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Everytime a new Commanding Officer (CO) showed up when I was in the Navy we tried to bet which type it was: 1) The kind who investigated the goings-on in the s

• hallway_monitor 4y ago
  The difference here is the ship is not running smoothly at all according to the new commander. It is a change in course and I think it's pretty obvious Elon wants to get rid of the people who won't be on board with the new plan. This change is one more opportunity for those dissidents to leave and for those that stay to build a better team.
  • eli 4y ago
    And how's that been going so far?
    • nxm 4y ago
      It’s been a few short weeks. He had to cut stuff (as others like Meta are) to ease the cost drain. Give Musk a chance… guy knows how to build and grow companies
      • crtasm 4y ago
        Fire people then ask some of them to come back?
      • paulryanrogers 4y ago
        Considering his reputation (alone, not the feats of those adjacent) how true is this?
      • jasonlotito 4y ago
        > It’s been a few short weeks. He had to cut stuff (as others like Meta are) to ease the cost drain. I mean, the massive increase in cost is a result of Musk's debt purchasing Twitter.
        • notinfuriated 4y ago
          Would you mind explaining this a bit further? I'm out of the loop here and don't know anything about Twitter's costs before or after Musk's purchase.
          • klyrs 4y ago
            He had to take out a giant loan to afford the purchase (debt financing), which twitter needs to pay about $1B a year to service. Twitter wasn't getting anywhere near that in profit.
            • notinfuriated 4y ago
              Ah, didn't realize this about the $1B/year. Thanks!
          • 4y ago
  • heyitsguay 4y ago
    Yeah but at least from the outside, to continue the metaphor, this seems like a CO taking over a struggling ship and deciding to just blow up all the ammunition in place. The ship needs to do something new, and this is something new, but it seems like it's just sinking faster now.
  • pajtl 4y ago
    Wouldn't the new commander always say the ship is not running smoothly?
    • LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
      Wouldn't they know going in what high-command's view of the ship was? Couldn't they judge the ship and crew against the others in the fleet?
  • happymellon 4y ago
    The only thing that ever happens on these scenarios, are that the skilled folks who are concerned about losing their jobs will move and Twitter will be left with the dregs who stay because they can't get a new job elsewhere.
  • ethanbond 4y ago
    Thank goodness COs can operate entire ships by themselves, otherwise they'd probably need some tact and grace to get the ship to its destination safely.
  • masklinn 4y ago
    > The difference here is the ship is not running smoothly at all according to the new commander. That’s not a difference at all, as it would be exactly what (2) were thinking of their new commands as well.
  • Ar-Curunir 4y ago
    Has that approach ever succeeded anywhere?
  • kadoban 4y ago
    > The difference here is the ship is not running smoothly at all according to the new commander I mean, if you ask any commanders in group 2, they're going to all say that.
  • ok_dad 4y ago
    Your entire reasoning behind your comment indicates you don't understand this point I'm making about leadership. You're talking about a "new plan" as if we all agreed that Twitter was doing so badly that it needed a 180. You use "dissidents" and "better team" as if it's a fact that things are so bad and the team is so inept that Elon could do nothing but burn the place to the ground and make a phoenix from the ashes. My point was that the organization/ship is more than it's current head, it's a massive organism and if you make systemic changes that affect a sick or even healthy organism massively you tend to just destroy/kill it rather than improve it. The best way to fix/improve something so large and supposedly unhealthy as Twitter is by small or medium steps that are well-thought-out, over time.
    • LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
      You seem to be basing this on the idea of a ship full of decent and willing sailors who had a common cause. I'm sure even those good type-1 captains you mention would still get rid of malingerers or enemy sympathizers. Elon's got activist employees who're trying to bring him down personally and entire useless product divisions so the best thing to do is cut out the expensive rot - nothing ruins morale like having hostile and counterproductive teammates dragging you down. The part of the company takes takes tweets, stores tweets, and displays tweets seems to be working fairly well. The rest is on the rocks or was headed for them full steam.
      • ok_dad 4y ago
        > I'm sure even those good type-1 captains you mention would still get rid of malingerers No, they'd try and figure out the motivation of the malignerer, or lack thereof, first. We had one guy who was a great tech, but then for a few months he showed up drunk to watch and was lazy. Found out his wife left him with the kids, to another state. The officer's mess arranged with some of the enlisted senior crew to invite the guy to family events every week, dinner and stuff, and helped him get back that family feeling with the ship, so he had something to work for. > or enemy sympathizers. I doubt anyone in the Navy I met was a spy for an enemy. I also doubt someone at Twitter is rooting for TikTok and working against Twitter in that direction.
  • escaper 4y ago
    God how can I downvote this. Did you even read what the OP said? So in this case the "dissidents" are people that appreciate incremental change, like their opinions to be valued in their respective field of expertise, and possibly appreciate being able to work from home?
  • bfgoodrich 4y ago
• edwnj 4y ago
  Difference is you served (or are serving) during peacetime. This is wartime.. Twitter is in a shit load of trouble and unlike Meta & Snap which are crashing like a shitcoin.. Elon bought Twitter at 2x-3x what its actually worth. Unlike the past decade, where these companies had easy access to funny money during a tech bull market.. now we are entering a uuge recession.. Twitter (or any company for that matter) which doesn't go into wartime mode is gonna get rekt
  • ok_dad 4y ago
    The Navy doesn't differentiate between wartime and peacetime for training or operations, generally. The difference would lie in what type of ordnance we used (real during wartime, inert during peace) and the measures we operated under at sea (we'd emit less signals and dog the hatches). Also, in wartime, it's actually even more important that a new CO didn't upset the delicate balance or change procedures, because you need to rely on your skills and drills during wartime even more! Changing things just makes it harder to do your job and during wartime that would be deadly. Also, you don't know where or when I served, so don't make assumptions.
    • edwnj 4y ago
      I meant no disrespect, just an educated guess since there has been no major war after WWII.. I'm mainly talking about the difference in strategy/posture during wartime vs peacetime.. Just look at whats happening in Ukraine rn, Russia changing commanders to go full scorched earth. To save a company like Twitter, this is exactly the kind of thing u need to do. Private equity does this all the time.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • thesuitonym 4y ago
    Ah yes, it's like Sun Tzu said, the best way to wage a war is to get rid of half your army, and demoralize the other half.
    • 4y ago
• chson 4y ago
  and generally acted like they owned the place To be fair, he actually does own the place.
  • ok_dad 4y ago
    True, and to be fair, CO's have "own the place" power most times (while underway at least).
  • usefulcat 4y ago
    ownership != operational knowledge
    • paulcole 4y ago
      ownership = ownership
  • sixstringtheory 4y ago
    I award no points for fairness because that is completely beside the point.
  • samus 4y ago
    It doesn't seem like he really cares about the place though
  • cerved 4y ago
    To be fair, he owns most of the place
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • klyrs 4y ago
    Only, he doesn't. His lenders do. And he's already talking bankruptcy.
• msmith 4y ago
  I wonder if you've read Turn the Ship Around [1]? It's one of my favorite leadership books and tells the true story of the Navy captain who was put in the awkward position of running a submarine class that he was not familiar with. He adapted to the situation by leaning on the expertise of the crew in a way that was very different than the normal command-and-control style of leadership. It sounds like what you describe in type 1. [1] https://davidmarquet.com/turn-the-ship-around-book/ https://davidmarquet.com/turn-the-ship-around-book/
  • ok_dad 4y ago
    Yea, the Navy has basically fostered a shit culture that turned the leadership into MBA-style bullshit artists today. Leadership isn't taken seriously, just promotions and personal gain. Only those who kiss ass can make it in today's Navy. If more leaders like this guy who wrote this book were sent to the top levels, it would be an improvement. Instead, you notice he's writing books for a living now.
    • matai_kolila 4y ago
      FWIW they teach 1 in MBA schools, if MBAs are doing 2 it's despite their education, not because of it. Also most top tier MBA programs are an excuse to get wildly drunk basically daily and make a bunch of powerful friends, so it's very possible most people who go don't learn a damn thing.
      • ok_dad 4y ago
        Same with leadership and officers, we definitely got good training teaching #1, but the actual culture of the fleet is #2. Sorry to rag on MBAs.
    • ramesh31 4y ago
      >Yea, the Navy has basically fostered a shit culture that turned the leadership into MBA-style bullshit artists today. Leadership isn't taken seriously, just promotions and personal gain. Only those who kiss ass can make it in today's Navy. This is a disease of all peacetime militaries. The Army suffers the same problem. They spend an entire career LARPing in camouflage, and think that somehow means they know anything at all about warfare or leadership.
• IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
  >>>>> and generally acted like they owned the place this is the $44B problem to your CO analogy. Skin in the game. The world runs far better on it.
  • baxtr 4y ago
    Nah. He doesn’t own twitter like you own a house. People can just quit and leave. In fact a CO might be in better position in that regard. Soldiers don’t quit as fast as devs.
    • deltree7 4y ago
      There will be plenty of devs desperate for work as large companies cuts a significant portion of the work. Bottomline, the last time tech truly saw a recession and slow-down was in 2001. So, the entire dev cohort has never seen economic conditions that they are about to face. Even high performers at Meta, Coinbase, Netflix will have to navigate this. There are two choices in front of them a) work at Twitter and other startups which requires 60+ hours of work. High workload / High Reward or b) Join services firm like IBM, TCS and have work-life balance but do menial tasks with steady but medium pay. Elon Musk will have no trouble hiring them. Most devs are completely out of touch about the economic reality. Now they have to work hard like the rest of other industries.
      • mikkergp 4y ago
        > Elon Musk will have no trouble hiring them. He just held an all hands where he said he doesn't know how long a run rate Twitter has, Twitter may lose billions next year, and bankruptcy isn't out of the question, so it sounds like it's possible he may have trouble hiring anyone.
        • deltree7 4y ago
          Yes, just like Tesla, SpaceX, probably NeuraLink. That's how he motivates people
• baxtr 4y ago
  Steve Job’s return to Apple was 1) Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is 2)
• iwillbenice 4y ago
• thordenmark 4y ago
  A better analogy is Twitter is a sick and dying patient and drastic measures are needed to be taken to save it. Whether or not you agree with those measures, well you don't have $44b on the line. Of all of Elon's businesses, this one is probably the most in his wheelhouse. He's a web guy after all.
  • Hamuko 4y ago
    >A better analogy is Twitter is a sick and dying patient and drastic measures are needed to be taken to save it. Was it that before Musk actually decided to buy it? Because as far as I can tell, the ad dollars started dropping after his announcement.
    • throwuwu 4y ago
      Their net profit was all over the place for the last 5 years including a big net loss during the pandemic.
  • Cyph0n 4y ago
    > He’s a web guy after all Of course he is.
  • citrined 4y ago
    patient is dying, better chop off an arm and a leg and remove some of the monitors and move the patient to a different building.
    • s1artibartfast 4y ago
      Extreme, but sometimes patients need exactly that
  • gdubs 4y ago
    I mean, those $12B annual debt service payments didn't exist before. Seems clear that Twitter was struggling in many ways, but things seemed to be accelerating post acquisition.
• luckylion 4y ago
  Wait, each ship works completely different from the other ships, there are no established generic procedures, the crew just figures out how they want to do encryption? When you transfer onto another ship, do you need a long onboarding as well, does each ship have its own culture? How do they coordinate?
  • killingtime74 4y ago
    Of course there are standards, execution is another story
  • ok_dad 4y ago
    > Wait, each ship works completely different from the other ships, there are no established generic procedures, the crew just figures out how they want to do encryption? There's some commonality, but it's like a fork of other ships. When a new ship is stood up and built, the pre-comissioning crew will write the SOPs for the new ship. Most of the time, you crib it from an old ship and make changes you think are useful, like a fork. There are some standards from up high, especially encryption stuff, but things can be run with some discretion. Crypto was probably a bad example, since no decent Navy crypto tech would deviate from the proper procedures, even in the face of the CO asking for it. Kinda like how once the CO asked me to use more ordnance for training than I was alloted, and I said "no" and he said "yes" and I said "if you do this, I will put in writing that I told you not to and you did it anyways and I also won't operate the system to check out the ordnance, so we'll have an imbalance" and he said "ok". > When you transfer onto another ship, do you need a long onboarding as well, Not long, but a bit, yes. Much like starting a new job. For some jobs, you shadow the current position holder for a good while. > does each ship have its own culture? Yes, undoubtedly. > How do they coordinate? Generally via SIPRchat, radio, flag signals, etc. But seriously, we have some standards for operations that make the different ships able to inter-operate easily. You also have groups of ships under commanders who do a bit more to coalesce those ships into a unit.
    • insane_dreamer 4y ago
      Interesting. I would have expected each class of ships to have the same operating procedures on the technology side.
• gdubs 4y ago
  When we began looking at farms, the advice we got over and over again was to live with it through a few seasons before making any changes. See how the water flows in the winter months, see what dries out in the summer. Learn what the wildlife get up to, where the best views are. It's something I think about to this day. As we've made progress restoring and transforming our place, we're constantly informed by those observations — and it's really easy to see how many of the initial ideas would've been premature or lacking context.
  • cpeterso 4y ago
    Good advice about the seasons. Sounds like "Chesterton's Fence": The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to [the fence] and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence
  • the-printer 4y ago
    Thanks for this..do you farm-blog by any chance?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• curious_cat_163 4y ago
  You are assuming that he is optimizing for employee happiness. I am not associating a value judgement to whether that is the right/wrong move in Twitter's context. I wish that we, as a culture, stopped harping over what Elon Musk might do to Twitter next. It does not matter. This will take some time to play out. I hope Twitter employees land on their feet. That is pretty much the only thing that matters. I don't have a lot of reasons to think that they won't barring some exceptions.
  • ok_dad 4y ago
    Actual happiness was not the point. In the Navy, the CO doesn't have to care about employee happiness, anyways, while Musk sort of does. 'Happiness' was a rhetorical device I used there.
  • samus 4y ago
    I bet a lot of people actually experience Schadenfreude at seeing these social media empires being toppled. The point was not employee happiness, but an attitude that completely ignores that the employees might know a thing or two about how to run the place. And plenty of employees are willing to put up with subpar pay and otherwise boring work if they feel valued for the stewardship and experience.
    • curious_cat_163 4y ago
      > And plenty of employees are willing to put up with subpar pay and otherwise boring work if they feel valued for the stewardship and experience. That sounds like a reasonable hypothesis. I don’t know if that is being (or was ever) tested at Twitter.
• mlindner 4y ago
  Elon's the #1 type there. He's been shown to be talking to a lot of people at Twitter to get a good understanding of how the product and company works and removing people as he finds it being unrelated to the future success of the company.