9 ms·

Interesting strategic window: You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats". Maybe this is a signal twitter isn't going to innov

by VLM 4y ago

Interesting strategic window: You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats". Maybe this is a signal twitter isn't going to innovate, develop, and maybe even operate, internally, at least going forward. You need code for a new feature? Buy a startup that already wrote it. You need to keep something running? Contract out instead of employees. Very few companies have a full time plumber or carpenter or electrician on staff (except for obvious obscure exceptions of course). He might be planning bigger changes than people seem to think. What fundamentally does twitter do? Sell ads by moving data around using enormous first mover advantage of account numbers. And that needs a huge employee count why exactly? I am not asking that it did, or it did in the early days of the technology, or what the competitors do. All industries, after the heavy employment phase, move into a value extraction phase. He seems to be betting on the heavy employment phase being over for tweeting. Honestly the only question is timing, is he just right or too early? Maybe tweeting is now like railroads or heavy industry, no longer employs entire neighborhoods or even cities. Maybe SV is about to become the new Detroit.

snapcaster 4y ago
>Interesting strategic window: You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats" what is this statement based on?
- alfiedotwtf 4y ago
  Factory production lines
jmiskovic 4y ago
Why call it 1950s style when it was most common mode of operation up to 2019? Elon already insisted Tesla engineers work on-site, so this move isn't too surprising. What leaves me puzzled is why would anyone decide to work there. Where's the carrot?
- muro 4y ago
  I guess the pay is the carrot. As long as they pay well for the requirements, there will be plenty people to take it. And if the job market deteriorates, they might not even need to pay that well...
  - purpleblue 4y ago
    Also the mission. If I didn't have a great gig right now, I would absolutely join Twitter, just for the opportunity to add new features and prove that the old Twitter was sorely underperforming and that Twitter can be a force for free speech, which I believe in an absolute right.
  - blackguardx 4y ago
    Elon's companies aren't known to pay particularly well. I got an offer at one of his companies that was such an insane lowball it was hard to take seriously.
- steve_taylor 4y ago
  Because the 1950s is the only decade that’s a villain.
SkyPuncher 4y ago
What has Twitter innovated on in the past decade? While I don't agree with the way Elon has been making this move, it's sure looking like he's trying to clear the place out so he can establish a new culture. These policy changes are likely to scare mobile, top-performers off to other companies. This likely clears out a lot of internal dissent and heal digging to make room for new "top performers". I wouldn't be shocked if we see new "top talent" hires in 3 to 6 months then _actual_ new innovation in 6 to 12 months.
- CrimpCity 4y ago
  > What has Twitter innovated on in the past decade? They basically stole clubhouses’ thunder with spaces and tbh clubhouse has lost a lot of it’s shine. Now did Twitter actually innovate? I would say not really but they did reimplement the wheel and so far seems to be working for them. I’d say the execution still counts as being innovative.
  - zen21 4y ago
    Clubhouse lost its shine on its own. It simply didn’t scale on a social level and became a cesspool of crypto scams and conspiracy theorists looking for marks.
    - CrimpCity 4y ago
      Both things can be true at the same time. I dropped of CH because the synchronicity was too much for me. But apparently other people still use Twitter spaces.
- jansan 4y ago
  What has Twitter innovated on in the past decade? Bootstrap
  - madeofpalk 4y ago
    Past decade. Bootstrap is 11 years old.
hutzlibu 4y ago
What does this has to do with Twitter stopping remote, which to me is simply a statement of control freak Elon and nothing else.
- propogandist 4y ago
  the guy spent 44 billion dollars. He has the freedom to run it straight into the ground and terminate every employee, if he choses. That's what FU money buys.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
> You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats" I like remote work too, but there's been plenty of innovation pre-pandemic when we (almost) all had our butt in a seat
lightbendover 4y ago
> You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats" This seems to be pulled from thin air. Nobody would have murmured it 3 years ago. You really think the whole world changed that much in the past 3 years that you can lay down such a superlative?
- croes 4y ago
  >You really think the whole world changed that much in the past 3 years that you can lay down such a superlative? Because 3 years ago people thought it wouldn't work. The pandemic showed it does.
  - throwaway98797 4y ago
    companies mad hired to offset productivity declines so many of that decline is because people can’t be trusted to workout without being baby sat
    - sangnoir 4y ago
      (Internet) companies mad-hired because they thought COVID permanently accelerated the demand shift to online from brick-and-mortar. It turned out it wasn't a new baseline after all.
    - croes 4y ago
      Source? Or is it just hearsay?
  - mrits 4y ago
    I'm not sure a huge tech recession is exactly proof.
    - bart_spoon 4y ago
      In what way is the current tech recession related to remote work, and not decades of free investment money followed by massive inflation?
sakopov 4y ago
> You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats" Seems to me that the majority was innovating just fine this way until pandemic hit.
- willcipriano 4y ago
  Personally I haven't seen much innovation in the past decade or so, you have to go back to before the VC's and pals figured out how to game equity compensation with their Hollywood accounting for any real innovation (in the consumer space, other areas like medicine and space exploration have had some big leaps). A person in 2012 could blow the mind of someone in 2002 with the phone he has in his pocket. A 2012 person would yawn at a 2022 phone and ask how they are meant to plug their headphones in.
roughly 4y ago
> What fundamentally does twitter do? Twitter does content moderation. That's your primary product when you're a billion dollar advertising company with a content farm of 300M people - your product is that the Ford ad you just sold is not going to sit above or below an (actual no-foolin' not just political-pejorative) neo-nazi.
- LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
  > an (actual no-foolin' not just political-pejorative) neo-nazi Could you give me an example from the USA? > your product is that the ad you just sold is not going to sit [near] The evolution of personalized feeds makes this less important. It's not Ford gracing a page in NeoNazi's Monthly magazine with their ad, it's your nazi-laden feed that happens to get a truck ad in passing. > Twitter does content moderation. Not well. And not usefully. They tended to block speech they don't like and leave worse from their friends. Blocking scams, bots, and actual harm seems to take a backseat to political stunts. To be useful it will need to be transparent and configurable, and so far Twitter has focused on making it hidden and based on their views, not the users' views.
  - roughly 4y ago
    > Could you give me an example from the USA? Sure: https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1590746170438975488 https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1590746170438975488 > It's not Ford gracing a page in NeoNazi's Monthly magazine with their ad, it's your nazi-laden feed that happens to get a truck ad in passing. Do you think that makes Ford feel better or worse, as a brand that’s mostly tried to avoid Nazi connections over the last 70-odd years? > They tended to block speech they don't like and leave worse from their friends. Two points here: First, I think you’d be shocked at how many people are super OK with blocking the speech Twitter blocked, and indeed prefer it. As a corporate money-making entity, Twitter is concerned about maximizing its user base, and if blocking the neo-nazi means 3 other people stay on the platform, by golly that’s the move Twitter Inc the business will make. It turns out speech is sometimes zero-sun or worse: one person’s instance of free speech makes another person feel like their life is in danger. Second, Twitter’s customer is not you, nor the public, nor democracy. Twitter’s customer is Ford, and if you’ve noticed from advertising generally in this country lately, most brands have decided that embracing things like LGBTQ rights and immigration, at least at a surface level, are better for their global brand than not, so Twitter’s content moderation strategy will reflect that. Most of the people complaining about Twitter’s content moderation strategy were already mad at Cheerios for running ads celebrating gay marriage, so it‘s hard to say they’ve really missed the mark here. Again, Twitter is an advertising company whose supply is “users”, and they need the maximal supply of palatable (read: users without paired lightning bolts in their bio) users for their customers, Advertisers. That’s what the platform is, that’s what their business is, and that’s who they’re moderating content for.
coldtea 4y ago
>Interesting strategic window: You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats". Maybe this is a signal twitter isn't going to innovate, develop, and maybe even operate, internally, at least going forward. Companies like twitter don't innovate, and never had. They're based on very simple ideas and features and network effects. They got big because it was a catchy idea ("be a smartass with one-liners and gossip with famous people"), but there's no innovation beyond that. Nothing that needs any big brain or creative genius anyway. Same for Facebook, Instagram, and so on. It's all about getting the VC money and traction, the innovation is 1% of the whole thing, if that.
protastus 4y ago
> Maybe this is a signal twitter isn't going to innovate, develop, and maybe even operate, internally, at least going forward. It seems clear to me that Musk believes Twitter is dysfunctional and inefficient. His top priority is to make it efficient. From this perspective, as the right people and a culture of intensity are set up, Twitter will be unburdened to move and innovate. The open question is how quickly can he pivot the culture. Nobody is better positioned than the CEO of a private company.
- three_seagrass 4y ago
  >It seems clear to me that Musk believes Twitter is dysfunctional and inefficient. His top priority is to make it efficient. Is it though? Musk also thought twitter had a bot problem, right up until it became apparent that saying so wouldn't get him out of the Twitter acquisition. I think the only thing that's clear is that Musk has a Twitter attention addiction, and buying Twitter was the world's wealthiest man buying his favorite toy to play with.
  - throwuwu 4y ago
    He’s continuing to repeat that getting rid of bots and spam is a top priority so that’s just straight up bull.
asdff 4y ago
>What fundamentally does twitter do? Sell ads by moving data around using enormous first mover advantage of account numbers. And that needs a huge employee count why exactly? I am not asking that it did, or it did in the early days of the technology, or what the competitors do. The issue with this question is that you make big assumptions to how the work should be. Sure to you and I maybe it takes 1 person to unscrew a lightbulb, but that's given our assumptions about the nature of the lightbulb and the whole job and where it takes place. Maybe twitter built themselves such a lightbulb that its 50 feet up high, and now you need to hire two people to change the lightbulb, one up on the ladder 50 feet up and one on the bottom. Maybe sometimes the latter falls, and historically the ladder holder doesn't want to admit liability. Now you need a third witness to make sure the ladder holder isn't murdering the light bulb changer (seems contrived but e.g. jobs working with children are like this where you need two adults in the room)l. If the light bulb is made from hazardous materials maybe you need a safety officer signing off on your process so insurance companies actually cover you for the high risk of murder in this line of work. Now we are at four people to change the lightbulb and you'd be a fool to remove any of them based on all the context I've given. Oh and you need to fill these positions for three shifts, so twelve people on payroll to ensure you are covered for lightbulbs around the clock. Its easy to add fat to a process, sometimes its very justified fat, and hard to cut it out after the fact without damaging a lot of other things you might not be accounting for at first glance. Thats why people are giving Musk a huge side eye here, because he couldn't have possibly accounted for everything already. Most people who make sweeping changes to orgs successfully start off by taking a lot of time to study how the org works, and not changing much of anything that would taint your observational study before its concluded.
iLoveOncall 4y ago
I don't think it's a crazy idea you've got here, but Musk has announced he wants to try a lot of things and keep what works. https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1590384919829962752 https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/15903849198299627... That doesn't seem compatible with what you present in your post.

by VLM 4y ago

snapcaster 4y ago

>Interesting strategic window: You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats" what is this statement based on?

alfiedotwtf 4y ago
Factory production lines

jmiskovic 4y ago

Why call it 1950s style when it was most common mode of operation up to 2019? Elon already insisted Tesla engineers work on-site, so this move isn't too surprising. What leaves me puzzled is why would anyone decide to work there. Where's the carrot?

muro 4y ago
I guess the pay is the carrot. As long as they pay well for the requirements, there will be plenty people to take it. And if the job market deteriorates, they might not even need to pay that well...
- purpleblue 4y ago
  Also the mission. If I didn't have a great gig right now, I would absolutely join Twitter, just for the opportunity to add new features and prove that the old Twitter was sorely underperforming and that Twitter can be a force for free speech, which I believe in an absolute right.
- blackguardx 4y ago
  Elon's companies aren't known to pay particularly well. I got an offer at one of his companies that was such an insane lowball it was hard to take seriously.
steve_taylor 4y ago
Because the 1950s is the only decade that’s a villain.

SkyPuncher 4y ago

What has Twitter innovated on in the past decade? While I don't agree with the way Elon has been making this move, it's sure looking like he's trying to clear the place out so he can establish a new culture. These policy changes are likely to scare mobile, top-performers off to other companies. This likely clears out a lot of internal dissent and heal digging to make room for new "top performers". I wouldn't be shocked if we see new "top talent" hires in 3 to 6 months then _actual_ new innovation in 6 to 12 months.

CrimpCity 4y ago
> What has Twitter innovated on in the past decade? They basically stole clubhouses’ thunder with spaces and tbh clubhouse has lost a lot of it’s shine. Now did Twitter actually innovate? I would say not really but they did reimplement the wheel and so far seems to be working for them. I’d say the execution still counts as being innovative.
- zen21 4y ago
  Clubhouse lost its shine on its own. It simply didn’t scale on a social level and became a cesspool of crypto scams and conspiracy theorists looking for marks.
  - CrimpCity 4y ago
    Both things can be true at the same time. I dropped of CH because the synchronicity was too much for me. But apparently other people still use Twitter spaces.
jansan 4y ago
What has Twitter innovated on in the past decade? Bootstrap
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  Past decade. Bootstrap is 11 years old.

hutzlibu 4y ago

What does this has to do with Twitter stopping remote, which to me is simply a statement of control freak Elon and nothing else.

propogandist 4y ago
the guy spent 44 billion dollars. He has the freedom to run it straight into the ground and terminate every employee, if he choses. That's what FU money buys.

insane_dreamer 4y ago

> You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats" I like remote work too, but there's been plenty of innovation pre-pandemic when we (almost) all had our butt in a seat

lightbendover 4y ago

> You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats" This seems to be pulled from thin air. Nobody would have murmured it 3 years ago. You really think the whole world changed that much in the past 3 years that you can lay down such a superlative?

croes 4y ago
>You really think the whole world changed that much in the past 3 years that you can lay down such a superlative? Because 3 years ago people thought it wouldn't work. The pandemic showed it does.
- throwaway98797 4y ago
  companies mad hired to offset productivity declines so many of that decline is because people can’t be trusted to workout without being baby sat
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    (Internet) companies mad-hired because they thought COVID permanently accelerated the demand shift to online from brick-and-mortar. It turned out it wasn't a new baseline after all.
  - croes 4y ago
    Source? Or is it just hearsay?
- mrits 4y ago
  I'm not sure a huge tech recession is exactly proof.
  - bart_spoon 4y ago
    In what way is the current tech recession related to remote work, and not decades of free investment money followed by massive inflation?

sakopov 4y ago

> You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats" Seems to me that the majority was innovating just fine this way until pandemic hit.

willcipriano 4y ago
Personally I haven't seen much innovation in the past decade or so, you have to go back to before the VC's and pals figured out how to game equity compensation with their Hollywood accounting for any real innovation (in the consumer space, other areas like medicine and space exploration have had some big leaps). A person in 2012 could blow the mind of someone in 2002 with the phone he has in his pocket. A 2012 person would yawn at a 2022 phone and ask how they are meant to plug their headphones in.

roughly 4y ago

> What fundamentally does twitter do? Twitter does content moderation. That's your primary product when you're a billion dollar advertising company with a content farm of 300M people - your product is that the Ford ad you just sold is not going to sit above or below an (actual no-foolin' not just political-pejorative) neo-nazi.

LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
> an (actual no-foolin' not just political-pejorative) neo-nazi Could you give me an example from the USA? > your product is that the ad you just sold is not going to sit [near] The evolution of personalized feeds makes this less important. It's not Ford gracing a page in NeoNazi's Monthly magazine with their ad, it's your nazi-laden feed that happens to get a truck ad in passing. > Twitter does content moderation. Not well. And not usefully. They tended to block speech they don't like and leave worse from their friends. Blocking scams, bots, and actual harm seems to take a backseat to political stunts. To be useful it will need to be transparent and configurable, and so far Twitter has focused on making it hidden and based on their views, not the users' views.
- roughly 4y ago
  > Could you give me an example from the USA? Sure: https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1590746170438975488 https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1590746170438975488 > It's not Ford gracing a page in NeoNazi's Monthly magazine with their ad, it's your nazi-laden feed that happens to get a truck ad in passing. Do you think that makes Ford feel better or worse, as a brand that’s mostly tried to avoid Nazi connections over the last 70-odd years? > They tended to block speech they don't like and leave worse from their friends. Two points here: First, I think you’d be shocked at how many people are super OK with blocking the speech Twitter blocked, and indeed prefer it. As a corporate money-making entity, Twitter is concerned about maximizing its user base, and if blocking the neo-nazi means 3 other people stay on the platform, by golly that’s the move Twitter Inc the business will make. It turns out speech is sometimes zero-sun or worse: one person’s instance of free speech makes another person feel like their life is in danger. Second, Twitter’s customer is not you, nor the public, nor democracy. Twitter’s customer is Ford, and if you’ve noticed from advertising generally in this country lately, most brands have decided that embracing things like LGBTQ rights and immigration, at least at a surface level, are better for their global brand than not, so Twitter’s content moderation strategy will reflect that. Most of the people complaining about Twitter’s content moderation strategy were already mad at Cheerios for running ads celebrating gay marriage, so it‘s hard to say they’ve really missed the mark here. Again, Twitter is an advertising company whose supply is “users”, and they need the maximal supply of palatable (read: users without paired lightning bolts in their bio) users for their customers, Advertisers. That’s what the platform is, that’s what their business is, and that’s who they’re moderating content for.

coldtea 4y ago

>Interesting strategic window: You can't innovate and software engineer using 1950s style "butts in seats". Maybe this is a signal twitter isn't going to innovate, develop, and maybe even operate, internally, at least going forward. Companies like twitter don't innovate, and never had. They're based on very simple ideas and features and network effects. They got big because it was a catchy idea ("be a smartass with one-liners and gossip with famous people"), but there's no innovation beyond that. Nothing that needs any big brain or creative genius anyway. Same for Facebook, Instagram, and so on. It's all about getting the VC money and traction, the innovation is 1% of the whole thing, if that.

protastus 4y ago

> Maybe this is a signal twitter isn't going to innovate, develop, and maybe even operate, internally, at least going forward. It seems clear to me that Musk believes Twitter is dysfunctional and inefficient. His top priority is to make it efficient. From this perspective, as the right people and a culture of intensity are set up, Twitter will be unburdened to move and innovate. The open question is how quickly can he pivot the culture. Nobody is better positioned than the CEO of a private company.

three_seagrass 4y ago
>It seems clear to me that Musk believes Twitter is dysfunctional and inefficient. His top priority is to make it efficient. Is it though? Musk also thought twitter had a bot problem, right up until it became apparent that saying so wouldn't get him out of the Twitter acquisition. I think the only thing that's clear is that Musk has a Twitter attention addiction, and buying Twitter was the world's wealthiest man buying his favorite toy to play with.
- throwuwu 4y ago
  He’s continuing to repeat that getting rid of bots and spam is a top priority so that’s just straight up bull.

asdff 4y ago

>What fundamentally does twitter do? Sell ads by moving data around using enormous first mover advantage of account numbers. And that needs a huge employee count why exactly? I am not asking that it did, or it did in the early days of the technology, or what the competitors do. The issue with this question is that you make big assumptions to how the work should be. Sure to you and I maybe it takes 1 person to unscrew a lightbulb, but that's given our assumptions about the nature of the lightbulb and the whole job and where it takes place. Maybe twitter built themselves such a lightbulb that its 50 feet up high, and now you need to hire two people to change the lightbulb, one up on the ladder 50 feet up and one on the bottom. Maybe sometimes the latter falls, and historically the ladder holder doesn't want to admit liability. Now you need a third witness to make sure the ladder holder isn't murdering the light bulb changer (seems contrived but e.g. jobs working with children are like this where you need two adults in the room)l. If the light bulb is made from hazardous materials maybe you need a safety officer signing off on your process so insurance companies actually cover you for the high risk of murder in this line of work. Now we are at four people to change the lightbulb and you'd be a fool to remove any of them based on all the context I've given. Oh and you need to fill these positions for three shifts, so twelve people on payroll to ensure you are covered for lightbulbs around the clock. Its easy to add fat to a process, sometimes its very justified fat, and hard to cut it out after the fact without damaging a lot of other things you might not be accounting for at first glance. Thats why people are giving Musk a huge side eye here, because he couldn't have possibly accounted for everything already. Most people who make sweeping changes to orgs successfully start off by taking a lot of time to study how the org works, and not changing much of anything that would taint your observational study before its concluded.

iLoveOncall 4y ago

I don't think it's a crazy idea you've got here, but Musk has announced he wants to try a lot of things and keep what works. https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1590384919829962752 https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/15903849198299627... That doesn't seem compatible with what you present in your post.