Twitter

Latest news is they have locked the offices till Monday to stop sabotage after hundreds of staff did not accept a deadline for the stupid loyalty oath.

The only people left might be the ones on sponsored visas.

He says he'd much rather have a small number of exceptional people than many who are "pretty good and moderately motivated".

I can see the vibes behind that sentiment, and if you're a small business trying to grow I think that's what you need. But surely for an organisation the size of twitter you need the opposite?

Although if the company could run on 1k people i guess it's achievable.

There seems to have been no mechanism to retain the exceptional ones though?

The very best will have jumped at the time of purchase so they could get the prime jobs elsewhere, before the rest started leaving.

The other issue is it's an established company so retaining knowledge is usually really important.

When you're building a business you can try to put in plave the right architecture and work things as you grow. With an established one you've got so much legacy stuff that even if there are issues with it, to start you need people who know what they're doing.

Of course all the good ones will have few problems getting work elsewhere, (though with amazon and meta shedding jobs the market is going to be flooded).

When you're building a business you can try to put in plave the right architecture and work things as you grow.

I think Twitter had a decent software architecture already, and (presumably) was more or less appropriately sized for it. Details of it are asked at interview questions. I don't imagine there's be a tonne of mileage in trying to refactor it too heavily.

It's the world cup next week - I've read that some critical teams ('serve tweets' being one of them) now have no employees. I imagine there's a really high risk that twitter will go down sooner rather than later.

I wonder if there's is a group of ex employees getting together to build a new version for when Musk kills this one.

software architecture

Sorry I meant architecture in a wholistic sense - all the systems, processes, organisation, etc. and businesses generally.

But yeah the general point stands. Although I guess it would be interesting to do a compare and contrast with some old school case studies - as I can imagine there are some similarities between the "excesses" in modern tech cos compared to companies of the past with final salary pension schemes and strong unions.

This is worth a read :
https://twitter.com/capitolhunters/status/1593307541932474368

Sorry I meant architecture in a wholistic sense - all the systems, processes, organisation, etc. and businesses generally.

Aah - of course. I guess while you're changing the direction of that kind of stuff the last thing you want is any actual problems with the widgets - you just want that to keep running without attention for a while. Whoops!

The numbers are ridiculous. Aware that they're probably reported with some degree of inaccuracy, but there were 7,500. He fired about half so 3,750 left. Then (again from what I've read) 80% of those have chosen not to be hardcore, so there's 750 left.

I can't believe it'll be able to keep running with 10% of the engineers it had a few weeks ago.

Deleted my account this morning, even though I've not been on or used twitter for the best part of two years (and my mental health is all the better for it)
I decided that I cannot forgive that utter cunt for spending his vast wealth on a vanity project that he's clearly too egotistical to accept he's fucked up, putting employees work situation in turmoil, when he could have used that money to genuinely help millions of incredibly impoverished human beings across the globe and actually gain the respect and admiration he so obviously craves

How much of that 750 are actual engineers vs reception, HR, finance etc. How many are the high skilled highly paid people who feel that they are very transferable in the jobs market and how many are junior assistant level people who wake up in fear of not being able to pay the rent. At that level of attrition there really could be no-one left who can keep the lights on.

I’m left worrying about this.

All the tech brothers marching out, probably straight into new roles and with decent earnings behind them makes me go all Citizen Smith, but there will be plenty of other employees who aren’t confident finding new work and who are left behind in a mess forced to work for a tyrant.

Erm… well
Probably not
But thanks for thinking of me

1 Attachment

Surely worth trolling?

Well it is an Internal Trolling role

https://futurism.com/panicked-elon-musk-begging-engineers-not-to-leave

"From my larger group of 50 people, 10 are staying, 40 are taking the severance," one source reportedly told Orosz. "Elon set up meetings with a few who plan to quit."

https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1593336525898530821?s=20&t=NjbmmVNIKzDp8rqST3dcUQ

"Hundreds upon hundreds of Twitter employees have technically resigned but still have access to Twitter’s internal systems, with some speculating it is because the employees tasked with managing that access also resigned."
https://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1593368576777396226

1. Tape the interview
   
2. Get the inside gossip
   
3. Ring the papers
   
4. Profit
   

The only good outcome here is that now everyone knows what we've known for some time on here, that Musk is a toxic cunt.

https://twitter.com/brainiaq2000/status/1593364144312537089

Just to say I appreciate there's probably been some really good engineering for the app but Twitter as a product has always been a dumpster fire and I won't miss it.

One of my customers is launching a new product this week and was planning on dropping a large amount of money on adverts and influencers. They're in a panic about what plan B is if Twitter goes up in smoke. There is no plan B.

This is really fascinating to watch, albeit with the sad twinge that livelihoods are on the line for some. Twitter is an awful and toxic place but a lot of companies and people have come to depend on it for income and influence.

Similar story for another customer. They've basically fallen on hard times and have let their marketing campaigns lapse. It took them 8 years to build up 10,000 twitter followers. The marketing strategy we just wrote is quite twitter heavy (for various good reasons)...whats their plan B if they lose that 10k reach?

Doesn't twitter have awful engagement and click through anyway? Get them on the tiktaks or whatever