6 ms·

A few tech startup CEOs in my country had started saying Elon's methods are fine

34 points by donsupreme 4y ago

mikkergp 4y ago
It will be very hard for people not to learn the wrong lessons from Elon’s takeover of Twitter, even if he is successful. Seems very early to judge in either direction, we’ll probably need at least a year to see (or maybe just through Black Friday). But I would disagree with anyone who doesn’t think Elon isn’t in the middle of a high tightrope wall without a net. How many leaders really want to take on this level of risk? And how many want to lose their best engineers to competitors who aren’t taking these risks. We’re like three months in to a bull market and everyone seems to think the lessons aren’t just generalizable, But universal? Everyone said Jobs completely changed the business landscape, by not very company is apple and not every leader is jobs. In fact it seems very few large tech companies other than apple operate like apple, and even Apple isn't feeling very apple-like lately. The other thing is I imagine their is a glacier effect here. If Elon is effective it’s probably for the 90% you don’t see, not the 10% you do. He’s not effective, because he fired people. He’s effective because of the way that fits into a larger strategy.
- he_is_legend 4y ago
  Maybe I am posting on the wrong forum, but a lot of people seem to have this magical notion that CEOs make everything in a company happen. Elon single-handedly made those rockets land on a raft in the ocean. Elon re-invented electrical cars all by himself. Elon made a Mars habitation dream possible. Except Elon did none of those things. He was the CEO of companies whose staff did those things, following his vision. Staff. People. It always takes a team. The team of people that he is currently attempting to grind into dust at Twitter.
rurban 4y ago
Well, with the suggested 1000 internal microservice calls per query it seems to be very brittle, esp. since 70% if those maintainers are now gone. Site will be up, but many features will be gone sooner or later. Which might be a good thing afterall. Worst is the extreme dependency on Scala devs, whose only realistic job is at Twitter. Look for Scala dev jobs, they are only needed in Sunnyvale.
- cowpig 4y ago
  > Look for Scala dev jobs, they are only needed in Sunnyvale. [citation needed] In my experience Scala devs are in extremely high demand as it's a language of choice for a lot of high-performance server-side software like data pipelines and also for the kinds of large enterprises that previously primarily used Java.
  - rurban 4y ago
    I"ve looked for Scala jobs in California and only one hiring company in Sunnyvale came up, which is 99% Twitter. Now I've searched again, this time on LinkedIn and this time also Apple (Cupertino) and some others showed up.
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    Yes, Scala is super high demand in fintech where Java is also king. Although I hope Kotlin catches on.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Given my personal experience working on Gmail, a system of similar scale and complexity, 1000 RPCs per user action sounds if anything a dramatic underestimate.
schnable 4y ago
The overall gist of what Elon is doing -- reduce complexity, reduce headcount, rethink conventional wisdom, and challenge regulators -- isnt necessarily bad, and maybe necessarily since he paid so much for this "asset." The chaotic way this has all this has all been done, though, seems like an extremely risky way to run any of kind of business.
- stephc_int13 4y ago
  Agreed. He is not entirely wrong on the principles, but his management style is clearly extremely risky here. I am curious to see the outcome, difficult to predict, I don't know if there are any precedent. I believe that software only companies can be run with a relatively small staff, but this is not easy and should be built in the company culture from the start. My intuition is that company culture can only change quickly when it is degrading.
- wwkeyboard 4y ago
  It's going to be hard to sell the premise of extreme work and unwavering dedication with the looming knowledge they will cut you out at a moments notice.
  - Macha 4y ago
    And a lot harder to inspire the kind of mission-based drive for Twitter as for mars colonies or electric cars
  - Aqua_Geek 4y ago
    And for what benefit? A higher salary? Stock options in case Twitter somehow survives and goes public again?
- tonetheman 4y ago
  The problem is really just him. Had he hired an adult and done all of those changes with some thought instead of what he did I doubt anyone would have batted an eye. It does seem like they were heavy with staff but that reduction could have been thoughtfully and with more tact. At the point that you fired half of the staff and then the next day started asking those some people back speaks volume to the chaos HE is causing and probably killed motivation/morale of the staff left. Publicly firing someone on twitter for disagreeing with you is also just wrong. He just purchased the company and the amount of arrogance and gall to think you know more than someone who had been working on it for years is just staggering... misguided... hubris. There are really not enough words to say bad the optics appear. He absolutely should have talked to that person privately and said look do not attack me in public. Now tell me why I am wrong. But that would require some humility and humanity, which HE seems short of. Then that grade school letter that HE sent at midnight. Do you love me? Do you want to stay and work in super hard core mode? Again it is hard to fathom how stupid of a move that was. Engineering is needed and is core to keeping the place running and moving forward but that alone is not enough. He needs real product people who understand the product. HE clearly does not. All of it is fixable but HE needs out of it day to day. Immediately. Get/keep your core staff you need to keep things running. Step out of the visible light and let and adult run the company. Get some good product people and brainstorm and vet ideas for making it better in private. Then execute.
spamizbad 4y ago
Here's what CEOs are going to think: If Twitter stays operational with a skeleton crew: it's confirmation to them that engineering is overstaffed and Twitter was bloated. If Twitter starts breaking down: it's confirmation that Twitter was so overstaffed it became too bloated to produce reliable, resilient software and instead relied on its outsized headcount to keep things running rather than doing things "properly"
- blitzar 4y ago
  If Twitter stays operational with a zero crew - the crew they had, that built it were f'ing geniuses, artists even.
  - ctrbg 4y ago
    This! If a system has minimal operational burden, that means it was designed by people who cared deeply about it and worked diligently building it. Those characteristics are rare commodity these days!
- dboreham 4y ago
  The bloat is deliberate. It comes from investors asking what you as a company manager are doing to put their money to work. One of the things you can do is hire more people, ostensibly to create more stuff to create more income. This lasts until the investors tell you you're being wasteful with their money by employing so many people. This is all that happened in the past couple of months.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    I mean you're not wrong; a lot of tech companies have money to burn and nowhere to put it other than hiring more people and doing more engineering work and bets that may or may not end up anywhere. The meme goes that most are in optimizing advertisements and gathering / collating data, anyway. So while I don't disagree with Twitter downsizing - as the other tech companies have been doing recently - I don't think it was wise to go at it so aggressively, having the effect that there's now a walkout of staff that Twitter absolutely needs to run.
kevinwang 4y ago
Paul Graham also seemed to defend the Twitter CEO: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961?
- mrtksn 4y ago
  It's just people having different interests and expectations looking from different angles. He is is right though, most people don't have the experience of being in the shoes of a company CEO and are trying to analyse Musk actions within a mental model of a company created from the perspective of an employee. What's funny though, when I clicked that link Twitter failed to display the tweet content, giving me an error message about the tweet not available or something. It worked after a refresh. I don't remember this happening before.
  - pfisch 4y ago
    This has been happening to me a lot since Elon bought twitter. Not sure what has changed specifically. I guess they shut down a bunch of their servers to save money before everyone quit?
    - lupire 4y ago
      Twitter invented the Fail Whale. Instability is not new with Elon.
      - pfisch 4y ago
        Yeah maybe 10 years ago. But this hasn't been happening to me for the last 4 years.
  - MaxMatti 4y ago
    Happened lots of times to me in the last year, perhaps the issues that were present in my region are now also present in yours.
  - kaba0 4y ago
FlyingSnake 4y ago
This somehow reminds me of the mimesis we saw in previous decades. 2nd rate CEOs copied all the wrong things Steve Jobs did for years and that took them nowhere. Black turtlenecks and new balance shoes isn't a shortcut to greatness.
- lupire 4y ago
  But now we have 3rd rate CEOs copying a fraud CEO. Steve Jobs had good taste and a healthy respect for the work of the engineers who he took credit from. Musk thinks (or at least nerds to project) he's the smartest engineer at his companies. Job was a proud dropout from his liberal arts degree. Musk got an econ debgree but has been lying his whole life about getting a Physics degree and being admitted to grad school.
  - 0xbadc0de5 4y ago
    Regardless of what I think of the wisdom of his foray into social media, it's hard to ignore the obvious success that Musk has had in bringing electric vehicles to the mainstream and vastly lowering the cost to put mass into orbit through rapidly reusable launch vehicles. Likewise, Starlink is looking like it may well succeed in bringing internet connectivity to the most remote and under-served areas of the planet. That's not nothing - and I don't think one (or several) poorly-considered venture negates his past successes. Just makes him a flawed human like the rest of us.
    - kaba0 4y ago
      The main reason spacex can put mass into orbit for a smaller price than nasa is that as a private company (living off government subsidies) they don’t have to pay all the insurance upfront.
      - 0xbadc0de5 4y ago
        A private company started, funded and run by who? I don't think that claiming the Falcon 9's reusability is not a significant factor in SpaceX's comparatively low launch costs stands up to scrutiny. How could it not lower costs significantly? Likewise, claiming SpaceX benefits from government subsidies is a red herring - all aerospace companies benefit from government subsidies as the government is their primary customer.
cat_plus_plus 4y ago
They are fine for startups where you can expect a bootcamp for a chances of making it big. Here it seems to be a bootcamp just for privilege of working for his majesty Mr Musk for regular salary and uncertain future. Only idiots would slog for free. Well, obviously people may have a financial crunch or visa/health insurance dependencies, but only idiots would not look elsewhere even if they have to stick around for now.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  Twitter can still make it big!
cowpig 4y ago
I may be naive, but I think that Elon was able to run SpaceX and Tesla this way because they both were companies with optimistic visions and by far the best (if not only) option for people who wanted to effect change in those respective industries. Twitter is not the same. What is the idealistic vision of Twitter right now? The whole "free speech" absolutism thing is thinly veiled political pandering. What is Twitter doing that's special which would make me want to work under significantly worse conditions than the myriad of other software jobs out there?
- rr808 4y ago
  I think this is it, good people will sacrifice a lot to work very hard on rockets or cool cars. Selling ads on social media not so much.
  - Zigurd 4y ago
    Let's say you are an engineer at SpaceX who thinks Starship is a stainless steel Spruce Goose. Won't work. Waaay under-engineered. Space internet always fails. Etc. What would you do? Work for Boeing, with their management? A capricious boss and working on a fool's errand can look pretty good in comparison with typical defense aerospace alternatives. Tesla is a profitable public company that can offer serious upside to employees. Even if you think Tesla is overvalued, it is at least a conventional bet on whether it will continue to be overvalued.
  - m_fayer 4y ago
    Agreed. While it's possible with some straining and twisting to make the case that Twitter represents an idealistic change for a better future, it doesn't take any straining at all to see the incredible potential of electrified transport and easy access to space. Also, with some straining and twisting, it's possible to make a case for Twitter changing the future (and present) for the worse. That's much harder to do with the other companies.
  - m_fayer 4y ago
    It says a lot about Musk that he mistook people's desire to work hard for the cool projects he's behind for a desire to work hard for him.
xiphias2 4y ago
This guy is the same that started to peredict that Twitter will go down. He was clearly wrong, for me Twitter already works better than before (multiple people who I was following were shadow banned, now I can see what they were writing without going to their profile page one by one, Elon is one of the examples). I specifically set up Twitter to show all tweets from Elon (and some other people). It wasn't working, and now it works. I think this is a basic feature that doesn't need 8000 engineers to implement. It seems like the author of the tweet can't take ownership for a bad prediction.
- raverbashing 4y ago
  "clearly wrong", no, actually right https://downdetector.com/status/twitter/ https://downdetector.com/status/twitter/ It is beginning to flake
  - VancouverMan 4y ago
    Why are you assuming that all, or even any, of those reports are valid? After opening that page, all it takes is a single button click to submit a report. The last time I reported an outage using that site, it didn't even have a confirmation prompt. I don't see anything preventing false reports from being filed, either.
deeblering4 4y ago
Of course they will, until something materially horrible happens. They are all members of the CEO club and will defend each other out of a vested interest in avoiding knock-on effects. Why would they want to introduce additional volatility?
dandanua 4y ago
The free world should look very closely at this incident in its pursuit of general AI development. Suppose some company has developed a super powerful AI system, which became crucial for a lot of public services, like healthcare, city planning, infrastructure routines (e.g. energy and transportation), etc. Then a guy with hyper-inflated ego and shady financial assets (probably supplied by fascists dictatorships) buys this company. He then fires all employees and takes control of everything, eventually ruining everything to the ground, making the life of millions of people miserable. Is this what our societies want to allow in the future?
nvln 4y ago
If you are bleeding a billion a year, you are not going to survive without drastic changes to culture, mission and focus. Making the engineering team nimble, hyper-focused and startup like is definitely a good solution. Pushing for revenue and profitability is great. The lead-up to all this, the utter lack of any grace, the public spats with employees, users and advertisers have made the whole thing a toxic spectacle. The sycophant brigade is exacerbating the problem. The product, engineering and services will bounceback / survive. (Remember the fail whales and the twittocalypse?). The cultural damage and toxic waste is going to be a tough one to clean up. I wouldn't have imagined a scenario where Meta looks relatively angelic compared to twitter.
sn0w_crash 4y ago
The purpose is to fire or force self-termination of anyone who is not a 110% Elon fanboy who believes in building a new Twitter. Whether or not that’s a good idea is debatable.
sys_64738 4y ago
Twitter isn’t a startup and startups CEOs generally want young people without a family who will slave endlessly for the cause. Elon tried this with Twitter but the smarter employees said Nah and left. Work to live and not live to work. If the latter is you then reassess your priorities as you’re only young once but have a lifetime to regret your choices.
tennisflyi 4y ago
Ultimately? Yeah. Overall, y'all spoiled.

34 points by donsupreme 4y ago

It will be very hard for people not to learn the wrong lessons from Elon’s takeover of Twitter, even if he is successful. Seems very early to judge in either direction, we’ll probably need at least a year to see (or maybe just through Black Friday). But I would disagree with anyone who doesn’t think Elon isn’t in the middle of a high tightrope wall without a net. How many leaders really want to take on this level of risk? And how many want to lose their best engineers to competitors who aren’t taking these risks. We’re like three months in to a bull market and everyone seems to think the lessons aren’t just generalizable, But universal? Everyone said Jobs completely changed the business landscape, by not very company is apple and not every leader is jobs. In fact it seems very few large tech companies other than apple operate like apple, and even Apple isn't feeling very apple-like lately. The other thing is I imagine their is a glacier effect here. If Elon is effective it’s probably for the 90% you don’t see, not the 10% you do. He’s not effective, because he fired people. He’s effective because of the way that fits into a larger strategy.

he_is_legend 4y ago
Maybe I am posting on the wrong forum, but a lot of people seem to have this magical notion that CEOs make everything in a company happen. Elon single-handedly made those rockets land on a raft in the ocean. Elon re-invented electrical cars all by himself. Elon made a Mars habitation dream possible. Except Elon did none of those things. He was the CEO of companies whose staff did those things, following his vision. Staff. People. It always takes a team. The team of people that he is currently attempting to grind into dust at Twitter.

rurban 4y ago

Well, with the suggested 1000 internal microservice calls per query it seems to be very brittle, esp. since 70% if those maintainers are now gone. Site will be up, but many features will be gone sooner or later. Which might be a good thing afterall. Worst is the extreme dependency on Scala devs, whose only realistic job is at Twitter. Look for Scala dev jobs, they are only needed in Sunnyvale.

cowpig 4y ago
> Look for Scala dev jobs, they are only needed in Sunnyvale. [citation needed] In my experience Scala devs are in extremely high demand as it's a language of choice for a lot of high-performance server-side software like data pipelines and also for the kinds of large enterprises that previously primarily used Java.
- rurban 4y ago
  I"ve looked for Scala jobs in California and only one hiring company in Sunnyvale came up, which is 99% Twitter. Now I've searched again, this time on LinkedIn and this time also Apple (Cupertino) and some others showed up.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  Yes, Scala is super high demand in fintech where Java is also king. Although I hope Kotlin catches on.
jeffbee 4y ago
Given my personal experience working on Gmail, a system of similar scale and complexity, 1000 RPCs per user action sounds if anything a dramatic underestimate.

schnable 4y ago

The overall gist of what Elon is doing -- reduce complexity, reduce headcount, rethink conventional wisdom, and challenge regulators -- isnt necessarily bad, and maybe necessarily since he paid so much for this "asset." The chaotic way this has all this has all been done, though, seems like an extremely risky way to run any of kind of business.

stephc_int13 4y ago
Agreed. He is not entirely wrong on the principles, but his management style is clearly extremely risky here. I am curious to see the outcome, difficult to predict, I don't know if there are any precedent. I believe that software only companies can be run with a relatively small staff, but this is not easy and should be built in the company culture from the start. My intuition is that company culture can only change quickly when it is degrading.
wwkeyboard 4y ago
It's going to be hard to sell the premise of extreme work and unwavering dedication with the looming knowledge they will cut you out at a moments notice.
- Macha 4y ago
  And a lot harder to inspire the kind of mission-based drive for Twitter as for mars colonies or electric cars
- Aqua_Geek 4y ago
  And for what benefit? A higher salary? Stock options in case Twitter somehow survives and goes public again?
tonetheman 4y ago
The problem is really just him. Had he hired an adult and done all of those changes with some thought instead of what he did I doubt anyone would have batted an eye. It does seem like they were heavy with staff but that reduction could have been thoughtfully and with more tact. At the point that you fired half of the staff and then the next day started asking those some people back speaks volume to the chaos HE is causing and probably killed motivation/morale of the staff left. Publicly firing someone on twitter for disagreeing with you is also just wrong. He just purchased the company and the amount of arrogance and gall to think you know more than someone who had been working on it for years is just staggering... misguided... hubris. There are really not enough words to say bad the optics appear. He absolutely should have talked to that person privately and said look do not attack me in public. Now tell me why I am wrong. But that would require some humility and humanity, which HE seems short of. Then that grade school letter that HE sent at midnight. Do you love me? Do you want to stay and work in super hard core mode? Again it is hard to fathom how stupid of a move that was. Engineering is needed and is core to keeping the place running and moving forward but that alone is not enough. He needs real product people who understand the product. HE clearly does not. All of it is fixable but HE needs out of it day to day. Immediately. Get/keep your core staff you need to keep things running. Step out of the visible light and let and adult run the company. Get some good product people and brainstorm and vet ideas for making it better in private. Then execute.

spamizbad 4y ago

Here's what CEOs are going to think: If Twitter stays operational with a skeleton crew: it's confirmation to them that engineering is overstaffed and Twitter was bloated. If Twitter starts breaking down: it's confirmation that Twitter was so overstaffed it became too bloated to produce reliable, resilient software and instead relied on its outsized headcount to keep things running rather than doing things "properly"

blitzar 4y ago
If Twitter stays operational with a zero crew - the crew they had, that built it were f'ing geniuses, artists even.
- ctrbg 4y ago
  This! If a system has minimal operational burden, that means it was designed by people who cared deeply about it and worked diligently building it. Those characteristics are rare commodity these days!
dboreham 4y ago
The bloat is deliberate. It comes from investors asking what you as a company manager are doing to put their money to work. One of the things you can do is hire more people, ostensibly to create more stuff to create more income. This lasts until the investors tell you you're being wasteful with their money by employing so many people. This is all that happened in the past couple of months.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I mean you're not wrong; a lot of tech companies have money to burn and nowhere to put it other than hiring more people and doing more engineering work and bets that may or may not end up anywhere. The meme goes that most are in optimizing advertisements and gathering / collating data, anyway. So while I don't disagree with Twitter downsizing - as the other tech companies have been doing recently - I don't think it was wise to go at it so aggressively, having the effect that there's now a walkout of staff that Twitter absolutely needs to run.

kevinwang 4y ago

Paul Graham also seemed to defend the Twitter CEO: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961?

mrtksn 4y ago
It's just people having different interests and expectations looking from different angles. He is is right though, most people don't have the experience of being in the shoes of a company CEO and are trying to analyse Musk actions within a mental model of a company created from the perspective of an employee. What's funny though, when I clicked that link Twitter failed to display the tweet content, giving me an error message about the tweet not available or something. It worked after a refresh. I don't remember this happening before.
- pfisch 4y ago
  This has been happening to me a lot since Elon bought twitter. Not sure what has changed specifically. I guess they shut down a bunch of their servers to save money before everyone quit?
  - lupire 4y ago
    Twitter invented the Fail Whale. Instability is not new with Elon.
    - pfisch 4y ago
      Yeah maybe 10 years ago. But this hasn't been happening to me for the last 4 years.
- MaxMatti 4y ago
  Happened lots of times to me in the last year, perhaps the issues that were present in my region are now also present in yours.
- kaba0 4y ago

FlyingSnake 4y ago

This somehow reminds me of the mimesis we saw in previous decades. 2nd rate CEOs copied all the wrong things Steve Jobs did for years and that took them nowhere. Black turtlenecks and new balance shoes isn't a shortcut to greatness.

lupire 4y ago
But now we have 3rd rate CEOs copying a fraud CEO. Steve Jobs had good taste and a healthy respect for the work of the engineers who he took credit from. Musk thinks (or at least nerds to project) he's the smartest engineer at his companies. Job was a proud dropout from his liberal arts degree. Musk got an econ debgree but has been lying his whole life about getting a Physics degree and being admitted to grad school.
- 0xbadc0de5 4y ago
  Regardless of what I think of the wisdom of his foray into social media, it's hard to ignore the obvious success that Musk has had in bringing electric vehicles to the mainstream and vastly lowering the cost to put mass into orbit through rapidly reusable launch vehicles. Likewise, Starlink is looking like it may well succeed in bringing internet connectivity to the most remote and under-served areas of the planet. That's not nothing - and I don't think one (or several) poorly-considered venture negates his past successes. Just makes him a flawed human like the rest of us.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    The main reason spacex can put mass into orbit for a smaller price than nasa is that as a private company (living off government subsidies) they don’t have to pay all the insurance upfront.
    - 0xbadc0de5 4y ago
      A private company started, funded and run by who? I don't think that claiming the Falcon 9's reusability is not a significant factor in SpaceX's comparatively low launch costs stands up to scrutiny. How could it not lower costs significantly? Likewise, claiming SpaceX benefits from government subsidies is a red herring - all aerospace companies benefit from government subsidies as the government is their primary customer.

cat_plus_plus 4y ago

They are fine for startups where you can expect a bootcamp for a chances of making it big. Here it seems to be a bootcamp just for privilege of working for his majesty Mr Musk for regular salary and uncertain future. Only idiots would slog for free. Well, obviously people may have a financial crunch or visa/health insurance dependencies, but only idiots would not look elsewhere even if they have to stick around for now.

BurningFrog 4y ago
Twitter can still make it big!

cowpig 4y ago

I may be naive, but I think that Elon was able to run SpaceX and Tesla this way because they both were companies with optimistic visions and by far the best (if not only) option for people who wanted to effect change in those respective industries. Twitter is not the same. What is the idealistic vision of Twitter right now? The whole "free speech" absolutism thing is thinly veiled political pandering. What is Twitter doing that's special which would make me want to work under significantly worse conditions than the myriad of other software jobs out there?

rr808 4y ago
I think this is it, good people will sacrifice a lot to work very hard on rockets or cool cars. Selling ads on social media not so much.
- Zigurd 4y ago
  Let's say you are an engineer at SpaceX who thinks Starship is a stainless steel Spruce Goose. Won't work. Waaay under-engineered. Space internet always fails. Etc. What would you do? Work for Boeing, with their management? A capricious boss and working on a fool's errand can look pretty good in comparison with typical defense aerospace alternatives. Tesla is a profitable public company that can offer serious upside to employees. Even if you think Tesla is overvalued, it is at least a conventional bet on whether it will continue to be overvalued.
- m_fayer 4y ago
  Agreed. While it's possible with some straining and twisting to make the case that Twitter represents an idealistic change for a better future, it doesn't take any straining at all to see the incredible potential of electrified transport and easy access to space. Also, with some straining and twisting, it's possible to make a case for Twitter changing the future (and present) for the worse. That's much harder to do with the other companies.
- m_fayer 4y ago
  It says a lot about Musk that he mistook people's desire to work hard for the cool projects he's behind for a desire to work hard for him.

xiphias2 4y ago

This guy is the same that started to peredict that Twitter will go down. He was clearly wrong, for me Twitter already works better than before (multiple people who I was following were shadow banned, now I can see what they were writing without going to their profile page one by one, Elon is one of the examples). I specifically set up Twitter to show all tweets from Elon (and some other people). It wasn't working, and now it works. I think this is a basic feature that doesn't need 8000 engineers to implement. It seems like the author of the tweet can't take ownership for a bad prediction.

raverbashing 4y ago
"clearly wrong", no, actually right https://downdetector.com/status/twitter/ https://downdetector.com/status/twitter/ It is beginning to flake
- VancouverMan 4y ago
  Why are you assuming that all, or even any, of those reports are valid? After opening that page, all it takes is a single button click to submit a report. The last time I reported an outage using that site, it didn't even have a confirmation prompt. I don't see anything preventing false reports from being filed, either.

deeblering4 4y ago

Of course they will, until something materially horrible happens. They are all members of the CEO club and will defend each other out of a vested interest in avoiding knock-on effects. Why would they want to introduce additional volatility?

dandanua 4y ago

The free world should look very closely at this incident in its pursuit of general AI development. Suppose some company has developed a super powerful AI system, which became crucial for a lot of public services, like healthcare, city planning, infrastructure routines (e.g. energy and transportation), etc. Then a guy with hyper-inflated ego and shady financial assets (probably supplied by fascists dictatorships) buys this company. He then fires all employees and takes control of everything, eventually ruining everything to the ground, making the life of millions of people miserable. Is this what our societies want to allow in the future?

nvln 4y ago

If you are bleeding a billion a year, you are not going to survive without drastic changes to culture, mission and focus. Making the engineering team nimble, hyper-focused and startup like is definitely a good solution. Pushing for revenue and profitability is great. The lead-up to all this, the utter lack of any grace, the public spats with employees, users and advertisers have made the whole thing a toxic spectacle. The sycophant brigade is exacerbating the problem. The product, engineering and services will bounceback / survive. (Remember the fail whales and the twittocalypse?). The cultural damage and toxic waste is going to be a tough one to clean up. I wouldn't have imagined a scenario where Meta looks relatively angelic compared to twitter.

sn0w_crash 4y ago

The purpose is to fire or force self-termination of anyone who is not a 110% Elon fanboy who believes in building a new Twitter. Whether or not that’s a good idea is debatable.

sys_64738 4y ago

Twitter isn’t a startup and startups CEOs generally want young people without a family who will slave endlessly for the cause. Elon tried this with Twitter but the smarter employees said Nah and left. Work to live and not live to work. If the latter is you then reassess your priorities as you’re only young once but have a lifetime to regret your choices.

tennisflyi 4y ago

Ultimately? Yeah. Overall, y'all spoiled.