10 ms·
Epilogue of my time working at Twitter
- mydriasis 3y agoAwesome post with a lot of hard-earned wisdom. It reads like a moment where a lot of "taking a step back to examine things" was done. > Most people were good at their jobs but it was nearly impossible to fire poor performers — instead they got shuffled around to other teams because few managers had the will or resources to figure out how to get them out. > Often it was a small cross-functional team of intrinsically motivated people who made the biggest impact by challenging some core assumption. > I learned a ton from watching Elon up close – the good, the bad and the ugly. His boldness, passion and storytelling is inspiring, but his lack of process and empathy is painful. And many, many more. Really spoken like someone clever, someone with a lot of understanding, someone observant, and someone very, very smart.
- reducesuffering 3y agoEvery section about the CEO just makes me think of Gavin Belson from the Silicon Valley series, surrounding himself with "yes men" and firing people who make him feel like he might be a little wrong. https://youtu.be/XAeEpbtHDPw?t=15 https://youtu.be/XAeEpbtHDPw?t=15 https://youtu.be/30WTWkFe910?t=8 https://youtu.be/30WTWkFe910?t=8 https://youtu.be/30WTWkFe910?t=762 https://youtu.be/30WTWkFe910?t=762
- jpwerty 3y ago[flagged]
- astrange 3y agoSays bad things about their moderation; this is literally the worst video in the world and any other large company would have it autobanned instead of leaving it up for days. Though I expect the mandatory legal reporting still works.
- ikekkdcjkfke 3y agoYeah, just sweep it under the rug..
- astrange 3y agoIf your plan is anything other what I said, it is either a crime or it will cause people to commit crimes by seeing the material in question. You need a lawyer, not your intuition.
- ikekkdcjkfke 3y agoIs there no room for journalism on the topic
- astrange 3y agoThere isn't any journalism that requires distributing child porn. Or even possessing it.
- hmmokidk 3y agoCan you share a source
- astrange 3y agohttps://twitter.com/QOrigins/status/1684319201635213315 https://twitter.com/QOrigins/status/1684319201635213315
- KerrAvon 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoPlease don't do this here.
- CameronNemo 3y agoI know we're not supposed to comment on the mechanics of the website or whatever, but did anyone else reach to click the X to make the login banner go away?
- lapcat 3y agoThere's a lot of good stuff in this post. You should read it for yourself before commenting here. (Word count is 2413 in case you're wondering.) I do want to call out one very questionable aspect: > I’ve pulled many all-nighters in my career > Sometimes I get asked about how I felt when I got laid off, and the truth is it was the best gift I’ve ever received. > Going on a sabbatical afterward has been exactly what I needed to decompress and I’m finally feeling rested and relaxed. In my long career, I've never pulled an all-nighter, and I don't think that we should ever allow capitalists to deprive us of the essentials, such as sleep. Musk doesn't give a damn about you or your sacrifices, and obviously he fired Crawford anyway, despite the all-nighters. Always put yourself, your physical and mental health, before your employer's profit. Crawford said, "I think of life as a game", but it's not really a game, which you'll eventually learn the hard way as you get older. You have only one life, and you need to pace yourself, protect yourself. What's the point of working so hard that you render yourself incapable of working anymore, burning yourself out and needing a long period where you cannot generate any income? I've seen this time and again, but it's actually counterproductive. Please don't pull those all-nighters, it only encourages the worst exploitation from management. Certainly don't be proud of your needless sacrifices.
- IMTDb 3y ago> Certainly don't be proud of your needless sacrifices. Who exactly are you to judge what she should or shouldn't be proud of ? When she quotes : > I’ve pulled many all-nighters in my career She goes as far as adding a full explanation that you - conveniently - redacted: > I’ve pulled many all-nighters in my career and also when I was a student for something that mattered to me. I don’t regret putting in long hours or being ambitious, and feel proud of how far I’ve come from where I started thanks in part to that type of work ethic. To me this reads as someone who is perfectly happy with the decisions she took. You do not have to share same work ethics as she does and you don't have to make the same choices. But you have absolutely no right to take it away from her or to dictate what she can be proud of or happy with.
- lapcat 3y ago> Who exactly are you to judge what she should or shouldn't be proud of ? It's not about what "she" specifically should be proud of. It's about all of us, employees and our relationship to management. > She goes as far as adding a full explanation that you - conveniently - redacted I literally said, "You should read it for yourself before commenting here. (Word count is 2413 in case you're wondering.)" So the comment about conveniently redacting seems a bit absurd. > You do not have to share same work ethics as she does and you don't have to make the same choices. Nobody who knows me has ever questioned my work ethic. But speaking of ethics, I feel that it's unethical for management to ask for, encourage, or condone this kind of needless personal sacrifice by employees. Management deadlines are nearly always totally arbitrary and only benefit management, not the employees. I also noted that it's counterproductive, individually. You can't win a marathon by running a series of sprints. > But you have absolutely no right to take it away from her or to dictate what she can be proud of or happy with. You're making this way too personal. It's intended to be general advice, directed not toward Crawford, who isn't here (I don't think?) but rather to the readers of this comment. The problematic aspect of what Crawford said is the public glorification of needless sacrifice, not whether she specifically is (currently) personally happy or proud of it. By the way, note that the infamous sleeping bag photo was infamous precisely because she posted it publicly for everyone, as some kind of model for work. And she was after all a manager, setting an example for others. It wasn't just a private photo she took for her album at home that she could look back on later and reminisce fondly about "the good old days".
- tmpz22 3y ago> I think of life as a game, and being at Twitter after the acquisition was like playing life at Level 10 on Hard Mode. Is it safe to assume theyre a multi millionaire with a large financial buffer throughout this saga? AFAIK they were on a do-not-fire list for that very reason. I understand the compensation and golden handcuffs may be under an NDA which could explain why her wealth and compensation is never referenced as part of the story. A wealthy person who wins even when theyre laid off yields a different perspective entirely. I think tech product development could use fewer of those types personally. It completely removes failure from the equation.
- bhauer 3y agoI appreciate this considerably more nuanced and thoughtful view of the modern history of Twitter. So much coverage of Twitter since the Musk acquisition is entangled with partisan politics, ultimately in part thanks to Musk provoking such a reaction. That makes this post feel ever more illuminating and thoughtful—it avoids the partisan pitfalls and irrational extremism seen in virtually every other article on the topic. I too don't agree with many of Musk's decisions with Twitter/X. I don't like the new name and thus far refuse to use it. I don't like the ads I see as a Twitter user. I have not (yet) paid for Twitter. But on the other hand, I am thoroughly disinterested in the unhinged vitriol I see so often from Musk's haters. The incessant lazy discourse about how Twitter is dying, for either technical or other reasons. The ridiculous blindness to the awfulness of other social networks when critiquing Twitter (have you ever seen Reddit or Facebook?). It's a shame journalists have been largely unable to cover Twitter as well as this former insider and I am thankful to Crawford for publishing this.
- JJMcJ 3y agoI spend time on Twitter. It certainly seems less interesting and more annoying than it did before EM took over.
- bhauer 3y agoAside from the feature changes, it seems about the same to me. I think it largely depends on who you follow and whether you use the "Following" or "For you" tab. I recommend the "Following" tab since this allows you to manage your feed by, unsurprisingly, selecting who you follow.
- jpwerty 3y agoHe's providing a platform and cover for a child pornographer, live, in realtime, in public. There is something profoundly wrong in your worldview that's going to snap in one direction or another, and it's probably time for some self reflection.
- jytechdevops 3y ago[flagged]
- jpwerty 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoWe've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. In fact, it looks like it has done that in every post! https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: I spoke too soon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36627224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36627224 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36168830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36168830 were fine. If you'd like to be unbanned and stick to posting good comments like those, let us know at hn@ycombinator.com.
- dang 3y agoPlease don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jytechdevops 3y agoappreciate the link, will take some time to read through it :)
- deanCommie 3y agoIt's cargo cult intellectualism. Too often people believe that if they write and think in a detached and dispassionate way that their approach is intrinsically superior. Terms like "partisan pitfalls" and "irrational extremism" stake a claim that these things this person disagrees with are inherently bad. As you say, we don't need a nuanced take on the "difficulty" of tolerance for intolerance. This is a solved problem, and well understood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance Musk may be brilliant in engineering (Many claim he doesn't, but I'm willing to give him at least some credit for the clearly revolutionary technical advancements both Tesla and SpaceX have achieved. I think the idea that both companies only thrive in spite of him is patently ludicrous.), but he has a teenager-level emotional maturity when it comes to social and societal issues. And it shows when it comes to his explicit tolerance and encouragement of discrimination on Twitter. Esther, meanwhile, is an admitted escapee of a genuine cult, that somehow missed all the signals, and dove into the same patterns headfirst when it came to Twitter post-Musk. I'm not going to psychologically diagnose someone from afar, but I suspect she needs help of the type neither Musk nor Twitter nor Hackernews can provide.
- lapcat 3y agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36884876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36884876 It's exactly the same text, just on Medium instead of Twitter.
- rockbruno 3y agoI never worked at Twitter but I can relate to a lot of what was mentioned about the culture, especially the "you have to be a politician" bit. Seems like all large tech companies are the same after all.
- djbusby 3y agoNot just tech. Any company...more people means more politics.
- Thoeu388 3y ago[flagged]
- kstrauser 3y agoCover up for what? Who should be in prison?
- croes 3y ago>A high performance culture pulls everyone up, but the opposite weighs everyone down. I doubt that. Not the opposite part but the high performance one. Sounds like a road to burn out and depression.
- love2read 3y agoWhy depression?
- TigeriusKirk 3y agoI have never been more burned out and depressed than when I was in a low performance culture. Completely wore me out.
- renewiltord 3y agoSame. Possibly personality styles. When low performance, gap between personal identity of skill and output causes me pain. Prefer high-speed cultures. Feel accelerated by peers. In moments of doubt, feel invigorated by peers. Good feeling.
- itronitron 3y agoMy experience has been that low performance cultures tend to have a lot of cynical naysayers that like to block things from happening. High performance cultures tend to have optimistic enablers who also know how to do a lot of things and are happy to share their knowledge.
- CobrastanJorji 3y ago> Colleagues openly talked about how Twitter was being sold because leadership didn’t have conviction in their own plan or ability to fix longstanding problems. I think, in this case, the colleagues were wrong. Twitter was sold because an idiot offered far more money than it was worth. If I have a coffee shop that earns me $100,000 in profit per year, and somebody offers to buy it from me for $10 million, I'm going to sell it to them even if I think the coffee shop is doing great and has the potential to grow.
- ethanbond 3y agoNot to mention if you had effectively a legal obligation to your investors to do so.
- nocoiner 3y agoYes. If Twitter had attempted to remain independent, they probably could have, but the board members would have spent the next several years of their lives in depositions for the inevitable shareholder lawsuits. The offer was so rich, they didn’t really have much of a choice but to take it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- choppaface 3y agoBoth are probably true: Twitter leadership could not focus or execute, and the Board also wanted to close the deal. What’s likely missing from the employee perspective is that Twitter’s inherent non-focus actually attracted fresh content and contributors at some scale. Also that the company burn rate and debt was a threat at a very different scale. Agree that the offering price and foolishness of the buyer was too good to pass up, but the particularities of Twitter leadership also helped set up an opportunity cost in the overall deal. Twitter never pursued ads as ruthlessly as Facebook.
- nancyhn 3y agoThe company was virtually static for a decade. It was a long running joke that they weren't able to ship and the article does a good job of explaining why.
- indus 3y agoMy TLDR reading this: - everyone working in big tech is so so lucky. millions of people would do anything for these jobs. - contrary to what the narrative is set, the kitchen is dirty, shit is on fire, and barring a few no one has a clue. - recruiters perpetuate the candidate bias manifold. “Get me a dropbox PM” or “Get me a a google ML person” sheer laziness as talent is all around.
- itronitron 3y agoAlso, weirdly, she references twitter's customers as being distinct group from their advertisers. The fact that she does not mention who those customers might be however is not surprising.
- indus 3y agoYeah - I read that a few times to understand what she meant :/)
- CobrastanJorji 3y ago> Elon has an exceptional talent for tackling hard physics-based problems but products that facilitate human connection and communication require a different type of social-emotional intelligence. This feels like the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. The author encountered Elon working in their area of expertise, saw that Elon was wildly incompetent, and recognized that in this specific case Elon Musk was not a great leader. But then they looked at other areas where they didn't have specific knowledge or expertise and still assumed that Musk was a genius leader in those other areas.
- nebula8804 3y agoThis right here is the million dollar question. I spent years following the Tesla drama and watching subs like /r/realTesla tear into Tesla's decisions. This sub was filled with "industry people" and well the naysayers have been screaming from the tops of hills since 2010 about Teslas mistakes. Most people ignored them because they are not in the auto industry. This quote from Bob Lutz explained it perfectly: https://youtu.be/GXJnS9RgKsg?t=2687 https://youtu.be/GXJnS9RgKsg?t=2687 I watched how they managed to will the Model X into production when it should have never have been built. They dug themselves into a giant grave by insisting on those falcon wing doors but they survived. I watched how they totally botched the Model 3 launch when it should have been the crowning achievement that showed that Tesla was now an established car brand. The amount of drama that occurred at the time was insane: making cars in "tents" in the parking lot, having a terrible body design, trying to force automation in all the wrong areas. In all these cases, the naysayers were proven wrong by Elon's ability to outlast his/his team's mistakes but at the same time they also managed to challenge assumptions that the industry thought was "the right way" to do things. Now we have incumbents copying Tesla's approaches to solving some problems. In the end who was right? I never really did get an answer to that. As a software guy I thought let me stay in my lane and trust the automotive industry people because thats what they do for a living. Before the pandemic I was so sure that following established industry insiders was the way to get insight. Now, I dont know anymore. But I can't reconcile the fact that as a software guy I know that the way Twitter was handled was a complete mess. Is this just another attempt at bungling along until it actually works? I guess the real deciding factor is does he have enough runway to keep plodding along until he figures it out?
- croes 3y ago>I think of life as a game, and being at Twitter after the acquisition was like playing life at Level 10 on Hard Mode I may feel hard but it's still easy mode compared to poor people in third world countries or people in warzones, especially if it doesn't matter to you if you get fired or not.
- droopyEyelids 3y agoThe trouble with this line of thinking is that it negates almost any problem someone can suffer. Starving to death? At least you're not starving to death while being physically tortured every moment of the day! The problems people face and their suffering is real, and should be respected, even if there is someone who has it worse somewhere else.
- valval 3y agoThis just reads as you having to get to say what you just said. You’re explaining a very self-evident concept to a bunch of intelligent adults. Yes, negating someone’s personal issues by saying someone has it worse can be unhelpful. No, working long hours when you don’t even care if you’re getting fired or not isn’t “playing life on hard mode at level 10”. Unless your hard mode level 10 is someone else’s Tuesday, of course.
- croes 3y agoNo it doesn't. At a certain threat level, you are on level 10 Hard Mode, especially if your life is in danger. So starving and starving and tortured are both level 10 Hard mode If you can afford a sabbatical after you lost your job, you are not in Hard mode.
- falcolas 3y agoThe existence of suffering greater than your own does nothing to invalidate your own suffering. And it certainly doesn’t mean someone else should come along and shame you for expressing your own pain. That’s toxic to any form of discourse.
- 3y ago
- chimerasaurus 3y ago"At times it seemed he trusted random feedback more than the people in the room who spent their lives dedicated to tackling the problem at hand." But also "Twitter moved at the speed of molasses and suffered from bureaucracy" I think this blog points at a common issue in the tech world. Many want to have a hand in the majority of decisions, but also deride at how slowly things end up moving. It's very hard to have it both ways. That and every company generally operates the same way. Tech is not special and humans are pretty consistent.
- marcinzm 3y agoIt seems like the author really just wants their ideas to be listened to without having to put the political effort into making them listened to. Previously that effort was playing the bureaucracy and now that effort was kissing up to Musk.
- chimerasaurus 3y agoYep. One system is political but clear in how it operates. The other system is political and unclear how it operates. Still both "political".
- apple4ever 3y agoProblem is it shouldn't be a political issue. But so often it becomes so instead of people listening with an open mind.
- croes 3y ago>He’s a complicated person with an unfathomable amount of financial and geopolitical power which is why humanity needs him to err on the side of goodness, rather than political divisiveness and pettiness. It's more of an example why nobody should have that much power and money. We should depend on which side one person chooses. It's like a monopoly of money and power and we know monopolies are bad.
- nocoiner 3y agoI thought this was an absurd statement in her post. Maybe our societies do exist only at the sufferance of billionaires, but I sure hope not. And if the continued existence of our society is in fact totally dependent on whether Elon Musk chooses to act out of the compassion and goodness of his heart, then we lost the plot a long time ago and probably deserve whatever we have coming.
- drc500free 3y ago> At times it seemed he trusted random feedback more than the people in the room who spent their lives dedicated to tackling the problem at hand. I never figured out why and remain puzzled by it. I think this bit here drives the love-hate views on him. Most mature orgs are overly bureaucratic with small visions and strongly conservative views about what can be accomplished. Some play-act at having big visions for marketing and ego, but internally few line employees believe that they are achievable, and there is rarely a plan that could achieve the vision. Musk seems to come in - similarly to Trump - and simply disbelieves the expertise of the managerial class, and comes with enough accumulated power to bulldoze them instead of playing political games. The managerial class is the connective tissue of all but the tiniest of orgs, so encountering them is a given. The pitfall to me is that he extends that to all expertise - engineering, science, marketing. His opening belief seems to be that most professionals are bullshit artists who spend their whole day lying to justify their jobs. And while the professionals are often wrong about what organizations of people can achieve, they are much less often wrong about how engineering needs to work, and they are hardly every wrong about the core science. So my general view is that he is pathologically convinced that everyone but him is a parasite. And in a world full of managerial parasites, that's a pretty effective strategy. But he can't turn it off once he breaks through the connective tissue and gets to the actual expertise. It doesn't matter if you are an expert on cave diving, or scalable architecture, or the behaviors of your core customers. I think it says more about our organizations than it does about him that just spamming a strategy of saying "I think you're a parasite with no actual expertise" and only believing in someone in extremely rare cases can make you the richest man in the world.
- nebula8804 3y ago>The pitfall to me is that he extends that to all expertise - engineering, science, marketing. His opening belief seems to be that most professionals are bullshit artists who spend their whole day lying to justify their jobs. And while the professionals are often wrong about what organizations of people can achieve, they are much less often wrong about how engineering needs to work, and they are hardly every wrong about the core science. If you see the teardowns of the Tesla cars you see engineering designs that are not done in other currently selling products. In fact now we see competitors playing catch up by copying Tesla designs. That alone disproves your theory. Whatever he is doing, Tesla/SpaceX seem to be forward thinking in terms of engineering.
- SllX 3y agoSo this looks like it is a repost of Esther Crawford’s original Tweet, and it’s a shame this is the linked version. Here is the original Tweet: https://twitter.com/esthercrawford/status/1684291048682684416?s=20 https://twitter.com/esthercrawford/status/168429104868268441... Now I’m not one to promote the use of Twitter, but in this case Esther actually had a very nice video at the end where she reads out what her post said in her own voice and I think it comes out better that way. It is 15 minutes though, but you can just have it on in the background, most of it is just text from the post. The important thing is hearing it in Esther’s voice.
- teach 3y agoBut it appears that this is Esther's own blog, and there's a 15-minute-long YouTube video linked at the top. Also, I thought you couldn't read tweets these days unless you're logged in.
- SllX 3y agoI looked earlier for it and didn’t see the video. Maybe she added it later or it didn’t load initially on my iPad? Doesn’t really matter if it’s in the Medium post or the Twitter post, the video is worth watching/listening to. Also logging in is apparently not a barrier to seeing Twitter now, at least through a direct link. I originally followed a TechMeme link and just double-checked, I’m not logged in anywhere.
- joker_minmax 3y agoThanks for this. I didn't realize we could view tweets without accounts again, so I had been avoiding Twitter links like the plague.
- antisthenes 3y agoDid anyone actually find it insightful? It reads like something half-generated by GPT and half-written by literally any product manager from an S&P 500 company, with a slight tech lean. Yes, big orgs move slow. Yes, top performers don't like bureaucracy. Yes, sometimes companies get sold and there are sweeping changes. Yes, people stay at companies for the paycheck. Yes, leaders are sometimes eccentric/erratic but also funny/charismatic (it's almost like people are complex and not a simple myers-briggs automatons).
- SkipperCat 3y agoThis is a very well written article and I really enjoyed reading it. However, I do think the author has romanticized how a privately owned company has exploited, abused and treated their workers like objects. Looking back of the past months of Elon's tenure, its been shocking to see how he violated so many legal and social covenants regarding how an employer should treat staff. The true insult of it all is that Musk did not need to be so brutal on everyone. He could have restructured the company without the cruelty, drama and chaos. He could have been the reincarnation of Jack Welsh (in his glory days).
- WheatMillington 3y agoThe author, being independently wealthy and in a safe position, didn't have the same downside risk as most of the people around them. Amusingly the author lacks a certain empathy through this romanticism, ironic given other parts of the article.
- itronitron 3y agoIf someone wrote a work of fan fiction of someone's experience at Twitter over the past year I believe it would read exactly like this epilogue.
- guax 3y agoHe's just like Welsh. And the outcome might be the same.
- bryansum 3y agoHaving also been part of an acquisition in 2020, I found her assessment of Twitter internally was spot on, and was something that I believe isn’t discussed enough in the context of the Elon acquisition. There was a great sense of shared vision and purpose internally, but this also masked a fair amount of cynicism / political machinations (launch a feature we don’t actually believe to prove it won’t work — Fleets), engineering tech debt (I worked on the iOS client) leading to extremely long product / dev cycles, and ultimately the most destructive, a sense of complacency about it all. It was ultimately why I left, even before the Elon drama.
- Balgair 3y ago> Instead he’d poll Twitter, ask a friend, or even ask his biographer for product advice I'm sorry, he has a biographer following him around now?
- Dig1t 3y agoIsn't Walter Isaacson writing a biography on him? Isaacson did the same thing with Steve Jobs, he followed him around for a long time, getting a sense for his day to day, on top of interviewing the people that spent the most time with him. That's one thing that makes Isaacson one of the best biographers ever, he goes to the source whenever possible and gets candid interviews with the right people.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- zackmorris 3y agoMoney and fame can create psychological prisons which may worsen mental health conditions. We’ve all seen high profile cases of celebrities who end up with some combination of depression, paranoia, delusions of grandeur, mania and/or erratic behavior. This is the first post I've seen that shows concern for the mental health of our leaders. I share that same concern for our elected officials, as they've been in survival mode since their popularity peaked on 9/11, just as I've run myself ragged to make rent. Political polarization has been on a steady upward climb since WWII. Now they spend so much time fundraising for reelection that they've all but abdicated their personal responsibility to do the right thing for the public. Regardless of what millionaires, billionaires and politicians say, it must be hard for them to look themselves in the mirror after doing so much for so long against the best interests of people and planet. I view the Twitter > X situation as the cherry on top of wealth inequality. Where most of us were probably inspired to disrupt the status quo in the 90s and 2000s, now it's become just another game of survival. Whatever work I do today will just get diluted and corrupted by the status quo. It's not any one thing like the loss of Twitter driving that, but the rampant replacement of real tech by phantom tech, and more importantly the loss of our enterprising spirit as seen by the disappearance of affordable college and our industry getting replaced by finance and other rent-seeking ventures. Understanding why wealthy and powerful people do the wrong things with their money may be one of the great problems of our time. On the other side of that is a world where tech does the work that people are forced to do today to survive, and we all begin to self-actualize and come full circle to a human being.
- JeremyNT 3y agoThis stood out at me as well. It's obvious that the author is very considerate and was hoping for the best, and even after being let go she has a nuanced and (to my reading) more positive stance on the company than I would expect. And yet, there are several hints here that Elon himself is isolated in ways that I think most of us could never really relate to. When it comes to running a social media platform - something designed to connect people - this isolation might make it difficult for him to make the right decisions. You can see this in actors, politicians, athletes, etc as well - being at the top of their game and being in the public eye makes them... weird. Their lives are far removed from the way most of us live, and it's impossible for us to really imagine ourselves in their shoes - and, maybe, vice-versa.