[digitalnirvana]

Originally Posted by BrokenHW

Elon Musk has got no chill

Attachment 2375075

I've got friends in Twitter who are extremely sharp and capable engineers. But more than that, they're normal people with bills to pay and problems to handle.

How to kill a business at 10x speedrun. Firing people with 0 day notice.

[poloman]

Twitter employees sleep on office floor to hit tight deadlines set by Elon Musk.
https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/tr...k-9439471.html
Another example of how quickly tides turn in IT industry. We were discussing Moonlighting, permanent WFH, soliciting multiple job offers during notice period, ghosting on joining date by job seekers, etc.. just a few days back.

[fnftech]

It was a very well planned & calculated move by Mr Musk to acquire Twitter
first he was not sure if his takeover offer would ever be accepted hence decided to overpay & sensationalize the deal, once the twitter management got floored & had no option but to accept it, he then started to take calculated risks & got down to doing business, mind you he is just bringing $13B debt in his twitter but here is the guy who is the worlds richest & driving Tesla & SpaceX the flagbearer companies of technological advances, i am quite sure with all the multiple resources he has available for himself its only matter of next couple of years that he will make his acquisition look totally justified & lucrative.

[download2live]

Twitter never made profit. It was weaponised to serve political needs. I suspect it is not Elon but others who are bankrolling/supporting this farce getting played out. Twitter has become a problem for these shadow players and they want to make an example out of it for others such platforms.
The message is "You will be taken over and publicly shredded apart".

[volkman10]

Twitter temporarily closes offices as layoffs begin. Chaos, confusion reign ahead of Twitter layoffs.

Staff to hear by 1600 GMT whether they are being laid off
Musk looking to cut around half workforce - internal plans
Employees file class action lawsuit against Twitter

Link

[volkman10]

Impact on Indian employees, the number of employees affected are yet to be revealed.

No clarity yet on severance package to employees laid off in India

[volkman10]

Twitter had more than 200 employees in India; large majority laid off across all functions.

Significant cuts across the engineering team, was the largest team in India.

Link

[AZT]

Originally Posted by volkman10

Twitter had more than 200 employees in India; large majority laid off across all functions.

Significant cuts across the engineering team, was the largest team in India.

Link

This is a cost cutting exercise and I’m guessing the engineering team would have been the highest paid. Probably the only time anyone won’t want to be top of the list money wise.

[digitalnirvana]

Originally Posted by DigitalOne

I haven't been able to logon to Twitter since morning.

Internal sabotage??



Source

Apparently if people lose access to code and their laptops, stuff can break. Who knew?!

[volkman10]

Twitter has seen a ‘massive drop in revenue’ as more brands pause ads.

Volkswagen Group confirmed that they are pausing advertising on Twitter in the wake of Musk’s acquisition of the social media company, in the clearest sign yet of growing advertiser uncertainty about the future of the platform under new ownership.

In a separate statement, Volkswagen Group, which owns Audi, Porsche and Bentley, confirmed it had recommended its brands “pause their paid activities on the platform until further notice.”

Soon after GM left the platform, Morning Brew reported that advertising giant Interpublic Group (IPG) was recommending to its clients to temporarily pause advertising spending on Twitter. IPG is one of the “Big Four” agency companies, alongside WPP, Publicis, and Omnicom, and manages the public relations of Coca-Cola, American Express, Johnson & Johnson, Nintendo, and others.

Link

[dailydriver]

Originally Posted by volkman10

Twitter had more than 200 employees in India; large majority laid off across all functions.

Not all of them are going home sad faced!



Related Tweet/Thread

[mayukh42]

Originally Posted by digitalnirvana

Apparently if people lose access to code and their laptops, stuff can break. Who knew?!

That is usually not the case with distributed platforms, which I think something as scalable as Twitter definitely is. Automated systems are in place, and supposed to work even if there are almost no employees looking at it, which already happens in weekends or Christmas. If a production server or node goes rogue, automatic fault tolerance would restart a new server with same code and terminate the older one.

Further, even if no one could look from India, there are other employees across the world who can take over. The only things that won't happen are any new features going live.

What I think is that it was deliberately taken off air for some time to prevent any risk of internal sabotage.

[digitalnirvana]

Originally Posted by mayukh42

That is usually not the case with distributed platforms, which I think something as scalable as Twitter definitely is.

My post was partly in jest and partly serious. Even if its at Spotify levels of robustness across the system, removing access to your employees on a Live application is... Interesting.

And scalability? Did you not read the target to reduce costs by 1 billion USD by cutting precisely that infra? Bigger and better run companies with way more resources, read Snap and Meta, still struggle to scale all the time.

[Jeroen]

Originally Posted by AZT

This is a cost cutting exercise and I’m guessing the engineering team would have been the highest paid. Probably the only time anyone won’t want to be top of the list money wise.

Sure it will cost. But I also think Musk is not impressed by the current Twitter engineering capabilities at all. It has been long suspected that Twitters platform were far from state of the art. Be it in terms of functionality, efficiency and or security. All a bit dated and scaled up from a wrong model to start with.

Musk is a CEO who knows more about advanced software development and coding than many hardcore engineers. I don’t like the guy at all, having met him twice, but there is no denying he has a knack of making impossible things work from an engineering point of view. However, more so than his other ventures, Twitter is all about the public domain, local laws, regulations and endless politics. Why would Musk be the saviour of free speech? Because he owns Twitter?

It is a sad day when so called free speech is hijacked by commercial technical folks. There is a lot of folks having some serious doubts about whether Musk can turn this into a succes. Problem is, as I see it, what the hell is the definition of succes in this case? Twitter making money? Twitter being better moderated? That in itself is almost impossible. Hate speech to one person is the next person free speech right. To this day I am still in two minds about Twitter banning Trump. I don’t have the answer, but why should Musk or anybody else, have the answer that would be acceptable to a large majority of people? At the end of the day, this is not so much about technology, but about politics, building bridges between groups of different opinions, total transparency and the ability to please many masters. Not something Musk has proven himself to be any good at.

Musk has proven time and time again to be a bit of a loose cannon, certainly briljant in certain areas, but totally lacking empathy and what most of us (I hope!) would think of fair and balanced, judgment and proportional action. This is a guy who has no personal life to speak of, several failed marriage etc. He has no idea on what ticks most people. We can’t have a world full of mini-me-Musks that work day and night, sleep at the office. If they do at all. Musk for all his brilliance also exhibits a fair amount of dictatorial behaviour. Which he justifies as being needed for the business.

I don’t hold people with so called high business acumen in high regards at all. Because it is relatively easy, if you just skip all the really difficult things in life. Like being a good husband/partner/friend/colleague. Really caring about your employees. Do you want to be remembered for your business acumen or for what kind of person you were?

The way he is handling the sacking of the regular employees of Twitter is identical to your typical entrepreneur approach to a new product launch. Do it quick, don’t worry about the legal side of things, let alone the moral side. When you get pushback you might need to adjust a bit. Some might see that as the true entrepreneurial spirit. Doing things, launching stuff before it is fully thought through. Fixing it on the fly. That might work for a new release on your Tesla or your iPhone. But this touches peoples personal lives in a huge way and Musk could not care, justifies it by stating difficult decisions need to made to secure the future. Personally, I think that is just the easy way out. The guy claiming to care about humanity, bringing humanity to a more and better level, can’t even bother to treat his staff properly. It’s utterly pathetic and completely immoral.

When Musk finally kicks the bucket, as we all do, he is likely to be remembered as a great innovator, entrepreneur, risk taker and so. But how many people will honestly miss him? I have learned a long time ago, those sort of people are rarely missed, a new one will step up. But people who you can relate to on a much broader range of topics, are empathetic, help individuals with no self interest, and are just interesting, pleasant outside their business arena of competence are far more important to the world long time.

Yes Musk, has given certain technologies a giant push, all credits to him. But has he made the world a better place? Just for those who are close to him? I doubt it very much. That is why I think it is a bad idea to have people such as Musk involved, let alone be the owner and be responsible for such a delicate platform as Twitter.

Jeroen

[extreme_torque]

Originally Posted by Jeroen

Yes Musk, has given certain technologies a giant push, all credits to him. But has he made the world a better place? Just for those who are close to him? I doubt it very much. That is why I think it is a bad idea to have people such as Musk involved, let alone be the owner and be responsible for such a delicate platform as Twitter.
Jeroen

I fundamentally disagree with this - he disrupted three of the biggest lobbies (car manufacturing, space and petroleum) and basically won. The world is indeed better place because of it - there is starlink which is democratising high speed internet access across the world, there is Tesla which is leading the charge towards sustainable energy and has already done more for the environment than perhaps any single company on the planet (and he open sourced most Tesla patents) and SpaceX which is democratising space and much more. These technologies did not exist earlier (electric cars werent commonplace or good, rockets were not reusable i.e. did not land vertically, satellite internet was not cheap). If it was easily done as you propose, why the incumbents in each of those fields with much more experience havent even caught up yet? Boeing? Blue Origin? Incumbent car makers?

Twitter is not special, it not anymore special than facebook and I did not know when it transitioned from being a technology company to a bunch of activist with a single minded agenda because I frankly I never used it much. It does not have the reach of other social media platforms either. What it was, was an exclusive safe space for people from a certain political ideology in the US and the rest of the West while at the same time it was a cesspool of communal filth in India. I for one am looking forward how it pans out under Elon Musk.

P.S. Its ironical that VW is taking a moral stance and rethinking their advertising on Twitter, especially after their diesel fiasco. To me that is more egregious than anything Elon Musk has ever done and yet, Elon is the devil.