5 ms·

Elon is engaged in something called “Whaling and Culling.”

13 points by Terretta 4y ago

Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
Always 6-D chess with this guy, isn’t it? Same with Trump. The possibility of people in power being just guys who are aimlessly winging it never crosses the minds of those who have an inferiority complex
- PM_me_your_math 4y ago
  Nobody successful has ever truly winged it. Your moves are deliberate, calculated, and based on what you observe, not what you think or believe. You may take a guess and come out on top, but in the end, you didn't get lucky, you make a calculated move and it went in your favor because you calculated correctly.
Juliate 4y ago
Gosh... Managing 101: no one lives in a bubble. Your so-called "whaling people" are highly contextual, in skills, but also in time: who is pulling all the work on one occasion may have been/become a drag. The "A-players is a thing" discourse too easily overlooks all the enabling/support coming from the so-called B-C-whatever-players/non-critical functions as well. No one operates in a vacuum.
xqcgrek2 4y ago
The skeptical comments here reminds me of the apothegm "people don't know what they don't know"
groffee 4y ago
This is the Emperors New Clothes [0] all over again, no-one wants to say straight up that based on what they've observed that Elon's a complete moron, so it's always got to be some kind of 'genius' that the rest of us can't see. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes
- PM_me_your_math 4y ago
  - freejazz 4y ago
    > Nonsensical, bitter, and infantile labels will never make your rant true. Pot, kettle... black.
  - yongjik 4y ago
    > Twitter employees strolled into work at 9am, drank smoothies for an hour, "relaxed" ...then had lunch at 1130, followed by meetings, and then didn't start work until around 2 or 3pm, and then went home at 4:30. > We have all seen the "my day at twitter" vids on YouTube. Do you know these facts because someone you personally know work(ed) at Twitter, or are you literally telling us that you saw something on Youtube and hence it must be true?
  - peneloco 4y ago
    So this is a prime example of the "Elon Musk -> Weird nerds" meme.
- luxuryballs 4y ago
  I mean it doesn’t have to be genius or complete moron, it’s most likely neither. But if it has to be one of the two extremes and I start with 50/50 odds, what would I lean towards with the limited information I have as an outside observer? This is a rhetorical question but I think it gives a hint of how this whole topic has become such a shit show.
HelloNurse 4y ago
Absurd management theory. If this sort of selection takes place, it's for delusional "heroes" and true believers, not for productive and competent people. A more likely scenario: 1) I'm a "whale". 2) You make me angry. 3) I leave. 4) Fail Whale forever.
invalidusernam3 4y ago
> By pushing for such an extremely tight deadline, Elon got to see who is actually doing work and who is resting on their laurels. Furthermore, it proved who could actually perform under extreme pressure. Very dumb take. It implies that all the engineers at twitter work on the exact same feature at the exact same time, which obviously they don't, which invalidates the rest of this guys argument
- PM_me_your_math 4y ago
  What features though? The color of buttons? Innovation at twitter died 10 years ago. The old team literally accomplished nothing but censorship and banning 500,000 people who didn't agree with their politics.
  - nikau 4y ago
    Or banned 500,000 people to stop twitter going the way of voat.co
  - arrsky 4y ago
    FWIW, here are two useful features released just within the past few months. In July 2022: Unmentioning to leave a conversation entirely, preventing others from mentioning you (not just muting), https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1546555047630159872 https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1546555047630159872 In October 2022: Community Notes (aka Birdwatch), to facilitate crowdsourced clarifications and corrections to misleading tweets, https://twitter.com/CommunityNotes/status/1578004575990202370 https://twitter.com/CommunityNotes/status/157800457599020237.... This uses some intriguing algos to surface 'best' contributions, such as when accounts that often disagree, agree on these, as well as on earned-over-time reputations for reviewers.
poulpy123 4y ago
Ah yes the theory of the 4D chess player, I know it
iainctduncan 4y ago
I have no doubt this what he is trying to do. Whether it will work is another question. I worked at a start up that got acquired and went through the same thing. First most people left, and then the whales (I was one of them) left too because life is too short to work in unhealthy environments. Pretty soon he had no one but the people he brought in and the tech debt just got worse as there was no one who understood the problems left to help fix them. Can it be done? sure. Is it a smart business decision? open question.
- PM_me_your_math 4y ago
  It is brilliant. Twitter was a poorly run company. He'd be better off firing just about everyone and bringing in his own people. He should also move the HQ and may just do that next year after debt restructuring.
  - iainctduncan 4y ago
    It is way too soon to say if it is brilliant. If the company tanks and can't recover, then it's not brilliant. This is not at all out of the realm of the possible. It's not like it would have been that hard to do the same thing more carefully, many other executives have taken over distressed companies and managed dramatic cutbacks better.
MouseTown 4y ago
Elon’s tactics have been to eliminate positions regardless of individual strength - e.g. his recent “hardcore” email. That is culling but it is not whaling. In my experience, whales have the most freedom to leave and will be the fastest to employ it. So, one could argue, this is anti-whaling. Whatever the case, it’s clear he’s not in on some master scheme us mortals can’t understand. He’s just a man with an inflated ego who wants to feel above the rest. Just like the Twitter poster here.
- PM_me_your_math 4y ago
  Or maybe... Just maybe... Twitter was a bloated and poorly-run company that was in serious need of an enema. This is bouyed by the facts. Employees did very little actual work, each had multiple bosses who haphazardly lead their teams to accomplish nothing in 12 years, and oversaw mountains of wasteful corporate spending that produced nothing but losses in 10 out of the last 12 FY. Upwards of $4,000,000,000. Musk could drag himself into the office, guzzle down 2 smoothies and "relax" ...and do nothing else till 4pm and still do better than the last decade of Twitter leadership.
  - metadat 4y ago
    Instead of an enema the patient has been pared down to a lobotomized quadriplegic.
- sake 4y ago
  That was my initial thought too about this theory. In any tech company competent people are always the first ones to leave on first signs of trouble. They already have new opportunities lined up and they are just waiting for an excuse to leave and probably get a pay rise on their way out. High functioning people in general tend to have each others backs because they have more to give and it's just more fun to work being surrounded by capable people rather than use your time instructing people who never seem to get it and just leech your time. In case I sound elitist, I don't think those competent people have any inherent trait that makes them that way, it's more to do with whether you know how to do deep work, it's something you can learn.
mindcrash 4y ago
Nice theory. But what will actually happen in practice is that the "productive 10%" will dangerously flirt with mental health issues, which will cause productivity to drop close to 0% and then when a outage happens the platform will simply collapse, because nobody will be available to deal with it anymore.
nikau 4y ago
cool theory, except elon has gone in like Arnold Schwarzenegger in commando and strafed indiscriminately at 90% of the workforce.

13 points by Terretta 4y ago

Always 6-D chess with this guy, isn’t it? Same with Trump. The possibility of people in power being just guys who are aimlessly winging it never crosses the minds of those who have an inferiority complex

PM_me_your_math 4y ago
Nobody successful has ever truly winged it. Your moves are deliberate, calculated, and based on what you observe, not what you think or believe. You may take a guess and come out on top, but in the end, you didn't get lucky, you make a calculated move and it went in your favor because you calculated correctly.

Juliate 4y ago

Gosh... Managing 101: no one lives in a bubble. Your so-called "whaling people" are highly contextual, in skills, but also in time: who is pulling all the work on one occasion may have been/become a drag. The "A-players is a thing" discourse too easily overlooks all the enabling/support coming from the so-called B-C-whatever-players/non-critical functions as well. No one operates in a vacuum.

xqcgrek2 4y ago

The skeptical comments here reminds me of the apothegm "people don't know what they don't know"

groffee 4y ago

This is the Emperors New Clothes [0] all over again, no-one wants to say straight up that based on what they've observed that Elon's a complete moron, so it's always got to be some kind of 'genius' that the rest of us can't see. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes

PM_me_your_math 4y ago
- freejazz 4y ago
  > Nonsensical, bitter, and infantile labels will never make your rant true. Pot, kettle... black.
- yongjik 4y ago
  > Twitter employees strolled into work at 9am, drank smoothies for an hour, "relaxed" ...then had lunch at 1130, followed by meetings, and then didn't start work until around 2 or 3pm, and then went home at 4:30. > We have all seen the "my day at twitter" vids on YouTube. Do you know these facts because someone you personally know work(ed) at Twitter, or are you literally telling us that you saw something on Youtube and hence it must be true?
- peneloco 4y ago
  So this is a prime example of the "Elon Musk -> Weird nerds" meme.
luxuryballs 4y ago
I mean it doesn’t have to be genius or complete moron, it’s most likely neither. But if it has to be one of the two extremes and I start with 50/50 odds, what would I lean towards with the limited information I have as an outside observer? This is a rhetorical question but I think it gives a hint of how this whole topic has become such a shit show.

HelloNurse 4y ago

Absurd management theory. If this sort of selection takes place, it's for delusional "heroes" and true believers, not for productive and competent people. A more likely scenario: 1) I'm a "whale". 2) You make me angry. 3) I leave. 4) Fail Whale forever.

invalidusernam3 4y ago

> By pushing for such an extremely tight deadline, Elon got to see who is actually doing work and who is resting on their laurels. Furthermore, it proved who could actually perform under extreme pressure. Very dumb take. It implies that all the engineers at twitter work on the exact same feature at the exact same time, which obviously they don't, which invalidates the rest of this guys argument

PM_me_your_math 4y ago
What features though? The color of buttons? Innovation at twitter died 10 years ago. The old team literally accomplished nothing but censorship and banning 500,000 people who didn't agree with their politics.
- nikau 4y ago
  Or banned 500,000 people to stop twitter going the way of voat.co
- arrsky 4y ago
  FWIW, here are two useful features released just within the past few months. In July 2022: Unmentioning to leave a conversation entirely, preventing others from mentioning you (not just muting), https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1546555047630159872 https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1546555047630159872 In October 2022: Community Notes (aka Birdwatch), to facilitate crowdsourced clarifications and corrections to misleading tweets, https://twitter.com/CommunityNotes/status/1578004575990202370 https://twitter.com/CommunityNotes/status/157800457599020237.... This uses some intriguing algos to surface 'best' contributions, such as when accounts that often disagree, agree on these, as well as on earned-over-time reputations for reviewers.

poulpy123 4y ago

Ah yes the theory of the 4D chess player, I know it

iainctduncan 4y ago

I have no doubt this what he is trying to do. Whether it will work is another question. I worked at a start up that got acquired and went through the same thing. First most people left, and then the whales (I was one of them) left too because life is too short to work in unhealthy environments. Pretty soon he had no one but the people he brought in and the tech debt just got worse as there was no one who understood the problems left to help fix them. Can it be done? sure. Is it a smart business decision? open question.

PM_me_your_math 4y ago
It is brilliant. Twitter was a poorly run company. He'd be better off firing just about everyone and bringing in his own people. He should also move the HQ and may just do that next year after debt restructuring.
- iainctduncan 4y ago
  It is way too soon to say if it is brilliant. If the company tanks and can't recover, then it's not brilliant. This is not at all out of the realm of the possible. It's not like it would have been that hard to do the same thing more carefully, many other executives have taken over distressed companies and managed dramatic cutbacks better.

MouseTown 4y ago

Elon’s tactics have been to eliminate positions regardless of individual strength - e.g. his recent “hardcore” email. That is culling but it is not whaling. In my experience, whales have the most freedom to leave and will be the fastest to employ it. So, one could argue, this is anti-whaling. Whatever the case, it’s clear he’s not in on some master scheme us mortals can’t understand. He’s just a man with an inflated ego who wants to feel above the rest. Just like the Twitter poster here.

PM_me_your_math 4y ago
Or maybe... Just maybe... Twitter was a bloated and poorly-run company that was in serious need of an enema. This is bouyed by the facts. Employees did very little actual work, each had multiple bosses who haphazardly lead their teams to accomplish nothing in 12 years, and oversaw mountains of wasteful corporate spending that produced nothing but losses in 10 out of the last 12 FY. Upwards of $4,000,000,000. Musk could drag himself into the office, guzzle down 2 smoothies and "relax" ...and do nothing else till 4pm and still do better than the last decade of Twitter leadership.
- metadat 4y ago
  Instead of an enema the patient has been pared down to a lobotomized quadriplegic.
sake 4y ago
That was my initial thought too about this theory. In any tech company competent people are always the first ones to leave on first signs of trouble. They already have new opportunities lined up and they are just waiting for an excuse to leave and probably get a pay rise on their way out. High functioning people in general tend to have each others backs because they have more to give and it's just more fun to work being surrounded by capable people rather than use your time instructing people who never seem to get it and just leech your time. In case I sound elitist, I don't think those competent people have any inherent trait that makes them that way, it's more to do with whether you know how to do deep work, it's something you can learn.

mindcrash 4y ago

Nice theory. But what will actually happen in practice is that the "productive 10%" will dangerously flirt with mental health issues, which will cause productivity to drop close to 0% and then when a outage happens the platform will simply collapse, because nobody will be available to deal with it anymore.

nikau 4y ago

cool theory, except elon has gone in like Arnold Schwarzenegger in commando and strafed indiscriminately at 90% of the workforce.