3 ms·

The management class does not want this Twitter ordeal (likely a huge public failure) making engineers think their skills give them power over companies.

woodruffw 4y ago
I agree completely. On top of that, it feels like classic "magical" thinking by a manager who doesn't understand technical scope or split responsibilities. Why bother to understand why you've hired so many people before blithely opining that 4/5ths of them are fireable? Who the hell wants to work for someone who says things like that? Certainly not the "high-quality" engineers who are supposedly being separated from the chaff.
mmmpop 4y ago
How do you define "public failure"? My definition would be entirely contingent upon the intentions of the new owner since it's his to do with what he pleases. If said owner is well into middle age and bored, but has more money than literally any other person...? Who am I to judge what he decides to do with it? "It's just money" says Elon and if his goal were to be the world's most massive troll (which I suspect is a large part of it), then it's achievement accomplished, full stop.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  At least to my mind, "public failure" includes but isn't limited to embarrassing outages and service degradation on one of the world's most popular social media sites, one that was more or less running smoothly immediately prior.
nindalf 4y ago
I notice every VC cheering this absurd management style on. If Twitter's new management can be somehow spun as a success, it will normalise treating tech employees in general and engineering in particular very poorly - longer hours, less compensation. For VCs and senior management, that's a fantastic outcome. In a month they're going to say "look! we didn't have a single outage during the World Cup" and act like it vindicates their approach.
merrywhether 4y ago
The irony here is that you could easily fire 80% of the C-suite and VPs and a company should survive for some time. This is kind of a tautology because leadership at bigger companies should be mostly operating at the months-to-years timeframe, so it should take a long time (or a unique emergency) for their absence to be felt. We could run both experiments (firing engineers vs firing execs) against each other across a sample of companies and I know which I'd bet on to still be mostly functional 3-4 weeks later.

woodruffw 4y ago

I agree completely. On top of that, it feels like classic "magical" thinking by a manager who doesn't understand technical scope or split responsibilities. Why bother to understand why you've hired so many people before blithely opining that 4/5ths of them are fireable? Who the hell wants to work for someone who says things like that? Certainly not the "high-quality" engineers who are supposedly being separated from the chaff.

mmmpop 4y ago

How do you define "public failure"? My definition would be entirely contingent upon the intentions of the new owner since it's his to do with what he pleases. If said owner is well into middle age and bored, but has more money than literally any other person...? Who am I to judge what he decides to do with it? "It's just money" says Elon and if his goal were to be the world's most massive troll (which I suspect is a large part of it), then it's achievement accomplished, full stop.

woodruffw 4y ago
At least to my mind, "public failure" includes but isn't limited to embarrassing outages and service degradation on one of the world's most popular social media sites, one that was more or less running smoothly immediately prior.

nindalf 4y ago

I notice every VC cheering this absurd management style on. If Twitter's new management can be somehow spun as a success, it will normalise treating tech employees in general and engineering in particular very poorly - longer hours, less compensation. For VCs and senior management, that's a fantastic outcome. In a month they're going to say "look! we didn't have a single outage during the World Cup" and act like it vindicates their approach.

merrywhether 4y ago

The irony here is that you could easily fire 80% of the C-suite and VPs and a company should survive for some time. This is kind of a tautology because leadership at bigger companies should be mostly operating at the months-to-years timeframe, so it should take a long time (or a unique emergency) for their absence to be felt. We could run both experiments (firing engineers vs firing execs) against each other across a sample of companies and I know which I'd bet on to still be mostly functional 3-4 weeks later.