7 ms·
This is pretty standard for a takeover process. As the sale is far from complete it’s normally considered safer not to make any changes that could threaten the
by altacc 4y ago
This is pretty standard for a takeover process. As the sale is far from complete it’s normally considered safer not to make any changes that could threaten the sale or commit the company to something the new owner doesn’t want.
- axg11 4y agoHow long is normal? The deal likely won't close for 6 months. Will all those engineers be sitting idle until then?
- BryantD 4y agoIn this case, according to the article, it's just this week. "Twitter Inc. locked down changes to its social networking platform through Friday."
- john_moscow 4y agoThey could continue work in feature branches, it just won't be pushed into the production branch unless it's a critical fix approved higher up.
- VWWHFSfQ 4y agoSounds like a great time to do some housekeeping/tech debt/quality of life improvements in the codebase. Not sure if that counts as product updates
- morelisp 4y agoSix months to do nothing but clear the bug and cleanup backlog, shore up infrastructure, and document? Sounds like an engineer's dream, tbh.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoBased upon the number of developers who want to build something new and actively avoid long term maintenance positions that doesn't seem right.
- morelisp 4y agoHence "engineer's dream". Fuck those other guys, they got every dumbass thing they wanted for the past ~15 years.
- recuter 4y agoTwitter is 16 years old. So more like a decade of that.
- cato_the_elder 4y agoTBH, it doesn't seem like they've been doing much before either. Their major problems in many fronts have remained unsolved for a long time (e.g. spam bots, readability of long threads, functional bulk block lists etc.). They aren't even that good at the one thing they seem to be passionate about: censorship.
- octonion 4y agoHacker News bans the same types of hate speech that Twitter prohibits. Is that "censorship", or only when Twitter does it?
- cato_the_elder 4y agoHN is a forum for nerds, not a public square. Even then, it's quite pro-freespeech.
- case0x 4y agoI hear the twitter = public square analogy a lot but I fail to understand it. Here and on Twitter discussions take place. What is the difference?
- oska 4y agoOne very obvious difference is that twitter does not purport to be a forum for any particular community or field of interest. So in that sense it's much more of a town square in that ppl can (or should be able to) tweet about anything.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zaphirplane 4y agoWho is volunteering and binding them to be a public square with slippery slop values
- 4y ago
- barbazoo 4y agoMight as well get a head start on that edit button.
- nerdjon 4y agoIs it really? I have only personally been through one acquisition personally but I do follow the game industry acquisitions. In those cases the companies have continued to largely operate as if nothing is happening until it actually closes. If for some reason the deal doesn't close it is a huge risk to the company to not continue to operate as normal.
- philistine 4y agoGame companies are usually making art products sold per unit. To continue as is while an acquisition is going through, you can't stop development and not release new titles; the company would go broke before it got bought! Twitter is a forever product; it means that maintaining the product and its revenues the same while the acquisition is happening is possible. There's also the underlying idea that perhaps Elon has said he has big plans, but no one at Twitter knows what those are and if they even exist. Better err on caution with Fickle Musk.
- josh_carterPDX 4y agoI don't know that this is normal. It's certainly not unheard of. In this case I just think it's such a huge acquisition that they probably just want to hold off until they get a clear vision from Elon. Why spend a bunch of time and money on something if Elon will come in and advocate for its exclusion from future features? Though I will say that I don't believe that Elon will have a tremendous amount of sway when it comes to drastic changes. I think it'll be a good year or two before we see substantial changes to Twitter as a platform.
- bradhe 4y agoAgreed. Every M&A deal I've been in includes a period of exactly this. Sometimes even leading up to funding events.
- donsupreme 4y agoThis is not normal.
- badwetter 4y agoI don't agree, if that was true then CNN+ wouldn't have gone forward when the buyout was happening, because the new owners weren't happy that it did!
- native_samples 4y agoThere have been tons of tech firm takeovers in the past 10 years. I can't recall a single case like this, where employees were literally completely locked out of their own systems because of the risk of them going rogue (citing the source in the Bloomberg article, there). No major changes in product direction, yes, obviously. You don't want to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. No changes at all - and only for a week - is pretty clearly a sign that Twitter management fear emotional kneejerk extremism in their own employee base. The fact that they have to do this speaks volumes about the problems inside the company.