who knew.
- the_gipsy 5y ago
  Well then don’t bait and switch.
  - FredPret 5y ago
    If they charged a subscription fee from day one they would have zero users. This is a valid business model
    - the_gipsy 5y ago
      If you do a bait and switch, then don’t come with the “they deserve to get paid” bullshit.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  There is no evidence these changes are instigated by regular employees. This sort of stuff is usual driven by the the owners with larger stakes.
  - FredPret 5y ago
    No profit = no business = no pay. Huge profits = rich business = famously huge FAANG pay.

spaetzleesser 5y ago

I always feel that most reorgs are done not because they lead to a fundamentally better structure but just to shake up things and break some managers' fiefdoms that are causing political problems. You could almost pick two or three structures and rotate every three years (which basically happens when leaders get replaced). After some decades in the industry I think any organizational structure will work if people are honest with each other and leadership proactively addresses problems. I have had countless situations where I pointed out to a VP that certain functions aren't performing and are causing problems for other projects but the VP just shrugged and basically said "there is nothing we can do". Considering that corporations are basically internally run like communist planned economies they share the same pathologies like counterproductive metrics, people pretending things are great and leadership ignoring glaring problems.

robbintt 5y ago
> Considering that corporations are basically internally run like communist planned economies This is interesting not because of accuracy but because thinking of counter examples is really interesting. I don't study businesses much, do you know of any counter examples?
- renewiltord 5y ago
  You’ll find more of the independent moving parts thing in larger orgs that Katamari Damacy like Cisco. But Coase’s Nature of the Firm postulates that a reason for a firm is to reduce transaction costs. Running as a planned economy inside is intentional. Since Twitter is large, you’ll see that they’re counteracting this with the GM structure. Smart imho.

yakshaving_jgt 5y ago

This part caught my attention: > Davis, previously a director of product design at Facebook, joined Twitter in 2019 to lead its design team. He is Black and Asian, and was the first Black executive at Twitter to report directly to the CEO. The company had touted him as a hard-charging leader who would detoxify the platform, but he was also criticized by some employees for what they said was a blunt, aggressive management style. Since they've clearly gone for the "diversity" angle here, I decided to read more[0] about Davis. > The comment occurred during a meeting in which Liz Ferrall-Nunge, who led Twitter’s research team, shared concerns about diversity at Twitter and referred to her experience as a woman of color. Mr. Davis seemed to dismiss her, telling Ms. Ferrall-Nunge, who is Asian American, that if she wore sunglasses, she would pass as white, three people familiar with the investigation said. …Wow. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210816090522/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/16/technology/twitter-culture-change-conflict.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210816090522/https://www.nytim...

Spivak 5y ago
That’s the best part about recognizing that people of all different races, genders and creeds as people. They have exactly the same capacity to be shitty as anyone else. If this was a white executive this wouldn’t even move the needle but a black CEO is naturally held to a higher standard. Progress is measured by having their shitty behaviors reflect on them as an individual instead of their class.
- yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
  Your comment seems to imply that anyone taking issue with Davis' racism is racist themselves, because they wouldn't otherwise notice if Davis were white. Please let me know if my interpretation of your comment is inaccurate, but if it isn't, then that's a pretty horrific rhetorical device that you're employing. Personally, I noticed this part because — according to the article — Davis was outspoken about diversity, and indeed one of the explicit reasons for hiring him was for him to "promote diversity". That's the context — not his skin colour. > Two years ago, the company brought in a blunt executive to make things move faster and to promote diversity. Then the problems began. > Twitter employees who were aware of the episode said they expected better from Mr. Davis because of his outspokenness about diversity.

comeonseriously 5y ago

New CEO: "<Hitches up britches> Welp, time to put muh stank on it."

_coveredInBees 5y ago

The CEO has been with twitter for 10 years and been CTO and actively involved at top-level decisions for quite some time. This isn't some sudden decision pulled out of a hat. Not sure why some commenters seem to have such knee-jerk reactions to this change. Most of it seems to be sensible. The CEO came up through the ranks from starting off as an individual contributor at Twitter. He probably has a good grasp for what organizational changes can help the company and it is also very likely that this has been in the works for a while.

ditonal 5y ago
They were both fired because they were very expensive and a net negative on the company. Dantley has an enormous ego, and that ego led to a bunch of fluff PR pieces commissioned where he bashed other employees which started a civil war. The guy who did the Google comic for years went to Twitter and made a comic about the civil war and HR accused him of racism (the comic was not racist) and made him take it down. Montara made like 20 million a year but did absolutely nothing but send an email about the important of diversity every few months. Only reason these guys weren’t fired a long time ago is that the previous Twitter CEO was totally checked out and obsessed with bitcoin. New CEO knows what’s going and and is cleaning house. I don’t work at Twitter but I’m close to many who do so this is grapevine gossip.
- _coveredInBees 5y ago
  Good to know. I knew Parag (the CEO) a bit from college (we both graduated the same year) and he was a very nice, humble and ridiculously sharp guy. Not at all surprised to see him rise to CEO and honestly, it feels like a much much better pick than your traditional MBA old-boys-club career CEO. Time will tell but I found it refreshing to see someone immensely technical (Parag won Gold in the international Physics Olympiad as a high schooler) being promoted from within and making it all the way to the top.
  - daqhris 5y ago
    It's infuriating how information about his track record is less saught for and discussed publicly. With what you've just added about Parag, I now see him as someone mistakenly judged, someone who's not given a chance or the benefit of doubt. Can't wait to marvel at the good decisions this stellar and technically-fit person will take as Twitter CEO. Jack Dorsey may have selected the most logical executive in the board room with a decade's worth of familiarity with the company and its products.

Traster 5y ago

It's about time, Twitter has failed to deliver for far too long and it's pretty clear things had to seriously change. I think the details of the structure are probably unimportant - these reorganisations are more about moving people up or out. It's all a bit academic since it'll all change once Twitter is acquired anyway.

FredPret 5y ago

"New hire announces that they intend to do their job"

User23 5y ago

Implicit in all these diversity pushes is a fixed-sized pie mentality. In that world-view, the only way to increase diversity is to replace white[1] executives with non-white ones. I'm not keen on the long term prospects of a company that is making its senior leadership hiring decisions based on a fixed-sized pie mindset. Frankly, while I'm not a fan of the racial discrimination aspect either, the lack of a growth mindset is what really predicts failure. [1] The status of South and East Asians isn't entirely clear to me here. In my time in big tech I never noticed a shortage of South Asian senior leaders, so I suppose maybe they're no longer considered diverse? As for East Asians, every single one I've personally worked with is a big fan of meritocracy. Perhaps that's because they believe they will do well under those rules.

KKKKkkkk1 5y ago
> The status of South and East Asians isn't entirely clear to me here. You must have heard the term "white-adjacent".
robbintt 5y ago
If you consider a certain threshold of match interchangeable then it makes sense. You're going to have bad hires no matter what. Complaining about fixed-pie replacement because one is a minority is not acceptable. The hiring committee probably worked hard to vet them, but things still go wrong, particularly if the organization trashes the person's incentives. Furthermore, a large part of most orgs is fixed-pie.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

kk58 5y ago

Paywall

bob332 5y ago

Twitter is cancer and needs shutting down

waynesonfire 5y ago

Sucks, enjoy your silos.