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The metaconversations around Twitter are just fascinating to me from a business perspective and personal one. It's astounding to see the difference between what

The metaconversations around Twitter are just fascinating to me from a business perspective and personal one. It's astounding to see the difference between what Executives, Normal People, and Tech People think of Twitter these days. Executives are truly impressed with Twitter these days from an operations stand point. The mass layoffs, the strategic regrouping, and the fact new features are being added with reduced staff. They don't see the technical issues behind the video platform or even this kinda of overwhelmed lawyer stuff as major issues. These are just part of the growing pains. Normal people are just checked out. I was asked a lot about Twitter and its layoffs around the time by friends and family in other fields when the media was getting hysterical. After all Twitter didn't go down, is still getting new features, and the vast majority people are still using it fairly the same as they always have. I think that was a very damaging blow to the tech media. The Tech people seem to driven from a strong place of fear. I think they are right to feel afraid too. I've been asked repeatedly about plans to reduce headcount, with Executives quoted Twitter's success or emerging AI. The most surprising part is the increase of admiration I'm seeing for Elon Musk from "non-tech" people and executives for "putting tech people in their place". I guess there was a lot more bitterness from everyone else, and a feeling of too much entitlement from "silicon valley".

tsunamifury 3y ago
On that last point. It’s incredible that as one crab is about to climb out of the bucket (tech workers becoming financially independent) and is pushed back down, the others take so much joy in it. While idolizing the fisherman that pushed that crab back down. They never, ever, seem to think — wow someone almost escaped this bucket, maybe we should try too. It’s incredible how self sabotaging we humans are.
- jonhohle 3y ago
  I think a lot of middle America sees a tech crab kicking blue collar crabs down to get themselves out of a bucket (true or not). Having spent all of my career outside of SV (worked remote for a company in SV for a while), but having spent a reasonable amount of time interviewing technical people from SV, I came away with a general sense of hubris that was not justified that I never saw from other parts of the country (n = several hundred at a FAANG and unicorn startup). Perhaps I was unlucky, but 9 times out of 10 I was astounded to find individuals commanding 6-figure engineering salaries who couldn’t code or even seemed put out that I was asking them to write code in an interview… for a role that required writing code. From an outsiders perspective, if one was laid off from Twitter (with a generous severance package), they either will find themselves in a new role fairly quickly and it’s Twitter’s loss, or they were dead weight and may or may not want to consider adjusting their career path. In either case they’ll have more job opportunity than a laid off factory worker typically has. The whining about it only reinforces the perception of petulance.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    > I think a lot of middle America sees a tech crab kicking blue collar crabs down to get themselves out of a bucket (true or not). This is a deliberate tactic used by the people actually kicking us all down. People who make $40M/yr have gotten very good at convincing people who make $40K/yr that it's those snooty, elitist tech workers making $400K/yr who are the big problem in the world. Divide and conquer.
    - p_j_w 3y ago
      >People who make $40M/yr have gotten very good at convincing people who make $40K/yr that it's those snooty, elitist tech workers making $400K/yr who are the big problem in the world. These same people have convinced the people making $40k/yr that Starbucks workers making $30k/yr demanding a union are also part of the problem, as well. Just call them millenials, woke, or coastal elites and people will be chomping at the bit to hate them.
    - medvezhenok 3y ago
      It's not as absurd a proposition as you think. The people making 40K are not competing for resources with the people making $40M - their consumption likely has relatively few overlaps (and the people at the $40M/year level are likely in a different social class altogether - so they are not seen as competitors). Additionally, the number of people making $40M/year is relatively tiny - probably less than 1% of those that make $400K/yr. You will notice that in Europe, the good social fallback systems / health insurance / safety net in place are at the expense of the people that make $400K a year (in the US), not at the expense of the millionaires.
      - tsunamifury 3y ago
        Your first observation is very apt. We are competitive with those in our league and not outside. And your second is a deep cut Europeans aren’t ready to hear if I understand correctly n
  - tsunamifury 3y ago
    I’ll Push on your thesis and argue that maybe you were not in the superior position you thought you were. Many times I’ve seen small (often midwest) firms try to engage me when I worked in FAANG and what they were tackling and how they were doing it lacked sophistication or experience to a degree that wasn’t even worth me engaging with. Their goals were small, their technology was unambitious, and their business lacked scale. They thought I was being smug, even when I was polite and said none of this out loud — but honest to god they were actually a bit insecure about the reality that they didn’t have much to offer and slowly realized it. I’m sorry but it’s really rich when someone from a small firm barely making millions would lecture me on how to do it right when I ran multi billion dollar programs. But that didn’t stop them from lecturing to feel superior. And the more I didn’t engage with that the more they seemed to think I was being “smug”.
- kipchak 3y ago
  I agree, but I don't know if it's fair to say that people just never thought "maybe we should try". See for example the Mined Minds program. This self sabotaging goes the other way too also, remember "learn to code"?
- redditor98654 3y ago
  Christopher Nolan's Interstellar had a line of dialogue from Matt Damon's character that went something like: "As a species, we can care deeply, selflessly about those we know, but that empathy rarely extends beyond our line of sight." Still resonates with me.
jonhohle 3y ago
As a tech person, I’m failing to see what’s wrong with cutting bloat? I’ve always felt much more productive on smaller teams, and while not quite at the scale of Twitter, have worked on teams with 10s to 100s of millions of active users with only 10 or so technical staff and another 10 or so business and managers. That team got increasingly less efficient as it grew towards 50 or more people over several years. I don’t really have an opinion about Musk one way or another (except coincidental his involvement in the 90s with Rocket Science Games), but I’m unsure where the animus has originated. For example, I don’t care much for Bill Gates because under his watch Microsoft was relentless at putting competitors, several of which I was a fan, out of business and his foundation funding experiments gone wrong in poor counties. Besides outspoken political stances and firing people, what has harm has Musk caused?
- Eumenes 3y ago
  I think its cause Musk is the richest person in the world (eat the rich, etc), isn't lock step with popular narratives, and engaged in the culture war stuff. "Cutting bloat" doesn't sound very empathetic either and is "anti-worker/pro management", thus the left leaning tech crowd disapproves. In his oppositions perspective, companies have an ethnical obligation to doll out corporate welfare and support causes they believe in. Musk isn't really into that. tl;dr - he's a Capitalist
  - jonhohle 3y ago
    > cutting bloat There’s lots of different ways to put it, and getting fired sucks regardless of the circumstances. Organizational bloat is a common phrase for groups that are larger than their utility, it doesn’t reflect on the individuals in that group in any way (except for maybe executives and middle managers who allowed it to get that way). If a private company is continuing operations to the satisfaction of its owner without a portion of its employees, whose prerogative is it but the owner’s? If I hire someone to do work on my house or do my taxes I expect them to do the agreed upon work for the agreed upon price. What right would those people have to complain about (or worse, demand) me not putting them on retainer for work I don’t need? The only one in a position to determine corporate welfare is the one who writes the checks, whether you like that person or not.
908B64B197 3y ago
> Executives are truly impressed with Twitter these days from an operations stand point. The mass layoffs, the strategic regrouping, and the fact new features are being added with reduced staff. They don't see the technical issues behind the video platform or even this kinda of overwhelmed lawyer stuff as major issues. These are just part of the growing pains. > Twitter didn't go down, is still getting new features For how long? Twitter is sitting on unpaid Cloud bills. GCP and AWS can cut them off at a minute's notice the moment their legal department judge they won't be able to recoup the losses. Rumor has it the reason they killed the API is they lacked the manpower to actually keep it running and it was a last-ditch attempt at getting rid of bots. Same bots who flocked to the platform after the layoffs started since people in charge of mitigating these were fired. Firing abuse and content moderation teams meant there was a lot more unsavory spam on the platform and advertisers didn't want any of it near their brand. In a few week Twitter lost half of it's top 100 biggest advertisers [0] and it doesn't seem they are coming back. > The Tech people seem to driven from a strong place of fear. I think they are right to feel afraid too. I've been asked repeatedly about plans to reduce headcount, with Executives quoted Twitter's success or emerging AI. It'll be funny to see it happen (and to short the stocks of the companies that will imitate Musk). Let's keep in mind that pre-layoffs Twitter had profitable/break even quarters. Now it probably won't happen for a long time thanks to advertisers leaving the platform en-masse. Also, what most people don't get thanks to sloppy reporting, is that the great majority of layoffs of "tech workers" were actually "tech-adjacent" positions. Think HR, recruiters, Managers, tech evangelists... Very few actual engineers. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-lost-half-top-advertisers-elon-musk-takeover-report-2022-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-lost-half-top-advert... [1] https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other-departments https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-24/tech-layoffs-are-hitting-diversity-and-inclusion-jobs-hard https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-24/tech-layo... [3] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3690309/about-those-tech-layoff-headlines-most-companies-arent-firing-it-workers.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3690309/about-those-te... [4] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-03-07-do-recent-layoffs-mean-the-tech-talent-crunch-is-over https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-03-0... [5] https://techreport.com/news/3493451/microsoft-layoffs-ethics-and-society-team-fired/ https://techreport.com/news/3493451/microsoft-layoffs-ethics...
mindvirus 3y ago
As more of an operator type, people in my crowd are more curious than anything. It's obvious that you could take a car company, fire everyone except for the sales, marketing and people working in the factories, and things would keep going for a while with significantly improved margins. However, that's not a recipe for long term success. Your competitors cars will continue to improve while yours will stay the same, and your systems slowly (and sometimes quickly) break down. The real test will be when Twitter needs to move fast in response to market changes (VR maybe?)
- johntiger1 3y ago
  AKA,the GE approach to doing business
rurp 3y ago
Does the fact that Twitter is wildly financially unsustainable under Musk's leadership ever come up in these executive conversations? Because if not, I'd say it doesn't reflect well on those folks. The purchase agreement was an objectively terrible deal for Musk. Axing all of those workers is directly related to how much revenue has fallen. Elon has increased costs (via debt) and slashed revenue. In any other context this would be a laughable failure, but I guess his weird charisma has a lot of appeal for certain people. Maybe in a few years when Tesla has declared bankruptcy or Elon has had to pump $xxB into the company to keep it afloat those people will reevaluate. I'm joking, of course they won't.
seanhunter 3y ago
This is a serious generalization in all three categories. Executives: I am a tech executive and work with other executives. Lots of them are far from impressed by Twitter and what has been done. If the "overwhelmed lawyer stuff" as you call it turns into an actual fraud settlement (ie if the lawyers for the employees on the landlords win) I think you'll struggle to find executives with much good to say about it. Normies: My wife and all her friends are normies. Small sample, but a typical talking point is how twitter has become a bit worse since the takeover but that most of the stuff they follow hasn't changed that much. Tech people: There seems a sharp division (like with Tesla) between people who admire Elon and people who don't. Noone seems to have changed their minds much over this issue other than some of the people who were publicly in favour of the takeover (eg Jack Dorsey) beforehand are now publicly against it. I can't think of an example of someone who's flipped the other way but I'm sure they exist.

tsunamifury 3y ago

On that last point. It’s incredible that as one crab is about to climb out of the bucket (tech workers becoming financially independent) and is pushed back down, the others take so much joy in it. While idolizing the fisherman that pushed that crab back down. They never, ever, seem to think — wow someone almost escaped this bucket, maybe we should try too. It’s incredible how self sabotaging we humans are.

jonhohle 3y ago
I think a lot of middle America sees a tech crab kicking blue collar crabs down to get themselves out of a bucket (true or not). Having spent all of my career outside of SV (worked remote for a company in SV for a while), but having spent a reasonable amount of time interviewing technical people from SV, I came away with a general sense of hubris that was not justified that I never saw from other parts of the country (n = several hundred at a FAANG and unicorn startup). Perhaps I was unlucky, but 9 times out of 10 I was astounded to find individuals commanding 6-figure engineering salaries who couldn’t code or even seemed put out that I was asking them to write code in an interview… for a role that required writing code. From an outsiders perspective, if one was laid off from Twitter (with a generous severance package), they either will find themselves in a new role fairly quickly and it’s Twitter’s loss, or they were dead weight and may or may not want to consider adjusting their career path. In either case they’ll have more job opportunity than a laid off factory worker typically has. The whining about it only reinforces the perception of petulance.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  > I think a lot of middle America sees a tech crab kicking blue collar crabs down to get themselves out of a bucket (true or not). This is a deliberate tactic used by the people actually kicking us all down. People who make $40M/yr have gotten very good at convincing people who make $40K/yr that it's those snooty, elitist tech workers making $400K/yr who are the big problem in the world. Divide and conquer.
  - p_j_w 3y ago
    >People who make $40M/yr have gotten very good at convincing people who make $40K/yr that it's those snooty, elitist tech workers making $400K/yr who are the big problem in the world. These same people have convinced the people making $40k/yr that Starbucks workers making $30k/yr demanding a union are also part of the problem, as well. Just call them millenials, woke, or coastal elites and people will be chomping at the bit to hate them.
  - medvezhenok 3y ago
    It's not as absurd a proposition as you think. The people making 40K are not competing for resources with the people making $40M - their consumption likely has relatively few overlaps (and the people at the $40M/year level are likely in a different social class altogether - so they are not seen as competitors). Additionally, the number of people making $40M/year is relatively tiny - probably less than 1% of those that make $400K/yr. You will notice that in Europe, the good social fallback systems / health insurance / safety net in place are at the expense of the people that make $400K a year (in the US), not at the expense of the millionaires.
    - tsunamifury 3y ago
      Your first observation is very apt. We are competitive with those in our league and not outside. And your second is a deep cut Europeans aren’t ready to hear if I understand correctly n
- tsunamifury 3y ago
  I’ll Push on your thesis and argue that maybe you were not in the superior position you thought you were. Many times I’ve seen small (often midwest) firms try to engage me when I worked in FAANG and what they were tackling and how they were doing it lacked sophistication or experience to a degree that wasn’t even worth me engaging with. Their goals were small, their technology was unambitious, and their business lacked scale. They thought I was being smug, even when I was polite and said none of this out loud — but honest to god they were actually a bit insecure about the reality that they didn’t have much to offer and slowly realized it. I’m sorry but it’s really rich when someone from a small firm barely making millions would lecture me on how to do it right when I ran multi billion dollar programs. But that didn’t stop them from lecturing to feel superior. And the more I didn’t engage with that the more they seemed to think I was being “smug”.
kipchak 3y ago
I agree, but I don't know if it's fair to say that people just never thought "maybe we should try". See for example the Mined Minds program. This self sabotaging goes the other way too also, remember "learn to code"?
redditor98654 3y ago
Christopher Nolan's Interstellar had a line of dialogue from Matt Damon's character that went something like: "As a species, we can care deeply, selflessly about those we know, but that empathy rarely extends beyond our line of sight." Still resonates with me.

jonhohle 3y ago

As a tech person, I’m failing to see what’s wrong with cutting bloat? I’ve always felt much more productive on smaller teams, and while not quite at the scale of Twitter, have worked on teams with 10s to 100s of millions of active users with only 10 or so technical staff and another 10 or so business and managers. That team got increasingly less efficient as it grew towards 50 or more people over several years. I don’t really have an opinion about Musk one way or another (except coincidental his involvement in the 90s with Rocket Science Games), but I’m unsure where the animus has originated. For example, I don’t care much for Bill Gates because under his watch Microsoft was relentless at putting competitors, several of which I was a fan, out of business and his foundation funding experiments gone wrong in poor counties. Besides outspoken political stances and firing people, what has harm has Musk caused?

Eumenes 3y ago
I think its cause Musk is the richest person in the world (eat the rich, etc), isn't lock step with popular narratives, and engaged in the culture war stuff. "Cutting bloat" doesn't sound very empathetic either and is "anti-worker/pro management", thus the left leaning tech crowd disapproves. In his oppositions perspective, companies have an ethnical obligation to doll out corporate welfare and support causes they believe in. Musk isn't really into that. tl;dr - he's a Capitalist
- jonhohle 3y ago
  > cutting bloat There’s lots of different ways to put it, and getting fired sucks regardless of the circumstances. Organizational bloat is a common phrase for groups that are larger than their utility, it doesn’t reflect on the individuals in that group in any way (except for maybe executives and middle managers who allowed it to get that way). If a private company is continuing operations to the satisfaction of its owner without a portion of its employees, whose prerogative is it but the owner’s? If I hire someone to do work on my house or do my taxes I expect them to do the agreed upon work for the agreed upon price. What right would those people have to complain about (or worse, demand) me not putting them on retainer for work I don’t need? The only one in a position to determine corporate welfare is the one who writes the checks, whether you like that person or not.

908B64B197 3y ago

> Executives are truly impressed with Twitter these days from an operations stand point. The mass layoffs, the strategic regrouping, and the fact new features are being added with reduced staff. They don't see the technical issues behind the video platform or even this kinda of overwhelmed lawyer stuff as major issues. These are just part of the growing pains. > Twitter didn't go down, is still getting new features For how long? Twitter is sitting on unpaid Cloud bills. GCP and AWS can cut them off at a minute's notice the moment their legal department judge they won't be able to recoup the losses. Rumor has it the reason they killed the API is they lacked the manpower to actually keep it running and it was a last-ditch attempt at getting rid of bots. Same bots who flocked to the platform after the layoffs started since people in charge of mitigating these were fired. Firing abuse and content moderation teams meant there was a lot more unsavory spam on the platform and advertisers didn't want any of it near their brand. In a few week Twitter lost half of it's top 100 biggest advertisers [0] and it doesn't seem they are coming back. > The Tech people seem to driven from a strong place of fear. I think they are right to feel afraid too. I've been asked repeatedly about plans to reduce headcount, with Executives quoted Twitter's success or emerging AI. It'll be funny to see it happen (and to short the stocks of the companies that will imitate Musk). Let's keep in mind that pre-layoffs Twitter had profitable/break even quarters. Now it probably won't happen for a long time thanks to advertisers leaving the platform en-masse. Also, what most people don't get thanks to sloppy reporting, is that the great majority of layoffs of "tech workers" were actually "tech-adjacent" positions. Think HR, recruiters, Managers, tech evangelists... Very few actual engineers. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-lost-half-top-advertisers-elon-musk-takeover-report-2022-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-lost-half-top-advert... [1] https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other-departments https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-other... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-24/tech-layoffs-are-hitting-diversity-and-inclusion-jobs-hard https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-24/tech-layo... [3] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3690309/about-those-tech-layoff-headlines-most-companies-arent-firing-it-workers.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3690309/about-those-te... [4] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-03-07-do-recent-layoffs-mean-the-tech-talent-crunch-is-over https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-03-0... [5] https://techreport.com/news/3493451/microsoft-layoffs-ethics-and-society-team-fired/ https://techreport.com/news/3493451/microsoft-layoffs-ethics...

mindvirus 3y ago

As more of an operator type, people in my crowd are more curious than anything. It's obvious that you could take a car company, fire everyone except for the sales, marketing and people working in the factories, and things would keep going for a while with significantly improved margins. However, that's not a recipe for long term success. Your competitors cars will continue to improve while yours will stay the same, and your systems slowly (and sometimes quickly) break down. The real test will be when Twitter needs to move fast in response to market changes (VR maybe?)

johntiger1 3y ago
AKA,the GE approach to doing business

rurp 3y ago

Does the fact that Twitter is wildly financially unsustainable under Musk's leadership ever come up in these executive conversations? Because if not, I'd say it doesn't reflect well on those folks. The purchase agreement was an objectively terrible deal for Musk. Axing all of those workers is directly related to how much revenue has fallen. Elon has increased costs (via debt) and slashed revenue. In any other context this would be a laughable failure, but I guess his weird charisma has a lot of appeal for certain people. Maybe in a few years when Tesla has declared bankruptcy or Elon has had to pump $xxB into the company to keep it afloat those people will reevaluate. I'm joking, of course they won't.

seanhunter 3y ago

This is a serious generalization in all three categories. Executives: I am a tech executive and work with other executives. Lots of them are far from impressed by Twitter and what has been done. If the "overwhelmed lawyer stuff" as you call it turns into an actual fraud settlement (ie if the lawyers for the employees on the landlords win) I think you'll struggle to find executives with much good to say about it. Normies: My wife and all her friends are normies. Small sample, but a typical talking point is how twitter has become a bit worse since the takeover but that most of the stuff they follow hasn't changed that much. Tech people: There seems a sharp division (like with Tesla) between people who admire Elon and people who don't. Noone seems to have changed their minds much over this issue other than some of the people who were publicly in favour of the takeover (eg Jack Dorsey) beforehand are now publicly against it. I can't think of an example of someone who's flipped the other way but I'm sure they exist.