8 ms·

Elon Musk Texts Parag Agrawal

68 points by 0xedb 4y ago

tomjakubowski 4y ago
What "heavy-duty" software did Musk write for a 20 year period? I can't square it with the career section in his Wikipedia bio.
- Vecr 4y ago
  Rocket flight control? I'm not sure that was 20 years in a row or how much he really does of it, but that's my guess.
  - tomjakubowski 4y ago
    He's the CEO. You think he's writing the flight control software?
- dgrin91 4y ago
  He made x.com, which was a financial service company that got bought by paypal. THen I think he worked at paypal for a while. Then he did spacex. Then he did tesla. All of those are very engineering heavy and he has been known to get into nitty gritty on all of them.
  - tomjakubowski 4y ago
    > he has been known to get into nitty gritty Is he writing any software at SpaceX or Tesla? I've heard stories here and there of him sitting in an engineering meeting. Zip2 was founded in 1995 -- there are credible claims (from a biography) he wrote software there, and that's all I've found.
  - saenns 4y ago
    highly doubt this guy wrote a single line of code at any of those companies
  - notacoward 4y ago
    Is there any actual evidence of him "getting into the nitty gritty" at SpaceX or Tesla? Confirmation from people who would have been there to see it? Or just his own claims? I don't think his time doing early web stuff at x.com or PayPal counts as "heavy duty" and it certainly wasn't 20 years.
    - dgrin91 4y ago
      If you ever see him at any talk thats not a pure PR event he tends to go into engineering details. Good series I would recommend from Everyday Astronaut where they get into lots of nitty gritty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ux6B3bvO0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ux6B3bvO0w
      - notacoward 4y ago
        What do you think "PR" is if not doing videos like that? And how do scripted comments about a technical domain that's not programming have anything to do with his actual claim (see OP) to have done "20 years of heavy duty programming"? There's no doubt that he has some kind of smarts, but he claimed something very specific and AFAIK that claim has no basis in fact.
      - justapassenger 4y ago
        I don’t have rocket engineering expertise, but I do have AI. When I see him talk about AI (which he claims to be an expert in), it’s like hearing college freshman, after first 5 classes of ML 101, who read a lot of pop-science blogs about it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- recursv_thnkng 4y ago
  There is none. The only thing anyone has referenced is some pre-PayPal code that got scrapped and rewritten in the merger and some games when he was a kid.
  - abudabi123 4y ago
    Look for his interviews. He mentions a software his organization wrote and sold, but the buyer didn't know how to fully take advantage of it. Kind of like flying an F22 as a cardboard box down the side of a grassy hill.
    - nkozyra 4y ago
      Can you elaborate? It's a big leap to go from vaguely describing something you read he said to then describing this hypothetical as a metaphorical F22.
- tedunangst 4y ago
  He forced PayPal to switch to windows. Opinions differ as to the wisdom of that move. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12513223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12513223
- JoeyBananas 4y ago
  He worked in the video game industry at one point and wrote some low level code there.
- dingosity 4y ago
  I can assure you Mr. Musk was not involved in writing code at x.com. Though he was a very decent product-manager-type guy and generally more technical than most PMs. I believe he can understand many issues with code-bases, but he absolutely did not understand why we did things the way we did in the crypto(graphy) code at x.com.
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    Sounds like you might have some anecdotes to share :-)
camjohnson26 4y ago
Don’t forget the texts that triggered his offer to buy Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1575598387335901190?s=20&t=3iaQcZvnt11aLRLXIp0F3A https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1575598387335901190?s=...
- Sateeshm 4y ago
  Damn. I could be wrong, but the texts with Bret makes it look like Elon's ego was hurt, from texting with Parag.
typeofhuman 4y ago
So many HNers thought the deal wouldn't go through.
- nkozyra 4y ago
  And so many thought it would. Predicting the future is an imperfect science, as it turns out.
- amusedcyclist 4y ago
  Elon did try very hard to stop it.
  - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
    or was this all just theater?
    - nkozyra 4y ago
      To what end? He signed the deal as was proposed, no?
      - superchroma 4y ago
        A month ago an article appeared detailing how several prominent investors made a huge amount of money by buying the dip on twitter as the lawsuit business unfolded. I personally suspect collusion. The legal drama cost him relatively very little and was basically a favor to his friends.
    - justapassenger 4y ago
      To achieve what? Crater a public perception of the company he’s buying?
      - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
        "no publicity is bad publicity"?
awb 4y ago
> "I wrote heavy duty software" > "I interface way better with engineer who are able to do hardcore programming" In 20+ years of developing, I've only heard non-technical (or well past their prime technical) folks use the terms "heavy duty" or "hardcore" to describe programming.
- abudabi123 4y ago
  "heavy duty", "hardcore", "falcon heavy", "cybertruck". Those terms relate. I guess he means appreciating programming down to the electron, photon millisecond when debugging a lost rocket launch three times in a row burning his money in the sense of physics and not some kind of marketty arbitrary opaque name for flavor of framework, platform package container combo.
  - rurp 4y ago
    How much "photon millisecond" level rocket debugging has Elon personally done?
    - discardable_dan 4y ago
      About as much as anyone else at SpaceX: none at all.
  - spoils19 4y ago
    Agreed. I'd expect the average HNer to emphasise with those terms as we all work in complicated and intense industries, but I guess there will always be disappointment as non-Conservatives join the World Wide Web.
  - Fatnino 4y ago
    The name falcon heavy is a direct riff on the name delta 4 heavy. ULA just slaps 3 delta 4 first stages side by side and that's the heavy variant. Falcon heavy is the same thing but with falcon 9. I don't think it has anything to do with heavy duty.
    - 4y ago
typeofhuman 4y ago
Jack and Elon discussing future protocol: https://www.twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1575588277700026368 https://www.twitter.com/TechEmails/status/157558827770002636...
- discardable_dan 4y ago
  I love the "can I call" texts he sends. It's neat to see boomers all act the same about texting.
  - concinds 4y ago
    Far from a Boomer attitude (they love calling and aren't as comfortable with texts), it's very much a Gen-Z attitude. But these descriptors obviously make no sense when we're talking about CEOs, not random people for whom "age group" is a relevant or informative descriptor.
    - thinkingemote 4y ago
      Calls are less likely to leave a paper trail, too.
      - concinds 4y ago
        Sure, but my point is that asking whether it's okay to call is somewhat rare among CEOs (boomer or not), while it's extremely prevalent among Gen-Z.
  - frumper 4y ago
    He isn't in the boomer generation.
- benwad 4y ago
  This is really interesting, and for me it highlights the problem of tech/business people trying to solve a social problem. In their mind everything can be solved by tweaking the software architecture or monetisation model. Nothing is proposed to change how users actually interact with each other on the platform, which (IMHO) is the main problem.
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
how does Parag Agrawal come out of this looking "in the right"?
- superchroma 4y ago
  he comes out of this quite wealthy, and, the man who made elon kneel, so I think he'll be all right.
  - theonething 4y ago
    > man who made elon kneel Uh, Elon just fired him.
    - mwerd 4y ago
      Paid a hell of a premium for the pleasure
    - superchroma 4y ago
      He can go around now saying that he forced Elon to buy the company by not backing down, for a price premium during a recession, no less. He has his generous severance package and will walk into his next job very comfortably, I'm not sure why you think there is a downside here.
      - theonething 4y ago
        > Agrawal, Segal, and Gadde were shuttled from the building after being fired, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post. Well, that doesn't seem like an upside to me, but that's just me. > He can go around now saying that he forced Elon to buy the company by not backing down Are you or anyone impressed by this?
        Volundr 4y ago
        >> He can go around now saying that he forced Elon to buy the company by not backing down > Are you or anyone impressed by this? I mean he produced shareholder value by getting the richest man in the world to by the company for a huge premium... There are certainly plenty of CEOs who have done worse who are having no trouble finding work today.
kumarm 4y ago
Elon apparently used Tesla engineers to review Twitter code: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-27/tesla-engineers-visit-twitter-office-to-review-code-for-musk https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-27/tesla-eng... Do Tesla employees work for Tesla or are they Elon's personal staff? How is acceptable when employees can be fired for moonlighting?
- throwoutway 4y ago
  I stopped trusting Bloomberg’s reporting after they refused to retract their “The Big Hack” which turned out to be bogus. Are there other sources for this?
  - skissane 4y ago
    Apparently, SpaceX has used Tesla engineers in the past, to help them evaluate/integrate Tesla parts into SpaceX designs. If Tesla is okay with doing consulting for one of Musk's other businesses, why not another? Legally, Musk has to pay Tesla for this, and someone very senior at Tesla (the board or the senior executive team) has to approve – without Musk being in the room. But, why wouldn't they say "yes"? So I don't think this story is fundamentally implausible. (As I pointed out in a comment on another post, the "code review" was probably actually an "architecture review", but it is easy for non-technical people to elide the difference.)
    - TheOsiris 4y ago
      > Legally, Musk has to pay Tesla for this, and someone very senior at Tesla (the board or the senior executive team) has to approve – without Musk being in the room. But, why wouldn't they say "yes"? that's not true at all. there's no law that says Twitter/Musk has to pay Tesla engineers anything. it's only up to Tesla's management to decide what they want in return for those resources. Also, as CEO there's nothing stopping Elon from using all of Tesla's resources to help Twitter or any other company. it is entirely up to Tesla's board and shareholders to punish Elon for what should be a gross misappropriation of Tesla's resources
dopidopHN 4y ago
- runnerup 4y ago
  AI-generated comments will soon ruin HN and everything else. https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/ I don't think this will be something to glorify when it arrives.
version_five 4y ago
This is probably more common than the context suggests. CEO/CTO that both claim deep technical skills while not having touched code in decades, one demanding to talk to engineers, the other claiming he's deep in the codebase and knows what's going on. The best executives I've worked with are the ones that freely admit they don't know about the code, the worst are the ones that insist they're "technical" and keep bringing up stuff from 20 years ago with no bearing on the current problem but believing they're sharing their technical expertise
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- outericky 4y ago
  I read it more as CTO was protecting the engineers.
- _coveredInBees 4y ago
  Lol, I always find it funny when people pretend that Parag is some clueless "management type". I graduated the same year as him from the same school, and he is a ridiculously sharp engineer who has risen up at Twitter the old-fashioned way. It's painfully obvious that Musk just wants sycophantic yes-men around him and was pissed off that Parag wasn't willing to kiss his ass regarding all his "revolutionary" suggestions.
  - spoils19 4y ago
    Can he invert a binary tree though?
- usea 4y ago
  Here's a sequence of events that led to me quitting a job: - The owner/CEO of my company met with another local business owner and sold them on us doing some custom software work for them. He gave them an estimate during the meeting, and made a handshake deal. - Owner tells a PM at our company about the project. Usual project kickoff stuff happens where the PM organizes a team and schedules a meeting with the client, etc. - PM sends a meeting invite to a dev (me), a designer, and a QA, to meet at the client's office for the meeting. - The owner of the client company does a similar thing, and at the meeting is 3-4 employees who know a lot about their business and the needs of this project. We talk for 2-3 hours and have a pretty good idea of what they need. (details: The company operates a fleet of temperature sensors. They currently subscribe to a service that alerts them when a thermometer reports values too high or low. They don't like the software and don't want to keep paying for it, and want us to build them a replacement. Basically to collect a bunch of data from devices in the field, parse and store, send sms/email based on rules configured on a web app, and also have some really basic reports viewable) - The team (4 people, including the PM) play agile games for a few hours, coming up with narratives and points. - I get to work. Get access to the data, find a japanese manual online for the devices that describes the format of the data, set up a web app, database, user management, data download/parsing, a polling and alerting service. Lots of parts unfinished, but it's technically functional. Less than one week has passed (and my time is split across multiple projects). - Project is put on emergency hold. Client found out how many hours we had spent, and was pissed. Apparently the person writing the check was told by our owner that it would be like 10-20 hours of work. That was never communicated to the employees at either company. The requirements gathering meeting exhausted the budget all by itself, unknown to everybody present. - The PM is fired. - The owner schedules a 1-on-1 meeting with me, where he spends 40 minutes describing the concept of database tables and rows. His thinking is that if I had only known how to store things in a database, the project wouldn't have taken me so long. Fortunately he gets a phone call and abruptly leaves. - The client was apparently paying $20 a month for their monitoring software.
rurban 4y ago
This confirms that Jack Dorsey will be back on top
- throw__2sdfw 4y ago
  I hope he does not. Jack Dorsey endorses decentralization, I don't believe Elon would. Jack is best left out to pursue his own products which will be more decentralized.
fileeditview 4y ago
> [...] I won't let this fail and will do whatever it takes. It's too critical to humanity. It's really hard for me to not be disgusted by these people thinking that a web platform whose main purpose are shitstorms is critical to humanity. This is so absurd.. it could be a Monty Python script.
- AlmostAnyone 4y ago
  On this website you have loads of people claiming that Twitter is an utility and should be regulated and even funded from taxes instead of running as for-profit company... I don't agree with this, but I think it's not so clear cut to be disgusted - many intelligent people think so as well...
  - thunkshift1 4y ago
    Lets be honest, Can you go a month without twitter and be okay? Well then its not critical
    - AlmostAnyone 4y ago
      I agree with you 100%, but even here among us you have many people who would've agreed with Musk.

68 points by 0xedb 4y ago

What "heavy-duty" software did Musk write for a 20 year period? I can't square it with the career section in his Wikipedia bio.

Vecr 4y ago
Rocket flight control? I'm not sure that was 20 years in a row or how much he really does of it, but that's my guess.
- tomjakubowski 4y ago
  He's the CEO. You think he's writing the flight control software?
dgrin91 4y ago
He made x.com, which was a financial service company that got bought by paypal. THen I think he worked at paypal for a while. Then he did spacex. Then he did tesla. All of those are very engineering heavy and he has been known to get into nitty gritty on all of them.
- tomjakubowski 4y ago
  > he has been known to get into nitty gritty Is he writing any software at SpaceX or Tesla? I've heard stories here and there of him sitting in an engineering meeting. Zip2 was founded in 1995 -- there are credible claims (from a biography) he wrote software there, and that's all I've found.
- saenns 4y ago
  highly doubt this guy wrote a single line of code at any of those companies
- notacoward 4y ago
  Is there any actual evidence of him "getting into the nitty gritty" at SpaceX or Tesla? Confirmation from people who would have been there to see it? Or just his own claims? I don't think his time doing early web stuff at x.com or PayPal counts as "heavy duty" and it certainly wasn't 20 years.
  - dgrin91 4y ago
    If you ever see him at any talk thats not a pure PR event he tends to go into engineering details. Good series I would recommend from Everyday Astronaut where they get into lots of nitty gritty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ux6B3bvO0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ux6B3bvO0w
    - notacoward 4y ago
      What do you think "PR" is if not doing videos like that? And how do scripted comments about a technical domain that's not programming have anything to do with his actual claim (see OP) to have done "20 years of heavy duty programming"? There's no doubt that he has some kind of smarts, but he claimed something very specific and AFAIK that claim has no basis in fact.
    - justapassenger 4y ago
      I don’t have rocket engineering expertise, but I do have AI. When I see him talk about AI (which he claims to be an expert in), it’s like hearing college freshman, after first 5 classes of ML 101, who read a lot of pop-science blogs about it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
recursv_thnkng 4y ago
There is none. The only thing anyone has referenced is some pre-PayPal code that got scrapped and rewritten in the merger and some games when he was a kid.
- abudabi123 4y ago
  Look for his interviews. He mentions a software his organization wrote and sold, but the buyer didn't know how to fully take advantage of it. Kind of like flying an F22 as a cardboard box down the side of a grassy hill.
  - nkozyra 4y ago
    Can you elaborate? It's a big leap to go from vaguely describing something you read he said to then describing this hypothetical as a metaphorical F22.
tedunangst 4y ago
He forced PayPal to switch to windows. Opinions differ as to the wisdom of that move. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12513223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12513223
JoeyBananas 4y ago
He worked in the video game industry at one point and wrote some low level code there.
dingosity 4y ago
I can assure you Mr. Musk was not involved in writing code at x.com. Though he was a very decent product-manager-type guy and generally more technical than most PMs. I believe he can understand many issues with code-bases, but he absolutely did not understand why we did things the way we did in the crypto(graphy) code at x.com.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  Sounds like you might have some anecdotes to share :-)

camjohnson26 4y ago

Don’t forget the texts that triggered his offer to buy Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1575598387335901190?s=20&t=3iaQcZvnt11aLRLXIp0F3A https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1575598387335901190?s=...

Sateeshm 4y ago
Damn. I could be wrong, but the texts with Bret makes it look like Elon's ego was hurt, from texting with Parag.

typeofhuman 4y ago

So many HNers thought the deal wouldn't go through.

nkozyra 4y ago
And so many thought it would. Predicting the future is an imperfect science, as it turns out.
amusedcyclist 4y ago
Elon did try very hard to stop it.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  or was this all just theater?
  - nkozyra 4y ago
    To what end? He signed the deal as was proposed, no?
    - superchroma 4y ago
      A month ago an article appeared detailing how several prominent investors made a huge amount of money by buying the dip on twitter as the lawsuit business unfolded. I personally suspect collusion. The legal drama cost him relatively very little and was basically a favor to his friends.
  - justapassenger 4y ago
    To achieve what? Crater a public perception of the company he’s buying?
    - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
      "no publicity is bad publicity"?

awb 4y ago

> "I wrote heavy duty software" > "I interface way better with engineer who are able to do hardcore programming" In 20+ years of developing, I've only heard non-technical (or well past their prime technical) folks use the terms "heavy duty" or "hardcore" to describe programming.

abudabi123 4y ago
"heavy duty", "hardcore", "falcon heavy", "cybertruck". Those terms relate. I guess he means appreciating programming down to the electron, photon millisecond when debugging a lost rocket launch three times in a row burning his money in the sense of physics and not some kind of marketty arbitrary opaque name for flavor of framework, platform package container combo.
- rurp 4y ago
  How much "photon millisecond" level rocket debugging has Elon personally done?
  - discardable_dan 4y ago
    About as much as anyone else at SpaceX: none at all.
- spoils19 4y ago
  Agreed. I'd expect the average HNer to emphasise with those terms as we all work in complicated and intense industries, but I guess there will always be disappointment as non-Conservatives join the World Wide Web.
- Fatnino 4y ago
  The name falcon heavy is a direct riff on the name delta 4 heavy. ULA just slaps 3 delta 4 first stages side by side and that's the heavy variant. Falcon heavy is the same thing but with falcon 9. I don't think it has anything to do with heavy duty.
  - 4y ago

typeofhuman 4y ago

Jack and Elon discussing future protocol: https://www.twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1575588277700026368 https://www.twitter.com/TechEmails/status/157558827770002636...

discardable_dan 4y ago
I love the "can I call" texts he sends. It's neat to see boomers all act the same about texting.
- concinds 4y ago
  Far from a Boomer attitude (they love calling and aren't as comfortable with texts), it's very much a Gen-Z attitude. But these descriptors obviously make no sense when we're talking about CEOs, not random people for whom "age group" is a relevant or informative descriptor.
  - thinkingemote 4y ago
    Calls are less likely to leave a paper trail, too.
    - concinds 4y ago
      Sure, but my point is that asking whether it's okay to call is somewhat rare among CEOs (boomer or not), while it's extremely prevalent among Gen-Z.
- frumper 4y ago
  He isn't in the boomer generation.
benwad 4y ago
This is really interesting, and for me it highlights the problem of tech/business people trying to solve a social problem. In their mind everything can be solved by tweaking the software architecture or monetisation model. Nothing is proposed to change how users actually interact with each other on the platform, which (IMHO) is the main problem.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

how does Parag Agrawal come out of this looking "in the right"?

superchroma 4y ago
he comes out of this quite wealthy, and, the man who made elon kneel, so I think he'll be all right.
- theonething 4y ago
  > man who made elon kneel Uh, Elon just fired him.
  - mwerd 4y ago
    Paid a hell of a premium for the pleasure
  - superchroma 4y ago
    He can go around now saying that he forced Elon to buy the company by not backing down, for a price premium during a recession, no less. He has his generous severance package and will walk into his next job very comfortably, I'm not sure why you think there is a downside here.
    - theonething 4y ago
      > Agrawal, Segal, and Gadde were shuttled from the building after being fired, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post. Well, that doesn't seem like an upside to me, but that's just me. > He can go around now saying that he forced Elon to buy the company by not backing down Are you or anyone impressed by this?
      - Volundr 4y ago
        >> He can go around now saying that he forced Elon to buy the company by not backing down > Are you or anyone impressed by this? I mean he produced shareholder value by getting the richest man in the world to by the company for a huge premium... There are certainly plenty of CEOs who have done worse who are having no trouble finding work today.

kumarm 4y ago

Elon apparently used Tesla engineers to review Twitter code: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-27/tesla-engineers-visit-twitter-office-to-review-code-for-musk https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-27/tesla-eng... Do Tesla employees work for Tesla or are they Elon's personal staff? How is acceptable when employees can be fired for moonlighting?

throwoutway 4y ago
I stopped trusting Bloomberg’s reporting after they refused to retract their “The Big Hack” which turned out to be bogus. Are there other sources for this?
- skissane 4y ago
  Apparently, SpaceX has used Tesla engineers in the past, to help them evaluate/integrate Tesla parts into SpaceX designs. If Tesla is okay with doing consulting for one of Musk's other businesses, why not another? Legally, Musk has to pay Tesla for this, and someone very senior at Tesla (the board or the senior executive team) has to approve – without Musk being in the room. But, why wouldn't they say "yes"? So I don't think this story is fundamentally implausible. (As I pointed out in a comment on another post, the "code review" was probably actually an "architecture review", but it is easy for non-technical people to elide the difference.)
  - TheOsiris 4y ago
    > Legally, Musk has to pay Tesla for this, and someone very senior at Tesla (the board or the senior executive team) has to approve – without Musk being in the room. But, why wouldn't they say "yes"? that's not true at all. there's no law that says Twitter/Musk has to pay Tesla engineers anything. it's only up to Tesla's management to decide what they want in return for those resources. Also, as CEO there's nothing stopping Elon from using all of Tesla's resources to help Twitter or any other company. it is entirely up to Tesla's board and shareholders to punish Elon for what should be a gross misappropriation of Tesla's resources

dopidopHN 4y ago

runnerup 4y ago
AI-generated comments will soon ruin HN and everything else. https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/ I don't think this will be something to glorify when it arrives.

version_five 4y ago

This is probably more common than the context suggests. CEO/CTO that both claim deep technical skills while not having touched code in decades, one demanding to talk to engineers, the other claiming he's deep in the codebase and knows what's going on. The best executives I've worked with are the ones that freely admit they don't know about the code, the worst are the ones that insist they're "technical" and keep bringing up stuff from 20 years ago with no bearing on the current problem but believing they're sharing their technical expertise

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
outericky 4y ago
I read it more as CTO was protecting the engineers.
_coveredInBees 4y ago
Lol, I always find it funny when people pretend that Parag is some clueless "management type". I graduated the same year as him from the same school, and he is a ridiculously sharp engineer who has risen up at Twitter the old-fashioned way. It's painfully obvious that Musk just wants sycophantic yes-men around him and was pissed off that Parag wasn't willing to kiss his ass regarding all his "revolutionary" suggestions.
- spoils19 4y ago
  Can he invert a binary tree though?
usea 4y ago
Here's a sequence of events that led to me quitting a job: - The owner/CEO of my company met with another local business owner and sold them on us doing some custom software work for them. He gave them an estimate during the meeting, and made a handshake deal. - Owner tells a PM at our company about the project. Usual project kickoff stuff happens where the PM organizes a team and schedules a meeting with the client, etc. - PM sends a meeting invite to a dev (me), a designer, and a QA, to meet at the client's office for the meeting. - The owner of the client company does a similar thing, and at the meeting is 3-4 employees who know a lot about their business and the needs of this project. We talk for 2-3 hours and have a pretty good idea of what they need. (details: The company operates a fleet of temperature sensors. They currently subscribe to a service that alerts them when a thermometer reports values too high or low. They don't like the software and don't want to keep paying for it, and want us to build them a replacement. Basically to collect a bunch of data from devices in the field, parse and store, send sms/email based on rules configured on a web app, and also have some really basic reports viewable) - The team (4 people, including the PM) play agile games for a few hours, coming up with narratives and points. - I get to work. Get access to the data, find a japanese manual online for the devices that describes the format of the data, set up a web app, database, user management, data download/parsing, a polling and alerting service. Lots of parts unfinished, but it's technically functional. Less than one week has passed (and my time is split across multiple projects). - Project is put on emergency hold. Client found out how many hours we had spent, and was pissed. Apparently the person writing the check was told by our owner that it would be like 10-20 hours of work. That was never communicated to the employees at either company. The requirements gathering meeting exhausted the budget all by itself, unknown to everybody present. - The PM is fired. - The owner schedules a 1-on-1 meeting with me, where he spends 40 minutes describing the concept of database tables and rows. His thinking is that if I had only known how to store things in a database, the project wouldn't have taken me so long. Fortunately he gets a phone call and abruptly leaves. - The client was apparently paying $20 a month for their monitoring software.

rurban 4y ago

This confirms that Jack Dorsey will be back on top

throw__2sdfw 4y ago
I hope he does not. Jack Dorsey endorses decentralization, I don't believe Elon would. Jack is best left out to pursue his own products which will be more decentralized.

fileeditview 4y ago

> [...] I won't let this fail and will do whatever it takes. It's too critical to humanity. It's really hard for me to not be disgusted by these people thinking that a web platform whose main purpose are shitstorms is critical to humanity. This is so absurd.. it could be a Monty Python script.

AlmostAnyone 4y ago
On this website you have loads of people claiming that Twitter is an utility and should be regulated and even funded from taxes instead of running as for-profit company... I don't agree with this, but I think it's not so clear cut to be disgusted - many intelligent people think so as well...
- thunkshift1 4y ago
  Lets be honest, Can you go a month without twitter and be okay? Well then its not critical
  - AlmostAnyone 4y ago
    I agree with you 100%, but even here among us you have many people who would've agreed with Musk.