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Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended
- locallost 4y agoIf I was Facebook or any other competitor, I would swoop in and poach everyone that is actually still there, mostly people afraid to leave because of visa issues etc.
- bushbaba 4y ago…why? Twitter much like Reddit has never been profitable. It’s a sinking ship.
- hn_go_brrrrr 4y agoBecause Twitter has (had?) skilled engineers. The profitability of a company is likely uncorrelated with the quality of its engineers.
- mayankkaizen 4y agoGod knows what is going on on the minds of remaining employees. I guess most of them want to quit but couldn't for variety of reasons (such as visa issues). And some may be too deep in awe of Musk to quit.
- nostromo 4y agoFacebook just laid off more than an entire Twitter’s worth of employees.
- mrguyorama 4y agoBecause visa employees are basically shackled to their organization. They stupidly cheap compared to a fare market value. There's probably like 1000 at most, and not all of them will bite. It would be a cheap way to get really reliable and CHEAP devs to replace the 10k they just dropped.
- allen3 4y agoElon needs to step down and remove himself from the company. No one with any sanity would want to work in that environment right now. Proper leadership would be one great step towards fixing all of these issues.
- timmytokyo 4y agoIt's probably too late for that. The skeleton crew left behind at Twitter isn't going to be large or capable enough to plug the holes that are about to start bursting. The next service outage Twitter has will probably finish it off.
- wildrhythms 4y ago> No one with any sanity No one with any sanity and a U.S. citizenship. Visa holders under Twitter's sponsorship are trapped.
- mongol 4y agoHow will Musk's failure at Twitter affect market confidence in his other ventures?
- TheLoafOfBread 4y agoDepends how he spins it and how much he will be able to control narrative. I guess he will use something like - Twitter was broken before I got in and I could not save it anymore. Being Elon, I would be more worried about the fact that Saudi's are supposed to be as one of the investors in Twitter and they already have trace of killing people. If Elon won't be able to spin the story as somebody's else problem and instead of it will be presented as his managing failure, well could be interesting.
- BizarroLand 4y agoI mean, he may be finding himself a good reason to repay the Saudis their 44 billion dollars after mismanaging their investment that terribly or he may find himself having an "accident". This is no threat, just a very real concern that I have for him. That is not the kind of money you blow.
- brookst 4y agoMy understanding was the Twitter financing was $27B cash from Musk, ~$5B from his pals, and $13B in bank loans. There was something like $500m in Twitter shares owned by a Saudi prince that were transferred to Musk as part of buying in, I think. Where are you seeing $44B of Saudi money?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rurp 4y agoI believe this is correct. The Saudi's will lose a decent chunk of money on this deal, but hardly an earth shattering amount relative to their overall investments.
- heyitsguay 4y agoIs there precedent anyone can point to where these sorts of wild dramatic moves under new leadership led to turning a large company around into success?
- labrador 4y agoSteve Jobs returning to Apple comes to mind
- mishac 4y agoSteve Job's return to Apple was not like this at all. For all his faults Jobs was never as erratic as Musk, and he never pulled stunts like causing 80% of the staff to be fired or leave, nor did he ever lock the buildings in Cupertino.
- itsdrewmiller 4y agoWhat did Steve Jobs do? He wasn't even at the company for half the layoffs that happened, and wasn't CEO until they were over. He killed some boondoggles 6 months after being formally named CEO (and over a year after NEXT was acquired).
- labrador 4y agoLooks like I'm not the only one who made the association: David Heinemeier Hansson November 5, 2022 Apple fired 4,100 when Steve Jobs returned in 1997 https://world.hey.com/dhh/apple-fired-4-100-when-steve-jobs-returned-in-1997-57ed6bc6
- itsdrewmiller 4y agoI'd encourage you to read the source he cites in that blog post - it's clearly very, very different from what Musk is doing.
- labrador 4y ago
- UncleOxidant 4y agoMaybe too many people decided to not click the 'yes' link in that email yesterday and the doors are being locked to keep people in?
- kevingadd 4y agoThe rumor is something like 75%, which would definitely explain the panic actions. This also means they don't have to specifically cut off badges for laid off people, it gives them time to decide who's actually gone.
- rurp 4y agoDoes this mean that 75% of the remaining staff declined to stay on? If I'm understanding that right -- wow. Isn't Elon still trying to hire people back from the last fumbled layoff?
- function_seven 4y agoI read it as 75% decided to ignore that email. I guess one way to interpret that is that they decided to quit, but I don’t see it that way. It’s more like an ultimatum that they refused to respond to. Checking that box was agreeing to work “hardcore” and add a bunch of hours to your day. I imagine a lot of people receiving that email guessed that their colleagues would also ignore the box and figured “he won’t fire all of us, right?”.
- philosopher1234 4y agoWhy not interpret it as “after all this, and if that’s the future, I’d rather leave”?
- function_seven 4y agoOh for sure. Some portion of non-box-checkers probably did think that. But 75% is such a high non-response rate that I’m betting another large cohort were just aggressively apathetic to the stupid email. Won’t play the game, but will collect a paycheck and do normal work as long as they’re allowed to.
- runjake 4y agoProbably a precaution related to this story, if the story is accurate: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/17/23465274/hundreds-of-twitter-employees-resign-from-elon-musk-hardcore-deadline https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/17/23465274/hundreds-of-twi...
- minimaxir 4y agoThat was the cause of this measure. (most employees did not commit to the hardcore pledge)
- oneeyedpigeon 4y agoDo you have a source for "most"? I've seen many quitting, but nowhere near 1,500+.
- UncleOxidant 4y agoI've seen some tweets saying that in some engineering groups 75% didn't click the 'yes' link. But those are tweets so... who knows? https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1593154189345316864 https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1593154189345316864 [@GergelyOrosz] Internally, there are polls at what % of current Twitter software engineers plan to stay, and these usually point to about 25% indicating to stay for Twitter 2.0, and the other 75% planning to take severance. Don’t forget: this is less than 50% of the original staff.
- bagels 4y agoI wouldn't click it. Why would anyone click it? He fired your friends, probably eroded your earnings significantly, and is now demanding that you work absurd hours.
- BeefWellington 4y agoRegardless of your feelings about Elon Musk as a person, this kind of behavior is absolutely crazy for the leader of a company. I can't imagine what investors who signed on to do this with him are thinking unless their goal was to simply destroy the company.
- cwilkes 4y agoWhy would two of Musk’s financiers in this Qatar and Saudi Arabia want twitter dead? Oh wait.
- tru3_power 4y agoSource?
- mikeyouse 4y agoThe Saudi one is well-known - they're the second largest equity holder in the new org; https://twitter.com/Alwaleed_Talal/status/1585975226567110656 https://twitter.com/Alwaleed_Talal/status/158597522656711065...
- mikeyouse 4y agoJust adding a source for Qatar as well - in for $375 million: https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2022/11/12/qatars-backing-of-elon-musks-twitter-deal-raises-questions-ahead-of-the-fifa-world-cup/?sh=5db5d472709a https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2022/11/12/qatar...
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoIn a $44 billion deal, I'm not sure that $375 million buys you much leverage. That's under 1%.
- cokeandpepsi 4y agoDidn't the saudi's get in trouble for trying to plant spies in twitter to sniff out political dissidents? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/09/twitter-saudi-arabia-dissident-spying https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/09/twitter-saud...
- davidw 4y ago@dang - maybe let one twitter story through to the home page?
- tomlockwood 4y agoYeah given paulg's tweets I'm wondering if our free speech absolutist view as a website, actually holds here.
- davidw 4y agodang has done a phenomenal job at moderating this site, and I trust his judgement. It is heavily moderated, and that's a good thing to keep it focused. Too much twitter drama would be lame. But this feels like an important moment.
- orangepurple 4y agoI am deeply concerned that only one person is holding this ship on course, and that person's time is running out.
- tomlockwood 4y agoI generally agree, but I also think that a certain subset of political beliefs get upvoted here that creates a real echo chamber, and that there's this idea of a "middle path" rationality that is assumed, but doesn't actually exist. It's a class of problem I think could be classified as a "I don't have an accent" problem. I wrote to dang directly about this, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30252817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30252817 I think there's probably a certain class of articles, critical of paulg and hn and the hn community's "accent" that get flagged and downvoted here, by people and moderators. And, a certain class of articles that always get uncritically upvoted.
- dorkwood 4y agoCould this be all part of the plan, though? A way to single out the true believers?
- Balgair 4y agoAnd do what with them? Completely rebuild Twitter in prod? Loyalty has nothing to do with the requirement of being one of the most exceptional programmers in existence.
- meepmorp 4y agoPunish them for their optimism through overwork and abuse.
- neurostimulant 4y agoIt would be funny if Musk just launch a mastodon instance, points Twitter domain there and call it Twitter 2.0. He probably could run it with just a dozen staff.
- schipplock 4y agoIndeed, that would be funny :). But you assume that Mastodon can handle the current number of Twitter users (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33594961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33594961 <-- it probably can't).
- neurostimulant 4y agoIf this scenario actually happen, I'm sure the number of active twitter users left would be just enough for mastodon to handle.
- rsynnott 4y agoThe idea that there is a _plan_, rather than random flailing around, probably gives too much credit.
- pschuegr 4y agoI hope that the wheels stay on sufficiently to get an idea of where EM wants to take Twitter and find out what kind of value it can bring. Having said that, he really made it obvious to me as an eng that the severance is the option I would be taking. Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. But somebody who takes over the company and accrues so much social debt so quickly for no other discernible reason than looking like the smartest person in the room misses the bar for "the right people" by a pretty significant margin.
- lost_tourist 4y agoI really hope it implodes. He has been so childish throughout, he deserves to lose the 44 billion. Sucks that thousands of people are out of work, but maybe this is better for them than a slow painful death of a once okayish company.
- MBCook 4y agoWhat about all the poor people on visas who are now desperately looking for jobs to avoid having themselves and their families deported?
- skinnymuch 4y agoTwitter wouldn’t shut down completely. The company would continue running…right?
- MBCook 4y agoThey already have basically no advertisers except SpaceX, which is a balance transfer in all but name, and maybe some right wing stuff. Real brands are terrified of them. They have no money. It’s not coming in, and only gets worse when the site goes down. They’re facing employment lawsuits over the last two weeks. They’re facing a discrimination lawsuit for requiring an employee with an ADA accommodation to work from home to work from the office (after that announcement). The FTC is mad. Congress is mad. Who knows what other lawsuits/etc will pop up. I just don’t understand how they can survive. Seems like chapter 7. Not “renegotiate the debt and we swear we’ll be fine” chapter 11. Sell every last post-it note and auction off the wall art to pay the creditors chapter 7. I knew he’d ruin Twitter. I never expected anything like this. I expected people to slowly leave (platform and employment) due to new policies and values. This was, and honestly is, unimaginable. Did he really destroy $44B in three weeks?
- minimaxir 4y agoElon's first non-reply tweet since the news broke: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593415171149791232 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593415171149791232 > How do you make a small fortune in social media? > Start out with a large one.
- barbazoo 4y agoI'm glad he's having fun /s
- kibwen 4y agoI hope all the employees whose lives he's glibly and unnecessarily upended while having the audacity to meme about it are having half as much fun!
- barbazoo 4y agoMy assumption is that he's unable to empathize.
- fbdab103 4y agoIt has been half a year since this nonsense all began. I hope everyone at the company planned for upheaval and knew there was a (seemingly large) chance they would lose their job.
- tehbeard 4y agoIt seems that way, but the timescale is massively compressed compared to even the most pessimistic estimates. We were expecting a collapse in several months, not a few weeks.
- recuter 4y agoDoes he or anybody owe them infinite amounts of money with no strings attached?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zeruch 4y agoDidn't Elon demand everyone back to the office?
- partiallypro 4y agoMany outlets walked back that story, apparently it only applied to some.
- dagmx 4y agoI don’t think they walked it back so much as Elon did. The early leaked communications did say that it was the norm to have everyone back except for people who can’t or are exceptional.
- nickthegreek 4y agoThey didn’t walk it back, Elon did with a new email he sent out. Outlets reported this new fact.
- EMM_386 4y agoIt's been rolled back, as long as your manager says you are producing "exceptional output" or however he phrased it, remote is ok it seems.
- reducesuffering 4y agoElon: "No more remote work" Everyone: "stupid idea" 1 week later... Paul G: "It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX." https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961 Elon: "Ok that was a stupid idea" The emperors have no clothes
- _8j50 4y agoTwitter isn't going anywhere because of two critical facts: a) attention whores and rage/doom scroll addicts b) Those people can easily find each other and talk to each other. Mastodon and Activitypub decentralize which means it is a lot harder to proverbialy whore yourself to the attention of the masses and and those attention whores (politicians, journalists,etc... not just celebrities and influencers) can't have the same reach with them or with truth social and other copycats of twitter. Mastodon should have let server operators flag other servers but not refuse federation with them, letting users decide if they want to avoid content from trash servers but of course user moderarion by server operators is fine. Also, like many ideology-first solutions, it catered to small disconnected communities. It should have created corporation separate from the main project that hosts a public mastodon server that directly competes with other social media (and ffs, it's 2022, no more email for anything!). On that note, Matrix can replace twitter and a lot more if they weren't chasing seemingly random features. Not just twitter but email also can be replaced by matrix, the api amd federates architecture allows for it. If I was Kelon (Karen elon), I would compete with tiktok, timing is great with all the talks of banning it. They mercilessly murdered Vine back in the day as they did Periscope. Those are the types of features where you can charge content creators for content types and for advertising in people's timelines. They made those separate products instead of part of the regular twitter experience. Also, be less crass about it and charge for award tokens like reddit instead of upfront cash and high priced awards make it to the top of the reply chain. I don't blog so let me know what you all think lol.
- robjan 4y agoAll of this is predicated on Twitter remaining accessible, or existing at all, in the medium to long term which is seeming increasingly less likely.
- _8j50 4y agoEven myspace is still around, unless someone replaces twitter there will always be someone else to buy it. Look at Yahoo!
- Arathorn 4y ago
- valeg 4y agoWhy Elon insists on actually running a company? He should hire competent people and stick to PR/bullshit thing. It works wonders in his other ventures, mostly. And no, competent doesn't mean Kimbal.
- waiseristy 4y agoHe frankly seems incapable of detaching himself from any project he’s applied his personal brand to. Cybertruck has suffered from the same treatment
- trillic 4y agoHire Oracle/Ibm to run the servers, grab some recently laid off Facebook moderators to do some moderation, and give it a quarter to figure out what the fuck to do.
- colechristensen 4y agoOh god, i know you’re serious but the ultimate in “enterprise” managing the ultimate in “overgrown disorganized startup” would be a ridiculous failure. It would take ten billion dollars and a decade to get something functional.
- kcplate 4y agoThis seems to me to be a byproduct of the “hurry up and close the deal”. May not have had replacement leadership but felt the need to take out the executive team.
- kumarvvr 4y agoIf I remember right, he did say recently that he will place a new leadership team at Twitter to focus on his other companies.
- threeseed 4y ago> He should hire competent people He did. Jason Calcanis and David Sacks will surely save the day.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bawolff 4y agoIronic given he just made everyone stop working from home.
- post_break 4y agoThis has to be the end. The engineers keeping the wheels from flying off are gone. Twitter just needs a technical hiccup that Steve or that one guy who manages a team to fix it is already putting out applications. It’s over.
- 1letterunixname 4y agoEM->sr engs: "Why did so many good engineers leave?" Sr engs: ... (Because you're an a.h.) People without equity should refuse to work like indentured servants for peanuts only to be told "they're not working hard enough". It's the only way to teach EM a lesson about hubris. $50 says Twitter will die down to a skeleton staff and be kept afloat by third-rate MSPs. No one will want to work on that creaky, steaming pile of poo for a billionaire jerk.
- philosopher1234 4y agoElon musk is 50 and filthy rich. No matter how hard he gets burned by twitter, he will not be learning.
- DaiPlusPlus 4y ago> Elon musk is 50 Damn, same age as Eminem
- devoutsalsa 4y ago(Catchy music starts playing) Look, if you had one shot or one opportunity To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment Would you capture it, or just let it slip? Yo
- dehrmann 4y agoWhile I suspect this is the case, this is also looking like his first high-profile expensive failure. If Twitter survives, he might grow up a lot during the process.
- sensanaty 4y ago>... work like indentured servants ... I'm sorry but are you reading what you're putting down here? These people are making ridiculous swathes of money doing piss easy work, let's not go overboard with the hyperbole here I do hope Twitter dies a painful death, however, so I'm with you on that bet
- ethotool 4y ago
- hristov 4y agoThis will be an interesting experiment in large scale code rot. How long do you think twitter.com will work with the code base frozen?
- fotta 4y agoThe TLS cert expires on December 12.
- post_break 4y agoOh man I just smiled like the Grinch.
- gonzo41 4y agoI had a job once, when TLS was new and half the internet was not using some form of SSL. We had to manually do keyswaps on a stack of machines to create a trust network for all the certs. IT really sucked. I made a note of the certificate expiry data and a calendar reminder 3 years into the future to start looking for a new job if I hadn't already.
- 3-cheese-sundae 4y agoHopefully that reminder never slipped pasta your attention.
- techolic 4y agoThe next outage will have a good likelihood of being the last outage.
- MBCook 4y agoYeah. Multiple entire teams that run critical systems have reportedly left. It’s over. Dead site running. Such a horrible loss. Glad the stockholders are happy. This was clearly better than the lawsuit. /s
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoWell the offices supposedly open up again on the 21st, which is coincidentally also the start of the world cup? That's gonna be fun.
- MBCook 4y agoI told someone earlier it’s going down and not coming back up by Monday night. I forgot about the World Cup. I don’t know what to say anymore.
- TheHappyOddish 4y agoWhat about now?
- heartbreak 4y agoThe shareholders got paid; this isn’t their circus anymore.
- notatoad 4y agosome of them didn't. at least the saudis and @jack both rolled their stake over to the new ownership.
- wnevets 4y agoAre people who still want to argue that Elon isn't destroying Twitter?
- dusing 4y agoHe is pushing the limits (and maybe finding them) of how quickly you can correct head count in a larger company. We won’t know if his actual vision for the product is bad until he gets done with this transitional period and can start releasing updates. Basically I’d argue not much happened yet but HR meetings.
- mikeyouse 4y agoHow are they going to release updates when they just nuked the entire design and engineering staff?
- Consultant32452 4y agoTo be fair, that design and engineering staff took over a year and couldn't deliver an "edit" feature. Project Veritas caught some Twitter engineer on camera claiming to work 4 hours per week. This is not an endorsement of Elon or anything he's doing with Twitter, but Twitter's core product is not complicated. For some comparisons: Rumble has 35 employees When WhatsApp was sold to FB in 2014 they had 55 employees. WeChat has about 1400 employees. My guess is you could successfully run Twitter with a few hundred employees.
- halfmatthalfcat 4y agoYour username justifies this take lol
- Consultant32452 4y agoWeChat does push to talk voice chat, image sharing like snapchat, broadcast messaging, video conferencing, video sharing, and digital payments. What is Twitter doing behind the scenes that justifies multiple times the amount of employees at WeChat?
- mrchess 4y agoDalton needs to fire up App again!
- 1attice 4y agoI need everyone to think very carefully about the attack surface, and how long it has been left unprotected, and how long it will be unprotected. Now, I need you to consider the following proposition: that eyeballs are to codebases, dashboards and telemetry as floss is to tooth and gum. Then, I need you to go to your phone and uninstall Twitter. Also, when you do visit it, visit it in Firefox. Use a Firefox Container.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Krisjohn 4y agoThanks for the heads-up. I got too focused on schadenfreude. I've added https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JackCuthbert/pihole-twitter/master/pihole-twitter.txt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/JackCuthbert/pihole-twitte... to my pihole and flagged this in our security forum at work.
- 1attice 4y agoYou're very welcome, and thank you. Any APT worthy of the name will be already moving. Personally? I'd be really worried for folks checking Twitter from Ukraine. That's a whole lot of compromising data and I know who wants it
- prettyStandard 4y agoAfter scrolling this thread for way too long. I can say this is the top underated comment.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rmatt2000 4y agoI'm a little bit confounded that Twitter's current culture is such that a large number of people contemplate sabotage as an appropriate response to changing employment conditions. I mean, maybe the company culture really is broken.
- justapassenger 4y agoIn Elon’s mind… And given that he fired most of the stuff and shutdown most of internal services, big outage is more likely each day. And I can bet $10 he’ll blame it on sabotage.
- throwanem 4y ago$10, hell. You'd need to put down $500 just to come out $10 ahead.
- giraffe_lady 4y agoI haven't seen any reason to suspect or expect sabotage per se, where are you getting that? And if you did want to sabotage it, what could you do that would be more effective than what musk himself is currently doing, short of straight up shutting it down? > maybe the company culture really is broken. Well it certainly is now! I could maybe see an internal group trying to seize it. It is a very significant connector of people, I can imagine how you could believe in it passionately as a product/movement/force in the world. I don't, but it's not a big stretch. And if you did, I think also that from that perspective musk clearly does not care about it in that capacity, and has done great damage to its power and potential. The pieces are definitely there so that a "true believer" could justify a takeover.
- happytoexplain 4y ago"Changing employment conditions" is a supernaturally charitable phrasing.
- rmatt2000 4y agoPeople get layed off from companies all the time. Why is it the end of the world when it happens at Twitter?
- wingkongex 4y agoThis whole ordeal is an absolute disgrace.
- neallindsay 4y agoThe next tweet in the thread: "We're hearing this is because Elon Musk and his team are terrified employees are going to sabotage the company." Um, I can think of one person who is definitely sabotaging the company.
- bsharitt 4y agoThis might just be the best game of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" I've ever seen.
- plaguepilled 4y agoHere's hoping twitter is seized as a public asset before it collapses! Probably won't be, but I can dream. (Its not like it would affect how much data the govt gets from the platform anyhow)
- nr2x 4y agoStill putting my hope into Blue Sky/AT. I want to believe.
- sitic 4y agoProbably a good time to download an archive of your Twitter data: https://twitter.com/settings/download_your_data https://twitter.com/settings/download_your_data
- lynndotpy 4y agoIn my experience, this has stopped working as of at least a few days ago. I can request, but the button never fills. I'm happy I did it a few months ago, at least
- minimaxir 4y agoUnfortunately it may no longer be an option as some have said the 2FA SMS needed to download the archive is not responsive.
- organsnyder 4y ago2FA SMS just worked for me. I have little faith that I'll ever actually receive the zip archive, though.
- MikeRichardson 4y agoMine had an option for e-mail or SMS. Never got the SMS, but e-mail worked. I love how it says "To protect your account" it can take 24 hours or longer for your data to be ready.
- mrguyorama 4y ago"It takes 24 hours" is a clear sign that it's a human being looking up an internal documentation page and running the scripts it points to. Unless I'm just not creative enough to reason why you can log into twitter from a country you've never been to with no 24 hour verification wait but fulfilling legal obligations takes 24 hours.
- tamcap 4y agoIn their defense, if the backup requires accessing archive tape drive records, long processing queues in non-scalable systems, etc - this could easily take 24 "physical" hours of things getting lined up correctly. It's one thing to show you the last 24hr of tweets. Another to get a complete twitter history for given uid.
- Balgair 4y agoPer her most recent tweet: https://twitter.com/ZoeSchiffer/status/1593427480051822592?cxt=HHwWgMCtvbn2_pwsAAAA https://twitter.com/ZoeSchiffer/status/1593427480051822592?c... "NEW: The designers leading Elon Musk’s Blue verified project are out, along with the lead web engineer. Many Twitter employees who maintained critical infrastructure have resigned. This is going to look like a very different company tomorrow." The snowball has gained too much momentum now. Especially with Thanksgiving coming, I don't see how Twitter is realistically going to keep the lights on, quite literally.
- bmitc 4y agoGod I hope it was as many engineers, designers, IT, and general employees as possible that said no. I mean, they get three months severance and get to give one of the biggest adult children in the world a piece of their mind by simply not clicking a button.
- fooey 4y agoThe World Cup is in 3 days too, that's a seriously massive global event
- Animats 4y agoHuh? Right after Musk ordered everyone to return to the office? OK, so everybody takes Friday off and comes back Monday. Then what?
- r721 4y ago>Hundreds upon hundreds of Twitter employees have technically resigned but still have access to Twitter’s internal systems, with some speculating it is because the employees tasked with managing that access also resigned. https://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1593431420587761664 https://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1593431420587761664
- kibwen 4y agoSame energy as the following article on the Twitter layoffs: "Twitter hasn’t responded to requests for comment, likely because its communications staff has been included in the layoffs." https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/04/twitter-faces-a-class-action-lawsuit-over-mass-employee-layoffs-with-proper-legal-notice/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/04/twitter-faces-a-class-acti...
- saghm 4y agoAt this point it just seems like a matter of time before Musk and/or his fan club start trying to change the narrative to him purposely running the company to the ground, and the fact that he wasted billions of dollars doing it somehow is noble.
- anonymousab 4y agoThat's already kinda the direction of his current tweets.
- nprateem 4y agoI thought he was doing it to save humanity, not because a court was going to force him to honour his agreements?
- enkid 4y agoPeople are already saying this.
- smrtinsert 4y ago"I always wanted to burn 44 billion dollars! It's tax genius!"
- personjerry 4y agoSo who's building Twitter 2.0 right now, featuring decentralization?
- wfaler 4y agoI moved to Mastodon. 1 day later I have a pretty nice feed and good amount of followers. Many of them old familiar now Twitter-refugees.
- neogodless 4y agoActivityPub has been around since 2018, Mastodon 2016. If you mean something else, how would it differ?
- solarkraft 4y agoMaybe they need a blockchain in there somewhere.
- dehrmann 4y agoIf we learned something from Tumblr, no one. The value was in the community, and just building a replacement doesn't recreate it.
- areoform 4y agoI am chalking this up to Russia syndrome. Personality types driven to do great things aren't easily satisfied. Most are perpetually dissatisfied & they need to raise the stakes. They win the war of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th coalitions. For the first time, they find that things are going fine. All they have to do is nothing. Pull back and consolidate. Maybe refine some things, tinker a bit. But it's not enough. It will never be enough. So they invade Russia. In his life, Napoleon had success after success after success. Every step of the way, critics told him that he'd fail. But he did it anyway, and won 38 battles. 17 at near impossible odds. How can someone like him be satisfied with sitting at home, ruling France? How could he be satisfied with puttering around in the countryside talking about his code with random farmers? And so he decided to invade. People warned him against invading. Armand de Caulaincourt staked his reputation on it, went with him on the campaign, and kept warning him. Warning him against wintering in Russia. He kept telling him to turn back. But Napoleon didn't listen. They'd been wrong every single time. And he'd been right. Let them babble, his path was one set at a different level than theirs. Except, that one time they were right. It seems that when you are touched with greatness, you end up believing that you can do anything. And far more often than not, you can. Right up until the moment you can't.
- 7e 4y agoBut Elon was fired from PayPal. He failed at Boring Company and Neuralink. He faked his educational credentials and was in the country illegally. He failed at Full Self Driving, the Roadster is nowhere to be seen, the Cybertruck is MIA and the Tesla Semi is years late. 95% of predictions he has made has failed to pass. As far as I can tell, he lucked out during the .com boom, then invested in Tesla and almost drove it into the ground—-saved only by government subsidies, cheap money, and fortuitous timing. SpaceX has raised $10B and is currently looking to raise more. Elon's MO is burning a ton of cash that his competitors aren't willing to do in order to be first in some space. That doesn't take talent.
- chadash 4y ago> Elon's MO is burning a ton of cash that his competitors aren't willing to do in order to be first in some space. That doesn't take talent. He's had failures before. But this line seems unfair. He was neither the first person in electric cars (a few notable failures before him) nor in rockets (e.g. Boeing)... but he was able to lead a team that figured out some of the key tech and the business models to make these things viable. Even with a lot of money, this is no small feat.
- hintymad 4y agoThe management is worried about internal sabotage? My Twitter friends said Twitter has been having large exodus. CSL(core systems lib?) team, blobstore team, graph platform team, and revenue forecasting team seemed have all quit. I'm not sure how robust and autonomous Twitter's infra is. Hopefully Twitter will continue to function.
- Aaron2222 4y agoIt definitely feels like internal sabotage at the moment...
- yrgulation 4y agoHow is abandoning a mad boss sabotage? Those people are my new heroes. They clearly send a message to anyone in the industry trying to emulate musk, that if you mess around you find out.
- janalsncm 4y agoI read it as Musk sabotaging it himself.
- vkou 4y agoBy whom, Musk? Because while particular actions he's taken in the past few weeks may be justifiable in certain contexts, all of them taken together can only be interpreted as an attempt to set 44 billion dollars on fire.
- janesvilleseo 4y agoNot sure if troll or real but… “Twitter terminated my employment this afternoon. I was in charge of controlling Twitter office badge access. Elon just phoned me to ask if I could return to assist them in regaining access to HQ after they disabled all badges and locked themselves out.” https://www.thelayoff.com/t/1jLtFzhv https://www.thelayoff.com/t/1jLtFzhv
- leetrout 4y agoParody account
- pengaru 4y agoI suspect things rarely go well when an autistic narcissist takes over anything involving thousands of people, not for said people anyways.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bagels 4y agoI was really thinking about this sabbotage thing yesterday. In these large companies, to make changes to a lot of systems, you have to have someone else also sign on to the changes (eg. code review). If your aim is sabotage, you would have to find a like minded saboteur to work with you. In normal times, at most places, this is risky, because most others would not want to assist you, and would likely report you. The equation has changed. Musk has turned nearly every employee against him. It is now much less risky to explore your social graph now to find people who are of like mind. The defenses that software companies have are completely inadequate to deal with this sort of situation.
- TheFattestNinja 4y ago"If your aim is sabotage, you would have to find a like minded saboteur to work with you" You are thinking active sabotage like git-committing a bug. Passive sabotage is trivial. I recommend skinming the CIA saboteur manual on the topic.
- MikusR 4y ago> In these large companies, to make changes to a lot of systems, you have to have someone else also sign on to the changes (eg. code review). Some time ago (when multiple accounts tweeted some crypto scam) it was revealed that at Twitter no such protections existed.
- lamontcg 4y agoThe legal system still exists though and your changes would need to not be auditable or else you're going to get thrown in jail. And no matter how much you think you're smarter than the average bear, you're probably going to leave traces. And if Musk gets personally pissed off at some bit of particularly bad sabotage he's got enough money to hire some actual expert outside talent to manage the incident and nail your ass to make an example of you. Which he most certainly would do. Employees interested in sabotage should not do anything stupid, they should just join the exodus. Fantasizing can be fun though.
- bagels 4y ago
- bartimus 4y agoHow many people does it take to keep HN running?
- lukaszkups 4y agothat question sounds like a start of a joke :D
- mrweasel 4y ago- Umm they got to have a steering wheel, there's a minimum crew requirement. - What's the minimum crew? - Oh, one I suppose. It does sort of feel like "The front fell off". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
- zach_garwood 4y agoWell, without dang this place would go to shit real quick.
- layer8 4y agoNot looking good at the moment: https://downdetector.com/status/twitter/ https://downdetector.com/status/twitter/
- CaliforniaKarl 4y agoLooking at the comments on that page, I think that spike is due to false reports.
- layer8 4y agoYeah, probably. It’s still fun to look at.
- jp0d 4y agoLooks like the employee who was in charge of managing badge access was laid off and several staff have locked themselves out! https://twitter.com/anothercohen/status/1593404311832338442 https://twitter.com/anothercohen/status/1593404311832338442
- BadCookie 4y agoTwitter reality is so strange that almost anything is believable at this point. But this tweet is parody as it turns out: https://twitter.com/anothercohen/status/1593407201913278464 https://twitter.com/anothercohen/status/1593407201913278464
- jp0d 4y agoInitially I actually believed this to be true. The line is getting more and more blurry with every single day under the Chief Twit!
- birdfood 4y agoIf twitter were to cease operation today, what is the maximum amount of money Elon can personally recuperate?
- bagels 4y agoProbably zero. Musk paid 44B for Twitter. This was with some loans and some equity sold. Generously, Twitter was worth half what he paid, 22B at the time he took over, given the decline in the market from when the Twitter tender offer was made. $13B in loans $7.1B from equity investors (did they have a liquidation preference?) How much has he degraded the value by scaring away all the advertisers? https://archive.ph/JhTuM https://archive.ph/JhTuM
- SilverBirch 4y agoJust to nit pick - Musk didn't pay 44B for Twitter. The total value was 44Bn, that was structured as 13B debt secured against Twitter. So let's say Twitter goes bankrupt (not totally ceases operations) - files for chapter 11. You'd have to find some way of restructuring the company to pay the creditors. In the most simplified approach, the most likely the only way of doing that is to sell the company. If the company sold for more than 13Bn (perfectly possible, although not hugely likely given the damage he's done) then anything above that would go to Elon and his equity investors, but we'd be talking about them walking away with close to nothing. But it's also perfectly possible that Elon just steps in and buys the 13Bn debt and continues to run the company.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jasmer 4y agoHis antics were fine in the context of material growth at Tesla, and SpaceX. There are incredible aspirational aspects to those businesses, and they have massive support from Big Government, and crucially, people mostly knew what they were getting into aka they went to work for him. It's the opposite at Twitter. This is looking more messed up every day, and Elon is messing with other people's money and they won't stand for this for very long. When he says 'we could be out of business next year' as a bit of a fear/motivation tactic, that's going to make his backers uncomfortable. If this keeps up Elon will be replaced and it's hard to fathom by whom. I suggest he will use the excuse of 'need to work on Tesla/Space X', but the terms of his continued oversight of Twitter will be interesting. Much like the otherwise 'normal' people who worked at the White House during the Trump admin, it's alluring for people to be that close to power, even at the cost of having the wrath of toxicity hanging over them. Any reasonable person taking over Twitter will want to have a pretty big firewall between them and Musk. I suggest it will be better for everyone: Musk can get a few points in for reform which is his prerogative and there's nothing wrong with that, and Twitter will have a chance at operational performance without the constant contradictions between Musk's populism and the basic operating civil culture at Twitter. There are so many uphill battles to fight before Musk can even try to get some of the reforms that he wants (which are a bit glib because most things at Twitter exist for a reason), and he's going to spend too much time just getting back on the 'right foot' ... I suggest that it's probably a good idea for him to just step down.
- outlawBand 4y agoSo...Elon bought twitter to tank it just to stop that kid from tweeting every time he flew in his private jet?
- convery 4y agoHe announced that he will not take any action against that account as it's free speech. So need to find a new "gotcha" / narrative / joke.
- solarkraft 4y agoHe also claimed he'd be okay with being criticized.
- wasmitnetzen 4y agoHe also said that comedy "was now legal again" on Twitter and then banned a bunch of Musk parody accounts.
- mrguyorama 4y agoIncluding an actual comedian making an actual joke lol
- JohnTHaller 4y ago"Twitter hasn’t responded to requests for comment, likely because its communications staff has been included in the layoffs." - TechCrunch
- makeitdouble 4y agoWasn't the PR department fired a while ago now ? TheVerge was already reporting on getting no PR access after the team was fired, like one or two weeks ago (damn that feels like a long time in this timeline...)
- JohnTHaller 4y agoYeah, this was a quote from the TechCrunch story from earlier in this mess.
- randyrand 4y agoI always appreciate their random speculation, thanks TechCrunch!
- piva00 4y agoTwitter has no PR department left, it's not random speculation [1] > GroupM didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment. Twitter no longer has a communications department to reach out to with such requests. The internal message seen by Platformer says that Twitter is “working through” GroupM’s requirements with leadership. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23459254/twitter-high-risk-ads-groupm-advertisers-content-moderation https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23459254/twitter-high-ri...
- havblue 4y agoIt seems like he's taking a "burning your ships" approach. So maybe the company can run with a far smaller but more desperate team. What I'm not sure about is how people will get to like social media again. Will it really be a larger company that innovates in this space, rather than a startup that will turn Twitter into the next myspace.
- nemo44x 4y agoTwitter needs at most 50 people to keep the lights on. 200 to innovate. We all know this.
- edmundsauto 4y agoI don't intend to be mean, but I think your statement is trivially disprovable: $4.8B annual revenue, even if every advertiser spent $1M annually, that's 4,800 advertisers who all require inside reps. If each rep can handle 100 clients (unlikely; that's less than 1 hour / month attention), they would need 480 inside reps alone just to keep ad agencies happy.
- nemo44x 4y agoNo they don’t all require inside sales reps. Most advertising can be automated. 95% of clients can self serve. They ran this website 12 years ago with the same number of users and like 200 people.
- neurostimulant 4y agoWho the heck willing to drop millions without having access to sales rep at all? Even Google, known as the king of self-service, still has account managers for large ads, workspace and gcp customers.
- MichaelZuo 4y agoAdvertisers who see even better click-through rates per dollar spend.
- mikeyouse 4y agoIt was 1,000 people and 50% fewer users -- and notably, no revenue. If you think they're going to be able to keep any substantial portion of that $4.5b in revenue by telling advertisers to self serve...
- tedunangst 4y ago
- croisillon 4y agocongrats @dang on getting all hn comments on one page :)
- chasd00 4y agoPull the plug and go home. Let Twitter go dark Elon, we all know it’s the rational thing to do.
- Woodi 4y agoBut what about all that current traffic and media attention ?! So many views ! :) ps. Pls, somebody, tell Elon to switch to 6/7, personally too...
- mikewarot 4y agoGiven the mountain of technical debt under the previous administration's focus on growth over everything else, as detailed by Mudge, I don't know how the wheels hadn't already fallen off the system. I fail to see how a networked system with nobody left tending it is going to last.
- bogomipz 4y agoIs there not just a bit or irony here that exactly 7 days ago Elon was ordering "all employees back to the office" and today he's ordering "all offices are closed"?
- r721 4y ago>In addition to the payroll team being gone, Twitter's entire US tax team is gone, I'm told, along with its financial reporting team. Not great. https://twitter.com/HaysKali/status/1593449877094047744 https://twitter.com/HaysKali/status/1593449877094047744
- tzm 4y agoThis is Elon's moment of Enlightenment, like Neo in the Matrix. If Twitter succeeds, he was the One.
- zintus 4y agoThis is how you reset the culture.
- randyrand 4y agoElon said there would be a 75% reduction in head count, ideally. This huge reduction is obviously what he wants. I’m sure he’d be happy if they hit 85%
- solarkraft 4y agoNow he only needs to find people who will work for him.
- iudqnolq 4y agoA telling exchange > What do people mean when they say Twitter is gonna shut down? Doesn't it kinda run itself? I feel like engineers are for changes not to just keep it running? I also don't know anything. Hey @elonmusk wanna do a Twitter space with me? Im confused. - Dave Portnoy @stoolpresidente > The best people are staying, so I'm not super worried - Elon Musk @elonmusk
- memish 4y agoA couple weeks ago 50% were laid off and nothing happened. Now I read on Twitter that Twitter died and it's at a record high DAU. Make it make sense! It may be bumpy in the short term, but then all of the supremely confident naysayers are going to look ridiculous and spiteful if it turns out that Twitter can operate with 80-90% fewer employees.
- nso95 4y agoOk but what if they can't
- convery 4y agoThen the company can hire more engineers? Even if devs in SF virtue-signal on Twitter about how they'd never work under Musk, a competitive paycheck attracts outsiders.
- solarkraft 4y agoI wonder how high the paycheck will have to be and how much more expensive this strategy will be than just slowly firing people.
- piva00 4y agoWho is gonna onboard those new engineers? I subscribe to Peter Naur's view of programming as theory building, the knowledge of what these applications running inside Twitter do is being lost on a fast pace, the code itself doesn't tell the whole theory behind the code. Institutional knowledge is necessary to sufficiently onboard any new hire, without that you have headless chickens running around trying to figure out what exactly are they working with. How do you solve Chesterton's Fence when there's no one around to tell you why the Fence is there?
- DoughnutHole 4y agoExcept Musk's companies are already known for underpaying, and the Twitter is stuck servicing a colossal debt from the purchase. Any engineers capable enough to rescue this trainwreck will likely be able to secure better compensation elsewhere without having to endure Musk's new indefinite "hardcore" death march. Twitter is going to operate on a skeleton staff of H1B's dependent on their employment for their visas (who are probably already floating their resumes) and whatever underqualified graduates they can hire.
- dirtyid 4y ago~1,000 H1Bs who can't leave due to VISA keeping twitter afloat are gonna get some big checks from foreign govs for acccess.
- browningstreet 4y agoWhy wouldn’t he have done a few weeks due diligence before making any changes? This seems like the worst way to do a management take-over.
- DAVer98 4y agoSabotage
- tyingq 4y ago+ Hubris
- mrguyorama 4y agoSame reason he didn't do due dilligence before offering them $44b; He spends most of his days sniffing his own farts, telling himself he's awesome, and being adored by legions of random people on the internet. He's basically a twitch streamer in terms of behavior and pleasure response to attention, so expect him to act like one.
- lossolo 4y agoIt's getting hot there https://twitter.com/i/status/1593450688922935298 https://twitter.com/i/status/1593450688922935298
- ls15 4y agoBack to working from home?
- paul7986 4y agoA lot of what he's tweeting and or replying to is completely fabricated trolling everyone stuff. Maybe he's trying to burn it to thr ground to hide something ... pardon conspiracy theory but it's just weird that someone goes and spends $44 billion and takes negative action after negative action against your new shiny toy. Though maybe he knows what and who is needed only to run Twitter and all the others were just sitting at home or on the beach working an hour to two a day yet getting paid $150 to 500K a year for a full time job they far from worked.
- traveler01 4y agoNo. This is just a dirty, yet ingenious, strategy to fire the most of employees without paying severance. It's the cheapest way of removing the "dead weight" from the company without spending too much money.
- ttul 4y agoHow long before the exiting engineers realize they can just walk across the street and start their own better, more “hard core” Twitter?
- joelthelion 4y agoIt takes more than just engineering talent to start a successful Twitter competitor at this stage. Platform stickiness is a real thing.
- cma 4y agoMastodon is just about to hit 7 million users and seems to be taking off. Time will tell if it can really overcome the network effects though: https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount/109363751197760331 https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount/10936375119776...
- pmlnr 4y agoHeh, no. All these centralized silos need marketing hype. Otherwise Diaspora* would have succeeded.
- ttul 4y agoI’m answering my own question, sort of. From HN this morning: https://post.news/?r=Bo9HV https://post.news/?r=Bo9HV
- georgeg23 4y agoIn case you want to view Elon's Twitter without giving him ad revenue: https://notabird.site/elonmusk https://notabird.site/elonmusk
- prawn 4y agoI use https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ with an adblocker and never see ads.
- georgeg23 4y agoBut he still gets analytics and tracking info that way.
- jrimbault 4y agoI've only seen twitter through tweetdeck for the last decade, and I believe it hasn't seen a new feature or design (both in functionality and form) change in at least 4 years ? It has become bug riddled (but I still use it), but all timelines are still linear. (example: polls have never been ported to tweetdeck) I don't think tweetdeck has seen active maintenance in years.
- sprkwd 4y agoRest of the site is just catching up to this now.
- prawn 4y agoI'd consider that a good thing. I avoid updating apps as long as possible because they inevitably add features that degrade the experience (ads, etc). Prior to the Tweetdeck URL, I used the OSX client which I also really liked, mostly for the ability to just copy and paste an image straight into a tweet. So functionality wise, I feel like my experience has actually declined since then.
- gulbrandr 4y agoOr you can use one of the many Nitter instances https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances
- Herbstluft 4y agoTwitter dying before the end of 2022 was not on my bingo card.
- overgard 4y agoUgh, as an outsider, I originally liked the idea of Musk protecting free speech better, but this is some epic mismanagement. I can't imagine why anyone that can find a new job would want to stay there, he seems like a terrible boss.
- 5350-uiop-1130 4y agoseems like he's using a scorched earth technique to force resignations. it seemed to me twitter was doing more or less ok, as a business - never heard any talk of bankruptcy until this robber baron came on the scene.
- yrgulation 4y agoMy respect to twitter folks quitting en mass is through the roof. I understand those who can not quit right now due to financial commitments. But as soon as your house is in order, quit. This will send a strong message to anyone trying to emulate musk.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MarkMarine 4y agoAnd the people looking at your resume later. Staying at Twitter now will need a darn good explanation, otherwise I guess the assumption is you buy into this BS, or you need your visa. If you need your visa I get it, otherwise that is a stain on your resume
- yrgulation 4y agoGood point re visa. Thats why i refused transfer offers to the us and generally speaking stayed away from h1b. It’s basically a form of paid indentured servitude.
- vinay427 4y agoThis limited definition of "indentured servitude" would describe the analogs to H-1B visas in most Western countries, which I think does a disservice to other problems with the US system that aren't as common: its cost to businesses/employees, the inconsistency in achieving permanent resident status, etc.
- amerkhalid 4y agoWhat percentage of tech folks are on h1-b. 20% seems about right. Makes sense that some people had to check that box.
- faangiq 4y agoMuch closer to 50%.
- retinaros 4y agolets remember that tesla was a mess at its inception and that musk also kind of had this bossy behavior that made many people reluctant to join its vision. those who joined him became millionaires if not more and contributed to create the greatest automobile company in recent history. and that was after building paypal. the press and many people in those comments are making a mistake thinking he is a fool and behaved in a stupid way. that is not donald trump. he doesn’t care about people that don’t buy into its vision and he doesnt care if twitter sinks to lower lows in the following years. for musk, the last years of twitter are a disgusting and corrupt way to deal with democracy and the way business was handled at twitter was totally corrupt. Wether you agree with the democrat agenda or no is a thing. that you want to push your cult into the minds of everyone on twitter while censoring alternative ideas is the problem and does not align with the vision of what a medium of communication should be in a free world. YOU ARE NOT in the side of good because you repeat the woke things that pelosi and its cult are repeating. and your oponents are not NAZIS. mankind is much bigger than your small conflicts and politics and the vision musk has for twitter is bigger than the beliefs of a few corrupt politicians and your voice should not be more important than the one of another human being. In five years I am pretty sure many of the people that are commenting here will put a lot of money into twitter stock when musk will make it public agaibn.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- narrator 4y agoI always scroll to the bottom of the HN comments to see the non-woke take. I was not disappointed! Elon is about the most capable entrepreneur of the 21st century. He could start from scratch and have something more awesome and profitable than Twitter in a few years. He had an extreme culture problem though it seems. The company had been taken over by ideologues and was losing 4 million a day. He had to get rid of everyone who wasn't aligned with his new vision. He had to depoliticize the company which meant firing most of the staff. He'll probably have to move it to Texas or make it fully remote if he wants to finish depoliticizing it. What does depoliticizing even mean? It making the company about maximizing profit, not transforming society based on the political value of its actions.
- ornornor 4y agoNitter link: https://nitter.net/zoeschiffer/status/1593391604785504257 https://nitter.net/zoeschiffer/status/1593391604785504257
- shp0ngle 4y agoI would obviously not want to work in such an environment, but. Given that he fired so many people, yet the site is working unchanged and works exactly the same as before, maybe he’s not that crazy? I can log in to the website and see no difference; nothing is obviously broken. Maybe he’s right and most people were doing nothing? I don’t know.
- cerved 4y agothe irony is the firings pulling eyeballs and interactions to Twitter, which increases load, which nobody works to handle anymore
- eugenethespleen 4y ago
- shp0ngle 4y agoOf course not. But nothing broke! So far.
- DAVer98 4y ago
- dang 4y agoWe've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- traveler01 4y agoI think what he means is that, things are basically on hold there and nothing has broken yet. So I think his point his kinda valid, Twitter doesn't need that much employees to work as expected. It's possibly a very low maintenance platform that can go for days without the need of any sort of maintenance.
- agnosticmantis 4y agoWorry not as the Optimus production will start by the end of this year and the robots can keep Twitter up at least 10 times better than human employees! It’d be financially insane to employ anything other than an Optimus robot!
- tempodox 4y agoMore details on current Twitter drama on Zoë Schiffer's thread: https://twitter.com/ZoeSchiffer https://twitter.com/ZoeSchiffer
- rsynnott 4y agoAbsolute omnishambles.
- ShredKazoo 4y agoSo here's my understanding of what happened, appreciating corrections: * Twitter was known for liberal corporate politics, most employees liberal * Purchased by center-right billionaire in the name of freedom of speech (modern liberals against freedom of speech) * Twitter employees amuse themselves by making billionaire's life difficult * Billionaire delivers ultimatum, many employees out * Unclear if sufficient knowledge to maintain systems will survive It seems like with the benefit of hindsight, the correct play for Elon would've been to avoid major moves at first, let far left employees quit, replace them with new hires excited by working at a Musk company. Then eventually, maybe, deliver an ultimatum once new Musk-enthusiast hires had absorbed enough knowledge to maintain systems. I think the hard-charging approach Elon took was likely the correct one for Tesla/SpaceX, since employees at those companies mostly knew what they had signed up for, but Twitter was a much different management challenge since the existing workforce has/had an active dislike for Elon.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- solarkraft 4y ago> Twitter employees amuse themselves by making billionaire's life difficult Where did you get that from? He immediately started firing people, so when should they have done that?
- ShredKazoo 4y agohttps://twitter.com/rlycalm/status/1592636069224542208 https://twitter.com/rlycalm/status/1592636069224542208 Granted, I don't know this person is actually an engineer as opposed to a troll. And she doesn't claim that she or other employees actively tried to create trouble. So there was an aspect of me reading subtext into her tweet + Elon's ultimatum. Maybe incorrectly.
- Chinjut 4y agoThat is a joke post. That person was never a Twitter employee. But even if they counterfactually were, big deal if the grunts at the organization you take over have a nickname for you.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rhaway84773 4y agoI don’t understand how anyone here can be supportive of the idea of the richest man in the world coming in, immediately firing half the staff, trying to get another significant portion of the staff to resign by demanding they switch from the promised permanent WFH to working from the office in 2 weeks, and then encouraging them to resign by giving them a highly fishy spammy/pushing email with an external link to a form to decide whether they want to work with this company or not within 48 hrs. This is horrible and destructive. We should be against this on principle. For us to not be against this is making us the ultimate Beta Cucks who are willing to take it WM the throat as long as the pretend Alpha is showing it to us.
- firstfewshells 4y agoThat's where the visa holders come in. They have no choice but to continue working for Twitter or else risk deportation.
- bpanon 4y agoDo you actually believe he’s the wealthiest person in the world? This is why the really wealthy own media corps.
- hef19898 4y agoHow does one follow a come-back-to-office police while being simultaniously being locked out from said office? Is this an employer lockout, the employer version of an employee strike? So many questions! Maybe one of those blue checkmarked Elon's on Twitter can answer! But seriously, how can someone burn down something he just bought for 44 billion so fast and consequently?
- mr90210 4y ago> But seriously, how can someone burn down something he just bought for 44 billion so fast and consequently? The fan boys would say: It’s Elon, he is playing 3D chess and no one is smart enough to understand his end goal.
- bjornsing 4y agoYea, I think I’m still leaning in that direction, although I wouldn’t use those words or go all in on this. One thing that’s interesting about this shakeup is that it’s a very clear statement about where Elon sees value, right? Lazy “rest and vest” engineers? Just go home. Communications department? Get out. Perhaps what Elon wants to say is “look, this thing runs fine on 20% of the staff, and now that the 80% naysayers are gone we’re going to really get shit done”. When I’ve worked for companies approximately the size of Twitter I’ve sure felt the urge to say that. :) Now, the question is, now aligned with “reality” is this reasoning from first principles? No doubt a lot of haters are gonna hate, like crazy. Is it enough to take the whole company down?
- denton-scratch 4y ago> this thing runs fine on 20% of the staff Every place I've worked that had more than 50 staff, 90% of the productive work was done by 10% of the staff. I mean, I can't document that; it's anecdata. But I think it's a pretty reliable rule-of-thumb guideline. But how do you identify that 10%?
- enkid 4y ago
- masswerk 4y agoOver the last few hours, I've seen numerous tweets displayed as deleted or not available, only to resurface later on. (Both embedded and directly linked.) Are these first signs of erosion?
- ModernMech 4y agoI've seen this too. Others are noticing it in this very thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33652976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33652976 Talking about this Tweet: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961 It's marked as "unavailable" when I view logged in to Twitter, but it's there in incognito mode. Edit: Actually I just tried refreshing a couple times and it seems to be stochastic as to whether I can see the Tweet or not. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it's "unavailable".
- masswerk 4y ago> Actually I just tried refreshing a couple times and it seems to be stochastic Yes, I observed this, too.
- low_tech_love 4y agoThis one goes for those who are positive towards EM right now (honest question, no ill intentions here): is there any way at all to look at his actions in the past weeks in a positive light from an administrative perspective? I mean, ok, you could argue that Twitter was in a bad shape and so on, but anyway, is there any real objective justification for such a messy, chaotic approach to its reorganization? Can anyone really expect to improve a company this way? He recently tweeted a meme of twitter burying twitter, and to me it really feels like the kind of thing a teenager would do, "oh shit, I made a mistake with this acquisition, let me blame someone for it".
- luckylion 4y agoI'm neutral because I don't care, I'm only watching it when I'm exposed to it through others, so essentially like a popular TV show. What I've read some say is that it's a strategy to drastically reduce head count and keep only those people on who really want to be there and are not just there because it's a well-compensated position and they've figured out how to appear busy without doing much. Those people might leave when it becomes a chore to keep up appearances ("this feels like work, if I wanted to work I could've just done my job"), they're self-identifying and you're not paying severance when they quit. Of course, you're probably also bleeding out some talented and productive people. I don't know if "it's a mess, but it's the challenge of a lifetime" and the chance to work for Musk is enough to recruit good people, but it might be, not everyone has a family and needs to be home by 5pm and wants work-life-balance. Trump was elected president riding on a wave of lots of people hating him and the media covering him 24/7 in a constant scream of GOTCHA and it worked out for him. Musk has claimed that Twitter usage is peeking among all of this. It kind of looks like a Wrestling show with lots of crazy things happening, only that not all participants are aware of what's happening or willing to participate. I have no idea whether it works out in his favor.
- wreath 4y agoI'm kinda glad to see this. Twitter has been a cesspool for years and it negatively impacted society. I'm glad to see it crash and burn. It took $44 billions to do but what the heck.
- davesque 4y agoAs bad as I feel for all the Twitter peeps whose lives were upended by this whole mess, it sure does feel satisfying to watch that weasel Musk get his comeuppance.
- Kraftwurm 4y agoI want Jack Dorsey back!
- mrweasel 4y agoWhy? He failed to make Twitter profitable for years. If you look at Twitter, under Jack Dorsey, as what it provided, I can see the point. If you view Twitter as a business, it should have been allowed to fail years ago. Musk does seem to take the speed run approach to trimming down Twitter, with the risk of killing it altogether. Working for Twitter can't be a pleasant experience right now, but the employees where on borrowed time already. I might be completely wrong, but my feeling is that in 5 years we'll look back and see Twitter as a novelty of the 2010s. See humor in an old ad with a Twitter handle on it, or watch a clip from a news show where they "jump to the Twitter comment" and remember that was a thing. There is no good way out of this for Twitter. Regardless of what he actually paid, Musk vastly overpay for for the company. They've been burning a $1B a year for a decade, and now Musk is stuck with the bills for next year. It's not that I think he's doing a good job, but he has to do something. Otherwise he'll be burning hundreds of millions of dollars every year, keeping Twitter running, and that's after having wasted billions upfront.
- pelorat 4y ago> He failed to make Twitter profitable for years. Well if you've read Jack's interaction with Elon about Twitter (part of the lawsuit), it's because the board was very risk adverse and against big changes. Jack actually supports what Elon is doing now, because it's not something he could do while he was in charge.
- nailer 4y agoInteresting: 0 roles worldwide for any team. https://careers.twitter.com/en/roles.html#team=careers-twitter%3Asr%2Fteam%2Fit-it-enterprise-applications&team=careers-twitter%3Asr%2Fteam%2Finfrastructure-engineering&team=careers-twitter%3Asr%2Fteam%2Flegal-and-public-policy&team=careers-twitter%3Asr%2Fteam%2Ffinance&team=careers-twitter%3Asr%2Fteam%2Fdesign-and-research&team=careers-twitter%3Asr%2Fteam%2Fmachine-learning&team=careers-twitter%3Asr%2Fteam%2Fmarketing-and-communications&team=careers-twitter%3Asr%2Fteam%2Fpeople&team=careers-twitter%3Asr%2Fteam%2Fproduct&team=careers-twitter%3Asr%2Fteam%2Fsales-and-partnerships&team=careers-twitter%3Asr%2Fteam%2Fproduct-and-design&team=careers-twitter%3Asr%2Fteam%2Fsecurity&team=careers-twitter%3Asr%2Fteam%2Fsoftware-engineering&team=careers-twitter%3Asr%2Fteam%2Ftrust-and-safety&team=careers-twitter%3Asr%2Fteam%2Fworkplace&team=careers-twitter%3Asr%2Fteam%2Fcustomer-support-and-operations&team=careers-twitter%3Asr%2Fteam%2Fdata-science-and-analytics https://careers.twitter.com/en/roles.html#team=careers-twitt...
- jpeter 4y agoMusk will do every job by himself. He earns 100000x more so he is 100000x more productive
- fredgrott 4y agoYou know if we look at this from a product building perspective.... 1. Twitter was attempting through out its history to tell this narrative and do this: Twitter's core was citizen journalists and verified journalists and being responsible enough to guide the conversation in what was allowed and not allowed as far as hate speech and misinformation. Elon bought it and had a new vision that the Twitter product should be a free speech conversation and that advertisers should be ditched as product consumers of Twitter. The problem for Elon is that he did not do enough of story telling about the new product vision and INVITING people on the journey Its not a type of journey you can crack a whip to get people to sign up for that journey. And certainly his product adviser, Jason Calacanis does in fact know this from his miss-steps with Mahalo.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoWell, we'll have to see how this plays out. "We'll send humans to Mars!" is something that I can feel good about working 80 hours a week on. "We'll help trolls spew hate!" ... maybe, not so much.
- xxs 4y ago>We'll send humans to Mars Even if(when) we do - what's there? We are progressively failing a perfectly habitable world that even has a magnetic core. Moving to another planet will not solve anything for the humans.
- avisser 4y ago> Q: "Why did you want to climb Mount Everest?" > Edmund Hillary: "Because it's there" Humanity is innately adventurous. We don't need a more complex reason to explore the unknown.
- mrguyorama 4y ago"Explore" is different than "colonize". Musk has been adamant that we "have" to colonize mars for "the survival of our species", meanwhile DART just proved that deflecting a meteor is a valid strategy, and we are all still choking on our own burned dinosaurs, a thing he seems to have no interest in fixing despite owning a damn solar panel company.
- wedowhatwedo 4y agoIf people are working 80 hours a week on sending humans to Mars, I definitely don't want to be one of those humans. People do not do their best work when they are tired and stressed.
- christophilus 4y agoBetween FTX and Twitter, I've run out of popcorn, and the local grocers are out of stock. I think the best tweet on that thread is [0]: "I was laid off from Twitter this afternoon. I was in charge of managing badge access to Twitter offices. Elon just called me and asked if I could come back to help them regain access to HQ as they shut off all badges and accidentally locked themselves out." I'm not sure if it's true or not, but... sounds about par for the course. Edit: As someone else pointed out, it's a parody account. Amazing that I couldn't infer that immediately. [0] https://twitter.com/JWeber988/status/1593423235252723715 https://twitter.com/JWeber988/status/1593423235252723715
- bobmaxup 4y agoIf you aren't sure its real, why propogate it?
- naijaboiler 4y agoits twitters job to tell us its real. Isn't that what Elon promised us?
- JoeyPriceless 4y agoBut Musk replied to the Tweet so I'm not quite sure what's real. > Thanks for helping out. You’re a lifesaver! [0] [0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593447646470889473 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593447646470889473
- NavinF 4y agoHe's obviously joking.
- elijaht 4y agoThat’s a comedian dude
- int_19h 4y agoThe sad part is that it's actually believable at this point.
- lifeinthevoid 4y agoLet's wait how it eventually all plays out, but one thing is for certain, I (and I suspect many others) have lost all respect for Musk.
- mihaic 4y agoWhat I find so amazing about this dumpsterfire is how easy the plan to maximize Twitter revenue would have been: fire 80-90% of developers over the next year and just optimize the system to reduce infrastructure costs by 95%. Be transparent, humane and not an asshole while doing this. When you then have a leaner organization then you can go nuts. Musk acted like an impatiant child, all the while being mostly right.
- pjc50 4y ago> fire 80-90% of developers over the next year and just optimize the system to reduce infrastructure costs by 95% "just" The presumption here is that 90% of the staff weren't doing anything useful, and that 95% of the infrastructure costs were wasted, and both of those would be extremely surprising? Also very non-efficient-markets-hypothesis, that a public company would just sit there wasting almost all of its money.
- mihaic 4y agoWhy would it be surprising? Without any pressure to cut costs engineers find countless ways to "be useful" that ads little value while adding massive complexity to the organization, ballooning maintenance costs in the long-term. I've heard so many bullshit work stories from FAANG friends that I'm not sure why you'd expect markets to be efficient regarding these hugely subsidized tech companies.
- paulgb 4y agoHe sorta forced his own hand here by saddling the company with so much debt that it couldn’t afford not to drastically cut back spending.
- Publius_Enigma 4y agoI find it curious that Musk has simultaneously demanded that all employees cease working from home and return to the office whilst also locking them out of the office.
- michaelcampbell 4y agoDo you really? Even when couched in terms of "this was a panic emergency measure"? It seems blindingly obvious.
- Publius_Enigma 4y agoYes, but only because of the way Musk went about changing the WFH Policy. Musk is quoted as saying "If you can physically make it to an office and you don't show up, resignation accepted". He was placing the onus onto employees to make it to an office at all costs, else they would be out of a job. To then lock employees out after such histrionic demands seems ironic.
- kranke155 4y agoHere’s what I don’t understand. Elon has offered no vision for twitter 2.0, only the promise of hard work towards a nebulous goal. He then offered no equity in return for that hard work rebuilding the platform. Why would anyone stay? “Hey, do you want to work triple the amount of hours for me for the same pay?” I wonder if seeing Chinese companies and Chinese factories work has warped his judgement. Without a vision of “this is how we’re going to change the world” and the shared commitment of “whoever helps me will get a big piece of the pie!” How does he expect people to stay motivated exactly ? I finally understand why brilliant people like Karpathy leave Tesla.
- johannes1234321 4y ago> Why would anyone stay? “Hey, do you want to work triple the amount of hours for me for the same pay?” Probably even less pay. No more stocks (and if: limited ways of selling ... unless Musk manages to execute a massive pivot and then go public again)
- kranke155 4y agoIt’s very strange. I suppose he must be at least mildly autistic, because he certainly doesn’t seem to understand regular people.
- rjmunro 4y agoHe said he had aspergers when he hosted Saturday Night Live. Someone with aspergers is not the person to run a social network.
- hnfong 4y agoIf I had to bet Mark Zuckerberg is probably further from "normal" than Elon Musk.
- wilsonnb3 4y agoHaving essentially infinite money for 20 years is a hell of a drug, I think that is enough to explain it
- irthomasthomas 4y agoIt's hard to follow this story. Do I have this right?... Twitter had a permanent WFH policy, and staff arranged their lives based on this. Musk gives 24hr notice to staff (those lucky 30-40% not already sacked) to return to the office for a hardcore 7 day week, or be resigned. Musk panicked about sabotage and closed the offices. But would-be-saboteurs still have systems access, as the people would revoke access have, themselves, been resigned.
- jokoon 4y agoMaybe Elon Musk is secretly plotting to destroy Twitter? Hard to say if I like this idea or not...
- jacknews 4y agoNever a dull moment with drama queen Elon at the helm.
- Communitivity 4y agoGoing "hardcore" can be an amazing experience. Some of the most exciting and fun times during my career were when I was on a tiger team. Elon Musk is approaching this in a horrible way though. By using hardcore as a default setting, and quiet firing anyone who doesn't sign on to it, he's signaling hard core must be forced thing. "hardcore" itself has negative connotations. Think of how different the news cycle would be right now if he had said the following: * "Twitter's engineers have done an amazing job, and everyone is getting a 2% out of cycle bonus in stock" * "Those who want to do an even more amazing job and enter beast mode with me (crucial that he work the same hours), will get a 10% bonus in stock each year they do, with the first year's 10% after the first month of beast mode. For me beast mode means 60-70 hour weeks, one or more pushed commits per day, and being on-site at least two days out of five." * "Those who don't enter beast mode are still Twitter engineers, among the best in the industry, and will not be penalized in any way. We recognize that different people have different needs when it comes to work-life balance, and we value diversity at Twitter." * "We do need to improve our platform in some ways though. To this end I am putting a 3 month freeze on hiring, firing, and new features. Our focus during this time will be improving performance, improving security, and fixing bugs."
- Someone1234 4y agoYou keep using stock examples: There is no stock, Twitter was taken private.
- Communitivity 4y agoGood point, I was primarily thinking about companies in general. You can issue private stock - it only gets issued to employees and investors, and sale is controlled. Though, not much point though if the company won't be going public some day.
- ericol 4y ago1: Fire top managers & half the workforce, the criteria behind the firing being "just coz" 2. Threat the remaining employees with bankruptcy. 3: Ask the remaining workforce to work 2.5 (Very likely to cover the other half fired, that were very likely already working their asses off) 4: Profit??? I'm no industry expert, but I wouldn't trust EM with my mom's bakery.
- shadowgovt 4y agoAnecdotally, it's been interesting to me to watch how quickly my Twitter social network is rebuilding itself on Mastodon. Twitter and its ilk don't have their hardest challenges in the technical space; they have their hardest challenges in the same space as the SCA. "You rule because they believe."
- gorbachev 4y agoI'm wondering at what point would the bag holders with whom he went into this venture start telling him to shut up and let an adult run things. Because all he's doing right now is burning the $44B.
- splatzone 4y agoI'm curious about the HN algorithm and why this post hasn't been closer to the top of the front page? It seems like there are so many comments and votes, it should be higher
- gdilla 4y agoSo everyone that's still left - all H1Bs quaking in their boots? What a tragic twist to their american odyssey.
- DesiLurker 4y agoBrown is the new Black
- memish 4y agoWhat happens when Twitter survives despite reducing headcount by 80-90%? It's going to send a message that companies are more overstaffed than we thought. This may explain an underlying fear driving even some engineers to put their reputation on the line with confident declarations that Twitter is going to fail. Some were saying it wouldn't survive the night. It's now morning. Others saying it won't last the weekend or coming week. We'll soon find out. I would expect some bumps along the way. Twitter Blue was a bump. Perhaps Twitter is just the first to go lean before the recession. Elon merely the first dancer who is willing to look dumb. Now who's going to be the first follower to transform the lone nut into a leader? Watch this 2 minute to see how this works, you may have seen this before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ Now here's a counterbalance to the fear with an optimistic take: This is a correction. A small number of tech companies have been hoarding talent. The talent gets a 3 month severance and made available to the larger ecosystem.
- taylodl 4y agoIf it requires more than 20% - 30% of your staff to sustain operations then you've implemented it wrong. So sure, you should be able to keep operations going having sustained large staff reductions, but you aren't going to be doing anything to expand your business opportunities. Maybe Musk doesn't think that's required, but if they lose too many key operations personnel then they may be screwed.
- BucketsMcG 4y agoI don't think there's any doubt that many tech companies are hideously, bafflingly over-staffed (3000 people working on just the music functionality of Alexa? What could they possibly be doing?). But maybe take a bit of time to understand what everybody is (and isn't) doing before throwing half out and alienating the rest? This is just a masterclass in how not to do it. He doesn't look dumb because he's reducing the headcount. He looks dumb because he's going about it like an absolute lunatic.
- ryandrake 4y ago> What could they possibly be doing? People constantly underestimate the size of the support staff needed to keep the engineering team productive. For every ten or so software engineers you hire to work on a new product or feature, you're going to need 5-10 QA engineers, another project manager, another product manager, maybe another build engineer, maybe more internal IT staff... You need these people. Software doesn't just leap from developers' fingertips directly onto store shelves. And now that that program's engineering manager has so many more direct reports, that manager needs another manager to split his duties up... And now that there are so many managers, their Director maybe needs a personal assistant to help keep her schedule better organized. All that extra staff eventually requires more HR support, more people working in facilities/building management, more janitors. On the business side, this product is going to need a few more marketers, maybe salespeople to sell it, business analysts to track its effectiveness, and so on. After a couple rounds of this, the company looks up and somehow has 3,000 people and HN sneers about what could they all be doing...
- mancerayder 4y agoIt's a strange idea to ask people to work 60-80 hours a week, as such people will be less productive than two people working 40.
- tzs 4y agoI'm looking forward to the South Park episode(s) that this will inspire.
- DonHopkins 4y agoSoftware developers who choose to stay at Twitter after the lack of respect and asymmetrical demand for respect that Musk has demonstrated towards them are just like Ted Cruz licking Trump's boots and kissing his ass after Trump called his wife ugly.
- cakeface 4y agoI am more and more worried that shutting down Twitter is and has been the plan. This is about controlling speech a different way.