Folks, just to set expectations here, it’s gonna be like this for a couple years. He’s going to be nanomanaging the company and learning from scratch the entire business and doing wild shit until he figures it out. And it’s going to be chaos internally and leaks left and right and ten crazy stories like this a week. The signal to noise ratio is gonna be ridiculously low and everyone’s going to get whipped up in every direction. Personally, I recommend getting off Twitter (not because of Elon per se but because of the unhealthy existing design) and checking in next year around this time to see if it’s any better. Better than drive yourself crazy by mainlining Elon Twitter drama.
I respect that! I’ve found Twitter as a drama generator has always affected my mental health negatively after inhaling too much.
It’s like purposely designed so you can take anything out of context, zap it to everyone worldwide, get angry at people you agree with, pile on, bully people. It’s so bad!
Yeah but his cardinal sin right now is forgetting that advertisers are small-c conservative. They despise uncertainty and drama, and have wisely fled Twitter for the time being.
For real. I deleted mine last week but I might have to make a new one so I can read the hilarious threads. They their up a modal if you scroll too far as an unregistered user
It is literally catastrophe-tourism at this point. You can’t just temporarily remove the people on a social media platform, it is dying and unless something happens very quickly, it is good as dead.
The most we can do is enjoy the comedic content while it lasts, I personally had a really great time reading these: r/RealTwitterAccounts
There's a number of subtle but vast pro-Elon takes subtly woven in, which I generally don't agree with.
But also, it loathes what I loath, which is that we're going to be hearing about this shit for a long long long long time, and the bias will be immensely one directionally negative. Which is almost certainly true. And, probably, for a long time, incredibly fantastically well deserved. But more so: this post questions the value of these proceedings. With that, I think there is truth... although it lends upon a pro-Fog-of-War notion, it leans upon apathy, which I think are weak responses, not good reasons for de-escallating one's popcorn munching tendencies.
I'd like to find a more general way to issue a call for moderation, or just a warning. The news is not bad, not slanted, but just attending to it regularly & dutifully makes us trapped in the cycle of news. There's drama here, a perpetual cliff hanger, and obvious damage & loss & redemption seems improbable (managing the world's most connected network is vastly more intricate & complicated than the much more directed & clear tasks of blasting shit into space). But most of this isn't really that important, doesn't really impact the long fate, even the dumb shit, and letting it take-over too much head-space is dangerous.
What I like about this post is that it talks about the long drama. This is going to be a semi-perpetual fixture of the news cycle. I disagree with a core point which is that the SnR will be low: I think a lot of the leaks & revelations & events will be very telling, very revealing.
But I'm not sure how significant or interesting or useful, as salacious & dirty as they are.
But there is enormous human resilience, & our ability to account for "will it matter" varies, and this is indeed a long game. This is the most inter-connected social network on the planet, by far. Short of real collapse or major fuckery, there's probably just not much that will in fact really change, for those on the network. For all the sound and thunder, storm and stress, it's enormously questionable whether there's any power here. The only noticable change most people can even imagine is ruin, is the end, and that's enormously telling, and also semi-unlikely. What has higher likeliness to change is what part of the vast capitalist system holds the reigns, who is "in charge," but this is a story of powerlessness. All this storm & stress is mostly, for the long forseeable, kind of pointless. This post, although pro-Elon, holds some hint of that perspective. How much attention we give, how readily we strap ourselves in for the ride, & bother with this long act of determining whether anything significant at all will happen, is the realest question. It's the ultimate social question. Does it matter?
Thanks for the insightful response! Here's some rambling thoughts about what your response made me think about.
I do think it's fair enough to read it as a pro-Elon take, to some degree. I find him to be a fascinating person, because I think there are many useful things to learn about building successful and important companies like Tesla or SpaceX, and I think most of his intentions are genuine (and good and correct). I think there's a lot of cynicism and misinformation and such around his companies that is mostly noise. I don't think it's true that he is dumb or incompetent, or obsessed with money, etc. If you watch a video of him talking about rocket engine design, you can definitely tell that he knows this stuff in great enough detail to be making low-level design decisions – he's always deeply involved, so much so that it's a difficult environment for many people to work in I think.
Now I also have lots of things where I disagree with him – I think he has lots of blind spots and is clearly in a right-wing info bubble (probably because of Twitter!), and I'm not sure I would try to emulate many parts of his workaholic management style, etc.
But also, I don't care as much about offering a moral judgement on him as a person, I can't change him. What's interesting to me is what can be learned. What things he does that are remarkably effective, and why. And conversely, what he does that really pisses people off in such a way that they are likely to ignore those things because they were upset by unrelated things he's said. It's okay to write him off, I understand why people do that, but I want to learn from it!
I would say that I have no idea whether he will be successful with Twitter, but I think he has a decent enough track record with his other companies. But that may not be enough, they are very different companies. And he really has put himself in a pickle, since he's not really acquired a company in the same way, let alone one that has such mindshare. He's certainly dragging his reputation and Twitter's reputation through the mud. But my take is also that Twitter has always been a product that is particularly well-designed to make useful discourse difficult or impossible, and to amplify drama and misinformation. And despite being a platform most people seem to dislike and doesn't have tons of users, it's currently locked in a negative-feedback loop with the news media, and disproportionately influential on the world. I think that's a really bad thing. I would be happy enough if Elon craters it, but I suppose it's also good if he fixes it somehow. It seems ultimately quite important that there is some way for society to have discussions at civilization-scale about what is important to us. Pre-Elon Twitter was not the right platform for that, so destroying it or replacing it is absolutely fine with me.
According to some people here you're just supposed to take it when your boss shits on your work and firing you for any push back at all is entirely justified.
According to Twitter employees on platforms like Blind and news sources, Twitter (the website) is the only datapoint for communication with their new boss.
1 - according to a lot of reports from other people fired these past few days, there is no internal conversation about anything substantial, they learn more about his point of view and/or what he doesn't like in their job from his twitter posts
2 - no matter what, as a manager you are the "face" of the team and while internally you are in charge of letting people know what's wrong in their code etc ... It is extremly bad form to push the problem down to the members of your team when talking in a public facing situation. You're the manager, it's your team, you're the face, and you're also the face of the problems. No matter how deep down or high up in the chain you are, if you manage a team and behave like what Elon did in the original tweet this guy answers to, I guarantee you no one on your team respects you.
3 - the guy is in a firing spree to try and justify his overpriced unwanted purchase, and then goes on to take a dump on the work of this engineer in public with a factually wrong comment. No matter if you're my employer, you have no right to damage my reputation based on false allegations in public just to help your ego.
No, you don’t have to “take it”. You could always just resign…and then comment on Twitter and frankly everywhere else about how wrong and how much of an asshole that Elon was yada yada yada…but I wam not exactly sure in which parallel universe people live in to think that publicly calling out your boss (who is known to be a little quick on the trigger already) should have zero consequences to you.
Pretty much seems to be a universally bad idea no matter who your boss is, but if your boss is Elon Musk…there is literally no other outcome to that action. He damn sure isn’t going to thank you for setting him straight and promote you.
This dude had to know and expect these consequences and this was an intentional publicity grab/hero syndrome deal. If not, he is just a moron (which kind of underscores Elon’s POV to be honest).
dude that's just "taking it" - either you lick the boots of your boss or you resign
but then if you don't try to push for anything at work (aka doing anything more than what's expected of your role) that's quiet quitting
you just can't win
also elon musk owned twitter for like 3 weeks how the hell was that guy supposed to know that as a mere mortal you're supposed to just let elon musk shit on your work and ruin your reputation in public then fire you anyway after you stay silent
if every choice makes you bad then it's at least nice to get fired publicly so you can line up a new job in replies to the tweet that got you fired
It may be hard to swallow but it’s not “your work”, it’s his work. He paid a shit ton of money to call it his and if he wants to shit on what he owns, so be it, it’s his. He paid for the privilege.
Those employees don’t get to take their contribution out of the source when they leave—so while they might feel a sense of ownership, their contributions belong to Elon the minute they transfer them from their brain to the company property they are using.
I am pretty confident that publicly criticizing your boss and getting fired might appeal to a lot of folks on HN, but it’s not going to be looked at very favorably by most hiring managers out there.
"your work" as in work that you did, not work that you own. a picasso painting is still a picasso painting even in a private collection. if your next line is "coding is just work and not art" then please tone down the capitalism.
if the "boss is always right or quit" thing is right then wouldn't hiring managers also have a problem if your boss publicly insults your work? you're doomed either way, self-defense or not! but so far what you're saying does not seem to hold true - replies to fired engineers are full of kindness and job offers.
> "your work" as in work that you did, not work that you own. a picasso painting is still a picasso painting even in a private collection. if your next line is "coding is just work and not art" then please tone down the capitalism
First, I made no such claim about coding, work, art, capitalism, or otherwise so lets not try and put words into my mouth that was never said, or even implied.
Second, if you are an artist and someone has paid and is continuing to pay you to generate more art…if you cannot handle their criticism (valid or not) of that art, you have the choice to leave and go elsewhere to create art on your own, or find another benefactor that appreciates you.
My criticism is not of these two engineers, they did what they did and I frankly don’t care. Their actions resulted in an obvious and expected consequence that would have happened anywhere and for any other boss. My criticism is for the people here on HN who feel that they should not have been fired. That is frankly ridiculous.
After seeing Elon mixing up all async services that happen in backend with Android client making as many requests, I wonder if I thought this guy is smart because I know nothing about building cars or launching space rockets.
Edit: "guy is smart" probably should be "guy is technically competent". I am sure Elon is smart, I think he is being Phony while acting technically competent in every area.
I still believe that his insistence on only using computer vision for Tesla’s self driving was profoundly wrong. I got my ivy-league graduate degree in a related field right around the time when he probably was making the decision (2015) and it was obvious to everyone around me that we are not even close to having the kind of generic, reliable CV you would need for a car. Obviously, in grant proposals and papers we painted a much rosier picture, but on the inside everyone knew it’s just exaggerated, best-case scenarios that have little bearing on reality.
Also in a related field (cognitive and neural linguistics) and I 100% agree. Elon read too much science fiction and doesn't understand the full stack. The results from automated statistics (I hate calling it machine learning) is amazing - but it amounts to really good pattern matching.
Which is why Tesla Autopilot struggles with left turns and has been stuck at SAE level two after a decade of work. Hell, Tesla Inc failed to automate their factories much beyond what other automakers already accomplished and that is for single-purpose robots in fixed operating environments. Yet Elon is busy selling shareholders on humanoid Tesla Bots that will be capable of running to the grocery store and getting items off the shelf ... someday.
People with a background in the hard sciences just don't do well when grappling with the soft sciences .
Considering I have been in situations with zero optical visibility, I am frankly baffled he thought that removing sensors including ultrasonics which are cheap as chips, was a good idea
It makes sense if you are someone who sold cars with a $10K "autopilot" add-on claiming that they would eventually be capable of "full self driving" for a decade only to realize that it's not feasible from a technological standpoint (at least not before most of those cars arrive at a junkyard [1]) AND the global supply chain suddenly shits the bed - jacking up the price of parts (especially electronics).
At that point, you can either (A) stop selling models that you actually make a profit from and risk your top spot on Forbe's billionaires list or (B) claim that "full self driving" really meant "driver assistance" this whole time [2] and cut whatever hardware isn't absolutely necessary to meet your lowered standard.
Elon chose option B - I suspect through some mix of self-delusion about the capabilities of automated statistics and knowing that he can continue to push the deadline for "full self driving" back another decade and pivot after his competitors have pushed the cost of radar/LIDAR down far enough.
I don’t know, throwing a hissy-fit whenever something doesn’t work out as he intended (pedo-guy, everyday twitter posts that are later altered/removed, etc), coming up with “a tunnel, but with cars” that is a fire hazard and has the capacity of horse-pulled metros from the 19th century, having only a single contribution to teslas in the form of a.. door handle (did you honestly think he knows anything about cars and rockets?), and having a tendency of overhyping and underdelivering with all of his stocks being grossly huge bubbles, meanwhile those companies have considerable government funding, and literally forcing himself into buying a company way overpriced that has never turner a profit and driving it into the ground —- I’ve never gotten the impression that he would be what I consider smart. He definitely wants to sell that image, but he is just a narcissist manchild.
he doesn't need to be smart, if you are building something yourself, then you should be smart about that stuff, but if you are managing people to build, then it is enough if you can manage the execution well (including hiring, funding and everything else)
Being a good manager doesn't give you license to be an asshole, at least not to this raging degree. He fired half of Twitters employees and is trashing their work with technically incorrect hot-takes that he posts in public. Then he fires anyone who dares to correct his bullshit? That's someone who has been rich for WAY too long.
Of course. A CEO can just be an excellent manager and be successful. But Elon is taking big action based on his two-week understanding of technical infrastructure within Twitter. If you are going to decide "wait, the architecture is all wrong" after a brief glance, you better also have technical chops.
>I'm a Staff Software engineer and co-Tech Lead of the Core API Platform Team at Twitter helping build the next generation API with GraphQL and Scala. I currently serve on the GraphQL Governing Board as a representative of Twitter, as well as on the Technical Steering Committee for GraphQL.
Amazing stuff. I thought I knew how to risk my career just for the sake of comedy, this lass shows that she's varsity and I'm
not even cleaning the jv bench
I respect it. If you're a Twitter employee fed up with this stuff and typing up a boring resignation email, why not instead say screw it and get publicly fired by the big man himself after hurting his ego on Twitter..
>If he fires all the engineers with a bad attitude
Where I work it's in the contract that you don't talk shit about the company on social media. I think that's common sense too. I'm sure Elon is an irritating piece of shit, especially as a superior, but shit-flinging online like this is just not something I'd want in my company either.
Eh, normally I'd agree, but let's not pretend this is a normal situation. If you parachute into a company as CEO and start publicly insulting all of the professional work that the employees (half of whom he just fired) have done, you can't expect them not to defend themselves and their (former) colleagues.
True, I didn't see that. Still, he wasn't her boss at the time, that was the day he filed the first termination letter of his attempt to buy twitter, so it looked like he never would be. (I'm assuming she pinned it after he fired her, but I'm not sure.)
Dangerous gamble for just a couple months of severance.
Would make me hesitant to hire that person knowing they have such bad judgement as to publicly badmouth the CEO of their company on Twitter. Even hiring managers who personally hate Elon have to understand that this developer could easily turn the same energy on their own company at some point in the future and make them look terrible.
Definitely a career limiting move, if not potentially career ending.
Unless you're in a financial FU position, and this is your grand FU moment on your way out the door, it seems like a bad move.
I think this attitude about "bad judgement" needs to evolve. We need to consider whether a worker's profane tirade is a reflection of their judgement or a reflection of working under an extremely abusive boss.
Career ending. Go scope her experience and actual role and you'll see why she spoke so freely. She can waltz into any other company she wants. They're already coming for her in the thread lmao
Lol.. these career ending move people are the same type that would say it is risky for someone who just graduated from MIT to leave their McDonald's job. I've sued multiple previous employers and never had it come up during interviews at Fortune 50 companies. I even went to work at one company that I had previously sued and won against in a personal dispute. If you're good at your job these companies don't care, they won't put that much effort into checking, and you can always scrub your social media later on.
Of course she’s receiving generous offers from the ‘hurr durr Elon bad’ crowd. The career limitation is that most people just aren’t in that crowd. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re licking Elons boots, it could also mean they don’t care at all or that they are somewhere in the middle.
I’m not in a hiring position but if I were I’d avoid her because I don’t want to import drama into my environment.
Telling your boss to ‘kiss my ass’ is not standing up for your team, it’s perfectly normal grounds to get fired. But be sure to hire her if you think that behavior is normal, it’s a free world.
If you are competent, at the end of the day you can get away with almost anything. In the worst case, she can go start her own company as a GraphQL consultant :)
Seems from my outsider perspective that this kind of hyper-aggressive and combative tone is like a currency on Twitter… There seem to be those for whom the Twitter bubble is _everything_ (which would include Elon), and then you have the other 99.9% of humanity who look on with confusion. And the 0.1% of the super engaged don't seem to be able to fathom that the Twitter bubble still exists _within_ reality, where actions can have consequences
Hurr durr Elon bad all you want, getting fired for telling your boss to ‘kiss my ass’ is not cancel culture and neither is continuing to host that message.
There's also a difference between criticizing your employees' work publicly vs privately. (And let's be honest - most likely the employee is 100% correct here, and he's lying about their performance as expressed by the codebase.)
> Eh, there’s a difference between criticizing your boss publicly vs privately.
Well, judging from the recent stories about Twitter’s internal environment and the public examples of criticism at Twitter, privately in an organization with no viable upstream internal communication and a culture of fear and retaliation is both impossible and likely to get you fired (immediately or on a list of targets by management) without your message getting to the top, whereas publicly your message is at least more likely to get to the top before you get fired, plus you are likely to have job offers in the thread, so, its clearly the preferred strategy.
I'm surprised at the number of people defending Elon here, how would you feel if your CEO literally shit on your work in public to millions of people and not only that was completely totally wrong about it.
Like I'm not surprised that they got fired because Elon behaves like a toddler but god damn if your response isn't to salute two people who got axed for speaking the truth then you have your priorities ass backwards.
Forums like this one are made up of a large number of temporarily embarrassed tech billionaires. It's no surprise that they think Musk's behavior is okay. They fantasize about doing the same to their own employees one day.
This is a web site originally set up by some of Elon's cronies for people to "pick me!" into jobs. It's hardly surprising that there's no shortage of bootlickers.
I would not equate suggesting that there is an absurdity about having the opinion that publicly shitting on your CEO (any CEO at any company) should not get you fired with defending Elon.
I dont know if it's true in this case. But I've worked at many places where things have gone wrong and nobody says anything about it. So it's nice to see things shaken up a bit.
Much of the controversy around this stems from the fact that he said the "app" is doing RPCs instead of the endpoints which it calls, that in turn assemble the instructions to render the timeline?
Seems like many are going out of the way to frame it as nonsense.
It's dubious that this only affects some countries. Is it likely that there are some extra pieces of logic for some parts of the world and not others? My guess is yes, although it seems unlikely that the impact would be so high.
As for this specific issue only affecting Android - that was never the claim. Instead he asked an entirely separate question about Android performance to this developer who replied to the tweet with the original claim.
Overall, aside from this specific incident - his attitude towards the way the company way being run is extremely hostile, and has naturally upset a lot of folks at the company who were happy with what they were doing.
Personally, my view would be that if this happens and it bothers someone a lot, the honorable thing to do is to quit or sit back and watch the company fall apart and own their bet that the new direction will be a disaster.
If one is not on board with the vision and direction of the company from new leadership, quit instead of getting in the way.
Actively sabotaging the company's new direction is not only immoral but also reflects a mean-spirited attitude towards one's fellow co-workers who don't share that view. I have seen tweets from current employees calling their fellow team members bootlickers, etc. which I find to be quite vile.
Seems like some folks are likening the whole thing to a Cardassian occupation.
I would love to hear from Twitter engineers who survived layoffs and aren't actively looking for other jobs right now. What is going on in your head? Are you okay with all the changes Musk is making? Did he fire the "right" people? Do you think you will have stable employment and a reasonable work environment for the next 1-3 years?
If they're getting good stock awards to stay, and if they think they can turn Twitter around, then there's a good chance they can make a lot of money.
Now that Twitter is private the stock is going to be a lot less volatile. Work hard. Acquire users. Enter new markets. Valuation improves (once or twice a year). Cash out during a purchase offer.
If I were Elon, I'd be drowning the remaining loyal employees with RSUs.
Elon literally just said that bankruptcy is a possibility for twitter in the near future. What are these RSUs going to be worth exactly? And how are they going to cash them out?
Twitter was already losing hundreds of millions per year. They now have another $1.2-1.5 billion per year due in loan payments. Interest rates are rising. Advertising revenue is going down due to the recession and companies cutting Twitter spend due to the toxicity. And his big new subscription idea is already on hold due to impersonation and scams. If employees can see a way out of this, they must really be believers.
It's funny when Elon companies are successful people say it was never him it was the engineers, and then when his companies are having trouble then it's not the engineers, it's him.
The fact is it's a team. Twitter has more than enough runway to get through this transition and turn things around. It's up to the team to execute effectively.
Nowhere in this thread am I assigning any blame to anyone, so that's just a strawman diversion from the conversation on your part.
As for runway – that's public information as well. Twitter had $6B in cash and securities as of the last financial statement release. That has likely gone down a fair amount due to acquisition-related costs as well as severance payments. Keeping up with the ~$2B/yr burn rate, unless Twitter can turn things around fast (or get another cash infusion), it has about 2-3 years left in the tank.
> Did you forget the $5B/yr they make from advertisers?
They…don’t. Their last quarterly numbers had a hair over $1B in advertising revenue, and that was both a quarterly and year-over-year increase, so they weren’t making more than $4B/year from advertising before Musk took over. Their advance sales were bad for next year because of the potential of the Musk takeover, and big accounts have backed out, and big agencies publicly advised clients to back out of the platform, based on what has gone on since the takeover.
I mean he was the one that saddled Twitter with a billion dollars in LBO debt. Most successes and failures have many contributors but this particular spot of trouble Twitter is literally just 100% his own doing.
I mean that was the cost of taking control of Twitter. Success or failure are yet to be seen. Their current revenue is more than enough to service the debt, but really all this restructuring is about making the company leaner and more competitive. If the valuation goes up then the debt quickly becomes a non-issue.
No, but plenty of SpaceX and Tesla employees became very wealthy sticking with Elon's ups and downs over the years.
There's no doubt, executed correctly, Twitter could be a $200 billion company or more. It's really an opportunity for the employees to make that a reality. Elon (like his other companies) is going to put the engineers in control.
>It's really an opportunity for the employees to make that a reality. Elon (like his other companies) is going to put the engineers in control.
Please, consider investing in some real estate. I have a fantastic property in Brooklyn and it is a deal that you would not believe!
Or a less sarcastic response... You mean he'll put them in charge after firing them? Twitter literally barely works right now. I'm not sure how you came to the conclusions you have, but they are unreasonable on their face.
Everything he's doing is bringing Twitter inline with how SpaceX and Tesla already operate. It's a massive culture shock/change. Insubordination is not tolerated. Everyone is super mission focused. No one is irreplaceable.
You mean like how entry level jobs are ran.. people at companies like Twitter, SpaceX, etc are literally not replaceable. It won't take long for him to figure that out. It appears he's already been begging people to come back.
If you're an engineer who thinks with the right app or feature, that you could increase the value of Twitter substantially - then those current RSUs would be a great investment and could pay off handsomely in the future.
Private companies still are 'valuated' by external third parties regularly and hold 'liquidity events' where private investors buy a combination of stock from employees and from the company itself. Usually once or twice a year.
SpaceX is also now buying ads on Twitter, in something close to a direct cash transfer from the other minority investors in SpaceX to a business owned on leverage.
When SolarCity was on the verge of bankruptcy, owing SpaceX billions in credits, he arranged for Tesla to buy SolarCity and essentially bail out SpaceX. And yes of course Elon owned all 3 companies.
Both Tesla and SpaceX could put every dollar of their marketing budget into Twitter ads and that still wouldn't get it out of the $2B+/year hole it is in.
The other problematic aspect is that the customers of SpaceX (which probably don't pick launch providers from Twitter ads) include the US govt, so it's essentially a transfer of taxpayer money to Twitter.
Looks like Elon tries to act like a chief architect of Twitter[1] even though he still seems to confuse that 1000 RPCs are serially sent[2] from the app[3]? Why don't we do a public technical design interview session for Elon to see if he is technically competent enough for architecting one of the most famous social network? :sigh:
Related to this discussion, Elon made a tweet saying there are over 1200 microservices. Are there any tech talks or explanation videos showing a rough outline of what all these microservices do or how they're broken up? It's difficult to wrap my head around that amount.
important to note, that there is a natural very steep Pareto distribution going on here, meaning probably 10-50 of these services are responsible for 90-95% of the activity and features, and on the long tail you have basically one off reporting "services" (queries)
I can’t speak to Twitter specifically, but Monzo are a company somewhat famous for their thousands of microservices which they’ve written about, so that might provide some insight to how a company could use so many: https://monzo.com/blog/2022/06/24/redefining-our-microservic...
Previously worked at Monzo and the way their monorepo is designed is in retrospect incredibly solid, there is pretty much zero feature overlap between different services which is something even Google never managed to solve completely when I worked there.
Definitely had issues with abandoned / zombie services, but nothing that ever actually got in my way.
At my work, we have a system about that large. We have about 50 or so capabilities/domains. Some of the bigger ones, like Orders or Quoting have 100s of services. Some may only have a few dozen.
Many of these capabilities have their own “gateway” that defines an API for inter-capability communication.
Many of the modern features rely heavily on async messages and consumers that process those messages and events.
Some of these capabilities already existed as modules in a monolith desktop application from the 90s that has 1000s of “screens”.
for example, there's one service to say that you have new messages, and then there's a different service that counts how many messages you have. or one microservice who's only job is to send sms 2fa codes. apply that level of division to the whole site and 1200 seems entirely possible.
That’s a bit of a thought terminating clique, imo.
If the only consequence for saying something reasonable but contentious is unpopularity then you have free speech, but if you can be punished (banned from a public platform, or fired from a job) then you don’t.
Freedom doesn’t mean “the right to” (that’s “liberty”) - freedom has to be “effectively exercisable”, and that requires limitation on any unjust consequences.
IANAL but I follow some: fired and laid off employees may have a recourse beyond the WARN Act, state legislation regarding layoffs and even unlawful dismissal.
The contract Elon signed to acquire TWitter included promises on layoffs and the treatment of employees. This makes the employees what are called "third-party beneficiaries to the contract".
This is to say that in addition to legal restrictions on firings and layoffs these people can potentially sue under Elon's own acquisition contract.
I find it annoying that the greatest source of information regarding the ongoing implosion of Twitter seems to be Twitter itself. I'm eager to watch it die but I'm still unwilling to load their horrendously slow and visually offensive web interface.
Unlikely. Elon's MO for all of his companies is to find the "true believer" types and work them to death for pennies. It's much harder to do in software when one can simply walk across the street and get a better job, but I'm sure there are still enough of them to keep Twitter running because they worship whatever he is spouting.
Sure that works for SpaceX and Tesla, but for Twitter? Maybe I'm out of touch with the average software engineer but there's a lot of FAANG and FAANG-adjacent employers that have more compelling products to work on.
> It's much harder to do in software when one can simply walk across the street and get a better job
That may have been the case six months ago, but those “better jobs” are drying up and there is now I think around 20k recently released FAANG level SWEs walking around without gigs. Once the severance payout is gone and the COBRA starts demanding $1500/mo…there will be all sorts of SWEs willing to stretch their anti-Elon morality for a decent paycheck again.
I love how Elon is supposedly destroying Twitter because he is removing all those thousands of employee he supposedly needs to run it, and then the same people who say that supposedly are fleeing and so happy with the alternative Mastodon, developed for free by a tiny team of volunteers and ran by a few volunteers for free.
Which is it? Can you run Twitter or an alternative basically for free? Or do you need thousands of employees?
I think it is becoming pretty clear pretty quickly that the alternative being run and developed for free doesn’t scale to anywhere near Twitter size at all, that’s one thing that’s for sure.
He decided to buy Twitter after his girlfriend left him and one of his children sued to never have anything to do with him again. He has blamed both of these things on "wokeness" rather than his history of broken relationships and his child's assertion of him being a shitty parent. This was apparently enough for him to pledge $44 billion to "own the libs".
But he paid that because a Delaware court was going to reveal a lot of shit. And many of those billions are from banks who had faith in him. Good luck trying to get funding next time, Mr. It's Just 8 Dollars.
Watching a jackass fuck up this bad is entertaining...
I'm starting to believe he decided it made more sense to mark down the investment to 0 and use the losses against his income for the next few years instead to pay the fine for pulling out of the deal.
> Where have you been? I think you may be uninformed on this.
I think you are victim to reading headlines and not understanding what Twitter went to court over. Elon paying the $1B wouldn’t have gotten him out of having to complete the deal.
I was aware that Twitter went to court to complete the deal, but I admit to being misinformed as much of the analysis I read stated both avenues ($1B fee or force the acquisition) were viable.
As per your own link, the situations where that deal could be broken and the fee would be applicable were very limited (Musk not getting financing, Twitter finding a higher bidder). Musk changing his mind was not one of those situations, it was a binding deal.
Twitter did not sue for the $1b, but for specific perfomance, i.e. closing the deal.
Fair enough, I'm not versed on the legal in's and out's and it appears you're correct.
I knew Twitter sought to close the deal, but most of the analysis I read claimed they could have chosen the $1B instead, as if both were viable legal paths. It appears that is incorrect.
I agree, I was misinformed. Too many articles state both acquisition or $1B fine were viable routes for Twitter, but other sources with more solid analysis look to contradict that.
He created a new holding company (X Holdings) for this acquisition that will also be a parent company to Tesla and Space X (see https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-21/musk-form...). So he'll be able to carry forward all of the losses against his income from other businesses.
> He created a new holding company (X Holdings) for this acquisition that will also be a parent company to Tesla and Space X
AFAICT, it was very nebulous at the time that it ever would be a common holding company for those (and Musk’s other companies), and very good reasons were cited for being skeptical that that would be workable. And, to my knowledge, none of the other companies has been put under X Holdings.
> He HAS to be doing it on purpose, no-one is this retarded, especially when he just paid 44 BILLION for it.
The idea that having lots of money on the line prevents bad decision making, when in fact it can just as easily be evidence of bad decision making, is silly.
I have a question. A person of such incompetence could have achieved such great success, how is that possible? In addition to being technically incompetent, he seems to be incompetent when it comes to managing people and running a business.
We all conflate success with merit and competence but in reality is much more complex than that. Having the means (cash) and insight or luck to make a bet at the right time gets you most of the way there. For the rest, you don't have to be that competent, just not completely incompetent.
Elons biggest virtue is his stubbornness on two very successful bets, those two finance and cover all of his other failures (and successes) and character flaws. For now, at least.
He's always been a shitty boss and terrible people manager. But where are you going to work if you want to be around the sexiest rockets ever made? Or even the new hotness all electric vehicle? At least for Tesla, the appeal is diminishing but the market for hardware engineers and embedded is much different than general software and there is plenty of dumb people who think is cool to work under him, he has infinite cannon fodder to burn.
His biggest mistake with twitter is to buy a company where revenue is tied to public relations and being a person who despises public relations with a passion. There is no product to sell and optimize, he didn't get a good idea that needs polishing and perfecting, he has to come up with one. That is much, much harder.
Does a person who invested 44B get away with minimal consequences if he brings the company down, files for bankruptcy? I am trying to understand the financial risks at play here.
Far from having consequences, chapter 11 bankruptcy is actually a very powerful and advantageous financial tool in cases like this. Elon can likely wipe away the $13B+ of debt, get rid of all employee stock obligations, and continue to run the company himself under the temporary observation of a bankruptcy court. Chapter 11 filings are a very common outcome of leveraged buyouts like this one.
I feel like engineers behaved like a jerk in this case. Maybe Elon's tweet about 1000 RPC calls were wrong, but they could politely point it out, try to help to the company by joining internal discussions about what's going on.
But no, instead they started attacking the current owner of company publicly (good or bad, doesn't matter, he is now owner of company, if you don't like it just resign professionally).
I see this differently. Elon attacked the credibility of engineers at Twitter by publicly making up a lie about their incompetence and shouting it out with the biggest megaphone in the world.
Imagined another way, if your manager went to Twitter to announce to 1,000 followers how bad a snippet of your code was, he'd be a jerk.
When your boss is abusive towards you like this, it's a good thing to stand up for yourself and/or your peers. I imagine each Twitter engineer responding knew there was a good chance they'd be fired for it.
Now if they handled it the "professional" route you mentioned, that's fine, too. But when Elon started the mudslinging with a lie, I'm not going to begrudge someone telling the truth with some sass.
> try to help to the company by joining internal discussions about what's going on
Its been widely reported that internal communication is ineffective since the takeover, even before the mass firings which drove the expectations to managers have a expected span of 20 professional direct reports (exceeded wildly in some cases) and expected to also be actively coding themselves.
Musk could deal with that breakdown that he caused responsibly, or he could shoot the messenger and reinforce the thermocline of truth effect isolating him from knowledge of what is going on in the company he owns.
I think you're right. Elon was a jerk, then the employees were jerks, and then Elon retaliated from his position of power. Was it fair? Absolutely not. Publicly humiliating someone is horrible, especially so from a position of power. But fairness doesn't come into play, when people are playing dirty like this. The original jerk couldn't win their original battle, so they escalated. Since they've thrown fair play away already, what remains is the legality, and legally this is all okay, I'm sure of it. And that's all there is to it.
