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If you (still) work at Twitter and you can code, head to the HQ now
- hello_friendos 4y agoThe world cup is in two days -- how will Twitter cope with the largest amount of traffic it sees all year? Why fire the majority of employees right before this major event?
- speedgoose 4y agoI think it's not his concern at the moment.
- chrisseaton 4y agoAre football fans really a big part of the Twitter user base?
- partiallypro 4y agoFootball Twitter is pretty big, but I don't think it's big enough to cause a big dent.
- crooked-v 4y agoTwitter experiences massive usage surges every year during the World Cup.
- acomms 4y agoEvery month in fact!
- Beldin 4y agoWhich sport? Football's world cup is once every 4 years...
- chrisseaton 4y ago> every year during the World Cup Wat?
- rhino369 4y agoI don't know about soccer, but American sports news is hugely tied up with twitter. It's replaced the sports page of the news paper, ESPN, and even sports radio. I imagine it's the same for international football.
- hfbff 4y agoFootball fans are a sizable group in pretty much in every social network
- jacquesc 4y agoI can't actually imagine watching NFL without using Twitter during commercials (or after something crazy happens). It's actually quite spectacular World Cup is definitely going to surge traffic
- spookie 4y agoI would guess so. As long as you are doing business outside North America, this is a fair concern to have.
- chrisseaton 4y agoAt least in the UK Twitter was mostly politicians, journalists, and tech.
- NaturalPhallacy 4y agoThe largest amount of traffic twitter has ever received was November 7th after his takeover.
- somehnguy 4y agoDo we have any real evidence of this or just what Elon tweets? Not sarcastic - I've just only seen his tweets saying that I don't believe the things he says.
- r721 4y ago>In an email for remote Twitter engineers, Elon Musk says he wants to speak to people on video ("only those who cannot physically get to Twitter HQ are excused") but "if possible, I would encourage you to fly to SF to present in person." He'll be at the office until midnight. https://twitter.com/ZoeSchiffer/status/1593665774744350721 https://twitter.com/ZoeSchiffer/status/1593665774744350721
- buildbot 4y agoThis shows how out of touch he is - fly, right now, possibly across the country, just to please me. He has no concept or care of how much that might cost or disrupt someones life.
- jmeister 4y ago
- drchopchop 4y agoLawyers and bankers a) don't fly on their own dime, b) have huge potential financial upside in getting those deals done.
- sparrish 4y agoThese employees are in the same situation. a) will be using Twitter expenses to fly (company credit card or reimbursed) b) may keep their 6-figure jobs.
- eropple 4y agoCould you explain to me who you think is processing reimbursements when AR/AP seems to have all quit? Ditto for company cards--most company cards I've had have fallback personal obligations if the company refuses to pay for a charge. What assurances do any of these people have that they won't be stuck with the check? A Twitter developer can get a "6-figure job" just about anywhere pretty quickly, and many can get ones that haven't just gutted their total comp by going private. What's the point, exactly?
- radicaldreamer 4y agoFeels like Elon has gotten a bizarre conspiracy into his head where there are phantom employees on the payroll or something...
- DimitriPetrova 4y agoThe entire payroll team resigned yesterday so that's probably correct for the moment.
- CoastalCoder 4y agoThat's a pretty huge deal if true. How confident are you about that?
- badwolf 4y agohttps://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-payroll-finance-department-resigns-en-masse-under-elon-musk-2022-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-payroll-finance-depa...
- pifm_guy 4y agoIt is almost but not quite true.
- halfmatthalfcat 4y agoThere seems to be some consensus in the Twittersphere that this is the case.
- chipgap98 4y agoIts been thrown around a lot on Twitter from recently departed employees and a couple other tech people who have been pretty accurate about Twitter news, but I haven't seen it carried by any major media sites.
- sidewndr46 4y agoI'm guessing they were just offered a half-decent severance and didn't want to work there anyways?
- jnwatson 4y agoI got the impression that a majority of folks left took the severance offer. This means he’s looking to cut even more. Who is going to be left?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- halfmatthalfcat 4y agoImagine thinking you can judge anything about a developer (especially Senior/Staffs) from screenshots of code. Elon has truly lost the plot.
- dshpala 4y agoThat would be nice. I know a senior developer that doesn't actually do anything, he had like 2 small CLs this year. But apparently he can't be fired, so he is just there, increasing work load for everyone else.
- jvanderbot 4y agoDoes he not do anything, or does he do things you don't see? How do you know?
- teaearlgraycold 4y agoHow does he get away with doing almost nothing? Why can't he be fired?
- jnwatson 4y agoLots of staff devs do nothing but coordinate and plan technology.
- eddsh1994 4y ago> Lots of staff devs do nothing but coordinate and plan technology. "coordinate and plan technology" can be a huge amount of effort, vastly greater than "nothing".
- drewbeck 4y ago"A lot of staff devs do nothing but critical organizational work"
- fknorangesite 4y ago> Lots of staff devs do nothing but their jobs.
- someguy212 4y agoGuess that means the office is no longer closed. I just hope whoever processes severance checks is still working.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y agoPerhaps it is still closed and no one told him. The movie is going to be great.
- smt88 4y agoI don’t want to see this movie. So far, it’s an entitled and mentally-ill man-child learning that all the praise he’s gotten in recent years is for other people’s work, and he’s not a domain expert on every type of technology. I think we all deal with enough of that on a small scale to be sick of it.
- karmakurtisaani 4y agoI'm afraid it's a bit optimistic to assume he's learning anything here..
- FireBeyond 4y ago> I just hope whoever processes severance checks is still working. In the dotcom era, I was in the middle of a mass layoff. At the meeting, "everybody go back to your desk and dial extension 1234, and you will get a message with your employment status, instructions and next steps". PBX crashed. PBX took a while being brought back up because, well, the people responsible for supporting it wanted to find out whether _they_ were some of those laid off before deciding whether they wanted to bring it back up.
- someguy212 4y agoI'm not enjoying how many comparisons lately I am hearing to the dotcom era.
- castrodd 4y agoDid Elon lead his other companies this way and we just didn’t know? Or has he suddenly lost his ability to make good decisions?
- adastra22 4y agoThis is probably eyewash to flush out leakers. Sent different emails with changed details.
- butterlesstoast 4y agoEven if this is eyewash to flush out leakers... why spend the time doing this as the owner of the company? There seems to be a lot more important work they could be tackling on instead of being a meme lord to a bunch of 14 year olds.
- pifm_guy 4y agoThe IT department might have sent the email, not Elon himself...
- klyrs 4y agoAnybody competent in IT wouldn't be asking for screenshots of code. They'd know how to access the repos touched by a given user.
- TheHappyOddish 4y agoThat wouldn't be relevant if it were for entrapment purposes, would it?
- karaterobot 4y agoIn fairness, being a meme lord to a bunch of 14 year olds has been a big part of his playbook so far, and by some metrics it has worked a treat.
- 4y ago
- zamalek 4y agoI can barely believe this man started a spaceflight company. He must have had some incredibly subordinates to pull that off; not only did they have to deal with him, but they also had to bootstrap spaceflight.
- pydry 4y agoI'm seriously wondering if this is drug related. I dont think he was always this erratic.
- zamalek 4y agoSpecifically the drugs required to stave off sleep, and the psychological effects of lack of sleep.
- DabbyDabberson 4y agoThat single puff of a joint on JRE definitely decreased his IQ by 40-80 points.
- artificial 4y agoThe one that he didn't inhale?
- jareds 4y agoRealizing you may have thrown away billions has a way of adding stress.
- InitialLastName 4y agoHe didn't throw it away, he's working on donating it to improving global public discourse by eliminating Twitter.
- Animats 4y agoUp until he was seen smoking pot, he seemed to be doing OK. Since then, he's been weird.
- itsthecourier 4y agoPlenty of smooth talkers are gonna be rooted out soon
- phailhaus 4y agoHis strategy for rooting out smooth talkers is to let them just talk about what they've done?
- butterlesstoast 4y agoElon has this bizarre conspiracy in his head where he thinks software engineers don't do anything until he realizes they do everything. Btw, a dev build is in prod right now. Or someone forgot to minimize the JS. Tons of import map issues.
- danrocks 4y agoIs it really that bizarre of a conspiracy? If you browse Blind for a day you kind of lose the faith in software engineering as a profession. People proud for making $400k while working 5 hours a week.
- Macha 4y agoI'd suggest the problem there is reading Blind uncritically. There's at least as many trolls as serious posters
- halfmatthalfcat 4y agoBlind is an alternate reality and a fraction of the market. A lot of people on Blind completely misrepresent themselves and have either worked really hard to get there or are just skilled. Sure some paper chase but using Blind as a gauge of anything is a mistake.
- time_to_smile 4y agoWhat Blind shows is that for a portion of the population TC is just a game. Sure they have "skills" but a lot of those skills are grinding leetcode, creating referral networks, and otherwise becoming skilled at getting hired and surviving in a large FAANG. In my experience leetcode has surprisingly low correlation with programming ability and most definitely software engineering. It's not just Blind either. I've been surprised how many young people aspire to "work at a FAANG" as a goal, and software is just a convenient way to get there.
- tempest_ 4y agoAt this point I am curious how long Twitter could run with no one at the helm. How long can the systems chug along with no one watching.
- DabbyDabberson 4y agoServing the UI, basic tweeting UX is trivial compared to operating the ads platform they have.
- justusthane 4y agoWe'll find out! I suspect not long.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoThe thing I don't get is the hyper-focus on salient or "fancy" code. We're not all Jeff Dean and most code is bland and boring plumbing work anyways. Even in awesome ML powered systems, it's still 99% bland foundation, 1% cool algorithms. Hell, as a manager, you don't want only "rockstar" developers because they'll become bored working on the plumbing code, which again, is most work. From datascience there's the phrase "Everyone wants to do the model work, not the data work" and it sounds like he wants only those people? Why?
- rich_sasha 4y agoIt's simple, Elon Musk has no clue what he is doing. Can he code.to save his life? Does he know anything about engineering from Tesla or SpaceX, beyond catchphrases?
- bcrosby95 4y agoAll personal accounts I've heard of from people that work there are yes, he does know about engineering and is incredibly smart. But that doesn't mean you know how to run a social media company, and trying to pivot Twitter's work culture on a dime is going to be chaotic. FWIW I think he's a toxic asshole, but that doesn't mean he's an idiot.
- wittycardio 4y agoHe might not be an idiot but that doesn't mean he knows how software works either
- dont__panic 4y agoSmart and idiot might not be mutually exclusive. I've known a lot of smart people who can act idiotic in certain circumstances. Elon could be very smart when it comes to engineering... but idiotic when it comes to running Twitter.
- rich_sasha 4y ago
- dshpala 4y agoI like the spirit of that though. Reminds me my startup days.
- avereveard 4y agoI look forward to when they will need to find the key to their domain for renewal. Or any certificate really.
- frou_dh 4y agoHow long until Musk starts posting tweets implying that he's a world-class Scala expert?
- pickovven 4y agoSeems pretty clear the goal is to create a cult of subservience at Twitter.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Animats 4y agoDoes Twitter have a management team right now? Who are the top 5 people there? Does anyone know? Musk can't do it all.
- r721 4y agoAccording to Vox: "Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, Sriram Krishnan, Alex Spiro, Jared Birchall" https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/11/12/23452396/elon-musk-twitter-jason-calacanis-david-sacks-alex-spiro-jared-birchall-inner-circle-war-room https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/11/12/23452396/elon-musk-twi...
- tonetheman 4y agoI would not want to be on that list. If it does tank they were part of it. Hopefully somewhere in the twitter headquarter they are yelling at him to stop. It would be great once times passes to hear their side.
- dilyevsky 4y agoTwo of them are on All-in podcast with Chamath. It did not sound like they opposed anything Elon was doing.
- haolez 4y agoWhat if Twitter actually succeeds after this? I'm not saying that it's likely, but what if? Let's imagine it as a thought exercise. What will this say about the current state of software engineering in startups and big techs?
- conradfr 4y agoThat the people who quit or got fired apparently created a very resilient system with easy to understand code.
- googlryas 4y agoWhy would you assume it was them, and not the people who didn't get fired or quit?
- jvanderbot 4y ago-- In this comment I said a dumb thing about stock price for a private company --
- lotsofpulp 4y ago>a stock rebound There is no publicly listed stock that can rebound. Any new investor will surely want to look at the books first:
- duped 4y agoThe stock can't rebound, it's a private company now. Whatever price it's available for on the private equity market will be unknown and/or fake. Twitter stock didn't tank, it actually stayed really high because he was locked in to purchase it well beyond the market value (as the entire sector was falling). It oscillated a bit, but you couldn't really call it a tank (especially in light of how the rest of tech was doing at the time)
- kemayo 4y agoSort of reminds me of the Freenode drama last year. The outcome of which might be informative -- almost everyone moved off Freenode, and all their new non-IRC platform stuff seems to have vanished from the web by now. EDIT: I assure you, this made sense in response to the non-stock part of the now-edited-away parent comment. :D
- rchaud 4y agoEven as long-time skeptic of Musk's ballyhooed business/engineering acumen, I have no clue what's going on here. Surely nobody at this level could be this brazenly incompetent when it comes to communicating a vision and building some sense of unity. Even the biggest fakers in the world are self-aware about the importance of maintaining the illusion of power and control. If you had told me that these emails were being written by Kanye as he scrambled to find a new shoe partner after Adidas, I would have believed you.
- belfalas 4y agoYou truly wonder at this? Look at the state of the world the last few years. If you’re lucky or brazen enough they may even let you run a whole country! Qualifications make the people suffer less but historically have never been required for leaders in any venue. In Europe awful kings were simply born to the throne and people had to accept it, for example. We remember ‘X the Cruel’ but none of their subjects. The victors write the history books.
- colechristensen 4y agoIt's funny how historically a lot of "kings" were more like dictatorial mayors of small cities to largish collections of huts and many great battles were actually more like cattle raids. The only reason Musk is getting away with any of this is that we've got the pending recession going on and others doing layoffs to jumping jobs isn't as easy for those who remain. I certainly would never go through that dance to prove my worth.
- jonathankoren 4y ago> The only reason Musk is getting away with any of this Is he though? There are reports of very few people left, and I suspect many of those are stuck on h1bs, rather than there by allegiance to the new mad king.
- colechristensen 4y agoI think what happens is his strange behavior is proportional to how little he sleeps. He has a spectrum between mildly unusual to full Kanye. While I'm usually not in favor of professional unions for programmers, I think that's the only option at Twitter at this point unless people are ready to quit en mass.
- chasd00 4y agohe's probably going to start handing out TODOs and randomly pointing at people and saying "now you're in charge of X and you, over there, are in charge of Y". Like a realtime re-org.
- Vvector 4y agoHow much new code does a 280 character tweet require?
- seydor 4y ago... but maybe if he got a medical diagnosis for insanity, maybe he could not have legally bought twitter ?
- tedunangst 4y agoHe is also currently in court to prove that he earns his pay at Tesla. A declaration of insanity would not be helpful there.
- nerdjon 4y agoDoes this mean he is actually looking to do more firings After the massive exodus yesterday?!? This is just... Honestly at this point this is just fascinating to watch from the outside and I feel bad for everyone impacted. Particularly those that had no choice but to stay (Visa's)
- plorg 4y agoFor better or worse I would assume the opposite: a great number of the engineering leads are gone and he's looking for people to replace them. If that's the case, though, just being an epic coder will not necessarily make you successful as a leader.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yumraj 4y agoSo at the end of all this, only those with visa issues or the ones that are really bad at their job and hence desperate, will be left at Twitter. I guess he’ll be able to drive them hardcore. Personally, expect for those with visa issues, I won’t have much respect for anyone who still remains. Unless of course, some of the good ones might be able to really renegotiate their comp and contract at this time.
- gausswho 4y agoImagining the recruiter algorithms seeing Twitter employment contiguous from 2021 through 2023 and going... hmmm.....
- michpoch 4y agoI am curious if he tried the same at Tesla or SpaceX: "Hello dear mechanical engineers, please bring photos all the cars/rockets that you created in the last 6 months".
- Victerius 4y agoIf you're still on HN and you can hack, head to YCombinator's HQ. Bring photos of all your hacks from the last 6 months.
- swamp40 4y agoI would think that would work rather well, since it is 100% visual.
- sidewndr46 4y agoI'm not that type of engineer, but I suspect it would be much easier as well. An ME could just show a picture of whatever part he designed. If it's part of the car's running gear it is unlikely to be something un-needed. If that person was an EE, they could just show a picture of the wiring harness potentially if they built that. The car is basically just a static display without that.
- boringg 4y agoI have to assume there's a website up somewhere that's putting Twitter on death watch. Who has it's location and if it isn't up, someone should try and get one going! (In reference to systemic software issues, not employees leaving even though there is correlation).
- snoopy_telex 4y agoistwitterdown.com
- boringg 4y agoFair - I was hoping for a view of things as it deteriorates not necessarily absolute.
- briga 4y agoKinda reminiscent of how dictators like Stalin and Mao surrounded themselves with sycophantic yes-men. Elon talks a lot about free speech but is that really possible when he's acting like a tyrant?
- mmcgaha 4y agoIf he is trying to cut staff, it would be easier to just institute a drug policy and fire everyone who tests positive. That is going to hit about 25% in any company that isn't already doing drug tests.
- FireBeyond 4y agoYeah, I'm amused when people say he's all liberal/libertarian. The only person allowed to smoke weed at a Musk company is Musk. Everyone else better piss clean.
- buggeryorkshire 4y agoIncluding Elon?
- tibbydudeza 4y agoWhat a glorious entertaining shit show - nobody could have predicted this - Jason Calcanis probably send this one.
- lijogdfljk 4y agoI'd love to see some code snippets that he likes.. because i can't grasp what would make good screenshots in this context. If i were Elon i'd want to see "dumb" looking code which brings together a larger, complex thing in a simple way. The larger picture is complex, but composed of simple primitives. Every piece looks unimpressive because experience taught the right abstractions to write things in a simple, testable and scalable manner. Yet Elon wants to fit that in a screenshot? I don't understand. I'm glad i don't work at Twitter.
- chasd00 4y agoyeah how much can you derive from a screenshot anyway? code formatting, variable naming? any references to classes/data structures/whatever not defined in the screenshot can't be attributed to the screenshot owner. maybe everyone is getting fired for putting '{' on a newline??? i have no idea.
- anotheracctfo 4y agoProbably exactly that. Looking for devs who used an if statement instead of a ternary operator. Not realizing that its sometimes really fucking useful to have readable code. Or the opposite lol, it's all subjective anyways.
- wellareyousure 4y agoIn my experience, things like code formatting and style were really predictive of the person’s contributions to a team. I’m not saying he’s making a strategically wise move. But there are potentially another 100,000 developers in this industry who are in meaningful jeopardy over their jobs, because they are truly bad at it.
- scarface74 4y ago> In my experience, things like code formatting and style were really predictive of the person’s contributions to a team. How would you “measure my contributions to my team” based on my code when I spent weeks dealing with larger strategy issues as a senior developer and working with other developers and being involved in the sales process?
- nearmuse 4y agoOh so that's the "extreme programming" I have been hearing about.
- leet_thow 4y agoUm, actually it's Xtreme
- almog 4y ago> ...please email me a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code. Holding my fingers crossed that he receives many many screenshots... of Leetcode.
- Lapsa 4y ago"most salient lines of code" - just yesterday I joked that next thing Melon gonna do is pay for amount of lines of code. I mean - it's pretty close to that. just when you think there's no way it gets more absurd, dude magically appears with new craziness :D
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- xrayarx 4y agoAt this point, I’d like to see a tv show of all this in the vein of recent silicon valley shows like ‘The Dropout’ or ‘Super Pumped’
- jmyeet 4y agoIt's getting harder and harder to discredit the idea that this is the most well-crafted and effective $44 billion marketing campaign for socialism. We are seeing Elon speed running the lessons of: - There is no value without labor; - Labor organization is crucial to protecting workers; and - Meritocracy is a myth. SpaceX was always the primary cause for people deifying Elon but I think it's becoming clearer and clearer that SpaceX succeeded in spite of Elon not because of him. You literally could not make up the happenings at Twitter since Elon was forced to purchase it after impulsively agreeing to buy it. Between this and the elction we're seeing a bunch of fat Ls for Peter Thiel and his blood boys (JD Vance notwithstanding). I'm including Elon in this cabal (ever since X.com/Papal) as there's a lot of evidence that Thiel was whispering in Elon's ear about acquiring Twitter and may well have been instrumental in Elon shifting further and further right politically. Imagine for a second firing and losing 90% of your workforce in a month and then scrambling and begging to get some of them back as you realize they're essential. Thing is, this is only beginning. Wait until law enforcement and the government get involved (eg child safety, consent decree compliance). And on top of that Elon is taken mere weeks to completely destroy verification and then discover exactly why verification existed and is necessary. And today we have employees simultaneously locked out of the building (after ending remote work) and begging engineers to show up with screenshots of code. You couldn't write this stuff.
- whatever1 4y agoCapitalist learns the hard way that his company is worth nothing without its labor
- Benanov 4y agoI don't even know why one would bother. Oh you want me to justify my job? I have a better idea - how about you try to find someone else to do what I was doing, without my help. Good luck! --I don't work at Twitter
- magwa101 4y ago
- CrypticShift 4y agoIMHO (my first and I hope last Elon comment), at a higher level of cognition, Elon is just playing two simple games: maximum buzz (media game), and maximum control (politics game). All his public persona, including all that pre-acquisition drama, is just for maximum buzz (Who cares about a few hundred millions ?) All this post-acquisition drama is just for maximum control (over Twitter and ?). If this is the case, some superhuman resilience and confidence are certainly needed. And if you have them, it is just mind-boggling how you can generate and control such a colossal level of human activity and attention by using a few words here and there. I'm not trying to be condescending or original here. I'm really just refusing the idea that the inner-Elon is really as conflicted as it appears, so I'm refusing to react to his games (because as I can afford to, not like twitter employees for sure)
- bena 4y agoHe already has maximum control of Twitter. There is nothing more he can do to control Twitter. He is at maximum Twitter control.
- CrypticShift 4y agoTwitter is not just a corporation you buy. At the very least, it is also the life and labour of all it employees. So you can never have absolute control. There is always resistance.
- bena 4y agoMaybe the real Twitter was the friends we made along the way. If his goal was control of the hearts and minds of all the employees in the company, he's going about that poorly. The only people I see speak positively about what he's doing are people not working for Twitter at all.
- CrypticShift 4y ago> Maybe the real Twitter was the friends we made along the way. +1
- errantmind 4y agoI'm no Elon fan, but why does essentially everyone in these threads automatically assume he is wrong? Has no one here worked at companies where there was more dead weight than talent? Where 80% of the work being done is by 20% of the people, and there are whole teams that do almost nothing? What if there is no clean, efficient way to discover who should be fired and so Elon's fallback plan is to test for who really wants to continue working for the company vs. who is apathetic? I'm not saying it will necessarily work, but I'm also not going to assume he is grossly incompetent either.
- drchopchop 4y agoThat would make more sense if 1) he had a coherent plan 2) he could motivate the good 20% to stick around 3) he had some way to differentiate high vs low performers. Instead, he now gets an effectively random layoff, with potentially whole/important teams vanishing, and biased so that the best people (who can easily find jobs) are most incentivized to leave.
- b112 4y agohe had a coherent plan So if he doesn't share his actual plan with you, the media, and his competitors, he doesn't have a plan?
- sidibe 4y agoWhen has Elon not shared a plan? He tends to announce everything before they've even started working on.
- _ugfj 4y agoBased on leaked texts and his answers to personalities like catturd, he is in a right wing filter bubble and truly believes there was a censorship problem with Twitter. In a leaked text he was outright asked whether he could buy Twitter after Babylon Bee was suspended. https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1591813699840495616 https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1591813699840495616 He made an offer for Twitter at a nonsensical price and only went through with the sale because of the looming court case. Chances are extremely low there is a plan hiding in this mess.
- curiousgeorgio 4y agoElon is a genius - seriously. Having worked at similar companies myself, I have a pretty good sense for how this went down (mostly speculation of course): • On day 1, Elon probably talked privately with some of the head engineers at Twitter. He told them he wanted to trim the fat, and asked them how much could be cut while basically keeping the lights on and the website up (accepting some risk of temporary outages). • I'd bet money that some of them told him something like 80-90% of the staff could be cut. I think that's true of a lot of large companies. • Then Elon had the balls to actually move in that direction. Rather than make arbitrary cuts, he's letting people self-select. Obviously the company will lose some really good engineers as collateral damage, but for the most part, the dead weight will reveal themselves through silly shenanigans like this. Elon knows it's silly, but there's no graceful way to make such drastic moves. He's painting with broad strokes to clear the canvas and re-imagine Twitter as a startup. And I think it's brilliant. If you think he's out of his mind (as many commenters appear to think), show me your billions of dollars and multiple successful companies as proof that you know more about success than he does.
- DimitriPetrova 4y agoPast performance does not make every action an individual does correct.
- curiousgeorgio 4y agoThat's true, which is why I explained why I think he's making smart moves. Maybe he has departed from his usual trajectory towards success, but at this point (given his history), the burden of proof falls on the people who think he's lost his mind to explain precisely why they assume they know more than he does.
- golem14 4y agoI don't think this is genius, it's hard nosed decision making. I personally think he wants to move Twitter mostly on maintenance mode until he has cleaned house, and then slowly rehire when new features are more clear. For that, running on 20% staff might be actually ok. The key would be to retain the right people. And I'm not sure which filter I'd use.
- gigel82 4y agoComments talking about how Musk will look at those screenshots of code and somehow determine an employee's worth are hilarious. This obviously has nothing to do with evaluating a developer's quality; this is a classic move dictators do to determine who has chugged the kool-aid all the way (who are the most loyal and subservient underlings willing to demean themselves to this level). Nothing more, nothing less.
- MarkMarine 4y agoThat's an interesting take I hadn't considered, thank you.
- curiousgal 4y ago> demean themselves to this level I guess we have different definitions of what's actually demeaning.
- ncallaway 4y agoIf you think Elon's behavior towards Twitter employees since the takeover isn't abusive and demeaning then we absolutely have different definitions of the word!
- hamburglar 4y agoAs a 30 year software veteran, I'd find it pretty demeaning to be called into a lineup where my CEO was going to judge me based on a verbal quiz about my past 6 months of code and 10 screenshots, and likely fire people based on that assessment.
- bb88 4y agoI'm in that range too. Not too many years ago, I was a fan of Elon. If I were a 5 year software veteran I might be a little different, particularly if I didn't personally know any VC's in the valley. It would literally be the opportunity of a lifetime. Unfortunately, I think this era of the "Big Ego" (Trump, etc) has been very detrimental to leaders, much in the way the Jobs biography was to leaders about a decade ago.
- lkrubner 4y ago10 years ago I was at a place where a new CEO came in and fired 80% of the tech team. It was a hard scramble for the surviving engineers, including me, and we had some episodes of being down, but we pulled through it and the site survived. I think a balanced view of Twitter right now is that Elon Musk has made some mistakes, but in the end, Twitter will be fine, and in 6 months it might be more profitable than ever before. The pros and cons work out something like this: con: Musk fired people recklessly, treating a global workforce as if it could all be treated under California fire-at-will laws. As such, Musk might face lawsuits and might have to pay out some damages. This is not a big deal. He has the money. He can pay. Musk probably violated the consent decree that Twitter had with the FTC. Again, Musk will probably face a lawsuit and he will probably have to pay. Again, not a big deal, he has the money. Musk fired or offered resignations to key team members. As such, in a crisis, Twitter may face some downtime. With key people missing, the ability to bounce back from a crisis will be slower than otherwise. But all this means is that Twitter will become unreliable again, as it was during the first 10 years of its existence. Not a big deal: it was popular even back when it was unreliable. Musk fired or offered resignations to key team members. As such, the roll out of new features will be slower than it might otherwise have been. In particular, his roll out of subscription features will be slower than he wanted. Musk could have made dramatic changes over 6 months and no one would have noticed except for industry insiders (including the type of people who read Hacker News). Instead, he wanted to reinvent Twitter in less than 6 weeks. This was a mistake, plain and simple. His actions came across as erratic, he made advertisers nervous, and as he has complained "Twitter has taken a huge revenue hit." But this will probably be temporary. In 6 months all of the advertisers will have returned. pro: It's likely that in 6 months advertising with be back to pre-Musk levels, but the staffing will be down at least 80%, so profits will be much higher than ever before.
- qwytw 4y ago> more profitable than ever before. Not if all the big advertisers leave... > In 6 months all of the advertisers will have returned Why? If the economy declines ad spending will fall and the industry is more competitive than ever, it's a buyers market. Also most seem to have left because they didn't want to be associated with Musk rather than due to technical/policy issues with Twitter itself. > his roll out of subscription features will be slower than he wanted Which is probably a good thing for Twitter, would move it to the pros parts.
- ijuz 4y agoWhile weird, that is probably the time and place where employees will get some equity or cash to stay on.
- kibwen 4y ago"I'll fire half the company to save on costs, then double the salary of everyone who's left!"
- erulabs 4y agoI think people miss the point with the "tell me what code you've written in the last 6 months" task. The idea is hopefully not to qualitatively quantify anyones work - the idea is to find folks who have nothing whatsoever to show, and yet have titles like "staff software engineer". Anyone who has worked at a large enough company knows there is a solid 10-15% of folks doing nothing. The new leadership probably asked the infrastructure team if they could keep the site online if all development stopped, and they probably said "easily". I don't think twitter is in any risk of disappearing - the real question is if velocity can be regained or not.
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- z3rgl1ng 4y ago
- deltarholamda 4y agoYeah, I read this as a stunt to sift out the people who are confident in their abilities and contributions from those who just kind of show up and do some minor edits. I have no idea how many people get through the code interviews at Big Tech and then think they've proved their value and just phone it in, but I guarantee it's not zero. If I have any particular concern it's that this sort of thing misses some real unsung heroes in any big technical project, i.e. the people who write good documentation and the people who chase down bugfixes. This is important work, but won't be captured by screenshots of code very well. "Here's a screenshot of where I fixed an off-by-one error, but it took two weeks of unraveling 137 microservices to find which RPC was guilty." Important, but not exactly impressive in the way one might think.
- sagebird 4y agoElon isn’t an idiot who has never been around real world software development. He will happily accept:” Here's a screenshot of where I fixed an off-by-one error, but it took two weeks of unraveling 137 microservices to find which RPC was guilty.” Not to mention, it plays into his perception that twitter architecture is too bloated to be productive. He is likely looking for people who have zero or less than 10 things to show. I bet you could squeeze by with one big thing to show and nothing else if it is explained. This sort of net would catch lots of zero screenshot responses for multiple reasons- I doubt there will be any scrutiny applied.
- aww_dang 4y agoOutside of HN the impression I've had is that Twitter is an unprofitable company which is overstaffed. There's also an image of idle employees pursuing political crusades unrelated to the bottom line. Elon is cutting the workforce. The short email doesn't seem out of place. On HN Elon is some kind of villain. Except he's also incompetent, so he's not a super villain. More of bumbling idiot destroying higher SV ideals which are beyond his comprehension. How gauche of him. In the RW media he is ocassionally portrayed as a savior, who is going to stick it to the libs, right where they deserve it the most. In their social media oligarchy! Elsewhere in the media he is an un-PC problematic figure who foretells the rise of fascism, just you wait, this time it is really going to get bad! Did you know he lived in apartheid ZA? Overall this just seems absurd. I cannot understand the fascination with him. Elon has become more interesting than all of the shit-posting on Twitter itself. I don't believe he's a villain, an incompetent, a savior or the catalyst for totalitarianism. He's just an above average troll with extraordinary money. He bought Twitter, a messaging and microblogging site. He's trying to clean house, maybe even turn a profit? Why is the Internet obsessed? Are partisans so emotionally invested in the outcome that they cannot turn away? Will his success or failure validate their tribal identity?
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- pschuegr 4y agoThis is a great way to reduce the workforce to high-performing junior staff and people who like to build code castles. A better way to find high performers would be "send me an email summarizing the code that you've deleted and why". (Not saying that doesn't have it's own problems, there's ultimately no substitute for understanding)
- mrloop 4y agoI was thinking the same thing, screenshot of commits with most code deleted https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
- rexreed 4y agoWhy and how is Twitter still running? Could it still run on a skeleton crew? If so, were all those people who left needed? Truly asking. If the answer is no, then why isn't Twitter already collapsing?
- dragontamer 4y agoThe base code and functionality of Twitter will keep working, because code is code. My HTTP server doesn't need me to check in on it pretty much ever. Its changes to the world that require code changes. Ex: when the new spam-companies figure out the new anti-spam techniques Twitter implemented last month, then those spam-companies will shoot up to the top of Twitter. And there will be no one to stop them, analyze the new spam or figure out how to stop it.
- holyharvey 4y agoI don’t know fellas, this Elon guy sounds pretty based to me. All snark aside, I can sympathize with his request. Every company does this, he’s asking for people to show they’ve been productive.
- glhaynes 4y agoEvery company doesn’t ask you to bring screenshots of your source code.
- dsugarman 4y agoMan, people are so assumptive and negative about one of the world's greatest innovators today. Hasn't he earned any respect? I know layoffs are really tough but does anyone really believe there was no reason for them at Twitter? He's got a tough task in front of him and getting to the barebones team of mission driven people seems like a plausible first step towards a better tomorrow. The assumption that only the worst employees will stay seems odd to me, I would bet that there's some population of employees that believe in their new ceo and believe what he is doing is necessary for a chance at a thriving company.
- unsupp0rted 4y agoI give him a lot of leeway, but it's not what he's doing so much as how he's doing it. The sloppiness of it gives people an excuse to pile on.
- short_sells_poo 4y agoI'm sorry but the only thing Musk has shown in the last couple of years is blatant market manipulation, kneejerk reactions and poor choices. It's great that he "supports" enterprises like SpaceX and Tesla, but more and more evidence points to these companies succeeding despite him, not thanks to him. This is anecdotal of course, but pretty much every single one of my friends - even the staunch Muskovites - are really scratching their heads at his behavior and choices. He may well be the awkward genius that was his prior image, but right now he is being widely perceived as a tantrum throwing privileged man child who had success fired at him from a high speed rotary cannon and he managed to avoid destroying it by the skin of his teeth. The way he publicly talks about his employees and how his approach seems to be to human beings can only be described as sociopathic. Again, there may well be an army of overpaid engineers at Twitter just twiddling their thumbs, but the expectation that people will somehow fall over themselves and sacrifice their personal life so that Elon Musk can add another couple of dozens of billions to his wealth is preposterous. He went from being an advocate for humankind to coming across as a robber baron who cares nothing for the wellbeing of those who work for him. As if it was somehow a privilege to work for him.
- ncallaway 4y ago> Hasn't he earned any respect? In the past, I respected him a fair amount. He did, in my mind, earn respect. However, his behavior over the last several years, has burned that respect to the ground. His behavior over the last several months has dug a deep pit into the earth. And his behavior over the last several weeks has dumped the ashes of that respect into the ground and covered it with concrete. You can earn respect, but you can also lose respect. He's done so much to lose every ounce of respect he ever earned.
- andreysolsty 4y agoIf there’s one thing I’ve learnt from this whole debacle, it’s that US employment law is fucked. I can’t believe worker protections are so poor in such a forward thinking, modern country. The things he’s getting away with sound like something out of a Victorian factory.
- smw 4y agoI'm not sure we're forward looking or modern? We have no trains. Sprawl. Won't build housing. A third of the country seems to believe we should aspire to be in a Margaret Atwood novel.
- Kon-Peki 4y agoNobody knowledgeable is going to argue that US employment law is great, but in much of the US worker protections are targeted towards those that do not make a lot of money. Twitter's software developers make a lot of money. The only similarity to a Victorian factory worker is that they have two arms and legs (but all of their fingers and toes).
- oneeyedpigeon 4y agoIs it just software developers that he's fired, though? I was under the impression he's been firing from pretty much every department.
- googlryas 4y agoWhy should a private company not be allowed to lay off staff that they don't need or want? If the government cares so much about workers, why don't they take care of them themselves, like with a guaranteed job or training program, instead of forcing other individuals to do so?
- lesuorac 4y agoWell, it's more of you can move fast and break things and then next decade the regulators will catch up with you. In this case it looks like it'll be Dec 8th when he'll have to show up in court about all of this. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/65680829/cornet-v-twitter-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/65680829/cornet-v-twitt...
- Balgair 4y agoNow he's saying that he wants people to fly in to present their code to him by midnight. On the Friday before Thanksgiving. Into one of United's big hubs. With 14 hours notice. And a lot of cold fronts over the eastern seaboard. Likely more like 10 hours with travel times and the line of potential people that are presenting. I'm honestly gobsmacked. Look, if you're on of those engineers and are unfortunate enough to have to go through this insane reapplication for your job on ~1/2 day's notice, then I think you owe it to the poor people that are trying to fly in to drag this thing out as long as possible and stall, Stall, STALL.
- m_ke 4y agoHe's really asking all 5 of the remaining engineers to come meet him at his office.
- dont__panic 4y agoReally taking that two-pizza team idea to the extreme!
- fknorangesite 4y agoRight? The only way this shit show would be worthwhile is if it were starring John Candy.
- darkteflon 4y agoExcellent, thanks.
- CoastalCoder 4y agoI miss John Candy as much as the next guy, but I'm not getting the joke.
- galdosdi 4y agoPlanes, Trains, and Automobiles
- user3939382 4y agoWhen you’re the richest guy in the world you have big enemies and friends, whose tentacles of power reach far and wide and can move populations for or against you. I have enough executive experience to be 100% sure that none of us have a complete picture of what’s going on behind the scenes, with his political or business relationships. It’s been fascinating to see how pliable public opinion is with the influence of these media stories. The generally more intelligent crowd on HN is clearly no exception.
- guelo 4y ago> influence of these media stories The influences are from Elon's actions and tweets as well as leaks from insiders. Media conspiracy theories are not relevant here.
- user3939382 4y agoIt’s not a “conspiracy theory” why do you think Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post? Because he loves journalism?
- themacguffinman 4y agoBecause of the prestige and status that comes with it, hardly an unprecedented reason.
- toofy 4y ago> Because he loves journalism? i mean. yes. while im sure there is an investment piece in their as well, do you think its unreasonable to say journalism is immensely important to a healthy society?
- HDThoreaun 4y agoBecause it was cheap and he values journalism
- ryanwaggoner 4y agoYou don't need 100% certainty of everything behind the scenes to decide whether this is a disaster. Maybe Musk will prove us all wrong, but right now it looks like a disaster. FWIW, what I've heard from friends inside Twitter matches the reporting.
- mongol 4y agoWhat are salient lines of code? Would be good to see some examples. I think there must be such lines on Github.
- m463 4y agoWhat kind of things did steve jobs ask of people when he returned to apple? Is elon just following his playbook?
- zac23or 4y agoWork on the software is very difficult to judge. In a company I worked for, only very technical groups get an A+ grade in the internal evaluation, because the evaluators don't understand anything. If you worked on the FFMPG + some obscure acronyms, get an A+ and never delay the delivery. But if you worked on a website, everyone would get in the way, delay the delivery, and you'd get a D-. I understand the difficulties of judging and some crazy systems created to help with that. But checking how many lines of code someone writes is more than crazy. My last tasks as a developer in the last few weeks. - I created an index - I put a line of code in a login controller to fix a bug A lot of my work is helping co-workers with setups and stuff like that. In many companies, my work did not leave a record. I don't stand a chance with bosses like Elon Musk. Musk is probably testing the developers' fidelity, and if true, he's crazier than judging someone by code line count. Required: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...
- lsy 4y agoI don't understand the strategy behind creating an atmosphere where the threat of termination is so regularly deployed to drive action. When I think of the best engineers I have ever worked with, I suspect every one would be turned off by Musk's behavior and leave, not just because of how they themselves were being treated unprofessionally, but because of a strong sense of decency regarding how their coworkers are being treated. If this goes on long enough, who will be left to work at this company? Can engineers effectively collaborate to create great products that appeal to a broad global market, if they are all self-proclaimed "hardcore rockstars" who are at least willing to overlook, if not excited about the mistreatment of their colleagues?
- 6510 4y agoI'm no expert but I think the valuation of Twitter was based on how big they are in every sense: Have big buildings, have many employees, have many users, many readers. Do you actually need thousands of people to run a blog engine? How does the website continue to work with so few employees left? Am I wrong to think the right person could write and run a blog service alone?? If we (like Musk) look at everything wechat does Twitter is rather silly. Specially in the US coders should be able to do the thinking for a company. It was not on its way to become a super-app, it took 2 years to do an edit button? He just wants people who can chop wood. If he turns out to be right only time will tell. He made success from things that don't work often enough. We should expect that to be plan B?
- robocat 4y agoWhat is the right way to remove 75% of staff? What selection criteria do you pick (the type of employee you want to keep), and what heuristics will strongly select for the criteria you chose? For example, metrics that measure productivity or actions that filter for loyalty. A metric could be hours of internal meetings per week! Can anyone comment on a successful downsizing they were involved in? The scary part about Twitter, is that the selection pressures seem to be mostly for fealty to Elon, or selecting for people that hate the new environment but cannot leave (medical insurance, financial risk, H1B, fear of applying for new job, etcetera).
- maxlamb 4y agoTwitter is now officially the Hunger Games for software engineers, complete with all doors being locked so people can’t escape. Maybe when Musk said he wants Twitter to become more of a video/content site, he meant bringing a film crew to Twitter, turn HQ into a real life hunger games for the few engineers left, and make a show out of it!
- wfaler 4y agoI'm wondering if this erratic behaviour is Musk having some sort of breakdown over how things are unravelling? * Currently that revenue is cratering and things are not going well. Bankrupcy is a real risk with the high debt servicing cost for the take-over. * If the value is going quickly in the direction of $0, banks will call the loans. * If banks call the loans, he has to sell Tesla stock to pay the $44bn. * If Musk starts to sell Tesla stock at that scale, the value of Tesla could quickly crater in the current climate. It's the last bubble-stock of this cycle, still 80% way to go down, if valued like its auto industry peers. The outcome of that could be that even selling his entire holding of Tesla, Musk could end up broke, and potentially still owe money from the Twitter take-over. It would make the wealth destruction of FTX look like a Sunday stroll in the park.
- genev 4y agoCan't he just let Twitter die and move on?
- jollyllama 4y agoHere's that alternative to the coding interview that everyone has always asked for.
- readthenotes1 4y agoWhat an opportunity to bring a blank page and claim to have deleted thousands of lines of clutter while still delivering functionality
- Uhhrrr 4y agoUsually when you pull off a large negative LoC change there's some pretty good code to show off in place of it.
- readthenotes1 4y agoHe only wanted one picture though...
- mgarfias 4y agoGod I’m glad the interview process there went no where
- robotburrito 4y agoHow the heck are you supposed to look at a screen shot of code and determine much from that?
- poulpy123 4y agoThat's a classical strategy to get obedient subordinates
- pifm_guy 4y agoI can't think of a single salient feature added to twitter in the last 6 months. Which does raise questions what all those coders were working on... The fact half of them have been fired and twitter is still running shows that they weren't all required for maintenance.
- iz4e 4y agoThis is a loyalty test for the cult of Elon. Doubt he's gonna actually read the emails deeply.