Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[Maladict]

Maybe some sort of "we'll make the all-in-one app" or something like that...

I'm having flashbacks to those old apps that rolled ICQ, IRC, Messenger etc. into one unified client

Those were the days. But doing it now would create horrendous privacy concerns.

Although being concerned about privacy is probably something only the olds do nowadays.

[Darth Wagtaros]

One thing is having kids, a very different one is actually raising them.

That's what the minimum wage nannies are for.

[Berkut]

Why do eugenics nuts always assume smart people have smart kids.

Why would you assume that smart people would not have smart kids? Is there some reason to think that intelligence is not heritable?

The science certainly suggests otherwise - IQ is generally highly heritable (although of course influenced by a large number of other factors).

That is not eugenics.

[alfred russel]

The other, critical difference is that he has owned the company for barely three weeks.  He strode into a company that had a certain culture, threw out half the staff, and imposed a major culture change on the other half.  The likelihood that a significant portion of the existing staff were on board with his new culture was, and has proved to be, very low.

It's a different case when you have a company that is known to be "hardcore".  The applicants to those companies self-select.  They know what they're getting into.

The people who worked for Twitter a month ago signed up for a much different bargain.  I'm not surprised there's a mass exodus as a result of this.  Also, I feel really bad of the people who are still there only because of their life or visa situation.

Hopefully twitter suffers a catastrophic failure, because while i'm not in tech, it would seem to be a very negative precedent for corporate drones if you can drastically slash staff, totally disregard employee morale, and the business continues to chug along without significant problems.

[Darth Wagtaros]

The other, critical difference is that he has owned the company for barely three weeks.  He strode into a company that had a certain culture, threw out half the staff, and imposed a major culture change on the other half.  The likelihood that a significant portion of the existing staff were on board with his new culture was, and has proved to be, very low.

It's a different case when you have a company that is known to be "hardcore".  The applicants to those companies self-select.  They know what they're getting into.

The people who worked for Twitter a month ago signed up for a much different bargain.  I'm not surprised there's a mass exodus as a result of this.  Also, I feel really bad of the people who are still there only because of their life or visa situation.

Hopefully twitter suffers a catastrophic failure, because while i'm not in tech, it would seem to be a very negative precedent for corporate drones if you can drastically slash staff, totally disregard employee morale, and the business continues to chug along without significant problems.

So the last 20 years (at least)?  A C level can burn a company to the ground and walk away far richer than when they started.

[OttoVonBismarck]

My read on how Musk has (mis)managed Twitter staff is he learned bad lessons from Tesla/SpaceX in terms of what might work in a more general sense.

Tesla and SpaceX both employ lots of engineers, who probably came to those companies from staider/established auto and aerospace firms. They very likely went to Tesla and SpaceX specifically to be bleeding edge, work on new tech, do things that they are deeply passionate about. It is a well-known thing that employees who are really passionate about what a company does are willing to put in longer hours and even accept lower pay. That's one reason for example computer programmers for game development companies frequently take jobs in gaming that pay less and work them harder than what they'd face if they worked at some generic enterprise software corp.

From an owner/manager perspective, there are tons of advantages to having people who drink your kool-aid vs people just coming to work for a paycheck. The idea of trying to create that same culture at Twitter certainly makes sense in that context.

What Musk majorly misunderstood though is Twitter isn't anything like a Tesla/SpaceX in its field. Twitter is a software company that runs a big web application, nothing it is doing or has done is particularly novel or exciting for someone already working in a software company. The list of companies that, tech stack wise, do work similar to Twitter is massive. Sure, Twitter is a little unique in that it's running a midsized and high-visibility social media network, but for the engineering people it's a big web app and there's lots of big web apps being ran by lots of big companies. Twitter is a lot closer to being Chrysler in comparison to Ford than it is Tesla in comparison to Ford.

The people who work there also know all of this, so when you cut 50% of the staff and then tell the remaining staff they need to do more work for no additional pay, they are basically just going to look at the broader job market where lots of companies working in web applications have job openings doing the same shit they were doing at Twitter without the bad work environment. Why wouldn't they leave?

Is it possible to build the sort of enthusiast workforce at a company like Twitter? I wouldn't say it is impossible, but it is definitely harder than it would be at Tesla or SpaceX because you aren't working in any technology that is that interesting or novel as compared to any job you could get at Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Alphabet, Facebook, Adobe etc etc. Those are just the tech majors, there are literally hundreds of firms with similar jobs that are less known to industry outsiders.

[Solmyr]

Why do eugenics nuts always assume smart people have smart kids.

Why would you assume that smart people would not have smart kids? Is there some reason to think that intelligence is not heritable?

The science certainly suggests otherwise - IQ is generally highly heritable (although of course influenced by a large number of other factors).

That is not eugenics.

IQ is not the same as intelligence or being smart, though.

[alfred russel]

Is it possible to build the sort of enthusiast workforce at a company like Twitter? I wouldn't say it is impossible, but it is definitely harder than it would be at Tesla or SpaceX because you aren't working in any technology that is that interesting or novel as compared to any job you could get at Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Alphabet, Facebook, Adobe etc etc. Those are just the tech majors, there are literally hundreds of firms with similar jobs that are less known to industry outsiders.

As a veteran/survivor of what feels like 1,000 layoffs, and never at a company like Tesla or SpaceX, the motivation for remaining employees has always been rapid advancement and higher pay. I'm sure it will be the same at twitter.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I mean after the 50% layoffs they had 75% of the remaining staff refuse to sign on to his demands, so whatever possibilities of rapid advancement there might have been didn't seem to appeal to most of them. Note that in the IT world if you're a senior developer or operations engineer / sysadmin, a lot of times the "manager track" career for people that supervise those positions is not seen as desirable. Lots of software engineers have zero desire to ever promote into management, which is maybe different from fields you've worked in, don't know. Many software companies actually create pretty robust "salary band increase in-place" mechanisms for developers/engineers so they can get more money without being pushed into management or a higher "ranked" position.

It isn't actually unheard of at many such companies for senior developers or engineers to make at or rarely above what their direct manager does--and the gap between manager and engineer/dev pay is often much narrower than is typical in non-tech industries.

For many of the guys who work in the NOC or etc keeping the lights on, Elon is basically offering them more work at the same pay--they would not be that interested in the fact that because lots of people were laid off they have less competition for promotions into the managerial ranks they don't want to join in the first place.

[Jacob]

Yeah, that's a good point Dorsey.

Last person standing is a pretty reliable way to get promoted. As long as you can keep your head down and play the politics well enough, you can do alright. And usually the most intense "everything is different now" stuff passes after a few months before a new normal settles in.

So yeah, good reason for a number of folks to remain.

Also - to be fair - departing staff often have a heightened sense of the negative impact of their departure. Still, it's a LOT of people reportedly gone I don't get a sense that Elon & co had a good idea of the impact of their initial layoffs, and the new wave of resignations seem even more unpredictable in terms of impact. It will be interesting to see how it plays out, but I don't assume it's a given either.

[Barrister]

The big concern for Twitter is if there are just so many people gone there's a complete lack of institutional knowledge of how key parts of Twitter work.  And while a new software engineer could over time figure things out, twitter might not have very much time if key parts of infrastructure start going down.

[OttoVonBismarck]

If reporting is accurate this isn't a small layoff or restructuring, right? This is a) a company that just downsized by 50% and b) then had 75% of remaining employees refuse to sign a sign-or-leave contract. That means we are at like ~12.5% of the original size of the company.

Twitter isn't going to magically burst into flames and disappear, but if reporting is right that entire teams that handle things like internal tools and other critical infrastructure are now entirely unstaffed...that is going to be a non-viable situation in the short term.

There are reports that Twitter's NOC (their networking ops team basically) is basically zeroed out, which for a major public facing website is a serious infrastructure problem right now. There are already articles coming out every day saying Twitter is no longer complying with various FTC and EU regulatory requirements because the teams responsible for that compliance no longer exist.

I'm not saying there is no way that Twitter can exist as a smaller footprint company, but in the form Twitter existed a month ago it had a lot of operational and legal things it had to do all the time, and now can no longer do those things. This isn't a regular RIF or downsizing, this is largely the complete destruction of the company's staff. With enough money you can weather any storm, but this isn't like a bit of a layoff to reduce overhead, this is basically a new company now, that will have to basically build itself from the ground up--also in an industry it was already not competitive in and was losing money at, and in an environment where most of their customers (advertisers) have already left them behind.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Basically Elon has now functionally paid $44bn for the Twitter branding and its user base (note this branding/userbase were generating $5bn/yr in revenue and negative profits), but gets to basically start up a new software company almost from scratch to try to turn a profit on it.

[The Larch]

The impression from the outside is that Twitter is a sinking ship, basically because the new captain started opening holes in the hull for shits and giggles. There's little upside to remaining on the ship. Sure, you can get promoted, but sooner or later it all seems to be going down.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I don't know that Twitter will really disappear, to me it's more looking at the business situation: because you've gutted almost all the expertise and workforce of the company, you have literally valued the blue bird brand and its low-monetization userbase at $44bn, which is 44x the best year of profit the company ever had. Even if Musk manages to limp the company through to a rebuild...I see almost no prospects that this will prove to be an investment of $44bn that makes that much sense versus...probably a fucking index fund, or just leaving that money in Tesla.