5 ms·

I think you're misunderstanding the situation. It's not that ALL software engineers don't do anything. It's that Twitter has so much staff, you start to questio

by Teandw 4y ago

I think you're misunderstanding the situation. It's not that ALL software engineers don't do anything. It's that Twitter has so much staff, you start to question what can they all actually be doing. If someone had 10 people cleaning a small apartment every day, you'd question what were they actually doing. That wouldn't make sense.

kibwen 4y ago
Conversely, if you had 7,000 people cleaning an apartment occupied by a few million people across the globe, that might make some sense. There's no doubt that Twitter could be leaner than it was as of September, but haphazardly firing employees at random and alienating the most employable of the remainder into resignation is not the way to go about it. He could have spent a few months getting to know the place, but deliberately chose not to.
- butterlesstoast 4y ago
  Best comment hahaha. Made my day.
- wwkeyboard 4y ago
  Exactly, go to your 25 year old HotMail account and open the spam folder. That's what they've been fighting.
- Terretta 4y ago
  Not if all few million people live in the same few variants of one apartment, and the same cleanup cleaned all of them. TBC, talking about the code part. There's another Twitter, which is not code, but guest and resident services. Your example holds there.
- ceres 4y ago
  And yet WhatsApp had 55 employees at acquisition. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/whatsapp-bought-for-19-billion-what-do-its-employees-get/tx2ebge88# https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/whatsapp-bought-for-19-b...
  - kibwen 4y ago
    WhatsApp is (was) an instant messenger, not an ad-supported media company.
  - uxcolumbo 4y ago
    Did Whatsapp serve ads? Did it have to moderate content? Twitter is vastly more complex than Whatsapp when it comes to functionality and platforms it had to support.
  - lesuorac 4y ago
    WhatsApp didn't get to 55 employees by having 2000 and then randomly firing 97% of them. The argument is not that twitter can't be ran leaner, it's that the current process of leaning twitter is bad.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- selimthegrim 4y ago
  So Twitter is the movie Mother?
xwdv 4y ago
Software Engineers aren’t doing things all the time but there is a tremendous amount of company knowledge and experience locked up in them. You basically pay to keep them employed for when you need them. They are paid for value not hours.
- dont__panic 4y ago
  Well said. I think this is where the 4-day work week and WFH pushes in the software industry get their momentum: most of us don't need to work 40 hours in an office with a manager looking over our shoulder to provide that value.
  - xwdv 4y ago
    Problem is a lot of people just don’t understand this because they’re used to having a 1:1 relationship between the hours they work and the value they deliver.
RC_ITR 4y ago
Sure, but then you ask them what they do and keep the ones who clean your toilets and drop the ones that organize your fridge. Your goal isn’t one cleaning person, it’s the right amount
dont__panic 4y ago
Elon has clearly read enough Hacker News to ask the question we've all been asking for the last... 5? 10? years. "What do all of those engineers do at [Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Netflix/Google]". That's a fine question to ask -- it's clear that plenty of those engineers aren't contributing real value. They're working on passion projects, or side projects like React or Docusaurus, or pie-in-the-sky next-gen products, or reinventing the wheel in-house, or infrastructure, etc. Many are working on similar projects in separate silos of large companies, completely unaware that they have "twin" teams elsewhere in the org solving damn near the same problem, but not in a generalized way. The big problem is that Elon has no idea what the fuck he is doing. I don't mean to disparage anyone, but jeez... the guy has fired thousands of people in the last few weeks and looks like he's on the cusp of running a company that's been around for over a decade into the ground in the next few weeks. Over the holidays. And who's going to deal with the issue? Oh yeah, the H1B visa holding employees who can't escape. He's officially a jerk, and that's not even counting the times when he called innocent people child molesters, or spouted lies about crypto, or tried to manipulate Tesla stock, etc. etc. TL;DR: Elon is an idiot trying to use internet wisdom to run a company. This whole situation reminds me of when some rich person you know tries to run a small business, like a coffee shop or an ice cream shop, and they screw up just about every piece of it... because they don't get the fundamentals. Elon does NOT get the fundamentals, based on observations of him over the last few years. It's clear he's just a lucky rich kid with a big ego and lots of confidence who loves smoking weed and ruining other people's lives.
- Teandw 4y ago
  "...and looks like he's on the cusp of running a company that's been around for over a decade into the ground in the next few weeks." What do you base that on? There's no evidence to point the company is going downhill or improving at the moment. You seem to be basing this on a personal hatred for Elon and nothing else.
  - dont__panic 4y ago
    Many (newly) former Twitter employees have raised concerns about essential services now left unattended. Reports indicate the internal beta build Twitter instance has slowed down significantly this week -- a sign that services, code, or other essential infrastructure is being neglected. Musk fired half the company and drove two-thirds of the remainder to quit. He's asking the remaining employees to print out their code contributions to prove their worth. These things might not be explicit signs of trouble in the company, but I sure wouldn't read them as positive. A shakeup could be a good thing in the long term if the company has stagnated... but there's no guarantee. I raised multiple explicit examples in my previous post; here's some more. I think Elon is a complete dunderhead, because it's hard not to think so based on his behavior. I still think Twitter is at a very high risk right now of collapsing. With him making such dramatic moves as CEO, isn't it impossible to separate his bad behavior from Twitter's future?
kccoder 4y ago
And nearly every decision he's made has driven away Twitter's best developers, who could probably be useful in reducing the headcount in an efficient and non-shambolic fashion.

by Teandw 4y ago

kibwen 4y ago

Conversely, if you had 7,000 people cleaning an apartment occupied by a few million people across the globe, that might make some sense. There's no doubt that Twitter could be leaner than it was as of September, but haphazardly firing employees at random and alienating the most employable of the remainder into resignation is not the way to go about it. He could have spent a few months getting to know the place, but deliberately chose not to.

butterlesstoast 4y ago
Best comment hahaha. Made my day.
wwkeyboard 4y ago
Exactly, go to your 25 year old HotMail account and open the spam folder. That's what they've been fighting.
Terretta 4y ago
Not if all few million people live in the same few variants of one apartment, and the same cleanup cleaned all of them. TBC, talking about the code part. There's another Twitter, which is not code, but guest and resident services. Your example holds there.
ceres 4y ago
And yet WhatsApp had 55 employees at acquisition. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/whatsapp-bought-for-19-billion-what-do-its-employees-get/tx2ebge88# https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/whatsapp-bought-for-19-b...
- kibwen 4y ago
  WhatsApp is (was) an instant messenger, not an ad-supported media company.
- uxcolumbo 4y ago
  Did Whatsapp serve ads? Did it have to moderate content? Twitter is vastly more complex than Whatsapp when it comes to functionality and platforms it had to support.
- lesuorac 4y ago
  WhatsApp didn't get to 55 employees by having 2000 and then randomly firing 97% of them. The argument is not that twitter can't be ran leaner, it's that the current process of leaning twitter is bad.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
selimthegrim 4y ago
So Twitter is the movie Mother?

xwdv 4y ago

Software Engineers aren’t doing things all the time but there is a tremendous amount of company knowledge and experience locked up in them. You basically pay to keep them employed for when you need them. They are paid for value not hours.

dont__panic 4y ago
Well said. I think this is where the 4-day work week and WFH pushes in the software industry get their momentum: most of us don't need to work 40 hours in an office with a manager looking over our shoulder to provide that value.
- xwdv 4y ago
  Problem is a lot of people just don’t understand this because they’re used to having a 1:1 relationship between the hours they work and the value they deliver.

RC_ITR 4y ago

Sure, but then you ask them what they do and keep the ones who clean your toilets and drop the ones that organize your fridge. Your goal isn’t one cleaning person, it’s the right amount

dont__panic 4y ago

Elon has clearly read enough Hacker News to ask the question we've all been asking for the last... 5? 10? years. "What do all of those engineers do at [Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Netflix/Google]". That's a fine question to ask -- it's clear that plenty of those engineers aren't contributing real value. They're working on passion projects, or side projects like React or Docusaurus, or pie-in-the-sky next-gen products, or reinventing the wheel in-house, or infrastructure, etc. Many are working on similar projects in separate silos of large companies, completely unaware that they have "twin" teams elsewhere in the org solving damn near the same problem, but not in a generalized way. The big problem is that Elon has no idea what the fuck he is doing. I don't mean to disparage anyone, but jeez... the guy has fired thousands of people in the last few weeks and looks like he's on the cusp of running a company that's been around for over a decade into the ground in the next few weeks. Over the holidays. And who's going to deal with the issue? Oh yeah, the H1B visa holding employees who can't escape. He's officially a jerk, and that's not even counting the times when he called innocent people child molesters, or spouted lies about crypto, or tried to manipulate Tesla stock, etc. etc. TL;DR: Elon is an idiot trying to use internet wisdom to run a company. This whole situation reminds me of when some rich person you know tries to run a small business, like a coffee shop or an ice cream shop, and they screw up just about every piece of it... because they don't get the fundamentals. Elon does NOT get the fundamentals, based on observations of him over the last few years. It's clear he's just a lucky rich kid with a big ego and lots of confidence who loves smoking weed and ruining other people's lives.

Teandw 4y ago
"...and looks like he's on the cusp of running a company that's been around for over a decade into the ground in the next few weeks." What do you base that on? There's no evidence to point the company is going downhill or improving at the moment. You seem to be basing this on a personal hatred for Elon and nothing else.
- dont__panic 4y ago
  Many (newly) former Twitter employees have raised concerns about essential services now left unattended. Reports indicate the internal beta build Twitter instance has slowed down significantly this week -- a sign that services, code, or other essential infrastructure is being neglected. Musk fired half the company and drove two-thirds of the remainder to quit. He's asking the remaining employees to print out their code contributions to prove their worth. These things might not be explicit signs of trouble in the company, but I sure wouldn't read them as positive. A shakeup could be a good thing in the long term if the company has stagnated... but there's no guarantee. I raised multiple explicit examples in my previous post; here's some more. I think Elon is a complete dunderhead, because it's hard not to think so based on his behavior. I still think Twitter is at a very high risk right now of collapsing. With him making such dramatic moves as CEO, isn't it impossible to separate his bad behavior from Twitter's future?

kccoder 4y ago

And nearly every decision he's made has driven away Twitter's best developers, who could probably be useful in reducing the headcount in an efficient and non-shambolic fashion.