Twitter has fired more software engineers

https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1595684664228052992

by r721 • 4 years ago

188 359 4 years ago

prepend• 4 years ago

I’m curious about “not satisfactory” standards and how they are evaluated. I’ve met many earnest engineers and architects who were trying to do good and ended up making stuff worse by creating conformant code that still sucked.

I’ve met many more “witch-hunt” reviews that were just a reason to thin the company to please VC or shareholders.

The article/tweet doesn’t mention it, but I assume they have the same severance package of a few months as the rest. If so, it could be a lot worse

gttalbot2• 4 years ago

It does mention it. 4 weeks severance. The people who decided not to sign up for "hardcore Twitter" got 3 months.

voakbasda• 4 years ago

So, punish the true believers? Yep, this can only end well.

shapefrog• 4 years ago

Imagine having paid 2 months of your salary to lick Musks boots and be discarded and branded "not satisfactory" for your efforts.

They should have at least gotten a horse out for the deal.

purple_ferret• 4 years ago

Well they can get unemployment now too.

smugma• 4 years ago

It’ll be at least 60 Days, as required by California law.

gttalbot2• 4 years ago

Also, firing people on parental leave, and firing people on H1B who have 60d to get a job or leave the country.

neilv2• 4 years ago

firing people on H1B who have 60d to get a job or leave the country.

And during the holidays at end of year, when hiring seems to slow down for a couple months.

laacz• 4 years ago

Is it legal in US to fire people who are on parental leave?

DemocracyFTW2• 4 years ago

The article/tweet doesn’t mention it, but I assume they have the same severance package of a few months as the rest. If so, it could be a lot worse

Yeah well not exactly. From the thread:

Those fired got 4 weeks severance, by the way. A slap in the face, given that if they chose to not click "yes" to stay just a week ago, they would have gotten 3 months.

They might have believed in Twitter 2.0, but still got a worse deal than those who chose to simply leave.

The performance warning email closes with this line:

"Please use this opportunity to restore our confidence and demonstrate your contributions to the team and company."

It should be Twitter 2.0 that needs to restore confidence with employees.

Happy Thanksgiving.

It is already worse. And just to top it off, management wants people to make efforts to regain their leaders' confidence in them. That's vaguely Orwellian.

kylecordes• 4 years ago

On anything vaguely Elon related I've learned to ignore high-frequency reporting. It's all about creating instant disgust. Who knows what we we'll eventually find out; my guess is that it's more likely everyone gets similar longish severance.

(Or pseudo-severance, for countries and states with certain regulations, to ensure actual legal compliance even among the public perception of everything happening instantly without regard to sources of delay.)

chillfox• 4 years ago

“The article/tweet doesn’t mention it, but I assume they have the same severance package of a few months as the rest.”

It’s mentioned in the 4th tweet. Says they get 4 weeks.

tyingq• 4 years ago

I'm sure there were some unfair evaluations. Like, for example "terrible code" that's terrible because it was some attempt to add functionality or fix a bug in existing terrible code.

up2isomorphism• 4 years ago

Actually it is easier than you think IF you know the stuff. But that big if does not apply in most of the cases.

I have tried this whenever I moved to a new company and read other people’s code and can almost pick out more than half of the coaster or BSers immediately without talking to any of them. You will miss a few more but you rarely get false positives.

BTW the loc is a stupid metric should never be used in the first place.

hello_friendos• 4 years ago

Simply vile behaviour from Musk here. Nobody except delusion fanboys would be willing to work for such a company -- maybe that's the point of this cruelty?

cinbun8• 4 years ago

Maybe it's self selecting, like those Nigerian scams

dandanua• 4 years ago

There is no point in cruelty in civil societies. The man just seeks more and more power, abusing the others gives the feeling of it. That's sadism, in essence.

npteljes5• 4 years ago

As I see it, cruelty is often a byproduct, not the goal. Most often born of ignorance, or simply because the incentives differ. Therefore, I think it's natural to expect people to be cruel to the other. So what we can do, to be more civil, is to regulate our way of doing things - either by culture, law, or in other ways.

dghughes• 4 years ago

Earth may send Musk to Mars...involuntarily.

cloutchaser• 4 years ago

Nobody except delusion fanboys would be willing to work for such a company

This is the point. It's by design. Musk wants that level of loyalty right now. You can hate his methods or decisions, but I think the entire point is he wants 100% dedicated people right now at Twitter.

Given the magnitude of resistance from so much of the staff about the entire acquisition, and the bloat of silicon valley companies on top of it, I can see his reasoning.

082349872349872• 4 years ago

Back when broadcast TV was a thing, I cut short an interview with a TV exec as soon as he mentioned "loyalty". I've been out of the SW game for a while, so serious question: are there actually any examples of technical companies where personal loyalties are considered a positive input?

concordDance13• 4 years ago

Note that we're only hearing one side of the story here.

salad-fan5• 4 years ago

Facts don’t have sides, and that’s all I’m hearing in the top post.

r7214• 4 years ago

Update: https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1595772983733354499

b3lvedere3• 4 years ago

"Twitter's management STILL trying to recruit back experienced software engineers who left Twitter last week, opting in to not be part of the "hardcore" Twitter 2.0.

Wonder how many of them return, knowing they also can be fired at any time based on a single code review."

Why would you return to something that will try to spit you out at the first sign of trouble? Or have those poor people working on a visa no choice?

evanelias2• 4 years ago

Relatedly, I really wish people would stop calling this a "code review". That term already means something different than "shallow performance evaluation used as a justification for completely arbitrary firings with no notice".

It's horrifying to allow well-established industry concepts and terms to be redefined overnight by a single incompetent individual.

koonsolo2• 4 years ago

Why would you return to something that will try to spit you out at the first sign of trouble?

First you ask a crazy upfront payment to come back, then you ask a crazy wage per month.

If they agree, you're mad at yourself for not asking more.

That's how I would do it. Like a x10 sum of money.

JohnTHaller• 4 years ago

Why would you give up your 3 month severance to come back for 80hr work weeks for the same salary with the risk of getting fired at any moment based on a weekly screenshot of 'salient' code and then only getting 1 month severance?

peterkelly• 4 years ago

All I can do is express my sympathy to those affected. None of you deserved to be treated like this.

mint2• 4 years ago

Prayers is not technically all we can do, we can push for more labor organization which would be able to prevent that type of mistreatment, among other things. We could also boycott Twitter.

socialismisok13• 4 years ago

If Twitter had unionized they could have protected themselves from the whims of Musk. It's still likely Musk would have massacred the company, but maybe people wouldn't be getting fired the day before Thanksgiving.

How any engineer looks at Twitter and doesn't say, "We should consider a union..." is beyond me.

q1w23• 4 years ago

Twitter engineers are extremely well paid in addition to being cashed out of their company stock options at an above market price - and then getting severance.

ProjectArcturis4• 4 years ago

Is this true? What happened to unvested RSUs?

taolegal2• 4 years ago

None of you deserved to be treated like this.

Give me a break. This sector of the economy is literally the upper echelon of humanity.

They won the lottery compared to most people and act like this is some affront. What a bunch of baloney.

pimlottc• 4 years ago

Ouch. The timing is really rough for H1B visa holders. With Thanksgiving and then the end of year holidays coming up, it effectively burns half the 60 day period to find a new job. That’s brutal.

reacharavindh• 4 years ago

I mean if I were working at Twitter, and on H1B (at the mercy of the US Gov), I would have started my job hunt and jumped off the moment all this drama with Elon started. So, I don't think anyone smart would be _starting_ their job hunt now..

Tozen3• 4 years ago

Truth. People in that situation would likely be in a mad scramble.

tester7563• 4 years ago

Isn't TikTok getting those people hard?

btw. what happens if you start your own company?

kramerger• 4 years ago

I assume the severance package comes with some strings attached to it. Like boot working for a competitor for a limited time.

realce3• 4 years ago

At this point you either stand with SWEs or you stand with Boss Musk.

Fuck Boss Musk.

concordDance13• 4 years ago

Not a productive way of thinking about it, this isn't some tribal conflict where its about having more guys to go beat up those other guys.

realce3• 4 years ago

Interesting - worker solidarity to you is equal to "tribalism" and violence? So unions are actually violent tribal groups in your mind?

wittycardio4• 4 years ago

It's actually a pretty clear labour vs capital conflict. Elons just a regular PE style investor who's hoping to gut the company and sell it off without actually changing anything

socialismisok13• 4 years ago

Labor solidarity is an extremely common, useful, and productive way to think about boss vs worker concerns.

It's why we don't cross picket lines, why we unionize and support other unions, etc.

anonymousab3• 4 years ago

This is quite literally a tribal conflict. It's Musk vs. the employees; that's why he bought the company! It's not like he made it a secret.

scarface7410• 4 years ago

Who are these people who are clicking yes to longer hours except for H1B visa holders who would have to leave the country if they don’t find a job in 60 days?

On another note, in any major city in the US, a software developer is making above the local average income and has no reason to not have a “go to hell fund”.

pmg1022• 4 years ago

Having an above average income may be a necessary but is far from a sufficient condition to being able save up such a fund.

If you have above average income, most likely you will have above average outgoings, including on things you can't instantaneously cut like housing costs, car finance and school fees.

The only way I managed to create savings is by earning like a wealthier person but living like a less wealthy one, but there's a social cost to this course of action.

scarface7410• 4 years ago

Then don’t have above average outgoing expenses that put you at the mercy of a tyrant?

I’m 48 now and I learned a long time ago after my first job to always live in a position of f*^k you (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI). I believed in living like that from 1999 when I was making $60K a year, for the next 20 years when I was bumping around as your bog standard journeyman CRUD Enterprise developer and after that when I pivoted slightly to get into BigTech.

You are seeing the consequences right now of what happens when you let lifestyle inflation happen.

vocram• 4 years ago

What do you mean with social cost? Ranking lower in status?

thomasahle• 4 years ago

The only way I managed to create savings is by earning like a wealthier person but living like a less wealthy one,

Isn't that natural by the definition of saving up? That you'll have less money here and now, because you are saving for later?

but there's a social cost to this course of action.

Only if the people you hang around spend more money than you. There can also be social costs to earning and spending more money than people around you.

ryandrake6• 4 years ago

If you have above average income, most likely you will have above average outgoings, including on things you can't instantaneously cut like housing costs, car finance and school fees.

Not to mention if you have costly medical conditions or past medical debt to pay, if you have college debt to pay, if you're financially supporting your parents, if you are paying for past judgments, alimony, or child support... There are a lot of valid reasons for not being able to save, despite having a high income, that have nothing to do with living like a wealthy person.

markus92• 4 years ago

Good question, but the better question might be if there is anyone except H1B visa holders left in the US.

pjc505• 4 years ago

Note that any Twitter staff who had been paid in options or RSUs will have had a conversion event turning them in to cash when the sale happened, so I would expect most of the senior and long term staff to have just had a windfall.

jurassic2• 4 years ago

This is not true. The RSU grants converted to cash but maintained the same vesting payment schedule; so effectively the same as RSUs with all upside removed. You don't get the money if you don't stay. And also, the $54 price is not a slam dunk for employees with RSU grants issued during the market highs from last year. TWTR peaked over $80, so depending on when you joined your equity is still down a significant amount.

stale2002• 4 years ago

I am currently applying to work at Twitter, and I am a US citizen.

The reason is because Twitter is the most interesting company in the entire world to work at right now.

Not everything is some monetary math equation, of the best dollar per hour rate you can get.

I want to work on something interesting and right now that is Twitter.

If I want to rest and vest, I'd go work at Google.

voidfunc• 4 years ago

None of this is surprising. It's not about the code it's about figuring out a reason to fire people to cut costs dramatically since the company isn't profitable at its current footprint or with its current Chief Moron making it a toxic asset for advertisers.

hourago2• 4 years ago

You are right. We are firing you to cut costs could put the blame on the company, we are firing you because your code is ugly puts the fault on the employee. It is all about blaming.

dragonwriter• 4 years ago

It is all about blaming.

No, its all about costs. A layoff for cost reasons gives the employee unemployment and costs the employer higher UI tax rates (which are based, in part, on the cost of UI paid to their employees vs. past payments.)

A firing for failure to meet performance standards other employers met doesn’t give the employee unemployment and doesn’t result in additional costs to the employer.

Of course, a pretextual firing might be the subject of an unemployment appeal, but at the pay of a Twitter software engineer, while people might take UI they are entitled to, they aren’t likely to bother fighting it based on need (but might just to make a point.)

BaseballPhysics• 4 years ago

since the company isn't profitable at its current footprint or with its current Chief Moron making it a toxic asset for advertisers.

And the enormous amount of debt that Musk heaped on the company as part of the LBO.

Let us not all forget that Twitter's debt service increased by a factor of ten thanks to the acquisition. This is a problem of Musk's own making.

Whatarethese• 4 years ago

Even if they fired everyone but 1 person they still would not make a dent in those payments.

socialismisok13• 4 years ago

The absolute cruelty of Musk through this whole process is astounding.

One has to assume he's like this at his other companies as well, which is absolutely shredding their reputation in my eyes.

hourago2• 4 years ago

The absolute cruelty of Musk through this whole process is astounding.

That is by design. There is a mindset were powerful people feels that they need to show up their power, otherwise why do they have it? That is one of the reasons inequality causes many illnesses in society as the rich few feel the need to be cruel on people with less power. If it was not Musk it would be someone else.

SQueeeeeL2• 4 years ago

Yeah, but didn't you know Musk is a "special person", so therefore can abuse the fuck out of anyone he wants. He isn't just some random emerald mine heir with some interest in technology.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/elon-...

hectorlorenzo• 4 years ago

If it was not Musk it would be someone else.

This is an argument that needs to be done really carefully: its logical conclusion is that his cruelty is deterministic and there is nothing he can do about it. People have a certain degree of agency, he actively chooses to be cruel amongst other options at his disposal.

socialismisok13• 4 years ago

Maybe it's time to consider whether we're better off not having such concentrations of wealth...

Let Musk keep $5B, he'll be able to live luxuriously forever on that. But he won't be able to ruin thousands of lives so easily.

moonchrome2• 4 years ago

That's a bulshit generalization. The way Musk is handling the entire Twitter situation is a shitshow and I don't really see many people in his position playing it that way. Musk is a controversial character even among rich/powerful and his behavior is in character but not something I'd expect from many of his peers.

kqr• 4 years ago

Not only that: the power itself depends on other people believing in it.

If literally nobody in the company believes you to be the CEO, then you are no more powerful than anyone else. Similarly, even if you're not the CEO, but everyone believes you are, you have all the power of being one.

This means if you want to stay powerful, you have to exercise your power to remind people that you have it, thus reinforce their belief in it, and retain it so you can exercise it again to remind people and so on.

Of course, I would argue there are better ways to gain and display power.

radu_floricica• 4 years ago

I agree it's probably by design, but I contest that it's a bad thing. People comment on this takeover with a mindset where the company is made only of employees and owner. There are quite a few more stakeholders in this, much more than usual in this case. There are its clients (advertisers), its users, and everybody that's indirectly affected by the dialogue that goes on Twitter.

From the mindset I mentioned, yes, Musk is needlessly cruel and a bully. But he was quite clear from the beginning that he's doing it in good part for society at large - so the normal priority of stakeholders is actually reversed. Society and discourse become most important, then users, then clients and employees.

bhaak3• 4 years ago

If it was not Musk it would be someone else.

I don’t know the name of this fallacy but the “if X doesn’t do it somebody will” doesn’t seem convincing.

Especially as the previous management of Twitter wasn’t like that so it’s actually already disproved by history.

quantified2• 4 years ago

If it was not Musk it would be someone else.

Do you mean that in the sense that some superrich person at a different company, or do you mean that in the sense that pretty much every superrich person who would run Twitter would act the same way?

pif2• 4 years ago

He is not more cruel than the stakeholders who sold the company without ever worrying about the employees.

socialismisok13• 4 years ago

He is. Demonstrably.

prirun4• 4 years ago

The Twitter board did not have a choice and were obligated to sell the company since it was in the best interest of the shareholders. If they hadn't sold the company because they didn't like Elon or whatever, they would likely have been sued by the shareholders.

mathw• 4 years ago

I've read a load of stuff recently talking about how SpaceX and Tesla survive when he's in charge there too, and apparently SpaceX have a load of people who basically are a buffer between Musk and the bits of the company that actually get the job done.

Twitter has no such buffer, so we get to see the full scale of his hubris and impulsiveness in action.

ahiknsr• 4 years ago

I've read a load of stuff recently talking about how SpaceX and Tesla survive when he's in charge there too, and apparently SpaceX have a load of people who basically are a buffer between Musk and the bits of the company that actually get the job done.

https://twitter.com/cestperdu/status/1595778031481942016

concordDance13• 4 years ago

apparently SpaceX have a load of people who basically are a buffer between Musk and the bits of the company that actually get the job done.

Every company I've worked for has this, its very common.

Also, I suspect this is the same story being repeated rather than being sourced from multiple different spacex middle managers. (Which doesn't mean its untrue, just don't assume hearing something in multiple places means it has more than one root source)

doitLP• 4 years ago

As one former early Tesla engineer remarked to me “Your chances of being summarily fired go up exponentially when you are in the same room as Elon”

Cyberdog• 4 years ago

I’m dumbfounded by the idea that Musk was under any societal or business obligation to keep underperforming employees on his payroll.

As much as you may hate Musk, if you’ve been in this industry for a while, you know SV is full of people who are better at slacking, whedling, and coasting than coding, and in some cases have no skill at all and are clearly nepotism hires. Musk clearly does not have time for that sort of hiring, but I don’t think it’s a unique thing to him; any other non-SV businessowner would almost certainly be doing the same.

socialismisok13• 4 years ago

I'm dumbfounded that anyone thinks these were underperforming employees.

anonymousab3• 4 years ago

The idea is that Musk clearly doesn't judge performance and rather just fires haphazardly, as somewhat evidenced by the failed attempts to rehire various critical staff.

Firing them with much less severance than the "nonbelievers" he pushed out previously is a pointlessly cruel action.

Over in the EU, it is quite clearly a set of societal obligations that he is violating, ones that are enshrined in law.

salad-fan5• 4 years ago

If you think the way Space Karen has gone about these RIFs is even remotely effective at achieving that objective, I have a bridge to sell you.

fzeroracer• 4 years ago

Musk has already fired what, over 80% of employees? If your rationale is that they were all underperforming then you clearly don't actually care and are just using this as a convenient wedge to push your agenda. If they weren't all underperforming, then Musk arbitrarily fired a bunch of people for nonsensical reasons.

bogomipz• 4 years ago

Indeed it seems he has:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/technology/elon-musk-twit...

thefz• 4 years ago

Musk, Jobs... all byproducts of the calvinistic and very american idolatry of wealth. Not much else.

sethd3• 4 years ago

Too bad the Mars colonization effort is just another Musk PR scam. It would have been great to eventually see that guy leave this planet and hopefully never return.

frumper2• 4 years ago

Now he can have starlink orbiting mars and still tweet to his minions from the colony!

hcarvalhoalves2• 4 years ago

Time to unionize.

smcl3• 4 years ago

Might be a little late for Twitter workers at this point

b3lvedere3• 4 years ago

Not impossible, but highly not possible.

If everybody (and i mean everybody) would walk out and demand better terms, things would get pretty tense very quickly.

hcarvalhoalves2• 4 years ago

Well, hopefully the rest of the industry learns a lesson. The next years we’ll see layoffs, even more unpaid extra hours and decreasing standards. Without unions or any kind of labour organization SWE will be just exploited even more.

npteljes5• 4 years ago

I agree. The situation really shows how little the law protects the workers.

moistly2• 4 years ago

Seriously, how far can they take it? Some of these people could lose 99% of their wealth, and then 99% of what was left over, and still have tens of millions of dollars. These abject displays of cruelty are really pushing the limits.

sys_647382• 4 years ago

Who is judging the code not being satisfactory? Can we see example of the code in question? Can we also see examples of the code written by those who say other folk's code isn't satisfactory? In other words, are the evaluators even competent? Usually not.

fhd24• 4 years ago

What else was Musk gonna proclaim about why they were fired? That he needed to scare the remaining staff into submission by getting rid of a few more without any rational selection criteria?

It already stopped making sense at "10 most salient lines of code". He's trying to spread his truth that he knows anything about software (or tech at large), a fiction that was probably always a big reason for why people gave him money. Enough seem to buy it. Probably the one thing he is an actual genius at: Marketing.

matthewdgreen2• 4 years ago

If you want some hair-raising stories of Musk mistreating his employees and generally being self-destructive, this article was a pretty good warning. There’s a story halfway down about Musk firing a competent engineer just because he was pissed off and that engineer was nearby. You can’t read the entire thing without thinking either (a) it’s all lies, nobody could be that cruel and inept, or (b) holy crap he’s the worst boss ever. This Twitter debacle has been illuminating. https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-giga...

decafninja5• 4 years ago

Wasn’t he bringing Tesla SWEs to do this?

matt-attack• 4 years ago

Must a talented food critique also be a good chef?

sys_647382• 4 years ago

Is the food critic also a SW developer?

ffssffss• 4 years ago

Even this metaphor breaks down, in what way would someone who eats at 5 star restaurants be qualified to comment on the structure of the recipe or the reliable sourcing of ingredients? The truth is pretty clear at this point: Musk has no technical chops.

djur• 4 years ago

What a food critic reviews (the food, the service, the ambience) is analogous to the user-facing Twitter experience, which you don't need to be a programmer to review. What a chef does to create that dining experience (sourcing ingredients, planning menus, organizing the kitchen) is analogous to what programmers are doing, and that's not something you can usefully critique without relevant experience.

In any case, I wouldn't really trust a food critic who couldn't cook. But even the greatest home cook is not a chef.

roflyear• 4 years ago

If they are looking at the recipe and using that to judge the food, yeah...

_hyn32• 4 years ago

Who is judging the code not being satisfactory? Can we see example of the code in question?

Why should you see the code, or learn who the judge is, or be the judge yourself? Are you qualified to judge someone else's $44B acquisition? If you haven't recently purchased a social network for $44B, then you are not qualified to look at things from their perspective either.

Go start your own company and then you can do what you want with yours and your investors' money, but Elon Musk doesn't owe you a shred of explanation for anything he chooses with the company that he bought that he clearly believes was on life support, at best.

mcphage2• 4 years ago

the company that he bought that he clearly believes was on life support

Well, it is now.

decafninja5• 4 years ago

Maybe petty and I know it will hurt Musk as much as slingshot against Godzilla.

But we’re looking at an EV purchase next year and my wife and I have ruled out Teslas. We also want to liquidate our Tesla stock position as soon as possible. Perhaps we should have done so when Elon himself did at its peak early this year, but that’s bridge under the water. Really want nothing to do with this guy anymore.

concordDance13• 4 years ago

I'd wait to change opinions based on recent stories, those tend to be heavily distorted. Instead look up events that happened months ago and judge based on those (eg calling Thai diver a pedo).

Might give you the same result in this case, but it's a good rule to follow.

mc32• 4 years ago

It wasn’t a Thai diver it was a Briton.

decafninja5• 4 years ago

Oh I agree. The Twitter fiasco is just the final nail in the coffin after cringing at his antics and generally being disgusted with him for some time now.

anothernewdude• 4 years ago

I like the Nissan Leaf and the Kia EV6, I do think Tesla make some questionable decisions for some real world needs where actual car makers know better.

TexanFeller9• 4 years ago

Nissan(in recent years after quietly selling the company) and Kia are crap tier auto makers, nothing like Toyota and Honda. As someone who has two Nissans right now, both of them with CVTs prone to break in under 100k miles, it pains me to hear them called actual auto makers that know better.

wittycardio4• 4 years ago

Elon's great strength is his personality cult. I think that being shattered in the eyes of normal people is a great thing.

fhd24• 4 years ago

My first instinct was: Is it being shattered in the eyes of normal people though?

But I think you may be right. 200 MM users is not enough to truly matter I suppose, but who _really_ cares about Twitter? Journalists. They're spreading this stuff that's going on in a bubble they're in way beyond it.

fhd24• 4 years ago

I do the same. Hate to be that guy, but I had a strong dislike for him when he first got hyped up years ago, this is just reaffirming an old decision. Does my boycott matter in any way? Yes, to me. That's sufficient.

someguy212• 4 years ago

I am in the same boat as you. I would hate to know that I spent thousands to help enshrine this petty guy's fortune and lower the bar for tech worker treatment.

etiennemarcel• 4 years ago

I think Musk's mistake was to openly embrace conservative opinions and fringe conspiracy theories (his since deleted tweet about Paul Pelosi for instance). I already know of people in more liberal circles that would never buy one of his cars, just like they don't buy "my pillows" or go to Hobby Lobby. It's a big target demographic for EVs and doesn't bode too well for Tesla in the current political climate.

akolbe• 4 years ago

That's a good point. Teslas might be significantly less "cool" this time next year.

Might bring some solace to competitors who badly underestimated Tesla four or five years ago.

hn2017• 4 years ago

He's become a right winger who spreads extreme conspiracy theories. So sad

ea550ff70a• 4 years ago

I recently liquidated all my Tesla positions. I also plan to sell my Tesla next year. Was originally planning on a new Tesla but I have ruled them out completely too. The company has gone from being my favorite to the one I dislike the most in the span of a year.

q1w23• 4 years ago

Teslas being charged nightly on a power grid that's still largely powered by gas/coal is really just a status symbol. ...and with the limited range and limited lifespan, it was never a good financial investment either.

keepselling777• 4 years ago

I was a consultant at Twitter. The engineers there love complexity. They created layers and layers just to justify their positions so they can have fuel to burn to climb up the ladder. Most of the stuff they built is unnecessary and that effort could have been spent elsewhere. The managers enabled this because they needed the efforts to climb up as well. There was an in-group bias there that kept opposing voices away which creates deep valleys of blindness that crack the company eventually. Which is what happened, Twitter was dead weight for a long time. Glad Elon is there to shake things up. Jack was not effective anymore. Actually the culture he enabled is what brought Twitter to the point it was.

This happens everywhere so nothing new here. Especially when tech investment has been free for such a long time. Maybe even this economic downturn wont disrupt the tech investment machine. We will see next year.

If Twitter goes public again. I will be the first to buy shares. Since it will actually be a good play going forward.

salad-fan5• 4 years ago

So then explain why the first people to go were in content moderation, trust & safety? That _is_ Twitter’s product after all (brand safety for advertisers), and he gutted that faster than the engineering teams.

jasmer• 4 years ago

"Engineering is complicated -> I will buy shares"

I don't think this logic works.

The company is not made or broken whether or not the software is a bit more complicated than it has to be.

Making it a bit simpler will not change the company.

Moreover, it's very doubtful if they are in a position to magically untangle all of that and make things a bit simpler.

Most of the value of Twitter will come from revenues, growth and other things.

It's entirely possible that Musk could turn things around, but it's also very risky. It's debatable whether the people will perform in a coherent manner for him, that advertisers will come back, that his ideas will pan out.

And after all of that - he bought Twitter at the peak! He's holding the bag! Twitter would be worth maybe 40% of what it was at the peak, just by market forces alone - so he has to climb up to that big valuation to break even.

It's entirely plausible, but there is nothing obvious about this situation, and it's not an 'architectural' issue.

Finally, I will say that just because you thought things were overly complex, does not mean they were. Things are sometime a bit more complicated. Maybe, maybe not.

orsenthil2• 4 years ago

I took that stance with my Tesla stocks when he ridiculed the person who saved boys from Thailand Cave. He put technology ahead of humans, something that I am not comfortable with.

My view has changed back and forth, his values being incompatible with mine, and his risk taking abilities which are sometimes good.

concordDance13• 4 years ago

The cave is a bad example of putting technology ahead of humans. He actually tried to do something that would help some humans (the head diver of the rescue operation told him it was worth working on) in that case.

You could say he put his ego above harm to someone's reputation, but I don't think you could sat he put technology above people there.

nunez• 4 years ago

Same!

I was planning on buying a new Tesla next year before Elon literally turned into Scrooge McDuck

jaybrendansmith• 4 years ago

Exactly! I might have expected him to be an anti-humanist because he made such a point of loving humanity. Perhaps he does but he dislikes people intently based on his actions. I think all of these things are true simultaneously: - There were many engineers at Twitter building overly complex things. Twitter was overdue for a classic re-org. - There are many individuals on the Twitter platform that were enabling the cancel culture and impacting free speech. - There are many trolls on the platform, enabled by many bots, impacting narratives and in some cases influencing politics. - Elon's narrative of Twitter's content moderation skewing liberal is false. Facts consistently have a liberal bias, despite a few notable exceptions. - Twitter content moderation was not wrong. In order to have a free society and free speech, we must be intolerant of intolerance (Karl Popper). - Elon seems personally oligopolistic, anti-democracy, and a throwback to the gilded age. He reminds me of Henry Ford, there is a clear lack of empathy here. - While I will watch SpaceX with great enthusiasm, I will not be buying a Tesla.

LightG• 4 years ago

Same. I made this decision 18 months ago when I was thinking about an EV.

The good thing is there are decent alternatives now that, in many ways, are superior. I've delayed my decision anyway as I happen not to really need one right now and so I hope my delay results in better technology.

Note: for those who cannot wait, Hyundai ioniq 5 is the one. I was so close to pulling the trigger on that beauty. Test drove it. Loved it. Excellent all around package with the added bonus that it looks far better than the model 3 (which looks horribly dated every time I see it now).

ajross3• 4 years ago

I guess. Lord knows I'm not happy with what's happening at Twitter either. But... Tesla is a mature manufacturer with 100k employees now, and they all feel they're doing good work and making great products.

And they're right, frankly. One of the things you'll discover if you start looking seriously at your EV purchase is that the other manufacturers just aren't measuring up, both in specifics (performance, range, seat count, cargo capacity, etc...) and in qualitative stuff (fart noises, navigation experience, watch it drive itself, frankly just supercharging alone would be a decisionmaker vs. the CCS network in North America).

devonallie• 4 years ago

I’m not well versed in California/USA labour laws but does the haste and lack of cause for firings seem like grounds for civil suits?

rco8786• 4 years ago

Certainly, but the cost of what those inevitably settle for will be far less than keeping the employees on payroll or paying severance.

ViViDboarder• 4 years ago

California is At-Will. You can fire for “no reason”. Someone could try to claim your reason was a lie and that it was actually based on discrimination against a protected class though.

pjc505• 4 years ago

Not all Twitter employees are in California; you generally can't do this in Europe, so it'll be interesting to see how that pans out.

anonymousab3• 4 years ago

My guess would be either ignoring the problem altogether or "pulling out" of Europe employment-wise and then ignoring any ramifications of that for as long as possible.

tjpnz• 4 years ago

How do you make that kind of determination when you're missing the wider context which led to the code being written? Same goes for the code printouts and screenshots he was requesting people send.

Did Elon write any code during his time at PayPal?

smcl3• 4 years ago

My understanding is that Paypal was largely implemented @ Confinity before the merger with (Musk-founded) X.com

tod222• 4 years ago

Exactly.

To recap for folks unfamiliar with the history:

Peter Thiel co-founded the electronic payments company that developed PayPal.

Musk co-founded an online bank which had massive security holes.

The two companies merged and Musk was fired before the name was changed to PayPal.

See part 1 of Common Sense Skeptic's video on YouTube: Debunking Elon Musk

pjc505• 4 years ago

How do you make that kind of determination when you're missing the wider context which led to the code being written?

Dartboard.

Musk believes that, having fired 80% or so of the staff already, it's still overstaffed. He wants to reduce it to a group of people he can fit in a room and shout at directly. It's the literal implementation of "firings will continue until morale improves".

p4bl02• 4 years ago

Twitter is not working anymore. I got errors after errors. My timeline won't load on mobile at least four times over five. I don't get most of my notifications on the website even when the interaction are right there before my eyes.

It is quite amazing/awful to me how it is possible to break a platform that has been working pretty well for 15 years in a matters of weeks. This is quite fast.

Anyway, most of all I sincerely hope the layed-off people will find another, better job as quickly as they were fired.

bilsbie• 4 years ago

Works fine for me.

wittycardio4• 4 years ago

It mostly works but it's clear that some features are slowly breaking. Maybe it won't matter that it's starting to look rough around the edges but I would love for a real competitor to show up

piva00• 4 years ago

Good for you, I'm experiencing the exact same issues as the parent comment. Tweets don't load taking multiple refreshes to load, on mobile I get an error every 2nd or 3rd request. Notifications definitely are not popping up anymore and when I click on the tab I do see them but then the next refresh they disappear. Sometimes completely failing to load.

It's not completely broken but I've been definitely experiencing a degradation the past 5-7 days.

salad-fan5• 4 years ago

When can you ship your laptop to production?

Tomte• 4 years ago

that has been working pretty well for 15 years

"Fail whale" is a well-used term for a reason. Twitter has always been known for low reliability. It got better, though, but still nowhere near Facebook etc.

flenserboy• 4 years ago

Haven't seen the Fail Whale in some time. But Facebook has been glitching terribly the last few months on desktop — mobile is smooth, but desktop has been acting very weird.

p4bl02• 4 years ago

I don't mind internet services being down from time to time. What I mind is services that are unreliable, that acts as if they were working while they're not. The fail whale was there from time to time (I've seen my share of her, I've been on Twitter since early 2007), but this time it is different. It's not a "oops something is broken, we're on it and the service will be back soon, sorry" situation. It's a "everything is going wrong and we don't even know if the people who can fix things are still there" situation.

jhanschoo• 4 years ago

Indeed, it used to be constantly broken in the early 2010s. But I believe it was quite stable by the time it started regaining relevance again with Trump.

_djo_5• 4 years ago

Nah. Those were the earliest days, but Twitter has been rock solid for about a decade now. Outages and service degradations were extremely rare.

The Fail whale itself got retired in 2013, and there hasn't been a complete global outage since.

tamersalama• 4 years ago

Many World Cup updates do not show up in time (usually delayed by 10-120 minutes). So, Twitter isn't broken but is essentially useless.

npteljes5• 4 years ago

The no-login experience was a piece of shit, even before Elon. I click it sometimes when people link to it, and around 1 out of 5 times the page, or some part of it, just simply doesn't load. Working right after a refresh.

jliptzin• 4 years ago

Astounding to me that this is what the leadership at twitter wanted, even forcing Elon to go through with the deal when he tried backing out, knowing full well that this is what would happen to their employees. All for like 20-30% premium on the stock price.

matwood3• 4 years ago

By the time the deal closed, it was speculated Twitter should have been trading ~$25/share or less. So more like 100%+ premium.

jlangenauer• 4 years ago

Why is it astounding? Leadership is there to serve the interests of shareholders, not employees. For obvious reasons, this truth is usually elided behind talk of "company families" and "valued employees", but it never ceases to be the truth.

Pigalowda• 4 years ago

Why astounding? They got paid a lot more than they should have so it made sense. Money makes people mean but that’s business as usual.

b3lvedere3• 4 years ago

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094012/quotes/qt0466959

bfgoodrich• 4 years ago

Astounding to me that this is what the leadership at twitter wanted

If they didn't accept and try to finalize his offer, they could have been successfully sued by shareholders: You don't turn down a premium offer unless you think you can get better, and you absolutely finalize that deal if the market takes a sharp downtown after getting it.

kasey_junk• 4 years ago

Leadership didn’t necessarily want this, shareholders did. Musk paid a huge premium in perhaps the worst takeover deal in a decade.

If the ceo and board had not taken the deal they would have been (rightly) ousted by the shareholders who lost tons of money.

badpun• 4 years ago

Leadership didn’t necessarily want this, shareholders did.

Musk is the shareholders though? Him and come-alongs, such as Larry Ellison.

jmull• 4 years ago

Those fired got 4 weeks severance, by the way. A slap in the face, given that if they chose to not click "yes" to stay just a week ago, they would have gotten 3 months.

Can this be real? That’s seriously f-ed up.

prirun4• 4 years ago

I was thinking, why did they give the first round 3 months and this time only 1? Why didn't they give the first round 1 month? Only thing I could come up with is that more people who were on the fence for the first round might have stayed, so giving them 3 months encouraged more people to leave, which is the ultimate goal, to save money.

This is why not getting to review severance (if leaving) and employment contracts (if staying) before having to make the "commit to hardcore" decision was unreasonable.

ProjectArcturis4• 4 years ago

Unfortunately this is often standard procedure when companies do layoffs. The first round gets generous severance. In subsequent rounds, the company's death spiral has become obvious and they no longer spend on niceties like unnecessary severance.

Lesson: if your employer offers you a buyout, take it.

coredog643• 4 years ago

First round got 3 months because a no-notice mass layoff requires at least 60 days according to various state and federal WARN acts. Once you get down to actually firing people for cause, you can (usually) skirt WARN acts.

petesergeant2• 4 years ago

I once worked at a very high-end online fashion retailer, and as a programmer, it was a decent place to work, and I look back fondly on my time there.

However, if you were in the fashion industry, and especially if you wanted to work at a company founded by an inspiring woman, it was absolutely the place you wanted to work. HR were inundated by applications for non-tech positions by highly capable and motivated people, and HR acted like it. It was very selective, and the best people fought for jobs there and worked hard.

But for tech workers, it was simply an decent place to work, and was perpetually a little bit short-staffed. HR couldn't wrap their minds around the fact that this one segment had choices and weren't really that fussed about working there, and so it took a lot of work for engineering managers to free up basic recruitment marketing money, to streamline recruitment processes etc.

I wonder if there's some of that going on. For people who want to work on the cutting edge of space-tech, SpaceX has to be very high up on the list of places you'd want to work. For people who want to build electric cars, ditto Tesla.

But for software engineers who are good enough to do the work that needs to be done at Twitter? meh, there are choices. There are companies with much more interesting problems, companies with larger scale, companies who'll pay better. Are there that many Twitter True Believers? My understanding is the big draw beforehand for Twitter was that they had a great working environment, and that's evaporated.

I wonder if Musk will be able to get his head around that.

leetrout• 4 years ago

I wonder if Musk will be able to get his head around that.

Doubtful based on how this is going.

Schweigi• 4 years ago

There is a certain amount of people who like to work in a “Elon Musk” company no matter what. Like him or not, but he is a guy who has a certain pull which let’s people overlook a lot of stuff. So Twitter will still bee able to hire from that pool - despite all the negative firing news.

tester7563• 4 years ago

If I had an opportunity to join Twitter now then I'd definitely do it

It could be interesting story to tell after years

petesergeant2• 4 years ago

I think you're right. The question is: is that pool big enough? For Tesla and SpaceX, you had a _vision_ as well, so you could be ambivalent about Musk but still stoked on what the company was doing. I don't think Elon's laid out that vision for Twitter yet very effectively ... I don't think building another Careem/Grab/Rappi/LINE/whatever super-app is very compelling, which was one of the latest ideas.

ryandrake6• 4 years ago

I think that used to be true about Tesla, but now other companies are fully into electric vehicles, opening up new opportunities for people who want to go into that field. The allure of Tesla is vanishing, leaving only long hours, workaholism, and Cult Elon as the differentiating reasons to work there.

Your main point is absolutely right: whenever you have a company where a lot of people want to work, that company can (and always does) get away with extreme hiring selectivity and abuse of the people it selects. See also the video game industry.

coredog643• 4 years ago

Counterpoint: Assuming Musk doesn't completely burn all remaining tech goodwill (which is a huge assumption), Twitter is probably the easiest entry point to a company with large scale that is also well known and will be a resume boost. Given two candidates, one who managed Twitter's datacenter and one who managed the datacenter for Mutual of Omaha, I'd posit that the former would have an easier hop onto the next rung of the ladder.

activitypea• 4 years ago

A lot of people who stayed did so because of H1Bs, and a lot of those people were sacked last night. Imagine having to find a new job in 60 days, starting the night before Thanksgiving. My heart goes out to those poor folks.

flandish• 4 years ago

“How much do twitter devs have to take?” - before a union vote, I hope?

sidcool• 4 years ago

At this point Musk seems to be doing things just for attention and losing least money with Twitter.

incomingpain• 4 years ago

https://twitter.com/maddoxrules/status/1594110328647794688

Maddox is so funny. I wonder if it's true.

arpa• 4 years ago

To be fair to Musk, indeed he is delivering on the "hardcore" twitter promise. Edit: not condoning his practices.

fhd24• 4 years ago

Sorry for going so off topic, down vote if you think it's too far. But:

Does anyone else think he's gearing up for running as president for the Republicans at one point in the future? I'm not a US citizen so I just have my armchair criticism to go on, but it's the most rational explanation of his behaviour I can come up with. Haven't read this from anyone else so far though. If Trump can do it, why not him?

Edit: Thanks for clarifying! So I guess that doesn't make sense.

zach_garwood2• 4 years ago

He wasn't born in the US, so he can't run for president.

zimpenfish4• 4 years ago

He wasn't born in the US, so he can't run for president.

It's "natural born citizen", not "US born". cf [1] which says via a Congressional Research Service report,

it appears that the most logical inferences would indicate that the phrase "natural born Citizen" would mean a person who is entitled to U.S. citizenship "at birth" or "by birth"

Hence e.g. Ted Cruz being eligible for President even though he was born in Canada because he has an American mother.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-born-citizen_clause_(U...

bikingbismuth• 4 years ago

Only natural born citizens can run for president, and Elon was born in South Africa.

zimpenfish4• 4 years ago

To be fair, he could have been a "natural born citizen" in South Africa if either of his parents were US citizens.

kibwen3• 4 years ago

The constitution only allows native-born citizens to become president. If we get to the point where people are amending the constitution to change things like that, then we'll have bigger things to worry about.

Balgair2• 4 years ago

Like Schwarzenegger.

pjc505• 4 years ago

He's certainly positioning himself for the rightwing sphere; whether he would run as a candidate (not president, maybe a govenor?) or whether he would prefer to be candidate kingmaker remains to be seen.

npteljes5• 4 years ago

I do think that he's moving to be an ally for them.

youknowthis33• 4 years ago

Powerful people are always targets of propaganda campaigns, just like political parties. There are many people who want to see them fail because they profit from that. Or are just jealous.

andy_ppp• 4 years ago

I heard the FSD code was a chaotic disaster too. I think numerous inexperienced programmers find fault with other people’s code and sometimes those criticisms are valid, but more often there is a huge amount of context the person sitting in their ivory tower is unaware of.

Doing things like this with kindness and wisdom would be better than swinging the axe with incomplete information. Especially H1Bs who are reliant on an employer to remain in the country are hopefully exempt from such extreme punishment and are at least given a shot at doing what Musk wants in terms of code quality.

From my point of view there’s no need to treat people as disposable commodities who cannot improve given the right environment. And I don’t like anyone thinking their opinions are that much better than anyone else’s, but these are the times we live in…

beeboop• 4 years ago

It’s cool that you’re wishing a product fails in a way that could kill people

rich_sasha2• 4 years ago

If I were to guess what's going on, it is that Elon Musk is seeing losses and not profits.

He now owns a significant chunk of the firm (not quite 100%, there were some other buyers, etc. but close enough). So now every $1 expensed by the loss-making company, he sees as a dollar he personally loses - and that's after overpaying through the nose for the company (he got hit by a double-whammy: Twitter value crashed along with other Tech stocks, and he had to sell more Tesla stock to cover the over-inflated valuation).

This is quite different from the perspective of a, say, 5% owner. For every dollar spent by the firm, that's only a $0.05 "spend" out of the minority stake owner. It's easier to justify such expenses to yourself, emotionally.

Basically, the more of your personal wealth is locked into an enterprise, the more risk-averse you become about it. If you have a diversified portfolio of small stakes, you're more likely to be bullish on them individually and encourage investment for high-risk / high-reward profile, but not if you basically have one massive bet.

So I'm guessing, he's thinking he not only overpaid for Twitter, he is now paying through the nose just to keep the office open, and he's not clear what it's all for. So without an idea for profits, he is desperate to cut the losses.

Obviously the human cost - collateral damage to Musk - is tremendous and it makes me so sad to see people's livelihoods shattered on a whim like this.

mcphage2• 4 years ago

the more of your personal wealth is locked into an enterprise, the more risk-averse you become about it

If Musk were risk-averse he wouldn’t be rocking the boat. None of what he’s done since the sale qualifies as “risk averse”.

rich_sasha2• 4 years ago

Au contraire, it seems to me he is desperately trying to cut cost. Plus his usual megalomania. I think he bit off more than he can easily chew this time.

davidg109• 4 years ago

Elon begone. I am so over this megalomaniac and his pompous, man-child behaviour.

papito• 4 years ago

Unhinged tweeting at odd hours, erratic decisions, irritability, lack of sleep, extreme defensiveness, vengefulness ("let's shame the advertisers"!), demands for unquestioned loyalty. Where have we seen this before?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/business/elon-musk-interv...

"But this has worried some board members, who have noted that sometimes the drug [Ambien] does not put Mr. Musk to sleep but instead contributes to late-night Twitter sessions, according to a person familiar with the board’s thinking."

This man is a walking zombie on no sleep. I just wonder if he is naturally this wired or he is crashing on upper/downer pills, like Trump did.

Balgair2• 4 years ago

With 33% of the severance that the 'non-clickers' got just last week too.

Why would anyone re-join Twitter2 or get hired there?

Why are the people that got put on the PIP doing anything but trying to find another job?

You know Elon's just going to abuse you and not much else, he's proven it a few times now. It's very clear, he thinks you're a chump and he's going to keep treating you like a chump.

q1w23• 4 years ago

They would join for the same reason you join any company - salary and experience.

It would be odd to expect more from other employers.

dekhn5• 4 years ago

I could imagine some young hackers/CS grads would see Twitter2 as an opportunity to come in, work hard, launch product that succeeds, and use that to parlay to a more sustainable career in the future. Such people will tolerate a fair amount of abuse (similar to grad school) because the expectation is that it will pay off long-term.

koonsolo2• 4 years ago

If it was me, I would re-join for normal working hours, a huge upfront payment and a 10x wage.

whywhywhywhy• 4 years ago

Can't take criticisms of where Twitter is heading from bluechecks like this, I mean they're not a celebrity, they're not a politician, no one is trying to impersonate a author of books about coding mobile apps... why do they have one? Only reason I can see is they likely had a friend at Twitter at the right time.

These people have everything to lose under Elon's plan because they had special privileges on the network and now those will be open to everyone so they're bound to be salty about the whole thing.

Only so many times I can be told the sky is falling at the app via the app itself.

neilv2• 4 years ago

This HN post has been buried:

    194.
    Twitter has fired more software engineers (twitter.com/gergelyorosz)
    139 points by r721 3 hours ago | flag | hide | 242 comments

r7214• 4 years ago

Too many comments (and a couple of user flags probably):

The FAQ notes that submission rank is impacted by "software which downweights overheated discussions." A good rule of thumb for this effect is when the number of comments on a submission exceeds its score.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

I recommend checking https://news.ycombinator.com/active ("Most active current discussions") once per day to find these discussions.

MartnMay• 4 years ago

Does anyone think these decisions are best for Twitter at this time?

tartoran2• 4 years ago

How come this post is now unsearchable on HN and yet it’s not flagged? I looked over back for about 10 HN frontages pages and it was nowhere to be found. I had to look through my browsing history to get back to it. This is really uncool soft censorship on HN we can’t talk about

smeyer• 4 years ago

I found this post by searching, and saw your comment when it was 1 minute old. I don’t think the post was removed from searches.

r7214• 4 years ago

See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33733310

It's also not "unsearchable", just sinking much faster than other posts: https://hnrankings.info/33730985/

danielspace23• 4 years ago

joinmastodon.org

_hyn32• 4 years ago

How many engineers did Instagram have when it was acquired by FB? (answer: 6 engineers with 30 million users: https://www.fastcompany.com/3047642/do-the-simple-thing-firs...)

Obviously, those were highly competent engineers, but perhaps Elon Musk is just trying to get to roughly the same proportion (~60?).

If so, he's still got a long, long way to go, so expect a lot more cutting.

ctvo2• 4 years ago

Instagram, when it was acquired, wasn't too concerned about making money: It was still VC funded, and was looking at raising another round.

The founders controlled the small set of features available, and weren't beholden to, say, trying to include targeted ads or adding shopping to the platform. They certainly weren't concerned about bots, child pornography, state sponsored actors, data warehouses to store and analyze data for FCC decrees, the list goes on.

It's very easy, looking in, to handwave away complexity that creeps into a business and its technology and assume it's a lack of engineering skill. Do a reality check: Compare Twitter to other similar companies e.g. Facebook, Spotify, Netflix, Bytedance, Snap ... are these companies ran by 6 10x engineers? 60? Do you think EVERYONE is stupid or is unaware of how to do software engineering or is there complexity here you may be ignorant of? It's obvious Elon thinks the former here.

raydev• 4 years ago

Instagram, at the time, was significantly limited in functionality. IG didn't have Android and web support until 2012, it was iOS only until then.

The more features you offer, the more complex your system needs to be, the more people you need to maintain and build on top of the system.

taolegal2• 4 years ago

ITT: liberals saying it's cruel that Musk changes the company.

As though any company has an obligation to employ people.

And most importantly, even though Twitter basically just employs PhDs, and other smart people, to hijack our monkey brains into mindlessly scrolling, engaging toxic emotional provocations and consuming advertisements.

Musk lives rent-free in so many peoples' minds. Another sort of derangement syndrome.

taylodl• 4 years ago

This should serve as a warning to everybody working at any of Musk's companies. Musk is unstable and unpredictable. You can't afford to put your career in his hands. The time to leave is now.

r7214• 4 years ago

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33733843

Twitter has fired more software engineers

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