X’s director of engineering, Haofei Wang, has left the company

https://www.theverge.com/twitter/634833/x-head-engineering-leaves-elon-musk

117 201 1 year ago

Well deserved.. On web, I get labelled as a bot for no reason and its so bad I just stopped using it on web...

They seem to be one of those sites that intentionally makes their Web version suck, to push you to the app. The behavior predates Musk, even, and during the first few months of his ownership this markedly improved (I assume as a side effect of ripping a bunch of stuff out) before getting even worse.

wlesieutre• 1 year ago

  Something went wrong... try reloading

I don't think I've ever seen this message resolved by reloading

aurareturn• 1 year ago

This has gotten worse for the web in general because AI bots are going nuts.

timeon• 1 year ago

I just stopped using it on web...

Just on the web? You have been labeled as bot and you are still using the service? This reminds me Stockholm syndrome.

anshumankmr2• 1 year ago

I follow some accounts like Chip Huyen, Andrej Karpathy and some cat pic accounts etc..., and a couple of close friends are almost exclusively active on Twitter. Also ocassional Marvel news is nice to check out in a while...

But its true that toxic crap does pop up on my feed, esp. before the Presidential election, I felt it had gone haywire so I just block some triggering words though even that doesn't work at times..

And by bot, what I meant was when I did try to tweet, way too many times it says to "This action seems automated. Please try again later" or "You have reached your daily limit for this action... Please try again later" or Add your phone number to proceed (though I have done this ages ago) ... not been literally labelled as a bot.

Maybe it is stockholm syndrome... social media does seem like a way to get my fix (cut out Instagram cause of doomscrolling on an ex's profile, Reddit cause its pretty toxic too but its still good place to get some esoteric knowledge, HN has been very good, Facebook is useless unless I try to sell something... speaking of which if anyone is open to buying a 21 speed cycle in Bangalore, please DM)

jandrese• 1 year ago

Was he the guy who made X block Firefox unless you turn off the tracking protection? I will say that change has made it much easier to stop using the site.

techpineapple2• 1 year ago

It’s been 3 years, which seems like a normal tenure in tech, I don’t recall seeing front page headlines every time an employee leaves another company.

dartos• 1 year ago

3 years at that high of a position is a little short.

But, yeah, seems like just a nothing burger from the Verge.

tonyhart7• 1 year ago

director of engineering at X(twitter) that pretty long for a company that Musk nickel and dime you

SecretDreams2• 1 year ago

Wang first joined Elon Musk’s X in July 2023 and has been an integral part of the company’s leadership, often serving as a conduit between Musk and the rest of the company’s engineers. More recently, he was seen internally as X’s defacto head of engineering and product

How do you get three years from the article?

It's been like 20 months.

techpineapple2• 1 year ago

His LinkedIn shows he worked for Twitter for more than a year before then.

9rx3• 1 year ago

I don’t recall seeing front page headlines every time an employee leaves another company.

I haven't seen it in quite some time either, but it has been more common during previous downturns. Presumably because everyone is trying to find signals that tech is dead to support their preconceived notions.

mcintyre1994• 1 year ago

It's The Verge, they report on senior people at tech companies. They wrote about Meta's head of engineering leaving (https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/8/23160405/meta-head-enginee...) and Apple replacing their head of hardware engineering (https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/25/22249393/apple-senior-vic...).

root_axis8• 1 year ago

This kind of thing gets reported on all the time, there are dozens of similar front page stories on HN over the years. It looks like you just didn't pay attention to those.

Oras• 1 year ago

Thanks to the growing profile of xAI and Musk’s newfound political influence, X’s business appears to be turning around. The company reportedly just obtained a $44 billion valuation from investors — the same price Musk paid for Twitter in 2022.

What? I don’t get it. So almost 3 years and “growing profile” to reach the same valuation? What was the growth for?

flanked-evergl• 1 year ago

Musk severely overpaid for X. The valuation is not the same as the price someone paid for it or would pay for it. Someone could today buy it at twice the valuation, it would be dumb, but they could.

Musk actually wanted to terminate the sale, but the twitter board chair pursued legal action to force the sale[1] at the $44 billion discussed here.

If Bret Taylor did not force Musk to pay that severely inflated price, Donald Trump would likely not be president today. Not all heros wear capes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...

yyyk• 1 year ago

You're assuming it was a business transaction. Of course not. Musk never intended to make a direct profit.

As a political transaction, if anything, Musk paid very little for what he got.

davidham2• 1 year ago

Are you sure? He used it to help get Donald Trump elected, and now Musk has an unassailable position in government and tremendous power to steer government spending to his businesses, and to cripple the agencies that regulate them.

b112• 1 year ago

He over-offered in hindsight. At the time however, no, as mega-low interest rate money was still a thing, and companies such as Twitter had significantly higher valuation as a result.

This is why he wanted to backout. The metrics had changed, by no fault of Twitter or him.

ljm• 1 year ago

I wonder how many of those investors have skin in the game and are sycophantically trying to avoid Musk leaving them holding the bag.

timmg• 1 year ago

What? I don’t get it. So almost 3 years and “growing profile” to reach the same valuation? What was the growth for?

In fairness, that was a frothy time for stocks. Twitter stock price was at an unsustainable price (IMHO) when he bought it.

cma3• 1 year ago

Compare market cap of others in their segment: Meta has grown a lot since then, Snap not so much.

llm_nerd5• 1 year ago

It's worth noting that the widely reported "$44 billion valuation from investors" was Elon Musk himself making someone who co-invested in the original buyout whole again. e.g. Elon Musk is the one who set the valuation.

All of these numbers are fantasy. Similarly Musk has been giving lenders stakes in "xAI" as well to compensate for the eventual failure of their loans, and again that is being reported as X debt losing its discount.

Everything in US equities is absolute farce, especially anything that involves Elon Musk. It's all fantasy numbers.

rvz• 1 year ago

Everything in US equities is absolute farce, especially anything that involves Elon Musk. It's all fantasy numbers.

Exactly. Then you would also agree that the entire startup industry, especially these AI startups are beyond overvalued.

What matters is when it all crashes down to reality.

rchaud• 1 year ago

Yeah and weWork got a "$50 billion" valuation from its bagholders. Then they released their actual books for the S-1, and well long story short, they're circling the toilet as a publicly traded company.

Zigurd• 1 year ago

Evidently, that $44 billion valuation didn't stick long enough for the most recent investment round, in which Elon and some tiny investor group I've never heard of and isn't an actual VC invested $1 billion at a $32 billion valuation.

Considering that was probably all Elon's money, he could've priced the round any way he wanted.

only-one1701• 1 year ago

When I saw this headline I thought it was going to be a blog post about announcements of heads of engineering leaving at a given company X.

I hate that stupid name.

kps• 1 year ago

X? Wake me when Wayland's director of engineering resigns.

ignoramous• 1 year ago

Wayland? Mainline Surface Flinger already.

gmays2• 1 year ago

I've started using X a lot more in the last few months since I built an app that let's you track habits with a tweet called Xtreeks (yeah, I know..).

I enjoy the product, but wish they'd spend more time making the core elements of the product work. For example, aspects of the API just don't work as expected, like for some reason search and mention endpoints do not have support for long form posts (>280 characters) enough though X supports posts with thousands of characters. The result is the API appears to work for some posts and just silently fails for others.

In addition to the API issues, we've struggled with inexplicable labeling/suspension and shadow banning, even on the personal account I've had for over a decade (seemed to be triggered by using my VPN). I understand the desire to control spam, but it seems excessive. Or if you do it excessively, at least provide adequate tools/support to request review.

On my app's X account I paid for both API access ($200/mo) and the Verified Org status ($2,000) and had a hard time getting support that took days to reply, when it did reply at all. And when the person replied they had nothing to do with the account label process, so weren't able to help, which was quite frustrating. It was fine since this was a little side project, but if this was a business at scale and I was paying that much in addition to ad spend I'd be furious.

Anyway, I know nothing about the Head of Eng or what's at the root of these issues, but I'm a big fan of X and hope they're able to fix these things. It's such. valuable tool. I'm even fine if it's pay to play, but if someone is on the higher tiers of your paid plans the support should be available when they need it.

smileybarry• 1 year ago

For example, aspects of the API just don't work as expected, like for some reason search and mention endpoints do not have support for long form posts (>280 characters)

At the risk of sounding blunt, they probably fired the people who actually built the API at Twitter and it's now (internally) in maintenance mode. They very openly don't care about giving other companies data -- even with the new pricey API tiers -- or making the non-app/-website experience good at all. I doubt any of the new item types -- Articles, ordered media in tweets, etc. -- even have an API exposed.

jonkoops• 1 year ago

The API is broken by design, even before Musk took over they slowly crippled it so you would only use official Twitter apps.

avs733• 1 year ago

I enjoy the product, but wish they'd spend more time making the core elements of the product work.

I think it might be worth stepping back and thinking about what the core elements of the product is. Not just with X, but with with all social media.

Personally I've migrated from thinking 'damn this is broken' to 'oh thats a feature not a bug'. I'm embarassed how long this really took me across a lot of platforms, but when I stopped thinking about my needs as driving product design decisions it all was less frustrating (albeit more disturbing).

abxyz• 1 year ago

Why did you choose to build it on top of X? X is no longer Twitter, it's Elon Musk's vehicle for his personal political agenda. Setting aside whether you are aligned with Musk's political views, it seems like a poor decision to align yourself to a platform that is so explicitly not intended to be used the way you're using it. You should take this as a sign to fix your dependency on X. Musk doesn't care about what you're doing, he cares about his political agenda, he will happily destroy what you're doing if it were to benefit him.

pc863• 1 year ago

The GP doesn't have a product that happens to have a dependency on X. They have a product that is by definition intertwined with X.

"Do it somewhere else" is just as bad a piece of advice as you would think "integrate with X" is.

haswell• 1 year ago

I'm a big fan of X and hope they're able to fix these things. It's such. valuable tool.

Genuine question: what value are people finding on X these days? I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but I gave up on the site due to the rampant toxicity awhile ago. Are people just highly curating their feeds?

It started to feel like going to a trash dump with the intention of finding things that aren’t trash. Perhaps possible, but extremely smelly and occasionally the cause of a bed bug infestation.

throw0101c2• 1 year ago

Genuine question: what value are people finding on X these days? I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but I gave up on the site due to the rampant toxicity awhile ago. Are people just highly curating their feeds?

There are still a few Nitter instances running, so I use a web browser to check up on a few individuals (journalists, economists) sporadically.

(I don't have any apps from The Socials installed on my phone (and never have): always web-based lurking.)

tpm3• 1 year ago

what value are people finding on X these days?

I find value in:

1. Good ML accounts that allow me to stay up to date. Didn't find such concentration of them anywhere else, even after some have left. This is what mostly keeps me there.

2. Current info about the russian aggression from a few trusted accounts, mostly in ukrainian. Again, as I don't want to use Telegram, it's hard to find those in other places, though some good ones are also on Mastodon and Bsky.

gmays2• 1 year ago

For context in response to the questions about "Why build on X?"

I've be working to relearn math and there happens to be a large group of others also doing the same with Math Academy and sharing daily updates on X.

I found this inspiring (especially as the lessons got harder) so I tweeting my updates too. But I also wanted a way to independently track my progress across math and other areas to see progress over time, even if I changed tools or stopped tweeting.

So that's the reason I built app on X: So my tweets get logged in a GitHub-like habit graph to show progress over time. It just pulled my bio/profile from X (login with X) and tracks my habit tweets. It's super simple, but meets my needs perfectly. My habit page: https://xtreeks.com/gabemays

I understand the questions around the long-term stability of the API, but I'm optimistic.

Nckpz• 1 year ago

Given what Elon has said about valuing people who work long hours and have an "extremely hardcore" work ethic, I can't imagine it's healthy to stay for too long.

FirmwareBurner• 1 year ago

All big-tech CEOs would value people working long hours even if they wouldn't say that publicly. Elon is the only one saying the quiet part out loud that every big-tech CEO was thinking but never saying to avoid backlash.

In a way, I value Elon more than the rest, since he has no filters, what you see is what you get, unlike the rest who are walking PR machines, saying one thing while meaning and doing another. The devil you know is better than the ones you don't.

tw04• 1 year ago

So when he promises fully autonomous driving is going to happen this year, you believe him?

krige• 1 year ago

But Elon lies too, and frequently. Worse still, at least some his lies seem to be motivated by a childish need to score brownie points and/or worship from random internet users. His continuing claims of being a "top player" in online games spring to mind.

altacc2• 1 year ago

Social media and tech news is full of CEOs praising long hours, start up culture, hustle culture, putting success first or whatever euphemism they prefer. Musk is just on the extreme and in the public eye a lot.

He's in the public eye because PR is one of his primary skills. He constantly says one thing and does another, just that his following is such that people believe him and do significant internal justifications and contradictions to do so. Musk leads the marketing hype of his companies, which consistently promise one thing and deliver another. He's doing the same with DOGE. Tesla FSD is not going to be delivered in 2017. Mars is not going to be colonized by 2050. Elon Musk lies, a lot, and a large number of people's identities involve celebrating each of those lies.

damnitbuilds6• 1 year ago

I think there is a decent person inside Musk, I just hope his brother helps him find it.

feoren2• 1 year ago

"no filters", "what you see is what you get", "tells it like it is" has been said about a lot of pathological liars. I don't really get it. People said the same thing about Trump. There seems to be this thought that people who are saying extreme things must be telling the truth, and the rest of us are merely thinking extreme things but we filter it out. No, I am not thinking those things. I do not to apply some social filter to prevent myself from doing Nazi salutes. The reason I don't do Nazi salutes is that I have no desire to be a Nazi. He's genuinely just a liar and an awful human being.

I'd much rather live in a world where the fascist lying sociopaths are under societal pressure to hide their true selves, rather than the one where they can openly do Nazi salutes and threaten to jail their political opponents. Give me the walking PR machine any day.

vonneumannstan3• 1 year ago

Its going to be funny to see the cognitive backlash when it comes out that Elon has a serious ketamine addiction and has essentially been a drug addled raving lunatic for the past half decade.

happytoexplain• 1 year ago

I know decent people with no filter. But in the past decade, increasingly, phrases like "has no filter", "doesn't sugar coat things", "calls it like he sees it", etc, have come to be used simply as attempts to positively portray obnoxious, tribalistic, anti-social, antagonistic, mocking, disrespectful, superior, or petty behaviors (behaviors which, not coincidentally, are also up over that time period, especially in leadership).

Also, your premise is flawed. CEOs get a lot of justifiable hate, and yes, many surely wish for employees devoted to the business, rather than proportionally devoted to each aspect of their life. However, there are also plenty of CEOs who genuinely don't want employees to work overtime. And Musk's attitude is arrogant/authoritarian even by the standards of less reasonable CEOs.

dathinab3• 1 year ago

fun fact

did you know that in EU way back in imperial times some of the worker protection rules where not introduced by angry workers by companies which realized that having well rested and healthy worker will long term produce much better results and then countries following up by enforcing it to boost their countries productivity (and internal stability)?

(and yes I _very_ grossly oversimplified it including lumping all EU countries together even through they had very different inner political histories)

The reason I'm pointing it out is because recently some people seem to be forgetting that at the core a lot of work protection isn't rooted in "being social/nice to your citizens" but in "having a more internal stable and international competitive" country.

damnitbuilds6• 1 year ago

And the European equivalents of Tesla and Spacex's sucesses are where exactly?

Paypal? X even?

I am totally not hardcore, I value my free time, but driving the staff like this seems to have worked very well for Musk's companies.

toomuchtodo6• 1 year ago

Healthy, happy, rested workers are more productive, full stop. Folks who force the grind are eating seed corn but don't care, they'll be gone by the time it matters.

kolanos• 1 year ago

Here is an excellent video on the history of work. In short, the Dutch screwed it up for all of us. [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvk_XylEmLo

Clubber2• 1 year ago

Henry Ford was largely responsible for the popularization of the 40 hour work week and paid his factory employees nearly double of what they would ordinarily get.

1926: Henry Ford popularized the 40-hour work week after he discovered through his research that working more yielded only a small increase in productivity that lasted a short period of time. Ford announced he would pay each worker $5 per eight-hour day, which was nearly double what the average auto worker was making that time. Manufacturers and companies soon followed Henry Ford’s lead after seeing how this new policy boosted productivity and fostered loyalty and pride among Ford’s employees.

Of course, this is a rarity. Most employee concessions in the US were earned with blood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre

feoren2• 1 year ago

having well rested and healthy worker will long term produce much better results

You said the two words which will ensure this never happens in the US: "long term". Most companies have zero decision-makers who care about the "long term". They are not the company's stewards, they are its parasites. Despite popular belief, most American corporations are not ruthless money-making machines, they are festering husks being ruthlessly parasitized by sociopaths while they slowly sink to the bottom of the ocean.

dekhn• 1 year ago

Ernst Abbe at Zeiss played a big role in this- helping to introduce an 8-hour work day along with employer co-ownership.

dominicq• 1 year ago

An idea I had (not sure if correct) is that many people have a similar amount of "work ethic", but distribute it differently. So, for example, person A can invest nearly 100% into their job and will be perceived to be "extremely hardcore", while person B might have the exact same absolute amount, but only allocate a fraction to their job, distributing the rest to other activities. This person will be "normal". Most people should limit the allocation to their job because they have very limited upside. Most entrepreneurs should allocate much more than employees because of less limited upside.

I feel like many bosses want people to allocate more to a job, but don't offer the corresponding upside.

osigurdson5• 1 year ago

I think there are some companies / missions / bosses, who can clearly identify goals and a concrete strategy to achieve them. This, plus some equity, can really help set people's incentives in the right direction such that people want to put in more time and effort.

On the other hand, a lot of companies don't offer either and seem to believe that simply rallying the masses to put in 20% more time (on average) will somehow lead to outsized gains.

reverendsteveii4• 1 year ago

I feel like many bosses want people to allocate more to a job, but don't offer the corresponding upside.

I agree, and I think that if you look back at the early dot com startups that did things like food, recreation, laundry and even housing right on-campus you'll see a culture that tried to actually meet that need in a way that doesn't seem unfair. The idea was "you give us everything you've got at work and everything else will just take care of itself". Then, as inevitable as death, came the investor class demanding more for less and eliminating the benefits with the hope that the sigma grindset would just perpetuate itself anyway.

tartoran• 1 year ago

Yes, they want you to give all you've got and neglect all other aspects of your life. Young people are very good candidates to fall into this trap. Once they burn through those precious years working for somebody else and get none of the upsides they get it too. But there are always new young people ready to "change" the world.

otikik2• 1 year ago

I had a boss like that.

One time he told me "In a bacon and eggs dish, the hen contributes but the pig really gets involved. I want all my team to be pigs".

I internally thought "yeah, but you are neither the hen or the pig, you are the guy eating the dish". I left as soon as I could.

osigurdson5• 1 year ago

Agree. He isn't very hardcore as he isn't working 16 hours a day at my company for $10 per hour.

ctkhn• 1 year ago

This is what unions are all about - most people should limit the allocation to their job, but a lot of employers (not just Musk) want employees to work "like owners" without providing real ownership of the equity upside of the company they work for. Even most equity packages do not provide upside on a remotely similar scale (you might make 500k extra) compared to what the founders, execs, and VCs will make on your labor. I'm not sure that HN is going to be very Marx-friendly but Capital Vol 1 gets into this if you can hang through all the blathering about coats and fabric.

pc863• 1 year ago

This is true in the sense that everyone has the same number of hours in the day, and someone who is 25 and single and lives in a studio apartment 3 blocks from the office will by definition be able to spend more time working than someone who lives 90 minutes from the office in the suburbs and has 4 school-aged kids.

But there are absolutely different levels of work ethic and stamina between people. And I'm not even talking about willingness which obviously varies, but some people can work for 12 hours straight and some people are just physically incapable of doing it.

ferguess_k4• 1 year ago

I think the biggest problem is, 99% of the jobs out there is boring and meaningless, regardless of level and pay. I don't know about other people, but I can't really be "hardcore" unless I really believe in the work.

damnitbuilds6• 1 year ago

Even if I was programming Starship's flight computers, I would miss my family too much to work more than 40 hours per week.

Regardless of really believing in their work, people want to have time with their loved ones.

thih9• 1 year ago

Tongue in cheek, Elon said that he intends to move to Mars, perhaps we shouldn't expect that he'd care about Earth's QOL.

On a more serious note, I see this as a net negative, both for employees and the company.

FireBeyond4• 1 year ago

Oh, I totally believe that that is his perspective. And he's entitled to that.

The bigger issue for me is that he's making decisions, ignoring (and now "canceling") regulators who prevent or minimize the impact of decisions he makes along that line to protect our QOL. Because Musk sure as hell isn't bringing along anything up to 8 billion of us with him.

lenerdenator• 1 year ago

You'd think that the director of engineering would receive enough of the pie (read: equity) to make them consider staying.

I guess it either isn't enough of a slice, or the slice wasn't going to be valuable enough to deal with Elon, which is really saying something.

aurelien• 1 year ago

Well .... The point is that working for Elon meen that you are not one of the best, but a fanatic.

Same for all Elon stuff ... Poor Elon

Last year I would have been be proud to works for SpaceX, today I will not accept an offered Tesla -_-'

skc• 1 year ago

Haven't used X in a long while. But from what I hear it's pretty stable again. So job done for this guy. Off to new challenges.

Not much of a story to be honest.

X’s director of engineering, Haofei Wang, has left the company

Related Stories