6 ms·

Twitter’s ongoing cruel treatment of software engineers

75 points by andyjohnson0 4y ago

Proven 4y ago
mrg3_2013 4y ago
This is much worse than what I had assumed! Wow! This article made me change my opinion on the twitter saga. It feels like Elon is overcompensating to make himself look like Nero playing the fiddle.
- fundad 4y ago
  His hype machine enabled the Twitter exit the board wanted. Nobody cared that he’s a MAGA loon who’s under investigation for retaliation against people who complain about racist working conditions. Its the only reason I believe people stayed when they could have left 4 months ago into a lava hot hiring market.
andrewfromx 4y ago
Not saying the points in the article are wrong but there is this other side: https://twitter.com/mattwensing/status/1594350932833480704 https://twitter.com/mattwensing/status/1594350932833480704
- andyjohnson0 4y ago
  > last night i drank 8 redbulls and rewrote the worst parts of our direct messages backend I'm fairly sure thats a parody. Nothing in that person's profile indicates that they work at twitter.
  - andrewfromx 4y ago
    sure, but does any engineer that's been on both sides of work crazy and get amazing stuff done vs. cruise ship make 1 icon change a day get that sentiment? Surely there are some engineers at twitter getting re-energized because of the new direction? https://youtu.be/KX7tj3giizI?t=5096 https://youtu.be/KX7tj3giizI?t=5096 (link to all in pod where they talk about the 2001st engineer hire)
    - SilverBirch 4y ago
      I really don't think you got the joke. Software development at a large company isn't a montage from the movie Hackers, you don't rewrite an entire direct messaging back-end in an evening. I'm sure there are people who believe it works like that, but those people are the butt of the joke. I mean we saw this with our own eyes with Twitter Blue checkmarks. A feature Elon Musk's new hardcore Twitter had to deliver in a weekend. What happened? A shitshow for 2 weeks that ended in Musk entirely rolling back the whole effort and completely re-evaluating the schedule.
- scottLobster 4y ago
  Even if true, pounding 8 red bulls is probably not a sustainable development practice. Then again Elon has made it clear that if you're an engineer at any of his companies you're there to be burned for fuel and get the "I survived 2 years of working for Elon" merit badge for your resume
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  >Matt Wensing >@mattwensing >2x founder, current @usesummit, the low-code platform for marketers to build calculators. fan of hard work, occasional comedian. Yeah, no, this post is just a good bit of trolling, and seemingly quite a few people seem to fall face first into it.
  - wittycardio 4y ago
    Lol Elon simps tend to be people like that. Technically capable intelligent people can generally see through the bs
- wittycardio 4y ago
  Always easy to tell a musk simp
- ncr100 4y ago
  It's a joke, echoing the myth that "just let me fix it" works. That's the authoritarian's pledge... "Need a Stong Man to fix it all for you, I'll do it." -What I personally gathered from watching authoritarians. It's an abusive situation at Twitter. Pray Evil Elon face is kept hidden from the people whom he now bosses, and Good Fun Guy Elon remains on.
jdmoreira 4y ago
I've been following this whole saga on Twitter and Gergely Orosz commentary as well. First of all you need to know that I'm a strong believer in worker rights and I am in no way on Elon's side ON ANYTHING he does. But Gergely Orosz commentary and narrative around this is just starting to get to me. Where is why: - He (Gergely Orosz) has personally been using this situation to inflate his influence and grow as some sort of thought leader for engineers. - Most tech companies are BLOATED, I know because I've worked in multiple for the last fifteen years. Everyone that works there with any sense of business acumen will know as well. - Most engineers work in cost centers and on wild company bets that will never pay off. Most engineers and teams at these companies have been funded by easy and cheap access to capital. - We have been treated like greek gods and goddesses and we are spoiled. Times are / have changed. Buckle up peeps, it's about to get rough. It's time to accept a lot of things are about to change. Now it's the time to be resilient and provide extreme value to you employer or just quit and build something on your own.
- zug_zug 4y ago
  I think you're really conflating two unrelated problems. I agree that there is bloat. But that has nothing to do with engineers. But it's not an engineer's job to create and provide value out of thin air. It is management's job to only hire engineers when they have real value to create that requires more engineers. I imagine 50-90% of hires are "empire building" or politics. I also expect it's probably a good thing for the industry and the world when these imaginationless FANG companies stop wasting great years of talented engineers and stop being seen as some aspirational goal for everyone.
  - jdmoreira 4y ago
    > But it's not an engineer's job to create and provide value out of thin air. It is management's job to only hire engineers when they have real value to create that requires more engineers. I imagine 50-90% of hires are "empire building" or politics. 100% agree. Head count is like oil or Dune's Spice at these companies. Middle managers just want to grow the headcount under them to grow their own influence and get more power in whatever petty politics they are currently engaged in. You are 100% right
tharkun__ 4y ago
Twitter’s US HR department seems to have a hard time understanding that the USA is not the world, and that in several countries, people cannot be fired over email, nor can local employment regulations be ignored. I am looking forward to seeing how this part is going to play out. I.e. how much protection is there actually in the EU vs. fluffy sounding "protections" that aren't really worth the paper they're written on. This seems like the ultimate test of those protections. I really hope it's not just fluffy words. On the other hand, there is the "salt water theory" of how this is going to play out (and the article I think proves that too): If you turn up the heat, the good guys will leave first. I.e. the water will evaporate, leaving only a salty brine: Elon Musk [...] set up meetings with key engineers in an attempt to persuade them to stay. Some employees were offered up to $100,000 in raises to stay[...]. Still, more than 1,000 employees quit that day, taking voluntary severance.
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  ? These protections have been, well, protecting employees from companies much larger and much more litigious than Twitter. A lot of it has been made around troubles with car manufacturers and other industries, and involves unions (something the US doesn't seem to understand is a necessary thing). There's been larger layoffs that have all respected the law, because judges do not fuck around with this. It's one thing to fire one employee and bet that he will not have the time or money to fight for two months of back pay. It's a whole other to fire more than 50 people (which in most of europe is the trigger for mass layoffs) and not have even the state have a look at it.
- bko 4y ago
  > On the other hand, there is the "salt water theory" of how this is going to play out (and the article I think proves that too): If you turn up the heat, the good guys will leave first. I.e. the water will evaporate, leaving only a salty brine: It could be the reverse. If you take at face value that twitter is trying to refocus on actual improvements to the product as opposed to whatever the thousands of engineers were doing before, then some people may be attracted to that work environment. In my experience the best engineers have left jobs because they're bored, not because of a lack of perks or money. A lot of people leave a lot of money, ridiculous benefits and a 20 hours work week by leaving FAANG so they can work on something meaningful, even if it is a CRUD app. At least they can point to something and say "I did that". There's a lot to do at twitter that was not a priority in the last decade. Things that seem like bugs (e.g. mobile app looking at a tweet and it disappears or gets pushed away), to search being awful (can't search specific users or before/after or exclude or anything really, its just a black box that sometimes works), to opening up and consolidating the API with the developer API, to actually getting rid of bots. These aren't necessarily hard problems. This is exactly what a startup would be doing and would definitely drive engagement. But for some reason Twitter has deprioritized these for ... other things? But now it looks like it might actually be an exciting place to work.
ohgodplsno 4y ago
The clown that lied on his credentials and doesn't have an ounce of technical experience keeps going at it. I'm sure the Tesla engineers are happy at least, with this dumbass no longer over their shoulder all the time, they probably can work on making their cars not kill people and stop recognizing children as targets instead of putting funny honk tones in the car. >We have to ask the question: why is Elon Musk creating what seems to be the most toxic working environment among major tech companies in 2022? Because he is a completely incompetent clown projecting his insecurities to the world and pretending to be hardcore, and if he was written as a parody of a capitalist villain in a book, he would have been rejected by the editor because it's simply not credible enough that he's that stupid.
- d23 4y ago
  > if he was written as a parody of a capitalist villain in a book, he would have been rejected by the editor because it's simply not credible enough that he's that stupid. One of the best summaries of him I’ve read.
- love2read 4y ago
  This is clearly rage bait.
freddealmeida 4y ago
When you restructure you can do almost anything in most countries. And you can always just shut down the offices. But yes it will be interesting to see
- Tainnor 4y ago
  No. You can lay off people when restructuring, but in many countries you still have to follow law while doing so. Automated "we accept your resignation" termination letters are definitely not legal in Germany, and probably also not in many other European countries.
SilverBirch 4y ago
I've really got a gripe over this whole "Bloated" discourse. Tech companies aren't bloated and this is a ridiculous literal way of viewing engineering. You cannot map every engineer to a singular function fulfilling a singular goal for a singular customer. It's like looking at VC and saying "Boy, you really are wasteful, for every 100 bets you make only 5 pay off, you should stick to just picking the 5 that pay off". It doesn't work that way, you have to invest in all the ways that have positive expectancy because you don't know a priori which ones are going to pay off and you need scale in order to spread that risk. So yes, there are lots of engineers at tech companies doing all sorts of different things, and thousands of engineer-years worth of energy are spent on projects that don't pay off. But that's not bloat, it's strategy. And particularly, in an era of cheap money, the risk-reward ratio was strongly on the side of "make more bets".
- runarberg 4y ago
  You’d think the HN crowd should understand when redundancy is a desirable effect. You’d also think we’d understand that some systems are non-linear and includes a lot of feed backs and feed forwards. But apparently applying this to workers seems a logical step they are unwilling to take.
Chyzwar 4y ago
Price's law in action. Top contributors already left voluntaryly and what is left cannot implement ambitious road map.
- danrocks 4y ago
  Either you support this statement with data or you're talking out of your behind.
  - Chyzwar 4y ago
    Imagine that you are a top performer working remotely for the last two years. The company have decent work-life balance and plenty of interesting projects. You have respect of coworkers and a plenty of independence. Musk: - want to stop remote working and force you to commune for 2h per day - want to bring "hardcore" work culture from Tesla/SpaceX - is known from firing people randomly and micromanaging - have no clear vision for company and is quickly loosing advertisers - bring outsiders from tesla to take over and judge you based on LOC Unless you are strapped to H-1B visa, you take 3 months severance and start holiday break. There are multiple reports of whole teams infra teams leaving. The next thing to happen is a big hack or outage. I only visit Twitter to see things of fire :P
exabrial 4y ago
The whining is insufferable at this point. Cruel? Quit. Nobody’s is making you stay. If you’ve worked at Twitter, you are one of the richest people in the world. Take those 1337 code skills somewhere else and stop complaining.
- fundad 4y ago
  The only reason anyone is surprised at the cruelty and stayed long enough to see Twitter go down is because of the hype machine around Musk. It was an open secret about how badly he treats Black workers but people anre finally reacting like he’s doing something bad. The task is to destroy the hype machine and his ego.
  - exabrial 4y ago
    I think if that’s your task, why? Who cares? Seems like there are plenty of good causes that could use your energy.
    - fundad 4y ago
      I suppose there are better causes than reducing the billions a bullshit soaks from investors and taxpayers.
- deleted 4y ago
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- ncr100 4y ago
  It's ok to complain. Identifying problems is one step in the path to make things better. Some people don't have the courage to Leave, like you might... Allow them to feel like it's ok to complain. Avoid shaming them. Cruel sounding messaging here, @exabrial, to me ears. Saying "whining", specifically suggests the employees are in the wrong, because to whine is generally a shameful act. Darth Vader said it best, "Pray that I do not alter the deal further." It's an abusive situation...and that is generally a bad thing for humanity's sake. In Nature, for sure an individual's solution to an overpowering (leader's) cruelty is to leave. That doesn't mean what's going on in the first place is right. In Humanity, we get to assert as a mega society, what is acceptable behavior. This Twitter stuff is not right and should not happen. It is bad and leads to worse things for all of us.
_8j50 4y ago
Guys, I am not a software engineer but I hope you make it difficult for people that chose to stay at Twitter get other jobs in the future unless they had a good reason like H-1b/immigration or lack of job offers elsewhere. People talk about how managers and CEOs will react if kelon succeeds, but it is at least equally important to think about how employees might react. Any move in my org in this direction and I'm jumping ship right away, I may not even waiting until I get an offer elsewhere. Few things piss me off more the "genius jerk" like kelon. Like, I like to think I am a peaceful person but people like that, I just want to destroy fully. Instead of being humbled and grateful for your talent and celebrate your hardwork and help others get to where you are, you use your accomplishment as an asshole badge. If you want to understand kelon or anyone really, but especially leaders, you must understand what their life and experience was during their developmental years(12 and under). Examples include: trump and how his father treated him when he was a kid, Putin and how he grew up in the shadow of his WW2 war hero brother or Xi and how he grew up in the middle of the chaos of Mao's great leap forward. Elon Musk (kelon) grew up in apartheid south africa in a rich emerald mining family, jewels are why apartheid existed basically. when you see that and his relationship with his parents , suddenly you see how he sees employees and bosses and how things should be done to increase wealth and why his companies are uniquely racist infested to the point several lawsuits (repeatingly across jursidictions) over racial hostility keeps happening against Tesla.
- fundad 4y ago
  H1-B holders were able to leave when the board sold the company. It’s not easy and unfair but the alternative was buying into the hype machine.
  - _8j50 4y ago
    First off, I am anti-asshole not anti elon, if he treated people with respect and showed some humility I would have no problem with him just like anyone else. And trust me, you are the worst evil here with little to gain yourself you support a terrible person and their endeavor of cruelty as part of a mob. I double checked wiki, it says when his parents divorced he lived with his father not mother like you said and his father was wealthy and a half owner of an emerald mine. The part about him coming to canada without thise riches is right. He did make a fortune from paypal though which you can claim was a genius idea but as the GP comment points out he did get several things wrong before he succeeded, his paypal wealth cushion helped. Every kid in tech and their mother had ideas of self driving cars, flying cars, spaceships. His courage to pursue wild ideas and lead technical people means nothing to the cruelty and arrogance he displayed. Nothing he can or has done makes up for that. If someone cured cancer but supported legalization of child abuse I wouldn't give a shit about how they cured cancer either. You gotta be nice to people and humble, sorry, no amount of money or genius makes you an exception. Take your elon, kanye and trump and keep them to yourself.
guax 4y ago
It is sad to me that a lot of people seem to think the problem with Twitter, or any company, being "bloated" is the fault of of the people hired and not the fault of leadership. That somehow people deserve to be laid off in the most stupid way because somehow its their fault that they were hired? Fire them, twitter was bloated, but do it with respect and dignity. Some of us here in the comments seem to think the world needs to be a dark and cruel place and people are "spoiled" but it does not, being a dick is an option and Elon went head first in.
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jef_leppard 4y ago
It makes me sad seeing the narrative on forums like this and elsewhere shift to "Tech companies are all bloated and Elon is right". Anyone saying that is missing the point entirely IMO. Even if if it were 100% true and everything Elon has done up to now is correct, it's still a complete travesty the way it's been executed. You want to come in and make big sweeping changes? Cut dead weight? Fine. But have some god damn empathy and also take a minute to figure out why everything is the way that it is before you start throwing your weight around. All the rest of the dialog is beside the point in my mind.
- ncr100 4y ago
  It got to me at various points in me career, working with a leader who appeared to have no empathy. Complaining, requesting change, then leaving was how it went. I still feel conflicted, "did I do the wrong thing, am I the weakling?" I now better appreciate that asserting my boundaries is all that keeps me safe from that kind of unhealthy situation, for me.
gofreddygo 4y ago
People terminated were offered 4 weeks’ severance if they signed a separation agreement. This severance feels insulting, given that people who did not opt into being part of “Twitter 2.0” just one week ago received three months' severance. Some folks on HN predicted this days ago! Incredible and more disappointing at the same time.
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xilinx_guy 4y ago
I actually joined Twitter, because I wanted to have a front row seat to the story as it unfolds. Twitter was never that interesting before, but now it's a madhouse of humor, revenge, and right wing zeitgeist. It's amusing AF. I think it's likely Twitter will eventually collapse under the debt burden as interest rates rise and stay high for some time. It will be a lesson for the ages, where eventually the phrase "Musk Buys Twitter" will reference legendary cluster f*cks of enormous magnitude.

75 points by andyjohnson0 4y ago

mrg3_2013 4y ago

This is much worse than what I had assumed! Wow! This article made me change my opinion on the twitter saga. It feels like Elon is overcompensating to make himself look like Nero playing the fiddle.

fundad 4y ago
His hype machine enabled the Twitter exit the board wanted. Nobody cared that he’s a MAGA loon who’s under investigation for retaliation against people who complain about racist working conditions. Its the only reason I believe people stayed when they could have left 4 months ago into a lava hot hiring market.

andrewfromx 4y ago

Not saying the points in the article are wrong but there is this other side: https://twitter.com/mattwensing/status/1594350932833480704 https://twitter.com/mattwensing/status/1594350932833480704

andyjohnson0 4y ago
> last night i drank 8 redbulls and rewrote the worst parts of our direct messages backend I'm fairly sure thats a parody. Nothing in that person's profile indicates that they work at twitter.
- andrewfromx 4y ago
  sure, but does any engineer that's been on both sides of work crazy and get amazing stuff done vs. cruise ship make 1 icon change a day get that sentiment? Surely there are some engineers at twitter getting re-energized because of the new direction? https://youtu.be/KX7tj3giizI?t=5096 https://youtu.be/KX7tj3giizI?t=5096 (link to all in pod where they talk about the 2001st engineer hire)
  - SilverBirch 4y ago
    I really don't think you got the joke. Software development at a large company isn't a montage from the movie Hackers, you don't rewrite an entire direct messaging back-end in an evening. I'm sure there are people who believe it works like that, but those people are the butt of the joke. I mean we saw this with our own eyes with Twitter Blue checkmarks. A feature Elon Musk's new hardcore Twitter had to deliver in a weekend. What happened? A shitshow for 2 weeks that ended in Musk entirely rolling back the whole effort and completely re-evaluating the schedule.
scottLobster 4y ago
Even if true, pounding 8 red bulls is probably not a sustainable development practice. Then again Elon has made it clear that if you're an engineer at any of his companies you're there to be burned for fuel and get the "I survived 2 years of working for Elon" merit badge for your resume
ohgodplsno 4y ago
>Matt Wensing >@mattwensing >2x founder, current @usesummit, the low-code platform for marketers to build calculators. fan of hard work, occasional comedian. Yeah, no, this post is just a good bit of trolling, and seemingly quite a few people seem to fall face first into it.
- wittycardio 4y ago
  Lol Elon simps tend to be people like that. Technically capable intelligent people can generally see through the bs
wittycardio 4y ago
Always easy to tell a musk simp
ncr100 4y ago
It's a joke, echoing the myth that "just let me fix it" works. That's the authoritarian's pledge... "Need a Stong Man to fix it all for you, I'll do it." -What I personally gathered from watching authoritarians. It's an abusive situation at Twitter. Pray Evil Elon face is kept hidden from the people whom he now bosses, and Good Fun Guy Elon remains on.

jdmoreira 4y ago

I've been following this whole saga on Twitter and Gergely Orosz commentary as well. First of all you need to know that I'm a strong believer in worker rights and I am in no way on Elon's side ON ANYTHING he does. But Gergely Orosz commentary and narrative around this is just starting to get to me. Where is why: - He (Gergely Orosz) has personally been using this situation to inflate his influence and grow as some sort of thought leader for engineers. - Most tech companies are BLOATED, I know because I've worked in multiple for the last fifteen years. Everyone that works there with any sense of business acumen will know as well. - Most engineers work in cost centers and on wild company bets that will never pay off. Most engineers and teams at these companies have been funded by easy and cheap access to capital. - We have been treated like greek gods and goddesses and we are spoiled. Times are / have changed. Buckle up peeps, it's about to get rough. It's time to accept a lot of things are about to change. Now it's the time to be resilient and provide extreme value to you employer or just quit and build something on your own.

zug_zug 4y ago
I think you're really conflating two unrelated problems. I agree that there is bloat. But that has nothing to do with engineers. But it's not an engineer's job to create and provide value out of thin air. It is management's job to only hire engineers when they have real value to create that requires more engineers. I imagine 50-90% of hires are "empire building" or politics. I also expect it's probably a good thing for the industry and the world when these imaginationless FANG companies stop wasting great years of talented engineers and stop being seen as some aspirational goal for everyone.
- jdmoreira 4y ago
  > But it's not an engineer's job to create and provide value out of thin air. It is management's job to only hire engineers when they have real value to create that requires more engineers. I imagine 50-90% of hires are "empire building" or politics. 100% agree. Head count is like oil or Dune's Spice at these companies. Middle managers just want to grow the headcount under them to grow their own influence and get more power in whatever petty politics they are currently engaged in. You are 100% right

tharkun__ 4y ago

Twitter’s US HR department seems to have a hard time understanding that the USA is not the world, and that in several countries, people cannot be fired over email, nor can local employment regulations be ignored. I am looking forward to seeing how this part is going to play out. I.e. how much protection is there actually in the EU vs. fluffy sounding "protections" that aren't really worth the paper they're written on. This seems like the ultimate test of those protections. I really hope it's not just fluffy words. On the other hand, there is the "salt water theory" of how this is going to play out (and the article I think proves that too): If you turn up the heat, the good guys will leave first. I.e. the water will evaporate, leaving only a salty brine: Elon Musk [...] set up meetings with key engineers in an attempt to persuade them to stay. Some employees were offered up to $100,000 in raises to stay[...]. Still, more than 1,000 employees quit that day, taking voluntary severance.

ohgodplsno 4y ago
? These protections have been, well, protecting employees from companies much larger and much more litigious than Twitter. A lot of it has been made around troubles with car manufacturers and other industries, and involves unions (something the US doesn't seem to understand is a necessary thing). There's been larger layoffs that have all respected the law, because judges do not fuck around with this. It's one thing to fire one employee and bet that he will not have the time or money to fight for two months of back pay. It's a whole other to fire more than 50 people (which in most of europe is the trigger for mass layoffs) and not have even the state have a look at it.
bko 4y ago
> On the other hand, there is the "salt water theory" of how this is going to play out (and the article I think proves that too): If you turn up the heat, the good guys will leave first. I.e. the water will evaporate, leaving only a salty brine: It could be the reverse. If you take at face value that twitter is trying to refocus on actual improvements to the product as opposed to whatever the thousands of engineers were doing before, then some people may be attracted to that work environment. In my experience the best engineers have left jobs because they're bored, not because of a lack of perks or money. A lot of people leave a lot of money, ridiculous benefits and a 20 hours work week by leaving FAANG so they can work on something meaningful, even if it is a CRUD app. At least they can point to something and say "I did that". There's a lot to do at twitter that was not a priority in the last decade. Things that seem like bugs (e.g. mobile app looking at a tweet and it disappears or gets pushed away), to search being awful (can't search specific users or before/after or exclude or anything really, its just a black box that sometimes works), to opening up and consolidating the API with the developer API, to actually getting rid of bots. These aren't necessarily hard problems. This is exactly what a startup would be doing and would definitely drive engagement. But for some reason Twitter has deprioritized these for ... other things? But now it looks like it might actually be an exciting place to work.

ohgodplsno 4y ago

The clown that lied on his credentials and doesn't have an ounce of technical experience keeps going at it. I'm sure the Tesla engineers are happy at least, with this dumbass no longer over their shoulder all the time, they probably can work on making their cars not kill people and stop recognizing children as targets instead of putting funny honk tones in the car. >We have to ask the question: why is Elon Musk creating what seems to be the most toxic working environment among major tech companies in 2022? Because he is a completely incompetent clown projecting his insecurities to the world and pretending to be hardcore, and if he was written as a parody of a capitalist villain in a book, he would have been rejected by the editor because it's simply not credible enough that he's that stupid.

d23 4y ago
> if he was written as a parody of a capitalist villain in a book, he would have been rejected by the editor because it's simply not credible enough that he's that stupid. One of the best summaries of him I’ve read.
love2read 4y ago
This is clearly rage bait.

freddealmeida 4y ago

When you restructure you can do almost anything in most countries. And you can always just shut down the offices. But yes it will be interesting to see

Tainnor 4y ago
No. You can lay off people when restructuring, but in many countries you still have to follow law while doing so. Automated "we accept your resignation" termination letters are definitely not legal in Germany, and probably also not in many other European countries.

SilverBirch 4y ago

I've really got a gripe over this whole "Bloated" discourse. Tech companies aren't bloated and this is a ridiculous literal way of viewing engineering. You cannot map every engineer to a singular function fulfilling a singular goal for a singular customer. It's like looking at VC and saying "Boy, you really are wasteful, for every 100 bets you make only 5 pay off, you should stick to just picking the 5 that pay off". It doesn't work that way, you have to invest in all the ways that have positive expectancy because you don't know a priori which ones are going to pay off and you need scale in order to spread that risk. So yes, there are lots of engineers at tech companies doing all sorts of different things, and thousands of engineer-years worth of energy are spent on projects that don't pay off. But that's not bloat, it's strategy. And particularly, in an era of cheap money, the risk-reward ratio was strongly on the side of "make more bets".

runarberg 4y ago
You’d think the HN crowd should understand when redundancy is a desirable effect. You’d also think we’d understand that some systems are non-linear and includes a lot of feed backs and feed forwards. But apparently applying this to workers seems a logical step they are unwilling to take.

Chyzwar 4y ago

Price's law in action. Top contributors already left voluntaryly and what is left cannot implement ambitious road map.

danrocks 4y ago
Either you support this statement with data or you're talking out of your behind.
- Chyzwar 4y ago
  Imagine that you are a top performer working remotely for the last two years. The company have decent work-life balance and plenty of interesting projects. You have respect of coworkers and a plenty of independence. Musk: - want to stop remote working and force you to commune for 2h per day - want to bring "hardcore" work culture from Tesla/SpaceX - is known from firing people randomly and micromanaging - have no clear vision for company and is quickly loosing advertisers - bring outsiders from tesla to take over and judge you based on LOC Unless you are strapped to H-1B visa, you take 3 months severance and start holiday break. There are multiple reports of whole teams infra teams leaving. The next thing to happen is a big hack or outage. I only visit Twitter to see things of fire :P

exabrial 4y ago

The whining is insufferable at this point. Cruel? Quit. Nobody’s is making you stay. If you’ve worked at Twitter, you are one of the richest people in the world. Take those 1337 code skills somewhere else and stop complaining.

fundad 4y ago
The only reason anyone is surprised at the cruelty and stayed long enough to see Twitter go down is because of the hype machine around Musk. It was an open secret about how badly he treats Black workers but people anre finally reacting like he’s doing something bad. The task is to destroy the hype machine and his ego.
- exabrial 4y ago
  I think if that’s your task, why? Who cares? Seems like there are plenty of good causes that could use your energy.
  - fundad 4y ago
    I suppose there are better causes than reducing the billions a bullshit soaks from investors and taxpayers.
deleted 4y ago
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ncr100 4y ago
It's ok to complain. Identifying problems is one step in the path to make things better. Some people don't have the courage to Leave, like you might... Allow them to feel like it's ok to complain. Avoid shaming them. Cruel sounding messaging here, @exabrial, to me ears. Saying "whining", specifically suggests the employees are in the wrong, because to whine is generally a shameful act. Darth Vader said it best, "Pray that I do not alter the deal further." It's an abusive situation...and that is generally a bad thing for humanity's sake. In Nature, for sure an individual's solution to an overpowering (leader's) cruelty is to leave. That doesn't mean what's going on in the first place is right. In Humanity, we get to assert as a mega society, what is acceptable behavior. This Twitter stuff is not right and should not happen. It is bad and leads to worse things for all of us.

_8j50 4y ago

Guys, I am not a software engineer but I hope you make it difficult for people that chose to stay at Twitter get other jobs in the future unless they had a good reason like H-1b/immigration or lack of job offers elsewhere. People talk about how managers and CEOs will react if kelon succeeds, but it is at least equally important to think about how employees might react. Any move in my org in this direction and I'm jumping ship right away, I may not even waiting until I get an offer elsewhere. Few things piss me off more the "genius jerk" like kelon. Like, I like to think I am a peaceful person but people like that, I just want to destroy fully. Instead of being humbled and grateful for your talent and celebrate your hardwork and help others get to where you are, you use your accomplishment as an asshole badge. If you want to understand kelon or anyone really, but especially leaders, you must understand what their life and experience was during their developmental years(12 and under). Examples include: trump and how his father treated him when he was a kid, Putin and how he grew up in the shadow of his WW2 war hero brother or Xi and how he grew up in the middle of the chaos of Mao's great leap forward. Elon Musk (kelon) grew up in apartheid south africa in a rich emerald mining family, jewels are why apartheid existed basically. when you see that and his relationship with his parents , suddenly you see how he sees employees and bosses and how things should be done to increase wealth and why his companies are uniquely racist infested to the point several lawsuits (repeatingly across jursidictions) over racial hostility keeps happening against Tesla.

fundad 4y ago
H1-B holders were able to leave when the board sold the company. It’s not easy and unfair but the alternative was buying into the hype machine.
- _8j50 4y ago
  First off, I am anti-asshole not anti elon, if he treated people with respect and showed some humility I would have no problem with him just like anyone else. And trust me, you are the worst evil here with little to gain yourself you support a terrible person and their endeavor of cruelty as part of a mob. I double checked wiki, it says when his parents divorced he lived with his father not mother like you said and his father was wealthy and a half owner of an emerald mine. The part about him coming to canada without thise riches is right. He did make a fortune from paypal though which you can claim was a genius idea but as the GP comment points out he did get several things wrong before he succeeded, his paypal wealth cushion helped. Every kid in tech and their mother had ideas of self driving cars, flying cars, spaceships. His courage to pursue wild ideas and lead technical people means nothing to the cruelty and arrogance he displayed. Nothing he can or has done makes up for that. If someone cured cancer but supported legalization of child abuse I wouldn't give a shit about how they cured cancer either. You gotta be nice to people and humble, sorry, no amount of money or genius makes you an exception. Take your elon, kanye and trump and keep them to yourself.

guax 4y ago

It is sad to me that a lot of people seem to think the problem with Twitter, or any company, being "bloated" is the fault of of the people hired and not the fault of leadership. That somehow people deserve to be laid off in the most stupid way because somehow its their fault that they were hired? Fire them, twitter was bloated, but do it with respect and dignity. Some of us here in the comments seem to think the world needs to be a dark and cruel place and people are "spoiled" but it does not, being a dick is an option and Elon went head first in.

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jef_leppard 4y ago

It makes me sad seeing the narrative on forums like this and elsewhere shift to "Tech companies are all bloated and Elon is right". Anyone saying that is missing the point entirely IMO. Even if if it were 100% true and everything Elon has done up to now is correct, it's still a complete travesty the way it's been executed. You want to come in and make big sweeping changes? Cut dead weight? Fine. But have some god damn empathy and also take a minute to figure out why everything is the way that it is before you start throwing your weight around. All the rest of the dialog is beside the point in my mind.

ncr100 4y ago
It got to me at various points in me career, working with a leader who appeared to have no empathy. Complaining, requesting change, then leaving was how it went. I still feel conflicted, "did I do the wrong thing, am I the weakling?" I now better appreciate that asserting my boundaries is all that keeps me safe from that kind of unhealthy situation, for me.

gofreddygo 4y ago

People terminated were offered 4 weeks’ severance if they signed a separation agreement. This severance feels insulting, given that people who did not opt into being part of “Twitter 2.0” just one week ago received three months' severance. Some folks on HN predicted this days ago! Incredible and more disappointing at the same time.

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xilinx_guy 4y ago

I actually joined Twitter, because I wanted to have a front row seat to the story as it unfolds. Twitter was never that interesting before, but now it's a madhouse of humor, revenge, and right wing zeitgeist. It's amusing AF. I think it's likely Twitter will eventually collapse under the debt burden as interest rates rise and stay high for some time. It will be a lesson for the ages, where eventually the phrase "Musk Buys Twitter" will reference legendary cluster f*cks of enormous magnitude.