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If I was working at Twitter right now I would be looking for a different job, regardless of what I think of Elon's politics/motives. The talk of layoffs and maj

If I was working at Twitter right now I would be looking for a different job, regardless of what I think of Elon's politics/motives. The talk of layoffs and major policy changes creates massive uncertainty and I don't think I'd risk sticking out the transition. I bet many inside the company feel the same. This begs the question: If there is a major exodus, will it even matter? And, if it does, how will the problems manifest? Reduced reliability? Slower feature velocity? Less innovation?

LinuxBender 4y ago
Slower feature velocity? Less innovation? Based on a few articles I've read, it appears he may be bringing developers from Tesla into Twitter but I have not seen anything from him directly stating that. I doubt they will hit the ground running but with time can probably dig into the code and processes. Sadly I've been in an industry that was focused on taking over after entire IT/engineering/development teams were let go. As rough as it is for the people let go, it is equally demoralizing to pick up the pieces from people either being let go or that were let go. It can be done accepting it will be rough around the edges at first. During the dot-com bust I was one of the people that had to sit with the soon to be let go team members and document their job and automate as much of it as I could. That's all I did for a couple of years.
- snowwrestler 4y ago
  If Musk is actually using Tesla devs at Twitter he better have a rock solid contract for service between the two companies. Otherwise he opens himself up to a shareholder lawsuit for misuse of Tesla corporate resources.
  - kjksf 4y ago
    A civil lawsuit is always about money. To win money in a lawsuit you need to show damages. As a shareholder, the damages would be drop in stock price. Good luck convincing all 12 jurors that Tesla's stock price dropped because a few Tesla engineers did a code review of Twitter code. Especially given that Tesla stock tends to go up, not down (recent beatings due to macro nonwithstanding).
    - tpxl 4y ago
      U wot. If Tesla engineers do work for free for a company owned by one of the shareholders, there's clear damage there in the form of misallocation of resources.
      - Keyframe 4y ago
        Who said for free? Twitter pays Tesla which renders that service. That's as clean as it can be.
    - snowwrestler 4y ago
      Uh huh. Let’s say Musk writes himself a check from Tesla for an extra $100,000. He cashes it, but the next day TSLA is up. No problems there? No legal risk? Now let’s say that instead of a check, he gifts himself $100,000 of Tesla engineering time.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  > it appears he may be bringing developers from Tesla into Twitter Two different calibre of engineers, doubt this will work out very well.
  - kybernetyk 4y ago
    yeah, one group are real engineers. the other ones turn sql queries into html to make people click on ads.
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      Taking your comment in good faith: A lot more engineering goes into "make people click on ads" than you seem to be realizing. And like or not but monetization is at the core of Twitter's business.
    - Cupertino95014 4y ago
      aside from the snarkiness: OP seems to assume anyone who works for Tesla must be inferior to anyone from Twitter. Dubious.
      - whimsicalism 4y ago
        I'm talking in aggregates, of course I don't assume that because it would be totally illogical. I'll be explicit in my assumption. If it were actually possible to rank engineers in some measure of productivity/effectiveness, the median at Twitter would be more product/effective than the median at Tesla. This gap would widen if we are talking about productivity/effectiveness at tasks necessary for Twitter's business.
        Cupertino95014 4y ago
        Utter nonsense and snobbery.
        whimsicalism 4y ago
- RoyTyrell 4y ago
  I've done that too, it really sucks. My boss wasn't thrilled about it either but it was a directive from a lot higher up than she was. I took that as cue to look for a new job myself, as did others. Not everyone left but enough such that between the layoffs and the devs/BAs that quit caused a project to slip such that they had to pay "fines" as designated in the contract and a couple senior leaders were let go.
aksss 4y ago
These are times of tremendously unnatural opportunity for people who stick with it. If you doubt your objective value or just don’t like high-stress environments, then yes, start looking elsewhere now.
- cutenewt 4y ago
  +1. So much opportunity for battlefield promotions right now.
- kenhwang 4y ago
  Musk immediately created a huge power vacuum within Twitter. There's absolutely going to be senior staff trying to climb into executive roles with golden parachutes.
- jupp0r 4y ago
  Can you elaborate what you mean by "unnatural opportunity"? The way Musk has treated employees so far seems to indicate that he doesn't really care about them.
  - scythe 4y ago
    If your boss loses his/her job, that's a promotion opportunity.
    - jupp0r 4y ago
      Only if the position is still there.
  - aksss 4y ago
    If the company is in a time of chaos, one has an opportunity to be an agent of order. This may come in the form of stepping into managerial or leadership roles or stepping into gaps in the talent pool as an individual contributor. These opportunities can often represent shortcuts in a career track, where in simpler times one may have faced more competition for a position or longer delays waiting for vacancies to open up. Further, these are great and rare times to learn about aspects of the business to which one has not hitherto been exposed, which in the long term is incredibly valuable practical education. When filling the breach, during mergers or downsizing, one finds many opportunities to wear multiple hats outside of what one’s traditional qualifications would warrant. I can’t speak about Musk, obviously, but some people will leave because they feel Musk does not sufficiently “care about them”. Others will step forward into those vacancies potentially because they don’t need Musk to care about them, but recognize that Musk cares about the job being done, and they are in a position to get it done, and are willing to do it particularly if getting the job done represents some measure of reward (promotion, accelerated career, exposure, etc). My own career advice would be that Musk “caring about you” is a ridiculous distraction in the short term, and that you should look at the professional skill development, education, and trial by fire opportunities with very lusty excitement. Truly, IME these are some of the most exciting times in a career if you can stand the heat and they produce very long lasting professional relationships and bonds that may pay dividends down the road. Alternatively, a boring job with a CEO who pretends to care about you is an option too, but “wherever you go, there you are.” If one has issues with high blood pressure, anxiety or has a busy life outside of work, this may very well be a better option.
treeman79 4y ago
More profit. It’s a message board.
capableweb 4y ago
> Reduced reliability? Slower feature velocity? Less innovation? Slower feature velocity usually means higher reliability as changes to systems are usually what causes big systems to fail or enter degraded performance modes. If Musk ramps up development and forces out more features faster, that'd lead to lower reliability most commonly.
- NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
  Haven't you ever worked at a company where the only thing that keeps the product going is ongoing heroic intervention by people with deep subject matter expertise; even in the absence of any actual feature-driven change?
  - ishjoh 4y ago
    This comment makes me sad because I left a place like this but I know good people who stayed behind even though it ruins their health and relationships.
  - jcadam 4y ago
    > Haven't you ever worked at a company where the only thing that keeps the product going is ongoing heroic intervention by people with deep subject matter expertise; even in the absence of any actual feature-driven change? Often coupled with a mindless executive team that has no idea that's the case, and eventually lays off the SMEs because they're "too expensive."
  - meowtimemania 4y ago
    I’m currently at a company like this and have been in the past. What should companies do to avoid this type of situation?
phpisthebest 4y ago
>>If there is a major exodus I think that is the goal of the announcements, it is always better for everyone if there are voluntary separations instead of layoff's and/or terminations.
_fat_santa 4y ago
Based on everything I read so far the plan seems to be to make Twitter a much smaller company by headcount so they could sustain themselves primarily through their users rather than advertisers. My guess is Elon is restructuring the company so it's not beholden to advertisers. He knows that Twitter is going to always be inherently controversial and he wants to structure their revenue so they aren't always having to react to every new controversy. All the social media giants seem to be very reactionary to any controversy, and I think that's because any time a new controversy comes up they are scrambling to make sure they don't loose their advertisers. If your revenue is coming from the users who know what they are signing up for, you can weather those controversies much better without having to take any reactionary measures.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  If they don't have advertisers how are they going to make money?
  - govg 4y ago
    Paid features, possibly. There is Twitter Blue, although I'm very unclear on how widespread it is, how much money it makes (if any), and what the extra features are (other than edit?).
  - therealdrag0 4y ago
    I thought one of the leaks someone mentioned charging a subscription for blue badges? Might be misremembering.
- cwkoss 4y ago
  Elon has already started groveling to advertisers: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1585619322239561728 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1585619322239561728
  - wrycoder 4y ago
    That is not groveling. It's an excellent message to his advertisers.
AlbertCory 4y ago
As I indicated in my post https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/should-elon-lay-off-all-those-developers https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/should-elon-lay-off-all-...: Twitter spends more on R&D as a percentage of sales than 5 other large tech companies, even Facebook, and moreover, the percentage is increasing. Where is this "innovation"? It's not a new platform. Its market is, arguably, saturated; I don't see a "next billion users" (as they say at Google) coming from anywhere. So the answer to "If there is a major exodus, will it even matter?" is pretty clear: No, as long as it's not the operations people.
- avrionov 4y ago
  Thank you for the post. Twitter is also the youngest company on your list. The percent spent on R&D goes done when the company get older.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    .. and yet, the percent is going up, not down. secondly, you are incorrect about it being "young." It was founded March 21, 2006, making it 16 years old. For a web company, that's an eternity.
    - avrionov 4y ago
      Younger than the other companies on your list. Microsoft is 47 years old.
      - AlbertCory 4y ago
        .. and Facebook is only a couple years older. And their numbers are not monotonically increasing. Can you find some companies you think are comparable?
        avrionov 4y ago
        Palantir 19 years old - 2021 R&D expenses were 25%, 2020 - 50% https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/PLTR/income-statement https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/PLTR/income-statement RingCentral - 23 years old - R&D Expenses increasing for the last 3 or 4 years https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/RNG/income-statement https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/RNG/income-statement
thebradbain 4y ago
I mean, if you're a huge fan of him you'd probably stay. If you're not, you'd probably stay for the severance package, and do absolutely no work in the meantime. No company or recruiter will be holding the fact you were fired against you if/when you're swept away in the layoffs. If you genuinely like your job there and don't feel strongly about Musk either way, that's probably the toughest situation, and you should come to terms with the fact that even if you keep your job at Twitter it will likely feel like an entirely different workplace in a couple months.
- beezle 4y ago
  So everyone who is canned will get a severance package? Not sure where this expectation comes from. Does everyone get an employment contract with a golden parachute these days? If the layoffs are large all he need do is give 60 days notice to those being terminated.
  - austhrow743 4y ago
    For many jobs, notice periods end up being given as severance packages. They keep paying you but don't want you to show up.
  - LocalPCGuy 4y ago
    In many cases a severance package is attached to an NDA and non-disparagement agreement, or whatever else an employer may want to protect against ex-employees doing. In exchange for signing, the employee gets X weeks/months pay, or a bonus of $X, etc.
  - thebradbain 4y ago
    Well, California mandates at least 3 months *pay for salaried employees in many layoff scenarios. There’s some further complexities, but I imagine most employees at Twitter in SF qualify. *technically, notice. But companies can opt to pay 3 months pay in lieu of the notice, if they want to cut ties immediately.
- LastTrain 4y ago
  I'm sort of a fan but I still think I'd be leaving - he has shown open disdain for the status quo there, including the rank and file.
robbyking 4y ago
That was my first thought, too. On the other hand, if you're a local engineer who feels stuck in their current position it could be a good opportunity to fill the void.
nebula8804 4y ago
>And, if it does, how will the problems manifest? Reduced reliability? Slower feature velocity? Less innovation? I got a good laugh out of that. Twitter is easily the worst operating social platform I've used. Still, it will be interesting to observe if there is a slow and steady degradation of their software stack. Everything in the world degrades naturally and needs to be maintained to fight against entropy. Elon himself once said: "The organizational problems of a company manifest themselves in the product". Knowing that it will be interesting to witness what "organizational problems" we can derive from the product as Elon takes over.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
version_five 4y ago
No doubt some people have / will leave. I think there is a very interesting opportunity too - even if it's just to see what happens from the inside, but more actively to try and be part of a different vision for the company. It seems in one sense like being acquired, which can suck but can also be interesting. And in another sense (possibly) the opposite of being acquired, optimistically going from corporate bureaucracy and overhead and lots of rules and politics to something leaner and more interesting. In any case, it would be cool to see it from the inside
narrator 4y ago
If your politics don't conflict with Elon's irreconcilably, and you don't get fired, I'd think it'd probably be a better situation than before. Elon is not a bad chief executive and has run several highly successful tech companies that have performed far better than Twitter.
kybernetyk 4y ago
tbh you don't require 7k employees to run something like twitter. there's a lot of dead ballast there and as a private company you can't allow for that.
- cmdli 4y ago
  Something like Twitter perhaps, but Twitter itself? I wouldn't be surprised if those engineers created enough servers that need to be maintained and require the manpower. Cutting engineers without cutting servers/code would be a nightmare.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sangnoir 4y ago
For nostalgia's sake, I hope the code responsible for rendering the fail-whale[0] wasn't deleted in the past few years[1]. Seeing it again will be like seeing an old friend. 0. http://www.yiyinglu.com/?portfolio=lifting-a-dreamer-aka-twitter-fail-whale http://www.yiyinglu.com/?portfolio=lifting-a-dreamer-aka-twi... 1. If it was, may an outgoing Twitter engineer please add it back as a last commit. I'll buy you a beer.
bogomipz 4y ago
>"If I was working at Twitter right now I would be looking for a different job, regardless of what I think of Elon's politics/motives." Imagine already being a bit nervous about your future and then seeing that one of the first priorities of the new CEO was to show up to the office and parade around the lobby with a porcelain sink in his arms?
booleandilemma 4y ago
If I worked at Twitter and I knew that I was actively contributing to the bottom line then I wouldn't be worried. If my job was approving the work of the guy who approves the work of the guy who writes emails for a living, then I'd be looking elsewhere. I think that's who Musk is going to be targeting with the layoffs. These people know who they are.

LinuxBender 4y ago

Slower feature velocity? Less innovation? Based on a few articles I've read, it appears he may be bringing developers from Tesla into Twitter but I have not seen anything from him directly stating that. I doubt they will hit the ground running but with time can probably dig into the code and processes. Sadly I've been in an industry that was focused on taking over after entire IT/engineering/development teams were let go. As rough as it is for the people let go, it is equally demoralizing to pick up the pieces from people either being let go or that were let go. It can be done accepting it will be rough around the edges at first. During the dot-com bust I was one of the people that had to sit with the soon to be let go team members and document their job and automate as much of it as I could. That's all I did for a couple of years.

snowwrestler 4y ago
If Musk is actually using Tesla devs at Twitter he better have a rock solid contract for service between the two companies. Otherwise he opens himself up to a shareholder lawsuit for misuse of Tesla corporate resources.
- kjksf 4y ago
  A civil lawsuit is always about money. To win money in a lawsuit you need to show damages. As a shareholder, the damages would be drop in stock price. Good luck convincing all 12 jurors that Tesla's stock price dropped because a few Tesla engineers did a code review of Twitter code. Especially given that Tesla stock tends to go up, not down (recent beatings due to macro nonwithstanding).
  - tpxl 4y ago
    U wot. If Tesla engineers do work for free for a company owned by one of the shareholders, there's clear damage there in the form of misallocation of resources.
    - Keyframe 4y ago
      Who said for free? Twitter pays Tesla which renders that service. That's as clean as it can be.
  - snowwrestler 4y ago
    Uh huh. Let’s say Musk writes himself a check from Tesla for an extra $100,000. He cashes it, but the next day TSLA is up. No problems there? No legal risk? Now let’s say that instead of a check, he gifts himself $100,000 of Tesla engineering time.
whimsicalism 4y ago
> it appears he may be bringing developers from Tesla into Twitter Two different calibre of engineers, doubt this will work out very well.
- kybernetyk 4y ago
  yeah, one group are real engineers. the other ones turn sql queries into html to make people click on ads.
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    Taking your comment in good faith: A lot more engineering goes into "make people click on ads" than you seem to be realizing. And like or not but monetization is at the core of Twitter's business.
  - Cupertino95014 4y ago
    aside from the snarkiness: OP seems to assume anyone who works for Tesla must be inferior to anyone from Twitter. Dubious.
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      I'm talking in aggregates, of course I don't assume that because it would be totally illogical. I'll be explicit in my assumption. If it were actually possible to rank engineers in some measure of productivity/effectiveness, the median at Twitter would be more product/effective than the median at Tesla. This gap would widen if we are talking about productivity/effectiveness at tasks necessary for Twitter's business.
      - Cupertino95014 4y ago
        Utter nonsense and snobbery.
        whimsicalism 4y ago
RoyTyrell 4y ago
I've done that too, it really sucks. My boss wasn't thrilled about it either but it was a directive from a lot higher up than she was. I took that as cue to look for a new job myself, as did others. Not everyone left but enough such that between the layoffs and the devs/BAs that quit caused a project to slip such that they had to pay "fines" as designated in the contract and a couple senior leaders were let go.

aksss 4y ago

These are times of tremendously unnatural opportunity for people who stick with it. If you doubt your objective value or just don’t like high-stress environments, then yes, start looking elsewhere now.

cutenewt 4y ago
+1. So much opportunity for battlefield promotions right now.
kenhwang 4y ago
Musk immediately created a huge power vacuum within Twitter. There's absolutely going to be senior staff trying to climb into executive roles with golden parachutes.
jupp0r 4y ago
Can you elaborate what you mean by "unnatural opportunity"? The way Musk has treated employees so far seems to indicate that he doesn't really care about them.
- scythe 4y ago
  If your boss loses his/her job, that's a promotion opportunity.
  - jupp0r 4y ago
    Only if the position is still there.
- aksss 4y ago
  If the company is in a time of chaos, one has an opportunity to be an agent of order. This may come in the form of stepping into managerial or leadership roles or stepping into gaps in the talent pool as an individual contributor. These opportunities can often represent shortcuts in a career track, where in simpler times one may have faced more competition for a position or longer delays waiting for vacancies to open up. Further, these are great and rare times to learn about aspects of the business to which one has not hitherto been exposed, which in the long term is incredibly valuable practical education. When filling the breach, during mergers or downsizing, one finds many opportunities to wear multiple hats outside of what one’s traditional qualifications would warrant. I can’t speak about Musk, obviously, but some people will leave because they feel Musk does not sufficiently “care about them”. Others will step forward into those vacancies potentially because they don’t need Musk to care about them, but recognize that Musk cares about the job being done, and they are in a position to get it done, and are willing to do it particularly if getting the job done represents some measure of reward (promotion, accelerated career, exposure, etc). My own career advice would be that Musk “caring about you” is a ridiculous distraction in the short term, and that you should look at the professional skill development, education, and trial by fire opportunities with very lusty excitement. Truly, IME these are some of the most exciting times in a career if you can stand the heat and they produce very long lasting professional relationships and bonds that may pay dividends down the road. Alternatively, a boring job with a CEO who pretends to care about you is an option too, but “wherever you go, there you are.” If one has issues with high blood pressure, anxiety or has a busy life outside of work, this may very well be a better option.

treeman79 4y ago

More profit. It’s a message board.

capableweb 4y ago

> Reduced reliability? Slower feature velocity? Less innovation? Slower feature velocity usually means higher reliability as changes to systems are usually what causes big systems to fail or enter degraded performance modes. If Musk ramps up development and forces out more features faster, that'd lead to lower reliability most commonly.

NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
Haven't you ever worked at a company where the only thing that keeps the product going is ongoing heroic intervention by people with deep subject matter expertise; even in the absence of any actual feature-driven change?
- ishjoh 4y ago
  This comment makes me sad because I left a place like this but I know good people who stayed behind even though it ruins their health and relationships.
- jcadam 4y ago
  > Haven't you ever worked at a company where the only thing that keeps the product going is ongoing heroic intervention by people with deep subject matter expertise; even in the absence of any actual feature-driven change? Often coupled with a mindless executive team that has no idea that's the case, and eventually lays off the SMEs because they're "too expensive."
- meowtimemania 4y ago
  I’m currently at a company like this and have been in the past. What should companies do to avoid this type of situation?

phpisthebest 4y ago

>>If there is a major exodus I think that is the goal of the announcements, it is always better for everyone if there are voluntary separations instead of layoff's and/or terminations.

_fat_santa 4y ago

Based on everything I read so far the plan seems to be to make Twitter a much smaller company by headcount so they could sustain themselves primarily through their users rather than advertisers. My guess is Elon is restructuring the company so it's not beholden to advertisers. He knows that Twitter is going to always be inherently controversial and he wants to structure their revenue so they aren't always having to react to every new controversy. All the social media giants seem to be very reactionary to any controversy, and I think that's because any time a new controversy comes up they are scrambling to make sure they don't loose their advertisers. If your revenue is coming from the users who know what they are signing up for, you can weather those controversies much better without having to take any reactionary measures.

pmoriarty 4y ago
If they don't have advertisers how are they going to make money?
- govg 4y ago
  Paid features, possibly. There is Twitter Blue, although I'm very unclear on how widespread it is, how much money it makes (if any), and what the extra features are (other than edit?).
- therealdrag0 4y ago
  I thought one of the leaks someone mentioned charging a subscription for blue badges? Might be misremembering.
cwkoss 4y ago
Elon has already started groveling to advertisers: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1585619322239561728 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1585619322239561728
- wrycoder 4y ago
  That is not groveling. It's an excellent message to his advertisers.

AlbertCory 4y ago

As I indicated in my post https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/should-elon-lay-off-all-those-developers https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/should-elon-lay-off-all-...: Twitter spends more on R&D as a percentage of sales than 5 other large tech companies, even Facebook, and moreover, the percentage is increasing. Where is this "innovation"? It's not a new platform. Its market is, arguably, saturated; I don't see a "next billion users" (as they say at Google) coming from anywhere. So the answer to "If there is a major exodus, will it even matter?" is pretty clear: No, as long as it's not the operations people.

avrionov 4y ago
Thank you for the post. Twitter is also the youngest company on your list. The percent spent on R&D goes done when the company get older.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  .. and yet, the percent is going up, not down. secondly, you are incorrect about it being "young." It was founded March 21, 2006, making it 16 years old. For a web company, that's an eternity.
  - avrionov 4y ago
    Younger than the other companies on your list. Microsoft is 47 years old.
    - AlbertCory 4y ago
      .. and Facebook is only a couple years older. And their numbers are not monotonically increasing. Can you find some companies you think are comparable?
      - avrionov 4y ago
        Palantir 19 years old - 2021 R&D expenses were 25%, 2020 - 50% https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/PLTR/income-statement https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/PLTR/income-statement RingCentral - 23 years old - R&D Expenses increasing for the last 3 or 4 years https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/RNG/income-statement https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/RNG/income-statement

thebradbain 4y ago

I mean, if you're a huge fan of him you'd probably stay. If you're not, you'd probably stay for the severance package, and do absolutely no work in the meantime. No company or recruiter will be holding the fact you were fired against you if/when you're swept away in the layoffs. If you genuinely like your job there and don't feel strongly about Musk either way, that's probably the toughest situation, and you should come to terms with the fact that even if you keep your job at Twitter it will likely feel like an entirely different workplace in a couple months.

beezle 4y ago
So everyone who is canned will get a severance package? Not sure where this expectation comes from. Does everyone get an employment contract with a golden parachute these days? If the layoffs are large all he need do is give 60 days notice to those being terminated.
- austhrow743 4y ago
  For many jobs, notice periods end up being given as severance packages. They keep paying you but don't want you to show up.
- LocalPCGuy 4y ago
  In many cases a severance package is attached to an NDA and non-disparagement agreement, or whatever else an employer may want to protect against ex-employees doing. In exchange for signing, the employee gets X weeks/months pay, or a bonus of $X, etc.
- thebradbain 4y ago
  Well, California mandates at least 3 months *pay for salaried employees in many layoff scenarios. There’s some further complexities, but I imagine most employees at Twitter in SF qualify. *technically, notice. But companies can opt to pay 3 months pay in lieu of the notice, if they want to cut ties immediately.
LastTrain 4y ago
I'm sort of a fan but I still think I'd be leaving - he has shown open disdain for the status quo there, including the rank and file.

robbyking 4y ago

That was my first thought, too. On the other hand, if you're a local engineer who feels stuck in their current position it could be a good opportunity to fill the void.

nebula8804 4y ago

>And, if it does, how will the problems manifest? Reduced reliability? Slower feature velocity? Less innovation? I got a good laugh out of that. Twitter is easily the worst operating social platform I've used. Still, it will be interesting to observe if there is a slow and steady degradation of their software stack. Everything in the world degrades naturally and needs to be maintained to fight against entropy. Elon himself once said: "The organizational problems of a company manifest themselves in the product". Knowing that it will be interesting to witness what "organizational problems" we can derive from the product as Elon takes over.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

version_five 4y ago

No doubt some people have / will leave. I think there is a very interesting opportunity too - even if it's just to see what happens from the inside, but more actively to try and be part of a different vision for the company. It seems in one sense like being acquired, which can suck but can also be interesting. And in another sense (possibly) the opposite of being acquired, optimistically going from corporate bureaucracy and overhead and lots of rules and politics to something leaner and more interesting. In any case, it would be cool to see it from the inside

narrator 4y ago

If your politics don't conflict with Elon's irreconcilably, and you don't get fired, I'd think it'd probably be a better situation than before. Elon is not a bad chief executive and has run several highly successful tech companies that have performed far better than Twitter.

kybernetyk 4y ago

tbh you don't require 7k employees to run something like twitter. there's a lot of dead ballast there and as a private company you can't allow for that.

cmdli 4y ago
Something like Twitter perhaps, but Twitter itself? I wouldn't be surprised if those engineers created enough servers that need to be maintained and require the manpower. Cutting engineers without cutting servers/code would be a nightmare.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

sangnoir 4y ago

For nostalgia's sake, I hope the code responsible for rendering the fail-whale[0] wasn't deleted in the past few years[1]. Seeing it again will be like seeing an old friend. 0. http://www.yiyinglu.com/?portfolio=lifting-a-dreamer-aka-twitter-fail-whale http://www.yiyinglu.com/?portfolio=lifting-a-dreamer-aka-twi... 1. If it was, may an outgoing Twitter engineer please add it back as a last commit. I'll buy you a beer.

bogomipz 4y ago

>"If I was working at Twitter right now I would be looking for a different job, regardless of what I think of Elon's politics/motives." Imagine already being a bit nervous about your future and then seeing that one of the first priorities of the new CEO was to show up to the office and parade around the lobby with a porcelain sink in his arms?

booleandilemma 4y ago

If I worked at Twitter and I knew that I was actively contributing to the bottom line then I wouldn't be worried. If my job was approving the work of the guy who approves the work of the guy who writes emails for a living, then I'd be looking elsewhere. I think that's who Musk is going to be targeting with the layoffs. These people know who they are.