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What 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

by haolez 4y ago

What 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 ago
That the people who quit or got fired apparently created a very resilient system with easy to understand code.
- googlryas 4y ago
  Why 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 ago
  The 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 ago
  Sort 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
mikkergp 4y ago
Ben Horowitz write this thing about wartime vs peace time ceos and I think it was particularly salient: https://hbr.org/2011/04/peacetime-ceos-vs-wartime-ceos https://hbr.org/2011/04/peacetime-ceos-vs-wartime-ceos For a long time tech was eating the world and the more engineers you had the more likely you were to accidentally walk into a massive piece of the pie (the google model). Now things are more mature and there’s probably just less opportunity to do that. But really I think leadership styles have to match the leader. Most leaders can’t get away with this because they fundamentally don’t want to. It will be really hard to take the right lessons away from this situation. 90% of what Elon is doing that is successful is probably below the surface, if the lesson is, come into a company and fire 90% of people and you’ll thrive, I think you’re going to have a bad time. Most important Edit: you have to have fuck you money for this to work so you can sell $4 billion in stock to keep the company afloat after you tank the revenue.
- aschearer 4y ago
  > For a long time tech was eating the world and the more engineers you had the more likely you were to accidentally walk into a massive piece of the pie (the google model). Now things are more mature and there’s probably just less opportunity to do that. Might be true, just easily might not be. Seems too uncertain to draw conclusions. Like, why didn't this happen ten years ago? Twenty? OK, take those explanations. Why can't they happen again?
  - mikkergp 4y ago
    Maybe they could? I’d love to see it, I love the engineering friendly culture, But we do seem to be a in a lull.
denimnerd42 4y ago
successful in what metric? Elon can privately throw billions at this if his ego can't let go of it. If you want to see success you just need to look at bytedance and tencent.
l33t233372 4y ago
This is a troublesome thought. It will mean that our profession is likely to get a lot more difficult. Perhaps a union or guild of some description would be in order.
- tgv 4y ago
  There's a lot of cruft, wouldn't you agree? Now, software engineering has a hard time getting rid of it, because we don't know what's going to be cruft in advance. So many promising designs turned out to be just a waste of time. But as long as we can't predict success, we're going to have to go through the motions. Once you have a working product, it's a bit easier. Maintenance is more predictable. But without R&D/innovation, you're slowly going to fall behind, and that's hard to overcome. So it might not be impossible that Twitter can keep running with a much smaller staff, but even then it might be the beginning of the end. We'll know in a few years...
greatpostman 4y ago
This is what everyone is afraid of. His firings are an assault on the professional credibility among a lot of people
- ryyr 4y ago
  i don't care for elon & co.'s broader mission, but for this reason i am hoping the skeleton crew that remains succeeds - i admit that it's naive to expect any positive change to come from it though
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  I think this is exactly it. Elon and the possibility of his success threatens the worldview of a lot of people.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    He's a terrible person and I empathize with the people who are suffering because of his huge, but fragile ego. I would hate for the Elon-idolizers to adopt his abrasive style, thinking that makes them good or radical leaders. That idea terrifies me, and reminds me of Steve-Jobs-wannabes who didn't realize he succeeded in spite of his manner. You can treat people with respect and still succeed; I have no kind words for anyone who inspires disrespect/looking down on employees (fellow engineers). Regardless of Musks success or failure at Twitter, the concentration of wealth in fewer hands will march on (due to automation and software eating everything, eventually, software will eat software). The middle-class SDE-type have been ignoring this reality for a while now, feeling safe because we thought we could find a different well-paying job at the drop of a pin. The bimodal income in the Software world is about to become more defined, with more folk shifting to the lower-income peak.
karaterobot 4y ago
That's a really good question, and much more interesting to me than just commenting on an ongoing train wreck. I suppose that we would need to first decide whether (in this scenario where he succeeded) Elon had actually fixed Twitter, or whether he tore it down to the studs and built a different company out of it, one which happened to be called Twitter, but did something completely different, with new people and new leadership. It feels like that's what he wants to do, and maybe that's why he's not backing down as everybody in the company leaves.
- googlryas 4y ago
  Isn't Twitter about sending short messages to the world or to people who are listening to you? How different are you envisioning Twitter could be? I really just want to make sure this isn't a cop out in the chances his stunts succeed(ie yeah it's successful now but it's different!)
  - karaterobot 4y ago
    I mean it sounds like he wants it to be a messaging service that functions as a payment service, and possibly also loans money (according to that Q&A session). I have no idea what his vision for the company actually is, it just sounds like his mantra is "anything is on the table at this point, but we need to make money fast".
  - kilolima 4y ago
    If that was the purpose of Twitter it would still function with JavaScript disabled.
    - googlryas 4y ago
      Maybe that's part of the bloat elon is looking to cut
nemo44x 4y ago
He's not doing anything unusual - he's just doing ti very aggressively and quickly. He dropped the bottom 50% as reported on by managers and now he has identified the best of that 50% and asked everyone else to either commit or get out. This is standard operating procedure but it is usually done over the course of many months to over a year instead of like 1 month in this case. If it works then I think senior managers will be more willing to reorg quickly and build from the solid core. However, I'm not sure it will change most things at most places. Managers love headcount more than anything. Each person under them makes them more important. Managers love this. I've had roles where I don't need anymore headcount but I was forced to add it because my managers wanted more headcount. Worst case, we'll have profitable tech companies far earlier in the lifecycle.
- malfist 4y ago
  Do you really think you can layoff just the bottom 50%?
  - TheHappyOddish 4y ago
    Seems to be working so far.
- arrrg 4y ago
  How did he identify those bottom 50% within a couple of days? That seems like an impossible task.
Ekaros 4y ago
What even is success for Twitter? And is this really a sensible way to work towards it?
helen___keller 4y ago
If elon has a massive success, which I define as taking Twitter back public in 2-3 years at a huge profit, then likely wallstreet will start to demand copycat behavior from public tech companies.
tqi 4y ago
Well the most plausible path to salvation is probably to issue a shitcoin that he can pump and dump a shitcoin, so I don't think that will have much salience to the rest of the industry.... That said, I do think it's very likely that 80% of the present value of any given company is derived from work that was done on the very first version. Twitter the product can likely coast as is for a long time. However I think the reason for having large product teams at mature companies working on marginal projects is because the stock price depends on it. Your potential for discovering new S-curves is priced into your revenue multiple. So while a private twitter might be able to find profitability as a 700 person company, theres (probably) no way for them to achieve meaningful growth. As a result, public companies probably wouldn't view this as a viable playbook. However I feel like Elon's public statements (and track record as an eng focused leader) make me doubt this will happen. He seems much more enamored of Hardcore Engineers who can ship new features (ie fart pillows[1]) rather than the ops/business side, so I don't think creating a glorified lifestyle business is something he's interested in pursuing. [1] https://electrek.co/2021/01/19/how-to-make-your-tesla-fart/ https://electrek.co/2021/01/19/how-to-make-your-tesla-fart/
joshstrange 4y ago
What is "success"? What does it mean to gain the whole world but lose your soul? Look, Twitter was over-hired, no doubt about it. I have no clue how you would need as many engineers as they had. That said, Twitter did/does have hard problems. People joke about how simple Twitter is but it's just not. The ability to search across all tweets alone in realtime is a massive undertaking at their scale. Even with that they had more employees than they problem needed. My issue with how Elon has managed this is more about how ham-fisted these multiple rounds of layoffs/firings are coupled with how inconsistent he is. Just 18 hours ago they said not to come in till Monday and then with only a few hours notice you need to be in the building with a list of achievements and screenshots (!?) of your code. I've produced a lot of code over the last 6 months, I'd want more than a couple hours (including traveling) to put together a "portfolio" of sorts. Though has I worked at Twitter I'd have taken the layoff yesterday rather than continue to be jerked around by this... jerk. To me it matters less if Twitter survives this and more about what that means for the employees that are left. Are they going to see any of the "success" if they turn it around? As it stands they have been asked to work longer hours/weekends but their salaries aren't changing (that we know of). The company isn't public and I've yet to hear of any sort of profit-share/equity/etc that's being given out to those who are going to stay. Also Twitter succeeding != Twitter being a good place to work at. Currently the only person that benefits from Twitter succeeding is Elon. I can't imagine putting my life on hold to enrich a billionaire, especially since Twitter itself isn't a noble cause, no matter what some people deluded themselves into thinking. I'm not anti-hard-work, I'm anti-hard-work if I'm not going to get something in return which as of now Twitter/Elon has not outlined any rewards other than "being part of Twitter 2.0".
daxfohl 4y ago
Layoffs are happening across the industry anyway. This means more work per person, and the increased competition for jobs means negotiating power for wages will go down. So this is all happening regardless, just in a less dramatic fashion. But yeah likely if Twitter does well then we'll also see a bunch of copycat douchebaggery at the C level because "it worked for Elon". For whatever reason, history seems to show us that any time some douchebag succeeds, all the wannabes come out of the woodwork to emulate it.
- Marsymars 4y ago
  > This means more work per person Or it might just mean less stuff gets done. My company’s had enough turnover without adequate replacement lately that pretty much everything that isn’t high-priority maintenance now just gets backlogged.
gilbetron 4y ago
It's a question I've been thinking about during this. The current narrative is that Musk is destroying value, which he probably is, but what if Twitter was as bloated as he thinks it was. What if he gets a core of 500 people working hard and twitter not only stabilizes but grows and innovates and becomes worth 10x. That's honestly a pretty scary notion for a lot of software engineers. CEOs will (and some already have) look around and realize that maybe they can get rid of a lot of the people around them, save a lot of money, and end up with a team better able to make product. Now, I don't really believe that will happen because software and technology is mind numbingly complex now, and I think only through large bodies of software engineers are we able to tame it, but it is one distinct possibility. Obviously it is the outcome Musk believes in. Issue is, people kill themselves to make awesome electric cars and rockets straight out of scifi, but to make a better twitter? I'm not seeing it. But I'm often (usually?) wrong!
- netsharc 4y ago
  The issue is, if Musk wants to find a core team of hardcore devs, I don't think the way he's acting is going to attract them. People who are great and know they are great probably don't want to be treated this way, unless they've drunk the Kool-Aid. It'd be more productive for Musk to be humble and actually have a plan to "win" in order attract top talent, top talent also wouldn't want to stay for a dickbag who seems to be very clueless. If Musk had a grand plan, keeping it secret is very very counterproductive. It gives off the air "I know I've been seemingly acting like a fucking idiot, but trust me, I have a plan, do you want to join?", how many would think "let's trust him now", if they haven't drunk said Kool-Aid.
- cloverich 4y ago
  I don't want to oversell Twitter -- I don't even like it (today). But most of the software we work on is frankly boring, even redundant or pointless at worst. Twitter may not be rockets or electric cars, but it is something most people are familiar with and its impact (Good, bad, whatever) is sizable.
rifty 4y ago
In the case of success I think it probably just puts back into perspective that all things considered most employees are still average quality despite being made out to be situationally necessary. That there may be some overestimation of how many actually are necessary and misattributing for who is actually high quality. The degree you would buy into this probably depends on how much you believe that Twitter is a good representation for the rest of the industry. I imagine a number of people would prefer to believe it is not in the case of success if it is their self value in question.

by haolez 4y ago

conradfr 4y ago

That the people who quit or got fired apparently created a very resilient system with easy to understand code.

googlryas 4y ago
Why 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 ago
The 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 ago
Sort 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

mikkergp 4y ago

Ben Horowitz write this thing about wartime vs peace time ceos and I think it was particularly salient: https://hbr.org/2011/04/peacetime-ceos-vs-wartime-ceos https://hbr.org/2011/04/peacetime-ceos-vs-wartime-ceos For a long time tech was eating the world and the more engineers you had the more likely you were to accidentally walk into a massive piece of the pie (the google model). Now things are more mature and there’s probably just less opportunity to do that. But really I think leadership styles have to match the leader. Most leaders can’t get away with this because they fundamentally don’t want to. It will be really hard to take the right lessons away from this situation. 90% of what Elon is doing that is successful is probably below the surface, if the lesson is, come into a company and fire 90% of people and you’ll thrive, I think you’re going to have a bad time. Most important Edit: you have to have fuck you money for this to work so you can sell $4 billion in stock to keep the company afloat after you tank the revenue.

aschearer 4y ago
> For a long time tech was eating the world and the more engineers you had the more likely you were to accidentally walk into a massive piece of the pie (the google model). Now things are more mature and there’s probably just less opportunity to do that. Might be true, just easily might not be. Seems too uncertain to draw conclusions. Like, why didn't this happen ten years ago? Twenty? OK, take those explanations. Why can't they happen again?
- mikkergp 4y ago
  Maybe they could? I’d love to see it, I love the engineering friendly culture, But we do seem to be a in a lull.

denimnerd42 4y ago

successful in what metric? Elon can privately throw billions at this if his ego can't let go of it. If you want to see success you just need to look at bytedance and tencent.

l33t233372 4y ago

This is a troublesome thought. It will mean that our profession is likely to get a lot more difficult. Perhaps a union or guild of some description would be in order.

tgv 4y ago
There's a lot of cruft, wouldn't you agree? Now, software engineering has a hard time getting rid of it, because we don't know what's going to be cruft in advance. So many promising designs turned out to be just a waste of time. But as long as we can't predict success, we're going to have to go through the motions. Once you have a working product, it's a bit easier. Maintenance is more predictable. But without R&D/innovation, you're slowly going to fall behind, and that's hard to overcome. So it might not be impossible that Twitter can keep running with a much smaller staff, but even then it might be the beginning of the end. We'll know in a few years...

greatpostman 4y ago

This is what everyone is afraid of. His firings are an assault on the professional credibility among a lot of people

ryyr 4y ago
i don't care for elon & co.'s broader mission, but for this reason i am hoping the skeleton crew that remains succeeds - i admit that it's naive to expect any positive change to come from it though
s1artibartfast 4y ago
I think this is exactly it. Elon and the possibility of his success threatens the worldview of a lot of people.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  He's a terrible person and I empathize with the people who are suffering because of his huge, but fragile ego. I would hate for the Elon-idolizers to adopt his abrasive style, thinking that makes them good or radical leaders. That idea terrifies me, and reminds me of Steve-Jobs-wannabes who didn't realize he succeeded in spite of his manner. You can treat people with respect and still succeed; I have no kind words for anyone who inspires disrespect/looking down on employees (fellow engineers). Regardless of Musks success or failure at Twitter, the concentration of wealth in fewer hands will march on (due to automation and software eating everything, eventually, software will eat software). The middle-class SDE-type have been ignoring this reality for a while now, feeling safe because we thought we could find a different well-paying job at the drop of a pin. The bimodal income in the Software world is about to become more defined, with more folk shifting to the lower-income peak.

karaterobot 4y ago

That's a really good question, and much more interesting to me than just commenting on an ongoing train wreck. I suppose that we would need to first decide whether (in this scenario where he succeeded) Elon had actually fixed Twitter, or whether he tore it down to the studs and built a different company out of it, one which happened to be called Twitter, but did something completely different, with new people and new leadership. It feels like that's what he wants to do, and maybe that's why he's not backing down as everybody in the company leaves.

googlryas 4y ago
Isn't Twitter about sending short messages to the world or to people who are listening to you? How different are you envisioning Twitter could be? I really just want to make sure this isn't a cop out in the chances his stunts succeed(ie yeah it's successful now but it's different!)
- karaterobot 4y ago
  I mean it sounds like he wants it to be a messaging service that functions as a payment service, and possibly also loans money (according to that Q&A session). I have no idea what his vision for the company actually is, it just sounds like his mantra is "anything is on the table at this point, but we need to make money fast".
- kilolima 4y ago
  If that was the purpose of Twitter it would still function with JavaScript disabled.
  - googlryas 4y ago
    Maybe that's part of the bloat elon is looking to cut

nemo44x 4y ago

He's not doing anything unusual - he's just doing ti very aggressively and quickly. He dropped the bottom 50% as reported on by managers and now he has identified the best of that 50% and asked everyone else to either commit or get out. This is standard operating procedure but it is usually done over the course of many months to over a year instead of like 1 month in this case. If it works then I think senior managers will be more willing to reorg quickly and build from the solid core. However, I'm not sure it will change most things at most places. Managers love headcount more than anything. Each person under them makes them more important. Managers love this. I've had roles where I don't need anymore headcount but I was forced to add it because my managers wanted more headcount. Worst case, we'll have profitable tech companies far earlier in the lifecycle.

malfist 4y ago
Do you really think you can layoff just the bottom 50%?
- TheHappyOddish 4y ago
  Seems to be working so far.
arrrg 4y ago
How did he identify those bottom 50% within a couple of days? That seems like an impossible task.

Ekaros 4y ago

What even is success for Twitter? And is this really a sensible way to work towards it?

helen___keller 4y ago

If elon has a massive success, which I define as taking Twitter back public in 2-3 years at a huge profit, then likely wallstreet will start to demand copycat behavior from public tech companies.

tqi 4y ago

Well the most plausible path to salvation is probably to issue a shitcoin that he can pump and dump a shitcoin, so I don't think that will have much salience to the rest of the industry.... That said, I do think it's very likely that 80% of the present value of any given company is derived from work that was done on the very first version. Twitter the product can likely coast as is for a long time. However I think the reason for having large product teams at mature companies working on marginal projects is because the stock price depends on it. Your potential for discovering new S-curves is priced into your revenue multiple. So while a private twitter might be able to find profitability as a 700 person company, theres (probably) no way for them to achieve meaningful growth. As a result, public companies probably wouldn't view this as a viable playbook. However I feel like Elon's public statements (and track record as an eng focused leader) make me doubt this will happen. He seems much more enamored of Hardcore Engineers who can ship new features (ie fart pillows[1]) rather than the ops/business side, so I don't think creating a glorified lifestyle business is something he's interested in pursuing. [1] https://electrek.co/2021/01/19/how-to-make-your-tesla-fart/ https://electrek.co/2021/01/19/how-to-make-your-tesla-fart/

joshstrange 4y ago

What is "success"? What does it mean to gain the whole world but lose your soul? Look, Twitter was over-hired, no doubt about it. I have no clue how you would need as many engineers as they had. That said, Twitter did/does have hard problems. People joke about how simple Twitter is but it's just not. The ability to search across all tweets alone in realtime is a massive undertaking at their scale. Even with that they had more employees than they problem needed. My issue with how Elon has managed this is more about how ham-fisted these multiple rounds of layoffs/firings are coupled with how inconsistent he is. Just 18 hours ago they said not to come in till Monday and then with only a few hours notice you need to be in the building with a list of achievements and screenshots (!?) of your code. I've produced a lot of code over the last 6 months, I'd want more than a couple hours (including traveling) to put together a "portfolio" of sorts. Though has I worked at Twitter I'd have taken the layoff yesterday rather than continue to be jerked around by this... jerk. To me it matters less if Twitter survives this and more about what that means for the employees that are left. Are they going to see any of the "success" if they turn it around? As it stands they have been asked to work longer hours/weekends but their salaries aren't changing (that we know of). The company isn't public and I've yet to hear of any sort of profit-share/equity/etc that's being given out to those who are going to stay. Also Twitter succeeding != Twitter being a good place to work at. Currently the only person that benefits from Twitter succeeding is Elon. I can't imagine putting my life on hold to enrich a billionaire, especially since Twitter itself isn't a noble cause, no matter what some people deluded themselves into thinking. I'm not anti-hard-work, I'm anti-hard-work if I'm not going to get something in return which as of now Twitter/Elon has not outlined any rewards other than "being part of Twitter 2.0".

daxfohl 4y ago

Layoffs are happening across the industry anyway. This means more work per person, and the increased competition for jobs means negotiating power for wages will go down. So this is all happening regardless, just in a less dramatic fashion. But yeah likely if Twitter does well then we'll also see a bunch of copycat douchebaggery at the C level because "it worked for Elon". For whatever reason, history seems to show us that any time some douchebag succeeds, all the wannabes come out of the woodwork to emulate it.

Marsymars 4y ago
> This means more work per person Or it might just mean less stuff gets done. My company’s had enough turnover without adequate replacement lately that pretty much everything that isn’t high-priority maintenance now just gets backlogged.

gilbetron 4y ago

It's a question I've been thinking about during this. The current narrative is that Musk is destroying value, which he probably is, but what if Twitter was as bloated as he thinks it was. What if he gets a core of 500 people working hard and twitter not only stabilizes but grows and innovates and becomes worth 10x. That's honestly a pretty scary notion for a lot of software engineers. CEOs will (and some already have) look around and realize that maybe they can get rid of a lot of the people around them, save a lot of money, and end up with a team better able to make product. Now, I don't really believe that will happen because software and technology is mind numbingly complex now, and I think only through large bodies of software engineers are we able to tame it, but it is one distinct possibility. Obviously it is the outcome Musk believes in. Issue is, people kill themselves to make awesome electric cars and rockets straight out of scifi, but to make a better twitter? I'm not seeing it. But I'm often (usually?) wrong!

netsharc 4y ago
The issue is, if Musk wants to find a core team of hardcore devs, I don't think the way he's acting is going to attract them. People who are great and know they are great probably don't want to be treated this way, unless they've drunk the Kool-Aid. It'd be more productive for Musk to be humble and actually have a plan to "win" in order attract top talent, top talent also wouldn't want to stay for a dickbag who seems to be very clueless. If Musk had a grand plan, keeping it secret is very very counterproductive. It gives off the air "I know I've been seemingly acting like a fucking idiot, but trust me, I have a plan, do you want to join?", how many would think "let's trust him now", if they haven't drunk said Kool-Aid.
cloverich 4y ago
I don't want to oversell Twitter -- I don't even like it (today). But most of the software we work on is frankly boring, even redundant or pointless at worst. Twitter may not be rockets or electric cars, but it is something most people are familiar with and its impact (Good, bad, whatever) is sizable.

rifty 4y ago

In the case of success I think it probably just puts back into perspective that all things considered most employees are still average quality despite being made out to be situationally necessary. That there may be some overestimation of how many actually are necessary and misattributing for who is actually high quality. The degree you would buy into this probably depends on how much you believe that Twitter is a good representation for the rest of the industry. I imagine a number of people would prefer to believe it is not in the case of success if it is their self value in question.