[dragonfire]

Originally Posted by poloman

With due respect, nothing is going to happen to Twitter. He overpaid for sure. It is almost a month now that he has taken over Twitter. Is there a exodus from platform? Is it down for extended periods? Has the active users decreased?

Exactly. People who are whining are whining on Twitter. And that says a lot. After all the whining dies down things will be back to what it used to be. Musk is not going to change the world, nor is Twitter going down.

Can some one from SW background throw light on why a social media company needs thousands of people in the technical roles

These companies start off as startups, get VC funding and then burn it away by hiring people like crazy. It takes effort to build a platform and then to maintain it. Often maintenance isn't going to be that difficult. But these people somehow find ways to keep doing what they were doing - in the form of feature additions, related services and stuff like that. It's a scam, honestly.

[binand]

Originally Posted by poloman

It is almost a month now that he has taken over Twitter. Is there a exodus from platform? Is it down for extended periods?

This thread lists out some scenarios (best, realistic & worst):

https://mobile.twitter.com/GergelyOr...20607672549376

And this one hints at some real non-tech issues Twitter will likely face in the near-term:

https://mobile.twitter.com/HaysKali/...25305464541186

[mayukh42]

Originally Posted by poloman

why a social media company needs thousands of people in the technical roles (not talking about content moderation)? Twitter had close to 8000 employees, Meta 75K Google 130K. What the end customers see is an app or a website, which is same for years. What all these guys do on a day to day basis?

The Big Tech are not just building products that "consumers" see on the website. They also build platforms that other product/ service companies use. E.g. AWS or GCP. GMail, e.g., has several APIs and libraries that others can use to build solutions on top of it, the simplest might be metrics. Same thing holds for others. AWS is a whole planet in itself.

They invest in programming languages/ frameworks/ design patterns, like Golang by Google and React by Facebook, or the microservices-first pattern by Netflix. The above APIs of GMail also need to be provided in multiple languages to capture the market.

It is a huge ecosystem, so they actually need thousands of employees. Twitter too, needs to develop certain access points to their tweet stream etc. which can be used for different Machine Learning solutions like sentiment analysis. I remember about 10% of their stream could be accessed for free with a developer account.

Another thing with these companies is that they often build every framework in-house, instead of using a readymade framework whose IP rights may be owned by a competitor. So they often reinvent the wheel for long term usage but free from loyalties.

Originally Posted by dragonfire

these people somehow find ways to keep doing what they were doing - in the form of feature additions, related services and stuff like that. It's a scam, honestly.

It is not usually the case at least in this ecosystem. Gone are those days of legacy frameworks from IBM/ Oracle which only a few people know in the company so they invent unnecessary stuff to stay employed. These days visibility is much higher, and organisations are flatter. Sooner or later, redundancy catches up.

[Comrade]

Musk has been this way all along (especially with TSLA workforce) and he has always been very public about it. I guess Twitter's pre-Musk work culture is not similar, and therefore these employees are bound to leave. That does not mean there is dearth of talent in the Bay Area, and I know Musk offers handsome packages to his employees. There will be people who will see an opportunity of moving up the pay ladder, and will slog the long hours that Musk needs. At the end of the day, I think TWTR will survive.

[prajwalmr62]

Originally Posted by poloman

Can some one from SW background throw light on why a social media company needs thousands of people in the technical roles (not talking about content moderation)? Twitter had close to 8000 employees, Meta 75K Google 130K. What the end customers see is an app or a website, which is same for years. What all these guys do on a day to day basis?

You see just one app, on one platform you use, something like iOS. But millions of people use millions of devices and the expectation is that the app should behave as expected irrespective of user or device.

Also, there are hundred different portals & systems developed internally, to ensure operations like monitoring, data analytics, security, ads platform, payment systems, etc. To do that, you'll need engineers, testers, and to co-ordinate everything, managers. It is not a simple affair.

Still, the most expensive part is not the app you have installed, but the one that is running behind these apps. Each app requests data from multiple services, which all needs its own development team. For example, something as simple as Uber, they have somewhere around 20k micro services. Maintaining these while also keeping a sharp focus on security is definitely a hassle, and the team can grow overnight as the app scope increases.

You will need not just people who create these features and apps, but also people who enable them to do so. IT team, SecOps, DevOps, etc. 8k might be on the higher side, but definitely not an unbelievable headcount.

Originally Posted by dragonfire

It takes effort to build a platform and then to maintain it. Often maintenance isn't going to be that difficult. But these people somehow find ways to keep doing what they were doing - in the form of feature additions, related services and stuff like that. It's a scam, honestly.

You are contradicting yourself. Apart from that, from my personal experience, I would say building an app is 10% of the actual effort and maintenance is the one which poses real challenge. The entire system keeps getting redesigned and re-developed for most performance and user experience. Not to mention security and efforts that goes into ensuring systems to not have any open exploits.

Some startups start with the same thought of yours and then end-up becoming dumpster fire caused by spaghetti code.

[jaysheth]

Originally Posted by poloman

With due respect, nothing is going to happen to Twitter. He overpaid for sure. It is almost a month now that he has taken over Twitter. Is there a exodus from platform? Is it down for extended periods? Has the active users decreased? I see a brighter future for Twitter than say a Meta. Any one uses FB now a days? But Twitter has a loyal following among the people in power and high places.
These guys can easily pay 8USD for the media/public attention they get for their tweets. We should not forget LinkedIn premium cost $29 a month and no one question that.

This is a clash of work cultures and ideologies which will settle down once Musk pushes his associates in to key roles.

With due respect, this is a storm and not meant to settle down. Things are falling apart already. Exodus? Near future would reveal. Just one example here.

Paying 8 USD was never a big problem. Scamsters paying 8 USD to get the blue tick to act as genuine folks/brands has made all genuine folks and companies (genuinely) shaken up!

Most of us can only watch this "drama" being unfolded as third persons, but one does feel bad for twitter employees who are having to steer their way through so much chaos. Why would any sane person (esp. a twitter developer) choose to continue to work for someone like this gentleman, who himself is lost and clueless, except those who badly need to retain their jobs?

[harshaguduru]

Gossip and Facts from an Insiders perspective:

At the outset let me be honest that I did not want to share this today and rather wait for a few days to verify the authenticity. However, my urge to share on T-Bhp has gotten the better of me and hopefully can add more to this as the events unfold.

The source is related to one of the investors who were approached to form the consortium of buyers about 6 months ago and I can not share if they went ahead or not. I also can't confirm the authenticity of this because of the amount of fluff and rumour out there and would advise everyone reading this to treat this as conjecture pending an official statement

Prologue:
Why the sudden interest in Twitter. Apparently, Elon Musk has been looking for a media outlet for some time. In his words having a clear functional media channel is essential to further his endeavour to enhance humanity along with reducing carbon footprint and making humanity a space travelling entity.
Twitter was the best in his mind because unlike insta/tiktok etc twitter enables discussions and the format is suited more for conversations compared to video and image-based systems where the comment sections exist not for discourse but for remarks.

His plan for this started with acquiring x.com a few years ago but with the challenges at his other ventures related to starship/cybertruck there was no time.
Why 2022: 2 reasons: 1 time availability with starship ready for orbital launch and cybertruck ready for production his inputs are no longer engineering intensive and he is at core a product guy. Boring and Neuralink will need 2-3 years more for the tech to reach a point where he would love to spend all his time in the office.

2- Twitter was 1-2 years from death and a move had to be made.( more on this later)

Why not a new platform: for a few billion it should be easy to build right?
Short answer not really. A lot of work was done to evaluate that and 3 factors made it unviable:
1- The tech would be easy enough as would the 1st 50-75 million accounts but growing it up after that would be extremely difficult and time-consuming
2 - The cost of building in terms of the amount of his time consumed was estimated significantly higher as he has 2-3 more moonshot ideas which he plans to roll out in the next 8-10 years.
3 - This break from tesla and spacex won't last more than 2 years because of the low-cost ev and the mars project


Did he overpay:
Short answer - probably but he apparently sees money as a means to an end and is not too bothered. For him the ability to get going ASAP was worth it.


Switching over to TWITTER Saga.
Twiiter has been in deep trouble for a few years. Even the founder has been disconnected and hence kept exiting the business on and off
To summarise what my contact said in desi speak - Twitter is a lala company masquerading as a liberal and modern organization.
There is a set of 20-30 people who rule with fear and a lot of their policies etc are dependent on them. Opposing them is a surefire way to get sacked or ridiculed. The culture was a disaster and slowly chamchagiri started coming in especially in the senior hires in the last few years.
The work culture was praised as there was no accountability and unlimited paid time off. Both these led to overstaffing by 5times the required strength basically to cover up the lethargy in the system. Product has been nil to negative.
If it wasn't for covid twitter would have died in 2020 because funds were depleted and as a public limited company with a tanking share value funds were tough to get by. all this info is online. As of March 2020 Twitter was around half the share value as it was in 2013.
Covid changed the game as for the first time twitter became profitable driven by a massive spike in advertising revenues during various lockdowns and marketing budgets were diverted from offline to digital.
Despite the inherent lethargy in the system there was money, however unlike Meta or Tiktok they didn't make enough to have a war chest for future.
Come 2022 money started drying upa s twitter is not a engaging platform for call to action and more of branding spend.
As it stood before the Musk interest twitter would have been saddled with debt by now mostly driven by the fact that the cost of revenue at twitter is 2x-3x of what similar companies spend.

Come on a multibillion dollar company cant be so poorly managed can it?
Shocking yes. The board of directors at twitter had almost zero skin in the game. If you remove the founder's shares the rest of the board had less than 1% of total equity. they were well compensated and most were never investors in the company and picked up shares at good discounts as part of their privileges. Most of them are millionaires many times over and a few lakh dollars being wiped off at twitter did not matter. They were as detached and lazy as possible and thus the inner circle of vultures grew in wealth and influence. Slowly bad things started happening. Covering up serious issues to support friendly politicians, shadow banning not driven by tech or keywords but by prejudices etc.

IF Elon wanted twitter so bad why the drama of interest refusing to buy and delaying the process by months?

Herein lies the meat of the story. Apparently, the buyout clause included certain contingencies which tied Elon's hand behind his back. The spam accounts were always 20-25% of total and this was fact he supposedly knew while making the offer. However he needed time to make a plan and figure out what changes need to be done. The whole 75% staff need to go etc was not an off the cuff remark but after 3-4 monthsof deep research and planning

The acquisition and its aftermath:

step 1 : No one apparently knows server tech like tesla AI does. Their dojo platform makes most of the data farms look prehistoric. (actual quote by someone who worked there as told to my contact)
So day 1 was tesla core tech team studying the capability of of automating the systems.
then the insane list of changes needed verifications/edits/etc etc all to understand who is actually coding and who is not.

Based on this Musk has been having 1-1 with the real talent and trying to retain them.
1st round of layoff were for those who were redundant and did not have much equity to be vested so pay them 3 months and by now he has a clear idea of how systems ran so removed everyone and locked them out of the systems so that no sabotage can happen (bit more on that later) Twitter ran fine no hiccups with server issues etc after that as we all have witnessed. which further reinforced the overstaffing issues.

The present second round of resignations is more interesting. Quite of few of these are troublemakers apparently and Musk is no mood to watch someone trying to destroy and sabotage get out with 3 months pay and vest their shares and hence the sign up for hardcore or resign email.
Sabotage Saga:
It is truly shocking on how lax the controls are at twitter and the extraordinary levels of access a few employees have. Supposedly despite all the safeguards there are so many backdoors that the fear of data destruction and sabotage is real and it has been happening which is the reason the office lockout now. Supposedly a lot more anti theft/hacking works are going on for next few days.

The purpose of the excitement in work last couple of weeks was a lead up to this to ensure that twitter continues to work (maybe with minor delays etc) while this cleanup goes

All the employees in the hit list if resigned are being accepted at face-value and those who are critical and resigned are being spoken to 1-1 to retain.


However as planned as this was, quite few unexpected issues were thrown up:

1- The mass layoff. this was not planned for 1 or 2 weeks later but once news that Meta/Amazon/Robinhood would layoff 20000-25000 people in the second week was Elon had to do it first so that they had slightly better chances to finding jobs and more importantly avoid any serious issues like suicide attempts etc.
Twitter also has a bad name in the tech industry as barring the core architects / engineering guys rest of the talent is overpriced and not up to the standards at other companies due to weak design/product shipping skill sets hence employability was a concern. neither could they delay this because the primary driver was to remove access to the software.

2 - The extent of the inner circle impacting morale. the inner circle has been circulating rumours/ distractions non stop and this has led to quite a few good resources resigning. Elon Musk and personally met a few of them to convince to retain and has gotten representatives from diverty teams at his other other companies to dispel rumors being spread about his character.
He also had to insist on the resignation of 2-3 of his favourite employees at twitter in order to appease a set of 40 people who gave a ultimatum of them or us.

3 - The flawed blue tick plan. The blue tick at 8$ was never meant to be launched so soon. but when the sabotage issues came up he prematurely had to launch it to understand exactly who were the people who were capable of getting it done and which employees actually write code. That single product was designed a test to identify who would be retained . What wasn't expected the public backlash and the misuse of verified accounts to impact a few organizations share values.

The public backlash was expected and Elon likes controversy and this is been driving the avg time spent on twitter not just average users a day to record levels. They have beaten intra covid twitter minutes per user per day metric within 2 weeks

4 - The advertiser boycott. this was expected but not to this extent. they are worried if this is temporary and will comeback once twitters bot accounts and lowered and usage continues to be high or will be a political statement



Regarding people practices. Elon employs close 150k people across the world and still has no unionization despite unions pushing pressure. its hard work and he expects nothing less than excellence but takes good care of his people as seen in tenures of various employees. its either with him and his vision or without and there is no midway. issues keep happening due to various reasons but by and far as one of largest employers in the USA he has few critics among his staff. HE however gets very angry at those who criticize and work against the organization and apparently has a one strike policy on a few matters and acts on it. That maybe a dictaorial approach but he tends not to listen to anyone on that if the employee under fire is a non critical resource. Critical resources are generally given a lot of leeway but if troubemakers are always planned for a backup.


funnily enough- a large of the troublemakers at twitter were outed in a group chat app where elon was accidentally added and he figured out the extent of sabotage then.



I repeat all of this maybe conjecture and I am not going to defend or counter this. This was told to me and I am sharing here.

[rrsteer]

My knowledge of business and corporate affairs is extremely poor compared to some of the senior members who have posted on this thread. Secondly, i have little or no interest in social media ( t- bhp is not Social media for me). But one rule that has served me well more often than not - both generally and in stock investing is to act or think contrary to opinion generators in popular media. Currently in that world wind is blowing against Elon Musk. So i am led to believe Elon Musk could be doing something right.
Also one thought, what if he turns around twitter and then operates with a fraction of the tech workforce compared to industry standard in general, what would it mean for the industry in general?

[binand]

Originally Posted by rrsteer

what if he turns around twitter and then operates with a fraction of the tech workforce compared to industry standard in general, what would it mean for the industry in general?

This is easy to answer. CEOs worldwide will look at their workforce carefully, thinking all the time whether they wouldn't be able to get along with 10% of their staff just as well. Many will do it too. It could lead to a bloodbath in tech economy locations like San Francisco, Bangalore, Singapore, London...

[dragracer567]

For those defending Musk’s actions because Twitter is just a ice cream/toy that he can destroy if it pleases him, a business is not someone’s plaything, certainly not one with thousands of workers and is used by celebrities and governments worldwide.

For those saying Twitter was too bloated, no company can operate with 50% of its staff Thanosed (yes, I made that word up) overnight. No company is THAT bloated unless we are talking about PSUs. They can’t just replace staff who are quitting in droves because of Musk’s ultimatum either - tech companies like Twitter will have systems and sub-systems that are unique to Twitter, the skills for which are unique and will have to be taught to new employees however capable they are. When half of your employees are fired and more leave due to company policies, there’s no one left to even mentor them.

I know Musk fans likes to think this is part of some elaborate plan, to be honest, this feels like something out of an episode of Southpark or The Family Guy (weird The Simpsons haven’t predicted this though).

[McLaren Rulez]

Never watched The Fast and the Furious? Now you can, over 52 tweets

https://twitter.com/anally_retended/...06850762637313

[volkman10]

Scripted or not?

Elon Musk starts Twitter poll on whether to bring back Trump.

with early results showing roughly 60% voting yes.

Link

[JithinR]

It seems we have people that have access to that special type of dope that everyone on social media keeps talking about.

People writing half page essays (seems like a WhatsApp/Telegram forward considering the grammar seems to be even more atrocious than mine) with insights into the minds of the top executives at Twitter but somehow fail to notice that their messiah himself offered 3 months' severance for employees who didn't hit Yes on his Twitter 2.0 mail (the damn thing is in public view for petes sake).

Also, these Whatsapp gurus don't seem to know about Sandbox/QA/UAT environments.

Do they really expect that developers from a tech giant in SM simply decide push out unfinished code into the production environment?

Isn't it more likely that a particular megalomaniac gave them a set of requirements without thinking it through, got his behind handed to him by multiple billion-dollar corporations and then promptly decided to roll back all the updates?

Imagine if Eli Lilly got to know that billions of dollars were wiped off their market valuation simply because this guy wanted to weed out poor developers.

Now there is news coming out that entire departments are gutted (including ones that ensure tax compliance in the USA - even Joker was portrayed as being terrified of the IRS ) and now this guy is sending out emails asking developers to meet him in person so that he can get an idea of Twitters tech stack .

Do you really need to come up with elaborate staged scenarios to defend all the depravity your messiah is responsible for? Left or right leaning - it seems human beings will put any guy on a pedestal and will then defend him to their deaths.

Edit: Oh and the proof for all their valuable insights - trust me bro!

Edit 2: If nothing else I appreciate all the business leaders (even on this forum) who seem to know that you can't really treat your employees like garbage and then expect them to deliver day in and out. When I left my first company (an IT behemoth) a few years back, I did it simply because their behavior towards employees was demeaning and I didn't want to deal with that along with the poor pay. Fast forward 1.5 - 2 years all my former colleagues and I got calls asking if we would like to join back because their attrition rate was through the roof and their reputation of treating employees poorly had become common knowledge.

[harshaguduru]

Originally Posted by JithinR

.

Noted on the feedback about grammar. but this wasn't some dope that was cooked up. Since you think this is copy paste job, kindly point me to where may have seen it. If it was indeed used as a forward, it's without my knowledge and I might as well remove the original because the last thing I want is for my friend to get dragged into this.
Every word was typed by myself FYI and since I did it in a bit of a rush didn't have time to use Grammarly which did throw up a ton of errors. My apologies for that.

B- In case you used the word messiah in reference to me please note, He isn't my messiah and neither do I claim as such. So maybe keeping your judgmental tone and vitriol on the DL would be appreciated and in a funny twist of fate, these choice of words and judgments are exactly what Elon is being criticized for. I appreciate him for what he does in the space he is in similar to how I appreciate Kalam, WOZ/Steve Jobs and quite a few other visionaries, none of whom are my messiahs.

[V.Narayan]

Originally Posted by harshaguduru

Noted on the feedback about grammar. but this wasn't some dope that was cooked up. Since you think this is copy paste job, kindly point me to where may have seen it. If it was indeed used as a forward, it's without my knowledge and I might as well remove the original because the last thing I want is for my friend to get dragged into this.
Every word was typed by myself FYI and since I did it in a bit of a rush didn't have time to use Grammarly which did throw up a ton of errors. My apologies for that.

B- In case you used the word messiah in reference to me please note, He isn't my messiah and neither do I claim as such. So maybe keeping your judgmental tone and vitriol on the DL would be appreciated and in a funny twist of fate, these choice of words and judgments are exactly what Elon is being criticized for. I appreciate him for what he does in the space he is in similar to how I appreciate Kalam, WOZ/Steve Jobs and quite a few other visionaries, none of whom are my messiahs.

Sir, with reference to your post #367 let's keep social media goobledigook out of this otherwise interesting and riveting discussion. Let's leave these kinds of forwards from alleged insiders to the grand uncle's and aunts who forward all kinds of things on social media these days. Regardless of whether we support Musk's approach or not we need to keep the basic intellectual standards on this thread and Team BHP . Thank you.

V.Narayan

PS: I don't know who your friend is but I do know more than a dozen excellent writers on Team BHP who could pen a thoughtful stimulating treatise on this saga (regardless of which side they may be on) of way way way better quality and coherence than what your friend has written.