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Twitter at 1am on a Friday
- alkonaut 4y agoI hope those people are paid in lots of equity in this startup…
- tomlockwood 4y agoLooking at that diagram, and thinking the person who needed it just bought the company for 44 billion dollars, is bewildering.
- wskish 4y agoI see that whiteboard as a mechanism to help build a shared mental model for all assembled. Everyone there has seen some previous unknown revision of architectural diagrams, and has their own partial model of the system. Due to the urgency at hand, they all need to have a crisp shared model of the important parts, down to the naming of things.
- divbzero 4y agoWhat puzzles me is that Twitter’s greatest challenges in recent years have not been technical. There shouldn’t be a technical emergency that requires an urgent call for all software engineers.
- dingaling 4y agoThat single Tweet took eleven seconds to load on my phone, up to the point that all spinners stopped and all elements were visible. That seems typical for Twitter on the web these days and suggests there is something technically wrong in the stack.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- HaZeust 4y agoThat's a hell of a hand-wave. But for Twitter's sake, I hope you're right.
- wskish 4y agoI am just imagining how to start a meeting with the remaining 25% skeleton crew of technical folks. Seems like drawing a map of the system and allowing various folks to contribute their part would be a super positive experience all around. What would be other alternative explanations?
- mhh__ 4y agoIf you need a shared mental model diagram at the 1am pseudo-crunch-a-thon then you're doing something wrong. Identifying what you want to fix should be written down but the structure of the app should not be what is being discussed at 1am
- wskish 4y agoI agree with you in ideal circumstances.
- tomlockwood 4y agoImagine you're thinking about buying a 44B business and want to radically change its business model, and potentially, plan to fire a lot of technical people. What are the things you need to know to achieve this?
- berkut 4y agoWhat diagram / whiteboard are people talking about? Is there more than one photo? The only whiteboard I see is on the right hand side at the back, mostly obscured by people, and I certainly can't make out what's on it.
- tomlockwood 4y agohttps://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593899029531803649/photo/1 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593899029531803649/phot...
- berkut 4y agoAha - thanks!
- sdwr 4y agoBeen reading a lot of hate on twitter, reddit, and here about how elon is handling twitter. Personally, I love the energy in this picture, want to work at twitter more now than before, and believe they have a good chance of doing great work. What I see in the picture is organic connection. It's really easy in tech for everyone to get siloed, working on assigned tasks without communication. Greatness comes from the shared spark <and then> head down focus. I bet elon is trying to recreate the environment that worked at paypal and tesla and spacex. Scrappy, energetic, get shit done, not 100 managers with 100 tiny fiefdoms.
- Kye 4y agoThis is after he fired over half the company and threatened the rest with unemployment if they didn't come in. This is not organic. This is coercion.
- kcplate 4y agoOr…it’s separating the wheat from the chaff
- big_red 4y ago^totally. I remember my startup incubator we all worked well into the night often as late as 6am. I remember falling asleep at my terminal often, and indeed slept at the office regularly, well until they told me to stop that. Look, people of a certain mindset need an Everest to conquer. If they don’t want to join in they can leave, everyone is there by choice.
- kcplate 4y ago> people of a certain mindset need an Everest to conquer. Well said. There are a few of us out there with that Gimli from LOTR approach to life: “Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?”
- x128 4y agoand what do I gain by giving my soul to the company?
- memish 4y agoEr. How many of them are H-1Bs?
- toomuchtodo 4y agoPer US. Citizenship and Immigration Services, around 300 employees at Twitter are working under the H-1B visa. My note: I am aware of someone at Meta attempting to reach out to these folks to interview for offers to transfer their visas. Very kind of folks willing to do so. Source: https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employer-data-hub?topic_id=Twitter&state=All&fy=All&naics=All&items_per_page=100 https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yftsui 4y agoThis data apparently is not complete, if you search Amazon it returns 646 employees, a random Amazon high rise building has more H1-B workers than that count.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoThe number is likely somewhere between 300 and however many Twitter employees are remaining (~1000?).
- throw_m239339 4y ago> I am aware of someone at Meta attempting to reach out to these folks to interview for offers to transfer their visas. Very kind of folks willing to do so. Meta is firing 11K people and freezing hiring right now. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/09/meta-to-lay-off-more-than-11000-thousand-employees.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/09/meta-to-lay-off-more-than-11... Twitter will bounce back. For the people who are staying, this is a giant career opportunity to get a good executive job as the result. I'd stay in a heartbeat, even if it means spending one terrible year or two there.
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]
- rawgabbit 4y agoLooks like a death march to the bitter end. A suicide pact.
- papito 4y agoYou do a Death March project once in your career, as a lesson. Just so that the next time you see it coming from 100 miles away, you run, run hard. Like in this case. Those who peaced out made the right decision. This is beyond office heroics or hustle porn - this is just a rich, long-time former coder, way out of his depth, trying to relive the former glory of the mad days of the Internet boom, abusing people because he is having fun with this.
- pleb_nz 4y agoWhy are they at work at 1am?
- dragontamer 4y agoMusk called them in at 2pm on Friday for a code review.
- pleb_nz 4y agoThat's at 2pm. 11 hours before 1am. What is so critical that they still need be there at 1am? Whose going to die?
- octopolus 4y agoto let that sink in
- wskish 4y agoI like to turn it around an ask what opportunity I would show up for at 1am.
- jsnell 4y agoIt's pretty amazing when you think about it. Even given Musk's erratic behavior in the previous weeks, it would have been hard to predict something like this. At a short notice summon the handful of engineers who survived the purges to the office at 2pm on a Friday and to bring 10 screenshots of code they've written "for review". With that implicit threat, have them wait until 6pm. Then keep them around until 1am to give a tutorial level introduction to the Twitter infrastructure to Musk (who could have gotten this months ago). There's just no legit justification for it; it's pure bullying and a loyalty test. And then to top it off, have your pet venture capitalists post fawning tweets about how this really shows the classic SV energy.
- bogomipz 4y ago>"At a short notice summon the handful of engineers who survived the purges to the office at 2pm on a Friday and to bring 10 screenshots of code they've written "for review". I wasn't able to read many of the collapsed comments since I don't have a teamblind account. Is that actually the context of this picture then?
- jsnell 4y agoYes. https://twitter.com/ZoeSchiffer/status/1593649356661436417 https://twitter.com/ZoeSchiffer/status/1593649356661436417
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sys_64738 4y agoSome people have families and a life outside of work. We sure as heck ain't staying until 1am for anybody.
- kcplate 4y agoI have a family and a life outside of work, and I can’t count how many all nighters I have pulled in 35+ years of my career. Sometimes you need to do them. Of course I was raised in a generation that believed it was in our best interest that our company’s were successful…
- sys_64738 4y agoI've never done an "all nighter" in 30+ years and never will. I value my time and if a company is expecting such a commitment then they're taking liberties with understaffing projects.
- not_the_fda 4y agoI did all nighters early in my career only to have management go in a different direction when we were done. It ain't worth it and shows lack of leadership. I now have cash on hand to walk out on all nighters and death marches.
- stouset 4y agoI have 20 years in startups and this is not normal.
- mike503 4y agoAs the comment says, it would be interesting to interact with the richest person on earth. Short of that, I have no idea why anyone would think it's fun or anything to be in that atmosphere. He could change direction on a whim and make you redundant in a second.
- octopolus 4y agoI’ve stayed up for hackathons and stayed out late for meetups, this seems way more fun. Who cares if you’re redundant? Not everything is about status.
- jmull 4y agoIn this context being made redundant means losing your job. (Just not sure if you’re aware.)
- octopolus 4y agoYea I’m aware
- chrisseaton 4y ago> Who cares if you’re redundant? People need money to eat.
- octopolus 4y agothen get a job?
- chrisseaton 4y agoThey have a job. Redundancy is taking their job away. There's a recession.
- mhoad 4y agoIt’s worse than that. For many of them it also means they will have to leave the country because Space Karen had a new idea for the 19th time that week.
- hotpotamus 4y agoHonestly, I like the picture of the new owner coming in and having engineers whiteboard the systems out to him and start getting up to speed with the company. It does have a nice feeling of espirit de corps to it. If he had started with that instead of fire and fury and a lame sink joke, he wouldn't have tarnished his image and the company so much.
- whateveracct 4y agoBut doing it at 1am is asinine
- dragontamer 4y agoDoing it after losing ~80%+ of the staff is also asinine. At a minimum, Musk should have done this _before_ deciding which 50% of the company to lay off, and then scaring the majority of the remainder with an ultimatum.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- giraffe_lady 4y agoTwitter is a mature tech platform that routinely onboards people at all levels of technical experience into every part of itself. There's no way they don't have probably several entire programs for getting people up to speed on how it all works. Possibly even a few full time dedicated people working only on that, actually. At least before he fired them anyway. This is nothing but ego and hubris still.
- cmh89 4y agoIts wild how many people believe this dumb "pull up of your sleeves" photo op bullshit. Musk doesn't even have a B.S., dude couldn't understand how to build a barn door much more something like Twitter.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
- wskish 4y agoI am amazed by how polarizing this seems to be. Some of my best memories are from previous startups with this exact 1am energy. This is how shared mental models are built, shit gets done, and shared suffering cements lifelong bonds.
- wawayanda 4y agoTwitter isn't a startup. The folks in this picture don't have the same risk/reward as their counterparts at a startup would.
- wskish 4y agoThey are going "hardcore" with EM at a critical time. You could be looking at the "twitter mafia" of 2030 something.
- ctvo 4y agoThe PayPal mafia had equity / ownership that paid off when they sold the company. Those people in the photo are employees with essentially 0 upside in terms of real ownership. For there to be a “Twitter mafia” Elon would need to, out of the kindness of his heart, give them real ownership in Twitter. And then Twitter needs to be a success, much more than it already was. I’d play the lottery instead and leave fantasy land.
- wskish 4y agoi guess we all have to judge the value of such human connections
- ctvo 4y agoElon, nodding along to your explanation of how authentication works, sees how intelligent, capable, and full of potential you are. He stops you: Wait Bob, do you have a startup idea you’re working on that I can invest in? Can I at least get your personal phone number for late night idea sessions? Again, it’s time to leave fantasy land.
- bern4444 4y agoLots of comments on how hackathons and late night sessions were fond memories for people. The difference is those events were chosen. If you are forced to remain at your company (due to visa issues for example) being forced by your CEO to stay at work until 1am is atrocious. This is not a profession where being at the office this late is the norm and it's not typical for the environment. Twitter is not a startup in any way shape or form. It was clearly just valued at 44 billion dollars, no startup is worth that much ;). This is an executive abusing his power, forcing individuals to do as they say. There is little choice and free will being exercised. Maybe some of the people do want to be there and are happy to do so; I don't believe this is the case. It is naive to think it would be. Hackathons, staying up late working on a passion or hobby by choice can be fun. Being forced to for your profession and by the new CEO who has fired and caused over 70% of the company to leave doesn't fall under that category.
- nathanaldensr 4y agoThe fact that so many people so willingly give in to it is why sociopaths rule us all.
- philosopher1234 4y agoWe are born dependent and vulnerable. If our parents are cruel we contort ourselves to love them anyways, so that they will keep feeding us. Then we go into the world and find we are still contorted. The world seems to be full of these people. It’s hard to see a way out.
- public_defender 4y agoNot sure why you're being downvoted. "Just resist psychopaths" is an ableist, reductive paradigm. Of course many people can't just resist. People have families, care responsibilities, and many are indeed conditioned to accommodate.
- capitalsigma 4y ago
- big_red 4y agoAre you kidding me? Those guys are living the dream! Chilling out with Elon Musk on a Friday night. I’d go there to make the coffee and clean the dishes so I could overhear in the next room. No seriously
- x128 4y agoOof. That boot.
- big_red 4y agoHe’s only the most successful entrepreneur alive. But sure visa holders need their beauty sleep. Seriously you can’t stay up to 1am to have the company of the worlds richest person? What an opportunity to learn. This thread is totally nuts
- raydev 4y ago> What an opportunity to learn I suspect you've never been around Musk or people of Musk's class. What could you possibly learn that would materially improve anything in your life other than "you get to keep your job (for now)"? Or is it just curiosity you want to satisfy?
- big_red 4y agoHis habits. You can’t regularly work 80 hour weeks without packing a few tricks. You can’t build multiple billion dollar companies without knowing something others don’t. Often I find when talking to successful people, they’ll make a revealing offhand comment that’s pure gold and can in fact change your life - if you’re paying attention. An example might be Einstein and Steve Jobs having a full wardrobe of duplicates of the same outfit. Ok, but why? Because they realize the mind is only capable of resolving a finite number of dilemmas per day and choosing what to wear depletes that resource. An eccentric habit, but revealing indeed. After being sold on the theory, they went all in. I wonder to what degree they executed on insights like that where the rest of us just brushed them off
- justahuman74 4y agoI wonder what twitter new-hire TC offers are going to look like going forward. I can't imagine there would be a large funnel looking to work there after this.
- deanCommie 4y agoOf all the scenarios with Twitter in the last several months where people talk past each other, this is the one I am most confused by. You got startup CEOs (not just Elon Musk brownnosers) talking about how some of the most innovative things get built at startups. Which is true! Big, world-changing ideas, don't get built 9-5. And especially if you have some competitive advantage, you need to rush to market, to beat the others. But Twitter is (was) a 40+ Billion dollar company. None of the people in this photo have any reasonable equity (the kind that makes people work nights and weekends in the hope that an IPO makes them a millionaire). And Twitter has a massive network effect of the kind meaning that if you don't screw it up (and god is Elon trying), none of these people are going anywhere. I can understand that it's in Musk's interest to create a reality distortion field and convince the employees that they need to stay and go Hardcore so that he can create the American Weechat, or whatever he's got in mind. But what do the other CEOs that are swooning over this have to gain except a dry run for also starting to treat their employees like garbage...
- wskish 4y ago> so that he can create the American Weechat, or whatever he's got in mind. What if what he has in mind is attempting to undo the negative effects that social networks have had on our society and democracy and instead attempt to rebuild this particular network in a way that can have a positive effect on society? It seems like that is a technological possibility and also something he could plausibly be interested in.
- pasttense01 4y agoElon believes in "free speech" and these unmoderated free speech networks rapidly become filled with toxic garbage.
- wskish 4y agohistorically, yes; but might that be a function of both the platform incentives (advertising, engagement) and poor technology?
- SanjayMehta 4y agoAs opposed to: https://www.theblaze.com/news/twitter-day-in-life-video https://www.theblaze.com/news/twitter-day-in-life-video Having worked in both types of environments, I can tell you only the 1am types survive and become profitable.
- csande17 4y agoSome of the criticisms of the video are a bit unfair. > She pans the camera to three women in a meeting room. She also shows several bookshelves filled with books, but otherwise shows nothing about the meetings they held or the "projects" they may or may not have been able "to knock out." I mean, of course someone's not going to record an internal company meeting and post it on TikTok!
- galoisscobi 4y agoWhat sample sizes are we talking?
- MiguelX413 4y agoWas it not surviving and extremely profitable?
- inawarminister 4y agoTwitter? It was not profitable in 2020 and 2021. Jack did do good in 2018 & 2019 though
- password4321 4y agoAFAIK Tesla & SpaceX aren't known for great work/life balance.
- memish 4y agoRight, they are known for changing the world.
- bleah1000 4y agoIt's kind of sad to see so many people just take this story at face value. Is it really 1am? I could certainly believe it, but some random picture doesn't make it true. Also, even it is 1am, it's possible that work ended hours ago, and that some people are staying late to talk to Musk. Who knows, but to assume that everyone is being forced to stay, maybe, maybe not. I guess I'd like a little evidence. The number of people saying all of these completely unsubstantiated things about Twitter, and everyone believing them without any questions is weird. In addition, how could this person know if mostly H1-B workers are present. I certainly can't tell who is and isn't on a H1-B. Or is it because the bulk of the people are not white that this person assumed they were? That seems like an immensely racist assumption.
- happytoexplain 4y agoWhy should people automatically disbelieve word-of-mouth any more or less than they should believe it, as long as they are not making it into some kind of conviction from which they base significant material action? Also, is nobody asking questions? I've seen multiple people doing so, including you. Also, in your accusation of racism, you are making assumptions about assumptions. Also, is positing that there are H1Bs among non-white tech workers "immensely racist", or is that dramatic?
- polished85 4y agoThis is like a sociological experiment where they show different people the same picture and ask "what do you see"? The results are heavily influenced by your previous perception of Elon. The results vary from "abuse and modern slavery" to "I'd fly halfway across the country to be there." I don't really have an opinion here as I don't know what is actually happening and assume the original poster intentionally framed it in a specific way. As humans we are very predictable, and even in a high IQ place such as HN, mostly everyone used the photo as validation of their existing position.
- happytoexplain 4y agoI mostly agree, but you're kind of implying that the photo exists in a vacuum. People are reasonably using context. Yes, they cherry-pick the context a bit and perhaps overextend it, but they're not just making up a story from whole cloth.
- ncann 4y agoThe "modern slavery" comment made me chuckle. Seriously...
- paul7986 4y agoI see it says there's a lot of H1 work are still there… Musk has said Americans are lazy compared to those not in the US… Maybe that picture shows it… Work balance over changing the world type of work or your stuck cause no job your out of the country. Maybe it's a mix of both Maybe musk could force more truth on the Internet, somehow through the blue checkmark and verification of each user… Create a reputation system, or may be crazy if you're going to spread lies how much of your own money you gonna back up that silly political lie with (so much drama in politics it driven by emotions more then logic).
- wdr1 4y agoHow is this not overtly racist?
- mlindner 4y agoWhen he posted it I thought it was pretty cool that he's sitting down with the team and discussing things. This is how Elon learns in an organization. He needs to do this kind of thing and do it a lot more. I don't think the time of day matters much. I've been in the office at that time of the day a number of times. As long as it's only an occasional thing it's fine.
- gilbetron 4y agoI have to say, if I was in different circumstances, I would love to go to work at Twitter right now. But that's because I really enjoy watching weird shit happen, and there's so much weird shit happening there right now. It would be a win-win for me, odds are I'd emerge in a few months, maybe a year, with some great stories about watching a bizarre implosion of a foundational tech company as well as experience a billionaire self destructing. Or, way less likely, but possible I suppose, I would help that crazy billionaire reinvent the tech company and walk away pretty rich.
- koonsolo 4y agoWhy would that make you rich? You would just be an employee, no?
- RickJWagner 4y agoLove him or hate him, Elon Musk makes things happen. Electric cars, space travel, large-scale drilling, Twitter 2.0, etc. This is a man history will remember.
- brokenmachine 4y agoPT Barnum with memes.