[HN Gopher] Twitter's mass layoffs have begun
___________________________________________________________________
Twitter's mass layoffs have begun
Author : matthieu_bl
Score : 911 points
Date : 2022-11-04 09:33 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| ankurdhama wrote:
| > print out the code you wrote in the last 30-60 days
|
| This is either a joke or Musk (or his team) doesn't know about
| something called version control and how it can be used.
| Bhurn00985 wrote:
| It's not about version control, it's a test to see how
| compliant you are.
| chii wrote:
| having a bunch of yes-men working for you isn't a recipe for
| innovation - it might lead to possibly some short term profit
| (if any), but absolutely and surely a long term decline.
| Bhurn00985 wrote:
| indeed, and based on what I've seen so far, I don't believe
| Musk is looking to position Twitter as an innovative
| company going forward
| havblue wrote:
| Is everyone using the same version control system? I wouldn't
| be surprised if some people have code that would get missed if
| they just had IT pull everything.
| bichiliad wrote:
| When there were layoffs at Etsy back in 2017, one of the
| unintended consequences were that a lot more people quit
| voluntarily afterwards. Attrition was a lot higher than expected.
| I have to believe that the people who remain are not all going to
| want to stay at the company that Twitter is becoming, whether it
| be for lack of institutional knowledge, peer support, or just
| because they liked their coworkers and are sad to see them go.
| This is a sample size of one, of course, but the layoffs at Etsy
| were a whole lot smaller than these ones were rumored to be.
| curiousllama wrote:
| The rule of thumb is ~1/3 of the layoff size will be
| incremental attrition over the next 6-12 months. If they hired
| a firm that knows what it's doing, they build it into the
| model.
| htrp wrote:
| i don't think they hired a firm to plan this out.... and if
| they did, no sane firm would float you a 7 day timeline
| teeray wrote:
| I bet there's two things that cause this:
|
| 1) those who quit in solidarity, because they don't like where
| things are going
|
| 2) those who are saddled with the work of those who were laid
| off / quit and burn out, causing them to quit (which can
| snowball to others remaining).
| geomark wrote:
| Regarding your point number 2, I've been having this debate
| over on Twitter (ha) about how much those who remain are
| saddled with extra work. I've been through a few layoffs in
| my career, though none as large as this one, and what usually
| happened was those of us who remained ended up with _less_
| work. That is because the ones who were let go were almost
| always low performers whose work usually needed a lot of
| review and redesign by the more competent ones, which was
| more work than just doing the whole thing over from the
| beginning. In some cases when it did cause a large burden to
| the remaining employees the project left behind by the laid
| off ones was left to die. And that often was the right answer
| since the low performers had so often been shuttled to
| projects that weren 't very valuable to begin with. With no
| visibility into the Twitter case I don't know if there is
| much of the same effect that I experienced, although I am
| reading a lot of opinions on HN and elsewhere that some of
| the groups that have been decimated should have been killed
| off long ago.
| nemo44x wrote:
| It's easy to quit a job when we are in a bull market. The last
| few years have seen massive turnover, for example.
|
| But we aren't in that scenario any longer. People who remain
| will find it much more difficult to find a good job somewhere
| else as more and more companies are freezing hiring. This could
| go on for awhile.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| I kind of figured this was part of the goal at Twitter. 75% of
| staff was the number that was originally floated, so maybe the
| thinking here is that after a brutal layoff round, another
| quarter will say "fuck it" and leave.
| generalizations wrote:
| And after that, the ones who stay are probably the ones most
| in line with the kind of culture Elon is aiming for.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Or the "lifers" with no other job prospects.
| pie420 wrote:
| no, those will be layed off first
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Not at places I've worked. The first to get laid off are
| low-performers that everyone knows is a low performer and
| no one likes. The unproductive lifers usually have built
| a system or two, and they're just coasting on that while
| doing as little as possible.
| tdeck wrote:
| Meaning the ones willing to put up with an abusive work
| environment.
| lizknope wrote:
| That happens at every company. I've been working in the tech
| industry for 25 years at 8 different companies. You lay off
| people and then the best engineers start looking for a new job
| and leaving 2-3 months afterward.
| dmurdoch wrote:
| Unintended? My company did two rounds of layoffs already and
| this was a thing that was known from day 1. Literally the day
| after the the first rounds one of the questions in the town
| hall was about "how do we plan to retain the people who are
| left now that they're getting spammed by linkedin recruiters".
|
| I think these days this is a known and intentional effect from
| upper management and they absolutely are accounting for another
| 5-10% of voluntary leavers post layoffs. Its free money from
| their POV, no severance.
| bena wrote:
| One thing that's always felt distasteful is the practice of
| essentially making the company buy itself.
|
| Musk bought Twitter, but Twitter itself is on the hook for $13
| billion of that. It reminds me what happened with ToysRUs. It was
| saddled with the debt of having been taken private by vulture
| capitalist, eventually couldn't make its interest payments and
| folded. Despite never really having a down year of sales.
|
| That's right, it was sold, not because it was losing money, but
| because it wasn't growing at the time. Profits were stagnant. So
| they were essentially made to buy themselves and the people who
| engineered this deal and "bought" ToysRUs collected consultancy
| fees and percentages and made out like bandits.
|
| The difference here is that I don't think there's a clear way for
| Musk to extract that kind of money from Twitter in the same
| manner.
| taurath wrote:
| Since apparently nobody else in the thread has any empathy for
| those who've lost their jobs, future access to healthcare (in the
| US and less civilized countries), and financial security, I guess
| I'll be the first: I feel bad for people who are laid off by the
| machinations of billionaires. I wish we lived in a society where
| it wasn't optimal to act like raving lunatics will tear down
| every bit of security you have at a moments notice.
|
| For those who are cheering this on - good thing its not you
| getting mauled by tigers in the gladiator pit, huh?
| nilsleep wrote:
| "less civilized countries" the arrogance, and you are the one
| asking for empathy?
| VancouverMan wrote:
| I think it would be easier to feel sympathy for these Twitter
| employees had we seen them show sympathy for the various people
| that were suddenly banned from using Twitter, and/or other
| platforms and services, often with the flimsiest of
| "justifications".
|
| In at least some of those cases, it was a matter of livelihood
| and financial security for the people who were banned, too.
| acdha wrote:
| How do you know they didn't? Are there any specific cases you
| can point to so anyone else can decide whether to agree with
| your assessment of how warranted it was? Speaking of which,
| why is this blame directed at Twitter employees rather than
| the managers setting the policies? Why are they also to blame
| for unspecified "other platforms and services" where they
| presumably are not in policy-making positions?
| [deleted]
| acdha wrote:
| I won't quote your reply since you deleted it but I would
| suggest reviewing that list of suspended Twitter accounts and
| looking for any example which supports your original claim
| that this is being done callously on flimsy grounds.
| Conservative grievance peddling is a popular way to assert
| group loyalty but it's hard not to recognize how routinely
| they leave out the parts about knowingly violating the terms
| of service repeatedly and ignoring warnings.
|
| People make mistakes but they also correct them and there's
| no reason to believe individual Twitter employees were
| callously nuking accounts, much less at the scale where it'd
| justify being dismissive about thousands of people losing
| jobs they were performing satisfactorily.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| It's that whole thing of reacting with great sadness to hearing
| of one person's death and being numb to hearing of a plane
| crash (I'm mangling the saying). If we stopped to think about
| all the individual tragedies that go on every day around us,
| nothing would ever get done, we'd stop eating and we'd never
| get out of bed. People have to cope, and we shouldn't have to
| feel guilty about it.
| rbanffy wrote:
| In CA, at least, Twitter may be liable for violating labor law
| with layoffs like this. It may be worth looking into it and
| lawyering up.
|
| And, shouldn't need to say this, unionize!
| spamizbad wrote:
| I feel like Musk is making a spectacle of Twitter layoffs as a
| way to curry favor with those who very vocally disliked
| Twitter's moderation policies, most of whom were just social
| media clout chaser types. Makers getting sacrificed to please
| the attention-seeking "professionals"
| s1k3 wrote:
| Has musk publicly flouted the layoffs? Isn't this all tech
| journalists reporting on it?
|
| Sounds like he's trying to cut to profitability to me...
| after spending 44 billions dollars.
| warlord1 wrote:
| zjlnd wrote:
| I think the empathy is limited only in this particular case.
| Twitter has a) been exemplifying cancel culture itself and b)
| been a major tool for cancel mobs to organize and defame. The
| latter was intended and encouraged.
|
| Some here have perhaps been victims themselves, for relatively
| mild things (I'm not talking about the really egregious cases
| where cancellation has been justified!).
|
| If you live by the sword, things may turn around at some point.
| polote wrote:
| All these people are making 200k a year and will have no
| problem finding another job.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| In a recent Tweet reply, Elon says that there are 10 people
| managing for 1 person coding.
|
| Based on my experience in a 2nd tier SV company I believe
| this to be true
| UncleMeat wrote:
| So it sounds like exactly zero people who have committed
| code recently will be fired, right?
| boc wrote:
| Right but the people who bring in the money (advertising
| sales) probably got axed because they don't write code.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Rightfully so, because 8EUR/month for blue stamp needs
| neither.
| jesuscript wrote:
| Depends on how Caligula feels next week.
| LightG wrote:
| Because we should believe everything Elon says.
|
| The guys has proven that his word doesn't mean a thing.
| Macha wrote:
| As I saw pointed out elsewhere, with a headcount of only
| engineers and these alleged 10 managers per engineers, this
| would leave twitter with like 630 engineers and 6300
| managers which is a clearly a drastic underestimation of
| the number of engineers and that's before you count roles
| like sales, support, etc.
|
| Don't take everything Elon tweets at face value
| talaketu wrote:
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586686935518498816
|
| > There seem to be 10 people "managing" for every one
| person coding
|
| Take this literally, not as as a ration. - each SWE in a
| product team has an EM, Dir Eng, VP Eng, PM, Director
| Product, VP Product, ...
| [deleted]
| Macha wrote:
| Sure, but that team may have N engineers and those VPs
| may have N teams, so that doesn't seem so ludicrous for a
| 7000 person company. Or even 3500 person company by EOD.
| Certainly in my company there's about a 200:1 engineer:VP
| engineering ratio, so pointing out every engineer reports
| to a VP is kind of a meaningless statement
| ghaff wrote:
| And there are also finance people, HR people, sales, etc.
| people. The company is far from entirely engineers, their
| managers, and the managers of their managers.
| cjrp wrote:
| So there's overlap between every developer
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| 630 coders is quite a lot for what Twitter does.
|
| They do not own datacenters, AFAIK.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| It is still never nice to lose your job, especially if you
| have a mortgage matching based on your 200K salary.
| woofyman wrote:
| Smart people live below their means.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| No amount of living under your means mitigates the h1b
| clock to get a new position or leave the country.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| Doesn't really matter when you have any mortgage or rent
| to house your family. It's fine when you're 22, less fine
| when you're 42.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| The majority of people who earn more spend more.
| badpun wrote:
| > Smart people live below their means.
|
| > The majority of people who earn more spend more.
|
| You don't need a Prolog engine to compute the
| conclusion...
| pieter_mj wrote:
| I do, but when I earn more, I definitely spend more :)
| windmaster wrote:
| :-)
| paganel wrote:
| I try to live by that principle but it's really difficult
| to actually do it, mostly because of costs related to
| real estate/housing, and seeing how housing is a big
| share of almost anyone's salaries (either through
| mortgages or rents) in the end it gets out of your
| control.
|
| What I'm saying is that is difficult to live "bellow my
| means" when it comes to, well, living, which means having
| a roof on top of my head. I don't want anything fancy,
| just a safe enough area, decent amount of space and
| decent amount of transportation options. I'm of course
| willing to pay for all that, the problem is that there
| are people who are willing to pay even more, which leaves
| me with two options: either compete against those other
| people, which, like I said, makes the "live bellow my
| means" moot, or, the second option, to compromise on my
| housing/living arrangements (choosing to live in a less
| safe area, giving up on access to public transportation,
| choosing a studio apartment instead of a one-bedroom
| thing), which is less than ideal (because housing is a
| basic thing in one's life).
| exitb wrote:
| Like Elon Musk.
| throwawaytwit9 wrote:
| Yeah right. Because smart people can always control the
| circumstances of their life like an illness, elder care,
| affordable housing, change in market conditions, etc.
| taurath wrote:
| Many will be fine, there also may be many who will not. Not
| everyone makes that much at twitter, not everyone is in a
| role that is competitive right now. The ones who make the
| least are the ones who will suffer the most. Stop being
| callous.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| The ones who make the least will also be in the most
| commonly available roles so they too should have no trouble
| finding a job elsewhere.
| throwawaytwit9 wrote:
| That's not the point. Dignity and respect. Going in a
| different direction? Fine. Make cuts. But, no one deserves to
| be treated as disposable playthings. Zero communication and
| unreasonable demands create anxiety. Contrast this to stripe.
| I fail to see how one's income determines the respect they
| should receive.
| nerdawson wrote:
| 6 months ago I would have agreed but it seems like the
| landscape has changed radically since then.
| ghaff wrote:
| Even leaving aside that a lot of these people are not
| engineers but customer support, finance, sales, etc. even
| developer hires in the current market are very measured and
| selective at most companies. First of all, probably nothing
| will move forward until after the holidays. It's not
| unreasonably pessimistic to think that it may take 6 months
| or more for someone to get a new position even as a
| developer.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| In civilized countries, you don't loose your healthcare when
| your loose your job. It's tie to your human status, not to a
| contract with a random corporation.
|
| Also, civilized societies have come up a long time ago with
| appropriate social nets that mitigate the hurdle of
| unemployment.
|
| And our food is vastly superior.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I guess then based on your narrow minded moral stance of what
| "civilized" means, Switzerland would be uncivilized. So would
| be Taiwan, Japan and Korea.
|
| Your definition of "civilized" just means a socialist state.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| We're all learning what civilized mean. If anything.
|
| We're established that all life are equals and each humans
| deserves rights.
|
| Not out of kindness but because it yields more cohesive and
| resilient societies.
|
| All places are civilized in one way or another, more in
| some aspects depending on the locality .
|
| In my books, Democratie in Switzerland is more advance that
| anywhere else in Western Europe for instance.
|
| But more robust social nets would help shield workers and
| their families from hick up in supply chain or markets.
| Preventing unwanted ripple effects.
|
| If that make it socialist, so be it. That word has lost
| most of its meaning from me. Let's talk policies and not
| political classification.
| TecoAndJix wrote:
| I'm with on on everything but the food! I can get like 10
| different kinds of apples at my grocery store, a dry aged
| ribeye, and there is an entire row dedicated to different
| types of sparkling water. If i want fresh noodles for fish
| soup I can go 10 minutes down the road to the Asian grocery
| and get Bok Choy, fishballs, and udon noodles. The only thing
| not near me is a reliable source of rainbow colored bagels
| that my daughter loves.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| Would saying that in the US I struggle with bread, cheese
| and wine give too much away?
|
| It's fine: you can find anything you want.
|
| But you have to suffer posh places and step markup.
|
| I just want some decent unpasteurized cheese.
|
| Joke aside, I was more thinking of culinary traditions.
|
| Like cooking things from the season, from scratch and eat
| it with other human beings around a table.
|
| US friends: that when I look at you like barbarian : when
| you shovel food in your mouth between you desk and break
| room.
|
| Get a table, look at your food! Talk to another human about
| his food. Share food and diner time.
| drstewart wrote:
| >Would saying that in the US I struggle with bread,
| cheese and wine give too much away?
|
| No, it was pretty clear you were a smug Frenchmen from
| the start
| dopidopHN wrote:
| I always put extra smugness on my fries :)
| beardedman wrote:
| > in the US and less civilized countries
|
| Going to have a hard time finding some goodwill when you refer
| to other countries as "less civilized". A tad hypocritical.
| taurath wrote:
| My apologies, it might have been more accurate to say "in the
| US and similarly uncivilized countries".
| luckylion wrote:
| Adding a little love to the world every day, huh?
| taurath wrote:
| The cruelty is the point here in the good ole US of A.
| etiennebausson wrote:
| That was my though as well before even reading the
| comments.
|
| I suppose I should admit as an European that confidence in
| your own superiority is not solely and American trait.
| nivenkos wrote:
| The US is far wealthier though, like just compare the
| developer salaries for a start.
| numlock86 wrote:
| What's a $250k payroll worth if that's also what you have
| to pay for the average hospital visit? I'd stick to my
| EUR100k and not have my life ruined just because I broke
| my leg or my kid is born with a heart disease.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| At the end of the day, the revealed preference is that
| many EU+CA developers move to the US for the salary, and
| extremely few US developers move to the EU. Draw your own
| conclusions.
| mola wrote:
| An EU eng knows that if shit hits the fan, she can go
| back to Europe and have live well. So why not earn some
| extra cash in the US.
|
| An American doesn't have that privilege.
| refurb wrote:
| I'll give you an example.
|
| The delta in wages from my home country to the US, after
| taxes, could pay for private insurance _for 5 families_.
| jmartin2683 wrote:
| I work as an engineer in America and yea.. that's totally
| not how the math works. Healthcare expenses are largely
| covered along with the much higher pay and lower taxes. I
| think my out of pocket cost last year was negative after
| hsa contributions from the company.
| chinathrow wrote:
| Yeah but what happens if you lose your job and get really
| sick? Or what happens if you get really sick and lose
| your job?
|
| In the US, that sounds like a need to either ruin your
| finances/life/pension/etc. In most places of Europe, not
| so much.
| BWStearns wrote:
| If you're productive and then get sick and get fired for
| being sick, by the time you die of lack of access to
| healthcare you had become poor. So you see, nothing bad
| happens to the good useful people!
| jmartin2683 wrote:
| You have cobra coverage until you go get another job,
| which is something you absolutely have to do regardless.
| If you have an hsa, you'll still have a bunch of money in
| there, too.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| If you make 250k you can afford fantastic insurance and
| you'll still have a lot more left over.
|
| It's significantly better to be a high earner in the US
| than almost anywhere else in Europe (in terms of capital)
| numlock86 wrote:
| bombcar wrote:
| Life insurance is available- as is emergency healthcare
| riders.
|
| Americans won't admit it publicly but a big part of
| living in America is knowing what parts of America you
| shouldn't go. And if you do have to go to or through
| those areas, you start to understand why so many people
| drive urban assault vehicles.
| Kavelach wrote:
| I definitely didn't expect this in a HN thread
| numlock86 wrote:
| I didn't expect to lose a cousin on a business trip to
| the US (Michigan) 6 years ago either. Life is full of
| surprises.
| patates wrote:
| I'm sincerely sorry for your loss, but moving the
| goalpost doesn't help the discussion. Again, nothing to
| take away from how dreadful what you lived through is.
| numlock86 wrote:
| Condolences appreciated.
|
| > doesn't help the discussion
|
| That's exactly my point. The discussion started to derail
| into "Who has more money?" like that's the ultimate
| metric. This just makes me sad but is pretty
| representative for the stereotypical US mindset. My point
| is there is a lot more to life than money.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| At no point did I claim it was the ultimate metric and
| instead clarified that I was talking purely in terms of
| capital
| sweaty wrote:
| If you think this is good oh boy do I have news for you.
| You don't need to "afford" fantastic insurance,
| healthcare is essential and needs to be free for
| everyone, which it is here. I have complete freedom of
| choice across 27 countries, no strings attached,
| completely free of cost. So do people poorer than me.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| And what about sending 2-3 kids to some good
| universities, how much do you need to save in cash? 1
| million?
| dopidopHN wrote:
| A bit more, I would say count 100k/year/kid.
|
| And that outside of your own retirement.
|
| I'm currently on a US salary that is very generous. I
| don't spend a dime extra because of those. It's kinda
| terrifying I don't know how they do it.
| the_mar wrote:
| Better how? It is probably better if you do not intend to
| have children or ever need medical care. People saying
| that taxes in the US are much lower than Europe, as a
| person who lived in London, San Francisco and NYC I'd
| like to disagree.
|
| The tax rate for my income bracket in the UK is 45%, and
| while federal income tax is 39.6% I still have to pay
| state and city taxes on top of that which works out to be
| about the same.
|
| However I get free medical care in the UK, affordable
| college tuition (10x less than the US at least),
| maternity leave, great public transit, I could go on.
| What does the same amount of taxes paid get me in the US?
| I'm not complaining about having to pay taxes, but sure
| would be nice to get something back that isn't military.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > The tax rate for my income bracket in the UK is 45%,
| and while federal income tax is 39.6% I still have to pay
| state and city taxes on top of that which works out to be
| about the same.
|
| This statement is meaningless without specifying the
| brackets or providing an effective tax rate for a certain
| amount of income.
| the_mar wrote:
| Oh, spare me the semantics, the difference is still
| single digit % of the total income.
| drstewart wrote:
| A single digit % of total income may not be a big deal in
| European salary terms, but when you make US salaries it's
| significant. That's your first mistake.
|
| Also, lol at UK public transit. Horrifically expensive -
| probably more than a single digit % of total income if
| you actually have to commute anywhere on a regular basis.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| How would a reader know that? And how can that be true
| when the brackets are so different? UK does not even look
| like it has single vs married distinctions, not to
| mention the myriad deductions in the US, and the
| drastically different taxes in various locales (I pay
| $30k+ less per year by living on the other side of a
| state/city border).
|
| https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/federal-income-
| tax-...
|
| https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates
|
| The 45% UK income tax rate is for 150k GBP, which is
| $167k. The top bracket for US federal income tax starts
| at $578k/$693k at a 37% tax rate.
|
| It does not seem to pencil out to being remotely close,
| and that is ignoring UK National insurance and pension
| tax rates, but I am not sure how UK pension works to
| equivocate to US FICA taxes.
| the_mar wrote:
| I was providing my personal anecdotal experience of
| having the basically the same net income in 3 places. 37%
| federal tax also does not account for 6.8% state tax and
| the 3.8% NYC tax which I know does not apply to all of
| the US, but then we get into the territory where we have
| to address that I will probably not have same income in
| bumblefuck alabama anyway.
|
| People here are talking like the difference between US
| taxes and EU taxes is 20% or more, when in reality it's
| maybe 5%
| rendang wrote:
| The difference in tax burden is give here:
| https://data.oecd.org/tax/tax-revenue.htm . It varies
| quite a bit by country, but the contrast with
| France/Nordics is particularly large
| the_mar wrote:
| I'm not sure how income tax % to GDP is relevant here,
| but perhaps I am looking at a wrong thing, it's quite
| painful on mobile
|
| UPD: looked at the tax wedge, the US vs UK looks pretty
| similar to me- which supports my point. Germany looks a
| lot higher, but they have 100% free tuition and I am not
| familiar with the rest of the benefits germans get.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| Just ran some arbitrary numbers. Someone earning $190k in
| mid Ohio would have take home of around $140k, between
| state/federal. That's before any other retirement savings
| or anything else. A 'fantastic' insurance plan from blue
| cross anthem will be around $2400/month for a family of
| 3. With a 'modest' deductible of $4k. $2400*12=I around
| $29k. This person is having to spend ~ 21% of 'take home'
| _just_ on medical insurance. Not any medical _expense_ ,
| just insurance.
|
| Assuming working independently, some of that is
| deductible, and one might argue how much left over is "a
| lot" or not. There's still food, shelter, utilities,
| transportation, education, etc. they need to account for,
| as well as saving for the future.
|
| Actually, looking at it, if the person is 'independent',
| they'd pay another ~$10k or so on FICA, or have some LLC
| structure set up. Or they might be lucky enough to have
| an employer who pays for some/most of this 'fantastic'
| insurance... until they don't.
|
| Perhaps in terms of raw dollars, there's some advantage,
| but there's a pervasive threat of "what if" scenarios
| that is hard to shake for a lot of folks.
| ericmay wrote:
| But if you are earning that you are likely working for a
| large corporation where your actual out of pocket
| expenses are much closer to something like $1000/month
| for that family (varies by situation). Far better
| scenario then a much lower European salary (probably
| closer to $80,000) with higher taxes and the same (at
| best) quality care.
|
| If you are working independently yea it may be more
| expensive, but (unfortunately) so few people work
| independently so it's an edge case not really that
| valuable here. Though worth noting providing a way to
| untie healthcare from employers and still make it
| affordable so that you can more easily start a company is
| a good idea.
|
| It's really difficult to do good analysis here. If you
| were in Ohio making $190,000 your family is automatically
| in the top 10% or so. If you worked remote you could buy
| a house outside of a major city for your salary
| equivalent, or in a city like Columbus for 2x your salary
| with some fantastic public schools.
|
| Also a nitpick while I think you get much more efficient
| and cheaper healthcare with the government running it, at
| the end of the day it's never free so you have to
| actually compare taxes to premiums to get a fair
| assessment of cost.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| > untie healthcare from employers
|
| This 1000 times. I don't think we'll see a meaningful
| change in my lifetime, but it's an existential burden
| that we, collectively, have had for generations. So much
| so, really, that hundreds of millions of people seemingly
| can not envision meaningful change.
|
| The constant "just get a great job with great benefits!"
| refrain irks me to no end, and demonstrates a privilege
| that people often deny exists. Even if/when I _can_ get
| that "great job with great benefits", I still only have
| it at the pleasure of the employer. I grow old? You're
| gone. Employer makes bad decisions? They "take
| responsibility" by letting me go.
|
| The notion of having access to health care, regardless of
| my employment status, should be such a basic thing to
| grasp. If I'm unemployed for a year or so (illness,
| family issues, whatever), having to upend specific
| doctors/medicines/hospitals/treatments because "insurance
| change" is life altering for many. Seen it myself in
| dozens of personal connections over the years. Want to
| change jobs? Whether abusive working conditions or just
| need to be with family? "Can't do it... I need my health
| care... the only doctors that take my health care are in
| this area...". Or... "I won't have health insurance for 6
| months if I take that new job".
|
| There's 1000 different examples I could find why
| "employer/insurance" connection is bad, and very few I
| can think of that are _good_ for all parties, yet, we
| continue in this mess.
|
| > but (unfortunately) so few people work independently so
| it's an edge case not really that valuable here.
|
| I know a growing number of folks doing this, and _many_
| more who would love to, but ... "health insurance" keeps
| them tied to "employers".
|
| argh...
| ericmay wrote:
| Great post and I do apologize if I came off as 'not
| caring' about people working independently it's just if
| we do broad characterizations we have to compare broadly
| and so few work independently.
|
| Maybe an idea there to start an independent business
| owners healthcare association or something that
| redistributes profits via lower premiums or something?
| How the hell do you start something like that?
| mgkimsal wrote:
| FWIW, there are orgs that do that, but they almost always
| end up being somewhat regional, and... it ends up being a
| lot of work. FreelancersUnion, in New York, I believe
| did/does something like that. Some chambers of commerce
| and similar groups do too, but... it doesn't really end
| up changing much of the price at all, especially since
| ACA. (oh, misread, I initially read that as simply just
| offering a buyers group to get 'group' rates).
|
| You've generally always been able to buy health insurance
| independently. I started... 14(?) years ago. The ACA,
| well-intentioned, was hobbled from day one, and my
| $220/month high deductible plan has morphed in to a
| $1300/month plan which is still high deductible
| ($14k/year), has fewer options, and ... well... some
| pregnancy services will be covered (cis male here). You
| want a 'low' deductible? You're looking at probably $2k
| or more for 2 adults. And yes, I know health insurance
| has an age component - I'm years older than I was then
| too. $3k/year in exchange for taking on some risk (higher
| deductible) makes some sense. But base price of $15k/year
| in health insurance, plus another $14k/year in
| deductibles means this is essentially catastrophic only,
| but not really priced as such).
|
| It's all region-based, and even where I'm at, I get
| measurably fewer options because I live 2 miles over a
| county line, and 'no one' insures out here. It got worse
| for several years - I know in NC, there are ~100
| counties, and I believe there were more than 30 at one
| point who had only one insurer even _selling_ health
| insurance in those counties.
|
| Also.. FWIW, I didn't take it as you didn't care, but
| yes, freelance workers are generally overlooked, even as
| the ranks grow. They just tend to be growing on the
| lower-end of the spectrum - rideshare drivers, door dash
| delivery, etc. Much easier to just ignore growing
| segments of society while we pride ourselves on our
| ability to "get a better job with great benefits!". I'm
| not in a position of having to choose food over
| medication, but having to decide between medication or
| surgery _today_ over funding retirement savings? I 've
| been there, as have some friends of mine. Yes, it comes
| across as a bit privileged, but privileges are all
| relative.
| [deleted]
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| This is just ignorant. Nobody with a $250k salary at a
| tech company in the US is paying any meaningful amount to
| health care. It is covered by insurance that their work
| provides.
| mola wrote:
| Yeah, but SF is swamped with homeless ppl. Yay for all
| those devs earning a lot while living in dystopia. If I
| can earn less but be confident that I won't go broke
| because of an unfortunate events. And that the system is
| humane, and tries to find a balance between capitalism
| and humanism, I'll take that any day.
|
| US wealth is a joke.
| drstewart wrote:
| I love when Europeans repeat Fox News talking points.
| Really shows how "progressive" they really are.
| lawn wrote:
| More importantly the US has far more inequality.
|
| Developers are already very well off no matter what
| country they live in, and I'd wager that "normal" people
| in the US are not far wealthier than people in Nordic
| countries for instance.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I often describe the US as the richest (and most well
| armed) underdeveloped country.
|
| It's unfair, as all short takes are, and it saddens me to
| see my friends who live there, who are at no fault for
| the mess they are in, suffer. I fear the coming mid-terms
| will only make things worse.
| MandieD wrote:
| Extra-urban (outside of the big cities) Texas feels
| increasingly feudal every time I visit; maybe it's
| because I've spent an increasing amount of my life in
| comparatively egalitarian Germany so it's easier to see
| than when I was embedded in it.
| auntienomen wrote:
| Op is saying that making healthcare dependent on employment
| is the mark of an uncivilized country. It's not a blanket
| dismissal of other countries.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| But US is pretty much a third world country when it comes to
| social safety net
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| I think people from actual third world countries would love
| to be in the US where the government gives you stimulus
| cheques, instead of back home.
|
| Trust me, the unemployed life in third world countries, and
| even in second world countries, is far more brutal than the
| unemployed life in the US, especially for unemployed big-
| tech workers who can find a new job anytime.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > unemployed life in third world countries, and even in
| second world countries, is far more brutal than the
| unemployed life in the US
|
| maybe so, but we should look at the trend not just one
| sample group at one point in time... for a long time it
| can be argued that the u.s is riding along as fast as it
| can to catch up to "the 3rd world" in that regard....
| pirate787 wrote:
| The US safety net, in terms of spending, is as expansive or
| more expansive than the rest of the world. For example, the
| U.S. spends $748 billion on Medicaid, health care for the
| poor, which is matched by state governments. Obamacare
| subsidies are another $160 billion a year. The fact is the
| terrible U.S. government administration of these programs
| and the regulatory capture of the health care system by
| doctors, pharma, and hospitals are the core issues, but
| liberals whistle past these real issues and wonder why we
| don't have European comforts and outcomes per dollar.
| defrost wrote:
| > but liberals whistle past these real issues and wonder
| why we don't have European comforts and outcomes per
| dollar.
|
| The US should grow up and stop it with these bicameral
| partisan pissing matches.
|
| _Both_ the US centre right and alt-right parties are
| equally responsible for putting US citizens taxes
| directly in the grubby hands of middlemen who fail to
| deliver outcomes.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| The biggest problem with us Healthcare spending is how
| the money is allocated and spent. A lunch pin in the high
| cost is that the government has no concern for the cost
| to benefit of treatments and largely props up the price
| of the market. This is a bipartisan problem. If the
| government set reimbursement for treatments based on
| patient benefit, it would go a long way to reducing the
| cost in the US.
| cvwright wrote:
| We don't have European comforts because we pay for our
| own national defense. We also pay for Europe's defense.
|
| We should work out a deal where we continue to provide
| their security, and they provide our healthcare. Even
| Stevens.
| biorach wrote:
| American healthcare is not underfunded due to defence
| spending. American healthcare is very well funded. It's
| just horribly inefficient and perverse.
| hnhg wrote:
| The USA pays for a lot of offense too. The USA also pays
| a lot for healthcare in general so lack of funds isn't
| the issue.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| It never seizes to amaze me the simplicity with which the
| Americans view the world :)
| drstewart wrote:
| There's literally a war in Europe right now because
| Europeans underfunded defense. Luckily, America will save
| you again :)
| stuaxo wrote:
| Big numbers are just big numbers, per capita and outcomes
| is where it's at.
|
| Having said that, the US healthcare system is very
| efficient at extracting profit.
| robocat wrote:
| An interesting rebuttal to the usual complaints about the
| US healthcare system (no idea how factual it actually is,
| but it passes my basic sniff tests, but it is a subject I
| am unfamiliar with):
|
| https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-
| wisdom-o...
|
| That said: tying insurance to employment is evil. I'm a
| New Zealander and our healthcare system certainly has its
| problems too.
| llamaLord wrote:
| Just to be clear, you're not implying that, just because
| the US spends more on healthcare than other countries,
| that means it's any good right?
|
| Coz like... it's not hard to spend trillions of dollars
| when you charge $5000 for a tablet you can buy in
| Australia for like... $20.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I don't think that was the point that they are trying to
| make.
|
| A lot of people hold the belief Healthcare in the US is
| bad because it callously refuses to spend money on
| people. This is not the case.
|
| When you remember that those funds were largely deducted
| from someone's paycheck, it has a real impact on those
| workers and it's important not to dismiss all the hard
| work that did go into supplying those funds.
|
| That's not to say that there are major structural issues
| with how Healthcare is regulated in the US, primarily
| related to how those funds are spent
| the_mar wrote:
| I don't know how "spending more money for less benefits"
| is better than "callously refusing to spend any money"?
| If your country has good intentions or bad it makes very
| little difference when u're dying from treatable cancer
| because u can't afford the care. Or when u have to go
| back to work immediately after giving birth. Honestly, my
| mother lives in Russia, which is by no means an example
| of a country with a good social net, she was mortified
| when I told her about US labor laws. It's true u net more
| cash in the US, but u also have only urself to rely on if
| anything bad happens, and people are really bad at
| financial planning for any and all unfortunate
| circumstances
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >I don't know how "spending more money for less benefits"
| is better than "callously refusing to spend any money"?
|
| I don't know if it is better, but it is certainly a
| _different problem_ , which matters if anyone is
| interested in understanding or fixing it.
|
| I think it is important to understand the problem
| specifically there are a lot of patients dying of
| treatable cancer who would benefit from a health care
| system that functions better.
| the_mar wrote:
| Sure it is necessary to understand the problem to fix it,
| I am not denying that. Sure, "refusing to pay" vs "paying
| a lot and accomplishing fuck all" are different problems.
| But the context of this discussion is "can US healthcare
| system be objectively called third-world-like" which it
| can. Whether it is bad because of X or Y reasons is not
| relevant and comments like the one I responded to, come
| off as trying to diminish how dire the situation really
| is.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Didn't seem like they were trying to diminish anything.
| The specifically called out how terrible the
| administration of the health programs are.
| throw3823423 wrote:
| There are significant differences when it comes to
| expectations on a fix. If the problem is just refusal to
| spend, the policy problem is easily improved with easy to
| write legislation: 'medicare will now cover everyone over
| 55'. The US healthcare system is far more difficult to
| improve than that, as just asking the government to cover
| more bills at the prices companies and the public pay
| would be hard to sustain. Changes to make costs more in
| line with European countries would have extreme
| opposition from some people: Every dollar of waste is
| someone else's income, and in general those are also
| American voters. This doesn't make American healthcare
| any better, but it means that it takes extreme efforts to
| make it better, even a little bit. So it's at least not a
| matter of malice.
|
| As for labor laws, the US does far better than it seems.
| Easy to fire also means easy to hire too, as the risk
| taken by the employer is also far lower. And the stronger
| the protections, the higher the slack, showing in
| unemployment. Very few European countries have the
| unemployment rates of the US, and the ones that do get
| there via a lot of temporary work, which has about as
| many protections as US work. And even with those
| protections, you still see Spain and Greece at well over
| 10% unemployment, while the US is under 4.
| the_mar wrote:
| Using spain and greece for comparison sure seems like
| cherrypicking your data.
|
| Also it has been proven many times by many people that if
| US were to transition to single payer insurance system,
| it would actually decrease the spending. No one claims it
| is easy, but there is absolutely no reason for the US
| insurance system to exist under single payer, that would
| be just setting piles of cash on fire.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I would quibble with the word proven here. There are
| compelling arguments with good data. single-payer could
| be better or worse depending on actual implementation and
| coverage.
|
| It's also worth noting that many countries with single
| pair still have a supplemental insurance market for
| premium coverage not included.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think there are some "simple" fixes that would go a
| long way to improving the healthcare system.
|
| The easiest is basing Medicare spending on patient
| benefit in terms off quality adjusted life years.
|
| I think it is a common misunderstanding that European
| countries maintain lower costs via price caps. In
| actuality, most don't limit the sale price, but control
| how much they are willing to pay for a drug, device, or
| procedure. This means that a product has to be
| substantially better to command a substantially higher
| price. More treatment with slightly worse products means
| much more benefit overall. Similarly, it puts some
| downward pressure on the price of new products because
| they have to compete with cheaper but less effective
| ones.
| [deleted]
| twekrljpl234234 wrote:
| firefoxkekw wrote:
| The personal financial security shouldn't be provided by
| corporations, is your problem, so you should be the one who
| solve it, if you want financial security just make sure you are
| highly employable at any point.
|
| Most people fired from Twitter will find a new job without
| problem and if they can't, is their problem, not mine.
| bordercases wrote:
| chess_buster wrote:
| It should be provided by the state like in Germany - where
| it's an insurance you pay into if your an employee
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Like Unemployment Insurance? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
| Unemployment_insurance_in_the_...
| [deleted]
| naijaboiler wrote:
| This is a very very naive take from someone who has no
| empathy and no understanding of macroeconomics.
|
| In a down economy, human resources and artificially
| underutilized and many competent workers with solid financial
| discipline will still find themselves in financial trouble.
| firefoxkekw wrote:
| << This is a very very naive take from someone who has no
| empathy and no understanding of macroeconomics. >>
|
| If your argument is an ad hominem, ok so.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Well people can be hard to replace thanks to skills and
| training they received on the workplace... which they can quit
| on a short notice if they are offered better pay elsewhere,
| causing enormous problems for business owners. So it kinda
| checks out.
|
| Obligations shouldn't be one way, they should be mutual. If you
| want an ironclad employment security, etc, etc, you should also
| accept to be bound to your workplace until the business hires
| somebody else to do your work who is as qualified to do your
| work as you are. And if you think that your obligation is only
| to work well until you decide to quit at the moment of your
| choosing... then you should also accept that this moment might
| be chosen by your employer.
| somedude895 wrote:
| It's okay to feel bad for people who lose their jobs. But
| business cycles are important for a healthy economy.
| Unsustainable ventures need to die or be pruned at some point
| if you want to generate lasting prosperity. Whether this
| specific instance actually serves to create a more productive
| and more dynamic company remains to be seen, and it sucks for
| the people affected, but if they're skilled and useful - as
| every person should always strive to be - they'll be fine.
|
| It sounds heartless, but it's the reality.
| hankerito wrote:
| As a european though, it is absolutely crazy to see you can
| do this on a day by day basis. Here you would have at least 1
| month, more likely 3 month, prior notice to just being kicked
| out and having your accounts closed. You would also have to
| state a business reason for people who are employed as fixed
| staff. This gives people time to react to these kinds of
| things.
|
| Edit: Sorry, this refers to a comment further below: Also,
| comparing this to the pandemic is kinda crazy, isn't it? It's
| one thing to have a global scale event effecting the lives of
| billions and another of just buying a company for way tooo
| much because you wanted to make a dumb joke about smoking
| weed.
|
| America truely is a heartless, dystopian society...
| PeterStuer wrote:
| In the European places you never get fired. They just make
| sure you quit.
| philliphaydon wrote:
| Notice period is different from redundancy. Redundancy can
| mean you leave the day you're made redundant. But they must
| give 30 days notice that redundancies are going to occur.
|
| In australia you cannot hire for a redundant role for I
| believe 9 months? If you do you must rehire the people made
| redundant or face big fines.
| [deleted]
| OJFord wrote:
| > As a european though, it is absolutely crazy to see you
| can do this on a day by day basis. Here you would have at
| least 1 month, more likely 3 month, prior notice to just
| being kicked out and having your accounts closed.
|
| That's not true, there are minimum periods for which you
| must continue to pay the employee after notice their
| contract will be terminated, but I'd be surprised to learn
| of any country where it's illegal to prevent the employee
| having access to the building, confidential documents, etc.
|
| Cf. 'gardening leave'.
| ghaff wrote:
| >be surprised to learn of any country where it's illegal
| to prevent the employee having access to the building,
| confidential documents, etc.
|
| And I'd surprised if there were many countries where you
| couldn't prevent an employee who had been notified they
| were being let go from having access to systems,
| documents, etc.
| OJFord wrote:
| No I agree, that's exactly what I mean. You might still
| have to pay them, but if you don't want them to actually
| 'do work' for you that's fine. (It's your prerogative to
| have ever let them access any of that stuff to begin
| with, could've changed at any point during employment
| even if they still had a job.)
| ghaff wrote:
| Yup. I misread.
| mancerayder wrote:
| That's only for very senior management positions and
| highly paid specialists, I've never seen gardening leave
| for even middle management, much less an engineer.
| OJFord wrote:
| We don't have to debate that though to agree that it
| demonstrates it's clearly not illegal.
| sweaty wrote:
| I'm surprised by these "generous" packages. Where I work in
| Europe, they must give me 3 months notice, my full salary
| is paid for 6 months, after which it's 75% up to 2 years,
| and if I still don't find anything new by then I get 50%
| indefinitely.
|
| I've worked in both the US and various EU countries, while
| the higher salary is certainly enticing, it's also a trap;
| When shit hits the fan, you better have been saving. In
| Europe, the money I make is money I get to really use,
| because the rest is taken care of for me.
| whoooooo123 wrote:
| Which country is that? Those benefits are insanely
| generous - the type that would make me never want to
| start a company there.
| balfirevic wrote:
| > and if I still don't find anything new by then I get
| 50% indefinitely
|
| So you can just retire after being fired?
|
| > In Europe, the money I make is money I get to really
| use, because the rest is taken care of for me.
|
| That's certainly not universally true in Europe.
| sweaty wrote:
| Yes, but you don't tend to get fired on permanent
| contracts to begin with and it's much more enticing to
| find something new especially considering work-life
| balance is very very good, I work maybe 24 hours at most
| with my company explicitly putting your personal life
| before work because a healthy employee is a healthy
| employer. You also still pay taxes over the 50% income
| you're receiving and taxes are high, so it pushes you to
| find something new -eventually-.
| twaway23 wrote:
| > So you can just retire after being fired?
|
| Not in my country (in Europe). You get unemployment
| benefits for up to 2+ years that is a percentage of your
| salary up to a certain level, depending on your job
| history in the last 2-3 years. The maximum you can get is
| around $40k USD, which can be difficult because you
| probably have a mortgage and other expenses that were
| calibrated to a much higher salary.
|
| You are also required to actively apply for jobs, and you
| may be required to take a job application course. I think
| you can even be assigned to a job interview if you delay.
| It is not intended as a "free" paid vacation. I think
| that even in some cases you are theoretically required to
| take any job anywhere in the country even if you have to
| move, but I haven't heard of anyone who had to do that. I
| assume they look at your social situation (family etc.)
|
| Every 2 weeks you need to send in a form where you state
| that you have been actively looking for work and your
| financial situation is unchanged. If you forget to check
| some boxes, you lose all your money for the 2 weeks.
| Vacation is also regulated and you need to inform your
| local government and in some cases you will not receive
| money for the period. You are assumed to spend a full
| working week applying for jobs.
|
| After 2 years you are placed into a different type of
| program where you don't get a fixed amount, but you get
| money according to what the local government decides you
| need. That means you would need to sell your big house
| and move to a cheaper appartement if you want to get any
| support. If you had any savings, you would probably have
| to spend them before getting any assistance.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| As a European I have never heard of such things.
| apetresc wrote:
| Sorry, what? Am I misunderstanding? In Europe after you
| get fired, you can opt to just draw 50% of your old
| salary _indefinitely_? Who 's paying it?
| windmaster wrote:
| That's certainly not true in all European countries. In
| Switzerland, for example, you get 70% (80 for very low
| salaries) of your old salary for 1.5 years (2 years if
| you're over 50). After that, if you still don't have a
| job, you're on your own (if you're broke, you can apply
| for social welfare).
| whoooooo123 wrote:
| "Europe" isn't a unified system. Those benefits
| definitely don't exist in the UK, and I'd still consider
| our labour laws to be well-balanced and reasonably fair
| to both employees and employers.
| olabyne wrote:
| Lmao, americans shocked when they realized that proper
| social welfare is a thing always baffles me. To reply to
| you genuine question : 1. Yes it is a thing. 2. Everybody
| is paying for it through taxes.
| kaashif wrote:
| 50% of your _salary_ is not a simple safety net and is
| extremely excessive for well-paid software engineers of
| the sort being laid off at e.g. Twitter.
|
| I support a modest minimum income provided by the
| government, but 50% of salary indefinitely is insane, it
| only makes sense if everyone is low paid.
| sweaty wrote:
| >Who's paying it?
|
| Very rich people and large companies, generally.
| peruvian wrote:
| Properly taxed wealthy people and corporations.
| apetresc wrote:
| In what universe would that be "properly taxed"? You're
| saying I can work for 1 year in a $200K/year job and then
| draw $100k x 30 years = $3,000,000 of value from that one
| year of work? And it would be fair and just to tax
| "wealthy people" on my behalf for that?
|
| I still feel like I must be misinterpreting something
| here, because I can't imagine even the leftiest of
| leftists thinking this sounds fair. That's basically just
| UBI except the rate is set for each individual based on
| whatever the high-water mark of their lifetime earnings
| were at any point?
| ryan93 wrote:
| So in exchange for software engineering salaries that are
| 8-10 thousand american dollars lower per month at least.
| you get a fraction of a much lower salary in unemployment
| benefits?
| balfirevic wrote:
| > In Europe after you get fired, you can opt to just draw
| 50% of your old salary indefinitely?
|
| No, definitely not in "Europe" in general (well,
| according to sweaty you can in some parts of Europe,
| although I have my doubts).
| wreath wrote:
| > after which it's 75% up to 2 years, and if I still
| don't find anything new by then I get 50% indefinitely.
|
| But this is not paid by the company, right? Where in
| Europe do companies have to pay you 6 months for firing
| you?
| oytis wrote:
| > When shit hits the fan, you better have been saving. In
| Europe, the money I make is money I get to really use,
| because the rest is taken care of for me.
|
| I wonder where this happy country is. In Germany it is
| already a common knowledge that relying on state for your
| retirement is a sure recipe for poverty in the old age.
| patates wrote:
| > In Germany it is already a common knowledge that
| relying on state for your retirement is a sure recipe for
| poverty in the old age.
|
| Is it? I'm living in Germany since so many years and
| nobody told me this. They send me estimates about the
| money I'd be getting when retiring regularly, and while
| it'd mean downsizing, I'd not be poor with the amounts
| named.
| hankerito wrote:
| Assuming you are somewhere in IT and earn above the
| average, you will be okay-ish. People with lower incomes
| will benefit less. But if you look at that receipt and
| consider inflation, the extreme rise in rent in Germany,
| etc and all of that over maybe 20-30 years from you
| ending your career. It becomes less. There are
| adjustments for inflation, but still.
|
| These high pension values are also quite sure to be
| unsustainable for the government, as the workforce
| shrinks quite dramatically and people still get older.
|
| Generally, people are advised to put some money for
| retirement on the side, if they can. If you are in a
| position to put some money aside probably try to do some
| research. "Geldanlage fur Faule" by Sina Gross is a very
| down to earth starting place.
| egeozcan wrote:
| Great reply! To be honest, It's easy to forget about the
| inflation. Well, worst case, one could make more kids and
| invent their own "take care of your parents" ponzi-
| scheme, hehe.
|
| Seriously though, in Germany, you always get this sense
| that everybody seems to know what they are doing until
| ??it hits the fan and you realize all that time nobody
| had cared about what's coming.
| jansan wrote:
| It is guaraneed to be less value in 20-30 years, because
| Germany's pensions are transferred directly from the
| pension fee deducted from salary of employees. And since
| in 20-30 years you will have a totally diffeerent ratio
| of number of employees vs. pensioners, the cake will be
| smaller and will have to be distributed to more people.
| No matter how inflation or anything works out in future,
| pensioners will then have less than pensioners now, who
| more or less live in paradise.
| Tainnor wrote:
| It's wise to be prepared for this scenario for the
| reasons you mention, but in 20-30 years a lot can
| obviously change; either a change to the way the pensions
| are funded (this already started happening to a small
| extent) or a sudden influx of qualified (!) migrants.
|
| I wouldn't bet on any of it happening, but predicting the
| future is always hard.
| onli wrote:
| France would fit.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| It's probably France
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Those benefits are ludicrous. How can any small company
| or startup survive if they have to contend with those
| kinds of requirements? If I were a business owner
| wherever you are I'd restrict my hiring as much as
| possible and try to find ways to _not_ hire anyone,
| probably by contracting work out to other businesses or
| offshore completely.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| Those benefits are not paid by the company, but by the
| state. That's one of the reasons why cash-in-hand
| salaries are lower in most "socialist" European
| countries: the State takes a big fat cut out of it (47%
| in France), so it can pay for these benefits.
| dboreham wrote:
| Taxes in the USA are often just as high (remember to add
| in state and local taxes for an apples to apples
| comparison with European countries). And for that you get
| no "socialism" -- no healthcare until you're old, for
| example.
| rendang wrote:
| Overall tax burden is quite different:
| https://data.oecd.org/tax/tax-revenue.htm
|
| US is around 25% whereas France is 45%
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| Income taxes (Federal + CA) seem to be roughly in the
| same ballpark as France based on [0]. A French income tax
| simulator is available at [1]. This is the "simplified"
| version. What matters is box 1AJ for salaried income.
|
| For 100000 USD it's actually a bit higher than for 100000
| EUR.
|
| However, as another commenter said, income tax is not the
| full story - far from it. There are other taxes that you
| have to pay. Also, while social security comes out of
| your paycheck, it's considered taxable income in France
| for the purposes of the income tax. Also, social security
| is usually insufficient, so you usually have to pay for a
| separate insurance. Which, you guessed it, isn't
| deductible from taxes.
|
| As far as a company's concerned, if the employee costs
| 100 EUR "fully loaded", they only get around 55-60 EUR in
| hand. Also, when comparing with the US, don't forget that
| VAT is at 20-25% depending on the country. And, at least
| in France, VAT is levied on some taxes (yup), like for
| example electricity and gas.
|
| [0] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/income-tax-
| calculator/califor...
|
| [1] https://simulateur-ir-
| ifi.impots.gouv.fr/calcul_impot/2022/s...
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| People forget to count the corporate taxes on the
| employers in Europe (to support the welfare state) which
| lowers the salaries of workers making the calculation
| look like taxes are similar.
| themitigating wrote:
| Why won't someone think of the business!
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| No jobs without businesses, so really we are keeping the
| workers in mind.
| sweaty wrote:
| It's a good question. Here, if you have a permanent
| contract, the employer is required to pay into various
| government insurances, and this is mandatory for all
| employers. The salaries here are lower because of this,
| but it's deceiving because the insurances are based on
| your salary. Your employer also pays anywhere between
| 2-10% on top of your monthly salary into a pension fund
| on top of your state pension. So in short, if you make
| 100k EUR, after taxes that's actually your money. So in
| my case, after I've made my monthly mortgage payment, set
| some aside for groceries and some subscriptions, the
| money I have left can be spent on whatever I want without
| worry, I practically don't need to save unless I choose
| to.
|
| You're right in that employers restrict hiring as much as
| possible, what tends to happen here is you get a 1 year
| contract with the option to be taken on permanently, and
| these contracts don't have all of the insurances. Taking
| a permanent contract here is seen as a serious commitment
| to the company, so most people who just want more money
| in their bank account at the end of the month choose not
| to take permanent contracts and take the risk themselves.
|
| If I saved for these things myself in the US, I would've
| been netting less than I do here in Europe, despite my US
| salary being 100k higher. A lot of people live way beyond
| their means with all these things considered.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The value of benefits packages in the US is often around
| 40% of the salary. For example, health insurance, social
| security, 401k matching contributions, stock options,
| etc.
| balfirevic wrote:
| > The salaries here are lower because of this, but it's
| deceiving because the insurances are based on your
| salary.
|
| Salaries in Europe are much lower even when all the
| salary and benefit related expenses (so called "gross 2"
| salary) are taken into account.
| scld wrote:
| Many don't contend with those requirements and it's one
| of myriad reasons that we're mostly talking about U.S.
| companies on this site.
| refurb wrote:
| Which is why in many European countries employers are so
| hesitant to hire - you're signing up for years of paying
| someone.
|
| So imagine your the next unicorn? Would you hire like
| crazy in Europe?
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I tried starting a manufacturing site in Switzerland. We
| wanted to get the Swiss Made badge (70% parts sourced in
| Switzerland and all major assembly steps done by Swiss
| employees). An hourly employee had basic rate of CHF 45
| an hour and they had to be paid some ridiculous benefits
| totaling up to like CHF 120 an hour. Apart from the cost,
| the biggest issue is that you can't fire them essentially
| if you hire them on "permanent basis". It's impossible to
| do anything there for a scrappy small business.
|
| Modern Switzerland is much of a socialist state. It's
| lost all the things that made it a great place for
| business. Zurich is still a small tech hub for startups
| but mostly services and finance. Labor is usually hired
| in US or elsewhere.
|
| About the only place in EU that's pro-small business is
| Italy. It still has some 50% of the GDP from companies
| less than 50 employees.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Pretty much what I expected. Also, I'm surprised that the
| Swiss Franc is worth exactly the same as the US Dollar.
| Is it pegged to it? 45USD per hour for an hourly
| manufacturing job is shocking as well, that's about $90k
| per year. I'm sure it makes it a nice place to live but
| God help them if they ever need to get something done in
| a hurry. I imagine they have to tightly control
| immigration as well.
| thunky wrote:
| > How can any small company or startup survive if they
| have to contend with those kinds of requirements?
|
| That's why Twitter didn't start there.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| If Twitter had started there the US would have just
| scooped it up with their free monopoly money.
| thunky wrote:
| That's beside the point if Europe's regulatory structure
| (among other reasons) made starting a business there less
| attractive anyway.
| friedman23 wrote:
| The free monopoly money that is somehow worth more than
| the european monopoly money.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Only the designated world reserve currency is truly free
| monopoly money.
| mola wrote:
| Because weapons.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| > you would have at least 1 month, more likely 3 month,
| prior notice to just being kicked out
|
| At this point we have no idea what kind of severance
| package Twitter will be offering. I think it's likely that
| what you're saying is pretty much what they're going to
| wind up with - that is, Twitter will push them out the
| door, but with a check equivalent to something like 60 days
| of pay plus like continuation of benefits. Of course, I
| don't know this for sure, but neither do you, so there's no
| point in condemning or praising them yet.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Many Americans think Europe is heartless because youth
| unemployment is allowed to get so high because businesses
| are paralyzed to protect those that have work and thus can
| never reorganize.
|
| Knee-capping the dynamism of youth is a current consensus
| of the European system.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Every coin has 2 sides - yes we have this additional
| security (which I love, just like everybody else), but we
| pay for it. Much lower salaries, companies not so agile, so
| they are hardly world leaders. You simply can't get
| compensation like those folks had/have in Europe, not as
| perm employee on 100%, more like 25-50% of it.
|
| Its actually great, skilled people can choose their
| priorities and how they want to setup their lives and
| career (stupid immigration policies and bad stuff coming
| out of it notwithstanding).
|
| I prefer something in between - ie Switzerland. Salaries
| higher, taxation lower, some middle ground on social
| security - ie easy to fire people, usual 3 months notice by
| law, but social system will give you 70% of your salary (up
| to an OK limit) for first year, you just need to keep doing
| the job hunt. It means you are not shit-scared if you take
| a mortgage for example, you don't need to have such a
| massive reserve like in US. And of course top of the world
| healthcare that cost very little (sickness, accidents are 0
| if you work/retired) and cca free top notch education
| including best universities.
| Vespasian wrote:
| Europe has plenty of world leaders and very large
| cooperations.
|
| Just a few examples: Automotive manufacturers, Siemens,
| ASML, Several arms manufacturer, Airbus just to name a
| few.
|
| In addition, at least where I am, there are a million
| small companies (a few hundred employees) who deliver to
| customers around the world and, I assume, at market
| prices.
|
| It's a balance and probably one of the reasons we lost
| out on the digital race so far.
| bombcar wrote:
| > you don't need to have such a massive reserve like in
| US
|
| If it makes you feel better people in the US don't have
| massive reserves either. They just gamble and hit up
| credit if things hit the fan, even at FAANG salaries.
| watwut wrote:
| But in here, the company has deep debt only because of
| overpriced leveraged buyout. And the layoff have popcorn
| qualities because they are rage driven. The debt twitter had
| originally was much smaller. The scale of layoff that had to
| happen would be much smaller. It is also fair to guess they
| would be deal with more tact and more fairness then done now
| (no I dont believe Musk team is able to actually tell bad and
| good performers apart).
|
| Twitter has some profits last year first time. I am not
| saying it was perfect company. But the deep deep financial
| trouble it is in now is because of leveraged buyout motivated
| by politics (stick it to ennemies) and ego.
| thedorkknight wrote:
| "if they're skilled and useful - as every person should
| always strive to be"
|
| Side note, but the fact that people will "be fine" based on
| their level of economic usefulness - and, indirectly, linking
| their value as a human to their ability to be productive - is
| what keeps me up at night thinking about what happens when
| automation outclasses all of us
| prepend wrote:
| As a programmer for a few decades automation has been a big
| part of my life. When you automate something, there's more
| to do.
|
| If we reach some zen state where truly all has been
| automated then we'll have UBI (or some dystopian hellscape)
| so I don't worry about it.
|
| I've always struggled with programmers who feared
| automation and wrote shitty, complicated, buggy code happy
| that they had "job security."
|
| I go to sleep wishing for the day when I can automate
| everything away.
|
| Also, there's tons of one person businesses you can run if
| you automate workflows.
| kzrdude wrote:
| We won't automatically have UBI, we'll have to fight for
| every part of it, just like historical working class
| movements.
| theprincess wrote:
| > I go to sleep wishing for the day when I can automate
| everything away.
|
| I've been sitting here trying to suss out why something
| about saying this outside the context of a job interview
| feels so cringe to me. Best I can figure is that it's two
| things. 1.) Having that thought as a central part of your
| inner life implies that you have a very limited social
| life. 2.) The lack of worry about your own well being -
| "we'll have UBI or a dystopian hellscape, oh well" -
| feels almost ... subish in a sadomasochistic sort of way.
| Like you're bottoming for the economy (not that there's
| an issue with bottoming, lol).
|
| If you owned your own business it wouldn't strike me this
| way, but if you're just a programmer at a company you
| don't actually get to work less by automating things, you
| just get to work on different stuff. But if you automated
| _everything_ you 'd just be tossed aside and reap no
| benefits. Wishing that on yourself is just.... so
| strangely pathetic. I know you didn't mean to sound
| pathetic. You probably consider it cool or heroic (in a
| nerdy sense) to talk about how much you want to automate
| everything.
|
| Sorry to derail like this. I'm just fascinated by my
| revulsion and trying to untangle it.
| prepend wrote:
| I don't literally think of this every night. I was
| exaggerating and should have been more clear about this
| statement not being literal.
|
| I've never actually ended my day wishing for automating
| everything. But it is an ideal that I would like.
|
| I wouldn't be tossed aside from automating my own
| business as I own it and no one could toss me aside.
| There's not a requirement that I have an employer.
|
| So I don't think automating all my work away means I
| won't have a purpose any longer. I think it will lead to
| more interesting and meaningful work.
|
| I could be wrong but I've automated hundreds, maybe
| thousands of processes over the years for various
| companies and it's always led to me working on more
| interesting stuff.
|
| I don't think it's cool or heroic, whatever that means,
| just part of fun problems that I get to solve.
|
| My lack of worry is based on not having any control over
| the situation so instead focusing on other things. It's
| just a reductive analysis that lets me think I don't have
| to worry about it.
|
| In the extremely small chance that it is possible to
| automate everything so that there's no more work, I don't
| have control over it. In hellscape mode, that sucks and
| is not fun. In UBI mode that's great. Either way, it's
| not affecting my decisions today. I certainly don't wish
| for the negative outcome or relish it's potential.
|
| I think your revulsion may be due to misunderstanding
| some of my motivations.
| thedorkknight wrote:
| It's not the next few years, but half-century out that
| I'm worried about. I'll personally be retired by that
| point, sure, but that doesn't stop me from being deeply
| worried by society at large. Even good programmers are
| going to have a hard time finding jobs.
|
| You're also missing that programming isn't the only
| sector that's going to be upended by automation.
| Basically every job market is going to be affected by the
| end of the century.
|
| >If we reach some zen state where truly all has been
| automated then we'll have UBI (or some dystopian
| hellscape)
|
| In the States at least, the resistance to any form of
| socialism is so strong that I have no faith UBI has a
| snowball's chance in hell.
|
| >there's tons of one person businesses you can run if you
| automate workflows.
|
| and when literally everyone can do it, competition will
| be brutal. When the stakes are "make it or end up
| homeless", and everyone is desperately trying to run
| their own business because corporations don't need to
| hire anymore, we're in deep trouble
| prewett wrote:
| We have about a century of empirical data that says that
| automation does not cause widespread unemployment.
| Automating horses took away all the horse-care jobs and
| business, but they found other things to do. Computers
| automated computers (armies of mostly women who chugged
| out calculations), and they all found new jobs. Nobody
| has a secretary any more. All those people responsible
| for inter-departmental mail are gone, because nobody
| sends memos any more. Nobody has live-in servants any
| more, partly thanks to washing machines, dishwashers, and
| microwaves.
|
| Actually, in some sense, _more_ people have servants,
| just that they are part-time: cleaning services, people
| who keep track of your schedule (executive assistants,
| but for normal people, can 't remember the word).
|
| When Microsoft Word automated away secretaries, it also
| raised the level of quality to be what was formerly
| available only at professional printers, so people spend
| the same amount of time, but now the expectation of
| quality of output is higher.
|
| There can't really be widespread unemployment due to
| automation, because then labor costs would decrease and
| handmade goods would become more affordable, so people
| would start doing that.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Actually studies are that people who specialized in Eg.
| Looming fabrics never found equivalent jobs. They
| literally lost their livelihoods and never regained that
| quality of life. I would be supremely worried if a
| permanent underclass of people whose specialties are
| automated away and _there are no equivalent quality jobs
| for them_.
| rendang wrote:
| Good point, but as a counterbalancing force, those people
| still benefit from the economy-wide productivity increase
| in the long run. An entry-level unskilled worker has a
| much higher standard of living today than a skilled
| tradesman of the 19th century.
| duderific wrote:
| > a permanent underclass of people whose specialties are
| automated away and there are no equivalent quality jobs
| for them.
|
| Isn't this pretty much a description of the US
| manufacturing sector over the last 40 years?
| thedorkknight wrote:
| When it comes to approaching the asymptote of the
| singularity (or just general exponential increase in tech
| advancements across the board, if you don't buy the
| general singularity theory), the societal impact of the
| car replacing horses means little to me in terms of
| predicting the future.
| none_to_remain wrote:
| UBI is orthogonal to socialism. It could exist under
| socialism, but you could also just take the existing
| state of the USA, widely considered capitalist, and
| modify it by setting the Social Security benefits age to
| 0. I've actually seen socialists against the UBI often
| enough; it implies the existence of money and markets
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| That's not what the other poster meant, stop it.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" if they're skilled and useful - as every person should
| always strive to be - they'll be fine"_
|
| And if they're not?
| croak3r wrote:
| Then they only have themselves to blame.
| fnimick wrote:
| So in your world, if someone doesn't have a useful skill,
| they deserve to be destitute?
| alex_sf wrote:
| Not making 500k in a job you're incompetent at != being
| destitute.
| xyzzy4747 wrote:
| They can always move back in with their parents, or worst
| case get a plot of land and start subsistence farming.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Many of them have been paid a high enough multiple of the
| median household income in the state (which is less than
| 80k) for long enough - they'll be fine.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| And if they are not, they should have been fired a long
| time ago.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Welfare and food stamps.
| taurath wrote:
| We're the richest country in the world and yet that lasting
| prosperity only seems to exist for a few. Maybe we're going
| about this wrong. Maybe being heartless and coldly efficient
| doesn't create lasting prosperity.
| cafard wrote:
| In this case, though, we aren't talking about the business
| cycle, are we?
| [deleted]
| anthropodie wrote:
| There is no security. You never know when things will go wrong.
| When pandemic happened software companies like Twitter were
| untouched but millions of workers felt its impact shaking them
| to the core and hence preparing them for better choices next
| time. The employees that are laid off I wish them best of luck
| but they should have been prepared for a day like this. They
| were earning good. It's things like this which transforms
| people. Maybe someone out of these employees will start next
| billion dollar company, who knows?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Business in a free market is a constantly changing and chaotic
| system of creative destruction.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| but underneath this 'business' there are real humans with
| kids & mortgages and a life. we dont/should't have to live to
| feed some capitalistic ideal of maximizing the line rather it
| should be other way round. looking at US for last 40 years
| which way you think its been going?
| rbetts wrote:
| One of the richest people in the world overpays capital holders
| and slashes labor by 50% in order to own "the world's town
| square". Remarkable demonstration of labor weakness.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| What was the average salary of a Twitter employee?
|
| It's great to see the fat getting cut and hopefully more
| companies follow suit
| bananapub wrote:
| don't forget immigration security - if you're on an employer-
| tied visa then you must find a job extremely quickly or leave
| the US and start the process over.
| turtlebits wrote:
| Too many people are unreasonably attached to their jobs. If you
| work in a country/state that is "at will", you should take that
| seriously as if you could lose your source of income at any
| time.
|
| That includes financial planning and money set aside for these
| types of events.
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| Sounds like what you're really saying is "from each according
| to their ability; to each according to their need..."
|
| Also I'm sure you didn't have this intention, but your comment
| made me think about East Germany. When the wall came down,
| there were all these state owned companies that had to be sold,
| something had to be done with them. They could not produce
| enough income to maintain the workforce that they had. This
| really upset a lot of people and they lost their jobs. It was
| not their fault, it was the fault of the state and the
| structure of the company.
|
| Twitter apparently is quite bloated, and for the company to
| survive and succeed it needs to cut costs, or go out of
| business.
|
| Germany could've easily just closed all of those companies in
| the east and laid everyone off, but they did their best to sell
| them so that people could still be employed.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| I must confess that I am finding it difficult to muster
| sympathy for them. And this coming from a man that despises
| Musk's behaviour, and wished he had been barred from buying
| Twitter. My reason being that during the pandemic, I repeatedly
| told people that my biggest fear was not the virus, but the
| economic collapse that would be the inevitable result of global
| lockdowns, and the authoritarian dystopia being shaped by the
| censorship of contrarian views. "First you are working from
| home, and then you are just... at home.", I said. And people
| who tried to share that view on Twitter where harassed and
| banned. Perhaps I will be proven wrong, and the economy will
| quickly rebound, who knows. But being gagged from even
| discussing the possibility of the events we now see unfolding,
| has left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
|
| Watching twitter ban dissenting doctors and scientists reminded
| me of Hannah Arendt and the Eichman trial: "The most radical
| revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the
| revolution"
|
| And this from a NYT movie review: "Arendt
| concluded that evil in the modern world is done neither by
| monsters nor by bureaucrats, but by joiners. That evil, Arendt
| argued, originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated
| bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning
| that they give themselves fully to movements. It is the meaning
| Eichmann finds as part of the Nazi movement that leads him to
| do anything and sacrifice everything. Such joiners are not
| stupid; they are not robots. But they are thoughtless in the
| sense that they abandon their independence, their capacity to
| think for themselves, and instead commit themselves absolutely
| to the fictional truth of the movement."
| [deleted]
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Btw arendt is hella, hella racist. Look at her essay on
| little rock. No defense for that, and she's extremely
| overrated.
| elcomet wrote:
| > First you are working from home, and then you are just...
| at home
|
| Being at home seems indeed scary compared to dying in a
| hallway of an overloaded hospital
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| False dichotomy. It's possible to feel empathy for someone who
| takes a bitter pill, but if the pill makes them and society
| better, I'm not going to be shamed by you for saying it's a
| good thing.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Even worse than that, immigration status. Getting laid off when
| on H1B, _especially_ when other companies are freezing hiring
| and we are getting close to the holidays when everything takes
| longer is _terrifying_. You are on a clock for being simply
| kicked out of the country.
| jquery wrote:
| I didn't even think about this. Absolutely horrifying. A lot
| of hopes and dreams just got destroyed.
| eppp wrote:
| Was this not known when signing up for H1B?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Of course it was known. The system itself is shitty to
| immigrants. But "well you signed up, deal with it" is an
| empathy-free way of responding to this sort of situation.
| An Indian or Chinese citizen can come to the US for
| undergrad, get a PhD in CS at a top US university, be
| unable to get o1 for a variety of reasons, end up with h1b,
| and be on a decades-long waiting list for a green card.
| This person can get married and raise a family while still
| waiting for that green card.
|
| Being weeks away from deportation is unimaginably
| terrifying.
| 988747 wrote:
| > This person can get married and raise a family while
| still waiting for that green card.
|
| That's your mistake right here - making long term plans
| while being on temporary visa. Just assume that you're
| here for a few years to make money, and then need to go
| back to your home country. That's the idea behind H-1B
| visas anyway.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| The green card wait for chinese and indian citizens is
| decades long. This is "don't make any long term plans
| until you are 50" kind of advice.
|
| The idea behind h1b is to bring people to this country to
| work in useful and productive ways. Telling people to get
| the fuck out after a few years of work (even if they've
| spent 8-10 years in school here prior to that) is
| heartless and definitely not good for the country.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _The idea behind h1b is to bring people to this country
| to work in useful and productive ways._
|
| Specifically, in a _temporary_ way. H1B is not an
| immigration visa, it 's a temporary working visa, for
| which duel-intent is acknowledged (it's legal for an H1B
| holder to intend to get and apply for a green card.) But
| at the end of the day, an H1B visa is still a temporary
| work visa, not an immigration visa.
|
| I'm not saying I like it. If it were up to me all the
| temporary work visas would be done away with and replaced
| with a system of permanent visas. But it is what it is.
| wobbly_bush wrote:
| That's hiding behind technicalities. A person on H1B
| needs to leave the country within 30 days after being
| laid off. What life plans can one make around that? Even
| a simple housing lease is minimum 12 months in most parts
| of the country.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| It leads to immigration in the sense that an H1-B
| terminates in a green card or the worker loses it after 6
| years. Compared to a Chinese Z work visa, which you can
| just renew indefinitely and has no path to a permanent
| residency, an H1-B is a completely different beast.
| galdosdi wrote:
| OK, why don't you volunteer then to give up the basic
| human tendency to fall in love, and give it up
| indefinitely for many years at a time? It's not temporary
| if it can last for a decade, is it? Just live a pathetic
| little life in a box, collecting money for the day, many
| years away, when you can finally let yourself be a human
| again?
|
| Tell me, which decade of your life would you be OK with
| throwing away this way? Your 20s? Your 30s? Get back to
| me on that.
|
| By the same logic college students should never date, as
| they may move somewhere far off after graduating.
|
| Sadly, while there is surgery that takes away your
| ability to procreate, there is as yet no surgery that
| will supress your ability to fall in love or to live a
| normal life.
|
| So even if an immigrant comes here with the same stupid
| mindset you are displaying, and tries hard to never fall
| in love, it may happen anyway.
|
| I don't know if I've read a more unempathetic statement
| on HN. Perhaps you are a happy lifelong bachelor, and
| can't relate to any other point of view. That is the only
| case that would make me understand where you're coming
| from, for if you have ever actually experienced love, you
| would understand the hypocrisy of your view.
| 988747 wrote:
| Well, it's not like decades-long delay for green card
| processing is something that surprises you - it is known
| long before you set foot in the US. Why would you plan
| your life around the assumption that somehow the issue
| won't apply to you? Also, H-1B visas are relatively short
| term (6 years tops) so that's the time to figure out your
| green card chances and life plans. Finally, it's not like
| love somehow totally strips you of the ability to think
| rationally. If it is, it's not love, it's obsession.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| this is unimaginably callous, do you not see the worker
| attached to the visa is a human being. they cant even
| have the most basics of human need by the virtue of being
| on a visa? you guys basically want immigrants to be
| slaves & guess what that works for your employers but not
| you the populus. your anger & callousness towards
| immigrants is misdirected.
|
| btw No H1B is just 6years, thats just paperwork, all
| employers know this & workers know this & us gov knows it
| too because you commonly file for a GC near the end of
| that term & use it to further your stay. the problem
| parent post is facing is that us immigration rules are
| unclear and adhoc in many cases & folks in the pipeline
| end up suffering for it mostly.
| 988747 wrote:
| > they cant even have the most basics of human need by
| the virtue of being on a visa?
|
| Well, if you ignore reality of your situation because you
| are high on love hormones that's on you.
|
| BTW. I'm not even from US, I live in central Europe, I
| spent a year in the US for one of the projects I worked
| on, didn't last, so I came back. You might say that I
| also fell victim to "unclear and ad hoc immigration
| rules", except they aren't ad hoc or unclear at all: if
| your intention is to immigrate to the US then H-1B is not
| even the right visa type for you, you should apply for
| EB-3 instead.
| [deleted]
| adityasaky wrote:
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > That's your mistake right here - making long term plans
| while being on temporary visa. Just assume that you're
| here for a few years to make money, and then need to go
| back to your home country. That's the idea behind H-1B
| visas anyway.
|
| Just to be clear, since H-1B (or visas with similar
| restrictions) are the _only_ path to permanent residency
| for people of many countries, this attitude is tantamount
| to "we don't want any immigrants from ______, period".
| eppp wrote:
| Lying about job requirements to import lower paid
| hostages has been an issue on here for years. I have
| empathy for the individual but they are also hurting me
| by doing what they are doing even if it is rational for
| them.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Software jobs create software jobs. I find it very hard
| to believe that the US bringing in a lot of people from
| around the world to work in software has actually hurt
| you. A major reason why tech compensation is so huge in
| the US is because it is a tech center, and a large part
| of that is because we draw people from the entire world.
| sweaty wrote:
| This happened to me (and is in part why I'm a tad salty
| in the comments), I was a H1B and in the process of
| adjustment of status. While your green card application
| is pending, you're legally in a grey area if your H1B
| expires. I had to leave for family circumstances but
| advanced parole took months to process, I figured it
| would be okay since it was a serious emergency. Upon
| returning I was told I couldn't re-enter the US because
| even though my stay in the US was completely legal, I had
| technically overstayed the terms of my H1B. The USCIS
| policy and CBP policy differs around this. There's a
| specific USCIS policy memo that mentions this actually.
| So I'm now banned, no leniency, no understanding for the
| situation.
| whoooooo123 wrote:
| What does 'advanced parole' mean in this context?
| junar wrote:
| Advance parole is the permission to leave and re-enter
| the US while your green card application is pending.
| USCIS is pretty backlogged right now, so getting anything
| approved, including advance parole, can take longer,
| which leads to bad experiences like this one.
|
| https://www.cbp.gov/travel/us-citizens/advance-parole
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I'm very sorry this happened to you. US immigration is
| heartless in a huge number of ways.
| prvc wrote:
| What makes them entitled to stay in the US without
| working in a "specialty occupation"?
| kaashif wrote:
| I mean, some people are coming at this from some kind of
| altruistic angle, but let's be pragmatic: immigration is
| the American superpower and the key to expanding the
| dominance of American companies decades into the future.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Yep even if you take a maximally cynical view and think
| of policies exclusively from the perspective of rival
| nation states, I have no idea how you'd conclude that
| pulling very large numbers of smart people from China to
| the US is bad for America's hegemonic influence in world
| politics.
| galdosdi wrote:
| Some shitty body shops are going to have a field day with
| this. Some random regional nontech companies who staff their
| IT departments as cheaply as they can are going to randomly
| accidentally end up with some MUCH better talent than they
| deserve for what they pay because of this.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| I've been laid off in downturns a couple times before, so it
| has been me in that pit.
|
| But you can't have the boom without the bust, and shrinking
| bloated companies is a thing that has to happen one way or the
| other.
|
| Also, the Twitter layoff in particular has had about as much
| advance notice as anything I've seen. It's been clear for
| months and months it was going to happen. Plenty of time to get
| yourself in order or get out first.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| No one said we needed "the boom".
| prvc wrote:
| > I feel bad for people who are laid off by the machinations of
| billionaires.
|
| Do you have different feelings about people who are laid off by
| the machinations of centi-millionaires?
| Macha wrote:
| Generally the centi-millionaires don't have a fan following
| cheering them on, so there's less of an opposing view to
| require a comment like the top level one to be made
| fast-nim wrote:
| zppln wrote:
| So, article is a bit vague on who were let go. Is this gonna have
| any real impact on operations going forward? Could you really axe
| half the staff and not?
| SavageBeast wrote:
| Now is a good time for us all to chill, take inventory as the
| year draws to an end and uncertain economic conditions have us
| all a little on edge.
|
| Change happens, it's uncomfortable at first but it can be made to
| work for you too. Change isn't always bad. Can anyone look at
| Twitters performance as a public company and say that no changes
| were warranted? Twitters "mission" wasn't exactly being well
| executed either. Something was bound to happen eventually and
| this was a long time coming.
|
| Had it been some Generic Private Equity Company that took Twitter
| private nobody would even be talking about this at all. But since
| you-know-who lead the buyout a lot of people have their tails in
| a knot over it. Has anyone considered what a giant hornets nest
| Elon has kicked in all this? I personally feel sorry for the poor
| bastard myself and I bet he wishes he could go back in time and
| ctrl-z all this terrible idea.
|
| More or less he's put a big chunk of his lifes work on the line
| over a silly tweet about buying Twitter. You know this all
| started off as a silly tweet, that turned into a funny joke, that
| got serious and became a potentially career wrecking mistake with
| too much momentum to stop.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| The lesson here is that he is not exempt from the consequences
| of his statements. And good! Hopefully he learns a lesson. When
| someone has such a gigantic platform in which to influence the
| lives of so many people, he absolutely should be humble and
| thoughtful about what he says. If it takes a $44 billion dollar
| lesson to teach him that, then oh well.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > More or less he's put a big chunk of his lifes work on the
| line over a silly tweet about buying Twitter.
|
| It's a forty-four billion dollar drunk ebay purchase. But it
| comes _after_ previous occasions when he 'd been told by the
| SEC to stop making stock-price-moving announcements on twitter.
| It's just astonishingly irresponsible of him to have got in
| this position in the first place.
| SavageBeast wrote:
| > It's a forty-four billion dollar drunk ebay purchase.
|
| ROFL!!! Well said! Very succinctly put.
| Tainnor wrote:
| I don't care a lot about Twitter itself, and I'm willing to
| entertain the notion that it could function equally "well" with a
| much smaller fraction of the workforce...
|
| But this is something that should be implemented gradually. Here
| is someone who just stepped into the company, and he's laying off
| people en masse. Even if you concede that Musk is some sort of
| genius (which I don't, but that's besides the point), that
| doesn't mean that you can just walk into a company and tell from
| day 1 who is productive and who isn't. And even if you could,
| making redundancies obsolete isn't something you can just do in
| one go, even if certain people and processes are inefficient
| there would probably be a need for a transition period where the
| institutional knowledge can be transferred.
|
| Given everything else I know about Musk and this deal, this looks
| to me like a knee-jerk action, not a careful business decision.
| dmix wrote:
| It's almost like blaming the new president for having to raise
| taxes after the last president spent too much $$ and raised the
| deficit during the good times.
|
| When Twitter massively expanded their headcount over the last 3
| years their stock price was nearly 30%+ higher than it was
| before the stock market tanked.
|
| People here aren't paying the bills or looking at the financial
| sheets. We're taking a human look at it (which is good) but
| there's more to this stuff.
|
| The C-suite was probably waiting for Musk to take over to make
| any hard choices that were coming anyway.
| r00fus wrote:
| All of what you said does not absolve the fact that Musk is
| acting whimsically and clearly showing errors of judgement in
| his words an actions since taking ownership.
|
| Memes aside (I kinda LOL at his sink joke), he is breaking
| laws and terminating entire departments without any handover
| or planning.
|
| The entire verified fiasco is a good indicator - the new
| process won't actually require verification of identity - is
| essentially a shakedown of existing verified users.
| type-r wrote:
| source for breaking laws? I've only seen speculation over
| the past few weeks that he's not paying severance, however
| in actuality we now see he's paying them until beginning of
| Feb to not work.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then
| treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion.
|
| Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be
| productive". Musk is not a proponent of that. He is a
| micromanaging, capricious, easily distracted, arrogant and
| vindictive CEO.
|
| If twitter thrives then we can expect copycats to try and spread
| his shitty work philosophy (like everyone idolises Jobs.)
| time_to_smile wrote:
| Tech "treated employees right" because for awhile software
| engineers had a "monopoly on skill". If you rewind to around
| 2008 and earlier there really were more getting work done,
| building real things jobs out there than people who could do
| it. There were a lot of startups that hand a hard time getting
| people to just build the initial CRUD apps to start their
| business.
|
| Startups and smart companies realized that if you couldn't
| compete on pay you could compete on how you treated employees.
| In the years leading up to the start of the current boom the
| pay differential between big companies and startups was't as
| vast as it is now.
|
| Then industry started pushing hard to create more software
| engineers from the traditional path of increased undergrad comp
| sci enrollments to the development and expansion of the
| bootcamp industry. Then the money started to go up and more and
| more people started rushing into the industry for the money.
| When I started in tech ~2005 almost every software person I
| knew got into the field because they loved to write code and
| build things, when I talk to recent software engineers almost
| all of them answer that compensation is their main driver
| today.
|
| Now anyone hiring today (or let's say 3 months prior to today)
| will claim that it's _still_ really hard to find good devs.
| However the amount of work being done that is essential and
| productive has dramatically decreased. Head counts have been
| expanding because money was flowing and managers need more
| people under them to get promoted (this logic flows even to the
| CEO level).
|
| But now this long, long tech bubble is starting to burst and
| we'll companies across the board start asking "how much of this
| work is really necessary? how can we become profitable?" and
| we'll realize as an industry that we are _way_ over indexed on
| software engineers.
|
| This is exactly what happened during the dotcom era, I guess
| most people are just too young to remember. Anyone who could
| use a computer got hired to work in tech, paid ridiculous for
| the time, there were tons of people enrolling in EE and CS, a
| huge number of software engineers. The the bubble burst and a
| lot of the engineers disappeared, CS enrollments dropped
| radically, salaries went way down, and the only people left in
| the industry were people who just really like writing code and
| building things.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| There's parts of what you wrote that are somewhat accurate
| but for the most part this is nonsense.
|
| > when I talk to recent software engineers almost all of them
| answer that compensation is their main driver today.
|
| I don't really understand what you're saying here. If you're
| trying to imply that folks are getting into the industry
| solely to make money, there is some truth to that but it's
| hardly the majority. That being said it's foolish to imagine
| that if the money dried up that everyone writing software
| would keep doing it. But software isn't going anywhere, so
| neither will the money.
|
| Outside of a few areas, the global situation is that software
| engineers make decent salaries but are far from the top,
| especially outside of North America.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| > Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and
| they'll be productive". Musk is not a proponent of that. He is
| a micromanaging, capricious, easily distracted, arrogant and
| vindictive CEO.
|
| Layoffs aren't the same as mistreatment. It matters more how he
| treats the employees who stick around and the new ones he
| brings in
| delfinom wrote:
| >THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then
| treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion.
|
| Yea but guess what will come into fashion at that point?
|
| Unions.
| adam_arthur wrote:
| Tech's been that way primarily due to a shortage of labor.
|
| Once layoffs begin in earnest across tech, there will be no
| more shortage.
| nxmnxm99 wrote:
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| If actors and football players can unionize so can software
| developers. There's no point in intentionally allowing our
| peers to be treated worse, because then it allows our bosses
| to treat us just as badly. The most famous actors have all
| the power to demand better and yet are still part the guild
| because the demands they can make actually rise as the floor
| of actor treatment also rises.
| yesdocs wrote:
| The audacity to think that running a company well involves
| running your employees into the ground is peak Republican
| stupidity. There are thousands of companies that are great
| and profitable and yet are still great places to work.
| EricDeb wrote:
| I dont think Musk necessarily thinks all of that is ending..
| more that he doesn't want to pay for all the employees that
| currently exist at twitter so he's making life miserable for
| them.
| smolder wrote:
| > trying to unionize despite being the most privileged class
| of people in human history.
|
| That's absurd. They're not even close to the most privileged
| class today, let alone in history. The most privileged class
| of people today are old money, born wealthy. Apart from them,
| there are plenty of new-money C level execs, finance people,
| celebrities, and so on who are rich enough to never work
| again, let alone unionize. Religious leaders can be extremely
| privileged as well.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| It's funny because you would've been one of the first people
| fired at Twitter given that you seem to work in sales. I also
| imagine you do not in fact work 14 hour days 7 days a week
| like Musk demands which would seem to make you an entitled
| softy.
| davewritescode wrote:
| I do agree there's a lot of people in tech who don't work
| hard and the problem has only gotten worse recently. I
| personally appreciate a blue collar approach to development.
| Don't be arrogant, do what you say you will and make sure
| that you're putting in your 40-50 hours a week of work, not
| 20 hours of work and 20 hours of ping-pong and bullshitting.
| Above all, be a professional.
|
| However, if you think for a second that you can replace US
| developers, building products for Americans with someone from
| Nigeria you are off your ass. The hardest part of software
| development isn't yolo-ing code into an IDE. It's collecting
| requirements, troubleshooting and translating that into both
| code and requirements docs for other teams.
|
| This is hard for native english speakers and approaching
| impossible for offshore teams. It works reasonable well with
| teams in the Americas because the timezones are close and the
| culture/language barriers aren't as high.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > However, if you think for a second that you can replace
| US developers, building products for Americans with someone
| from Nigeria you are off your ass.
|
| I've been a SWE for decades and have worked on large,
| complex projects. I've always been an IC, never officially
| a manager (personal choice), but at the moment as part of
| my regular job writing code I am also managing a team of 10
| developers from a country where they are being paid around
| 1/5th our rates and they are doing a very good job at at
| it.
|
| I don't make the hiring decisions where I am at the moment,
| and this was the decision. It turned out that, yes, good
| developers from country X can easily replace good
| developers from country Y.
|
| It's the same skills, you either have them or you don't.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > * The hardest part of software development isn't yolo-ing
| code into an IDE. It's collecting requirements,
| troubleshooting and translating that into both code and
| requirements docs for other teams.*
|
| Pre-agile development laundered all that through a bunch of
| heavyweight documents and such. And while it had issues -
| leading to the whole agile thing - it also didn't
| completely _not_ work.
| nxmnxm99 wrote:
| LOL. You're completely delusional. How exactly do you
| suppose multi-billion dollar companies selling to Americans
| while hiring Indians, like Freshdesk, operate? The average
| IIT grad is going to smack you - as cute as it is you think
| you're worth 6 figures because you can "collect
| requirements in English"
|
| This arrogance is why you'll be out of a job in ten years.
| The rest of the world is here to eat your lunch, yet
| American egos refuse to see the signs.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| >if you think for a second that you can replace US
| developers, building products for Americans with someone
| from Nigeria you are off your ass.
|
| Looking at some of the crap coming out of the faangms - and
| a few others - I'll take a bet on the non-us developers
| ('nigerians')/ ui-deciders making a quite a few substantial
| improvements, and certainly not changing things just for
| the fuck of it. My hosts file is now full of the software-
| i-use-the-most's ip adresses so they don't/ can't auto-
| update when they try to phone home and all end up looking
| the same, whereas previously each had 'character'.
| nfRfqX5n wrote:
| Gotta work harder to make those shareholders more money
| wittycardio wrote:
| Insanely profitable trillion dollar company that the entire
| world depends on ? Let me guess you're in saas sales or some
| other unproductive garbage like that
| gota wrote:
| In other words, if developers had guild mentality the ones left
| at twitter would have great incentive to actually sabotage the
| company
| polote wrote:
| > Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and
| they'll be productive".
|
| Maybe that was what the field was letting visible, but in
| reality that has never been the case. There is everyday news
| about unicorns where employees complain that the culture is
| toxic, and that the CEO is impossible to work with. Only need
| to read Glassdoor pages.
| lumost wrote:
| I suspect that part of this is a re-buttle to WFH. In the past,
| managers generally could see who was doing what. Now it's based
| on trust. If someone decides to watch TV all day while
| sometimes checking slack... well then they can. No one ever had
| any idea how long coding tasks took anyway. Some people are
| doing fine in this new world, and some are struggling. Whether
| I'm succeeding or struggling depends on the day.
| lithos wrote:
| Why should a manager care as long as the employee's output is
| average or better?
| lumost wrote:
| It's been known for a long time that the output of teams is
| highly variable, and difficult to compare within an
| organization. If your team isn't delivering, and you are
| delivering slightly more than the average - where does that
| leave the company?
| yodsanklai wrote:
| It's a free market. He'll keep employees who adhere to this
| culture and those who think the pay is worth it. Others will go
| work somewhere else.
| altacc wrote:
| Classic free market fallacy. It's only a free market if there
| are other options available. Those in power control the
| options available and low regulation free markets enable them
| align at the lowest common denominator.
| mc32 wrote:
| Are you saying all other companies are just Musk-company
| clones and thus treat their employees as Musk does? I get
| the feeling people think Musk's management style is an
| outlier and that's why they are complaining --but you seem
| to be sayin, "they're all like that and we have no
| options".
| q1w2 wrote:
| The job market for engineers is still incredibly
| competitive.
| incone123 wrote:
| At present there are other options available for Twitter
| workers. You make a reasonable point though; Its easy to
| imagine skilled engineers are doing well but equally we
| could say that its just the lowest common denominator terms
| and conditions for that kind of job are better than those
| for most other jobs.
| infamouscow wrote:
| Twitter employees are compensated better than 99% of the US
| population and have more employment options available to
| them than virtually anyone on the planet. Give me a fucking
| break.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| There are lots of help wanted out now and incredibly how
| unemployment. Options abound. Twitter employees wont starve
| to death if they leave.
|
| They might take a pay and lifestyle cut. do you consider
| that not an option?
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| Highly paid Twitter SWEs have a lot of other options,
| although the tightening job market is making it harder.
| Twitter's competitors are also recruiting directly from it
| Closi wrote:
| > Classic free market fallacy. It's only a free market if
| there are other options available. Those in power control
| the options available and low regulation free markets
| enable them align at the lowest common denominator.
|
| People don't pay good developers lots of money because they
| want to pay lots of money, they pay because good developers
| are in short supply.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Hmm this poses an interesting theory. We know that part
| of the motivation of Obama's "Learn to Code" initiative
| and the coding bootcamps was to increase the supply of
| developers. Now that there is supposedly a recession
| coming it might be the case that in the end it will end
| up tilting the scales back in the developers court. The
| reason being that not 100% of the bootcampers are in it
| fore the love of the job but only for the money. We will
| see people dropping out of the market and once it
| recovers we might be back in a situation where there were
| too few devs.
| fullshark wrote:
| The point is OP thinks everywhere else will soon be exactly
| like Twitter.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| Doesn't make sense, there are thousands of interesting
| companies, each of them with their own culture.
| willsoon wrote:
| This. Who kill by capitalism will be killed by capitalism.
| What's that noise (tik tok reference) about that "creating
| and Ethical A.I." and I'm a God you not you trust. Nonsense.
| ?What that noise?
| linuxftw wrote:
| I mean, there's the possibility that Twitter was entirely
| mismanaged and they had tons us useless staff. Given their
| profitability, I'd say this is exactly the case.
| lucideer wrote:
| I think you're giving Musk too much credit by classifying this
| as not "treating employees nicely" - he's mismanaging things in
| every way possible. The individual treatment of employees is
| such a small subset of it (e.g. Bezos also mistreats employees
| but seems much more grounded & competent than Musk).
|
| My real curiosity from the whole affair is gauging the actual
| impact a CEO can have on a company's success / failure. No
| doubt Twitter's had issues as a product for a long time, long
| before Musk came along. Whatever direction the company goes
| next, will be be due to or despite Musk's input.
| SicSemperUranus wrote:
| Are people really expecting Twitter to survive The Musk? His
| rash actions almost feel like sabotage. I honestly expect
| Twitter to be dead or irrelevant in 2 years at most.
| grumple wrote:
| There's already a bigger org doing this - Amazon. They are
| constantly hiring and struggling to replace those who leave -
| even during their new corporate hiring freeze.
|
| Tech workers are still in very high demand. And the younger
| generation seems much more willing to unionize or refuse poor
| working conditions.
| delfinom wrote:
| Amazon is a completely asinine company that not only
| recognizes the need and difficulties to continue replacing
| turnover, they continue to actually maintain a turnover goals
| and mechanisms.
|
| I really do think they are going to speedrun themselves to
| labor pool exhaustion in a first for a company in the US.
| Their management seems fully head in sand.
|
| But hey, even Bezos said in an interview that he doesn't see
| Amazon lasting forever, even 30 years tops.
| nimbius wrote:
| 'treat your employees nicely' exists in tech for one reason
| only: to deter unionization in the face of overwhelming
| profiteering at the expense of an overworked tech cattle.
|
| if twitter employees understand now the excess capital from
| their labor has been extracted without due pleasantries such as
| notice or severance, then Musk has done far worse to the tech
| industry than just lay a bunch of people off, hes galvanized
| the case for tech worker unions.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| It seems extremely challenging to construct a theory of how
| an unprofitable company is profiteering or extracting excess
| capital.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| SpaceX does not seem to have a problem attracting talent and
| even poaching it from competitors.
|
| The difference might be in the fact that Musk founded it and
| allegedly takes part in the recruitment process himself. Maybe
| he wants to do the same at Twitter. Turning an already existing
| company with an already existing company culture around is much
| more complicated, though.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| SpaceX is going somewhere. Twitter is going nowhere.
|
| This is a political play.
|
| Musk may be a competent engineer, but he's used to being
| Emperor. He's completely out of his depth with culture and
| politics. So he's unprepared for the brutal muck-racking,
| humiliation, and character assassination that underpin
| political power games.
|
| The "You can have free speech for just $8/month" accidental
| branding is already such a bad look. I don't see that he has
| the instincts, talent, or experience to even understand why -
| never mind to do better.
| ok123456 wrote:
| > Musk may be a competent engineer
|
| What has he personally engineered. He's an 'ideas guy' and
| maybe a manager.
| CommieBobDole wrote:
| I think the difference is SpaceX doing cool cutting-edge
| things with rockets. People want to be a part of that and are
| willing to take less pay and poorer working conditions to do
| so.
|
| Twitter is boring. Its explosive growth days are behind it,
| working there now is basically about maintaining a legacy
| platform that has a bunch of problems that mostly aren't
| technology problems. It's about as interesting as working for
| a big insurance company; if the paycheck and working
| conditions aren't there, you're not going to be able to
| attract talent.
| dver wrote:
| Does Twitter have the ability to have a mission vision that
| people will sacrifice for? That's what keeps the recruiting
| pipelines full for the other companies and allows for the "we
| put up with Elon's BS" culture.
|
| Tesla, saving the work through EV
|
| SpaceX, projecting humanity into the cosmos
|
| Twitter, ?
| khazhoux wrote:
| > THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful
| then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion.
|
| How bold, to speak for everyone ;-)
|
| I really don't see this as a "treat employees nicely" issue.
| I'm open to being convinced otherwise. But... Elon's premise
| from day 0 was that Twitter was mismanaged -- bloated,
| misguided, bad as a business and broken as product. This echoes
| the sentiment even by many here on HN over the years. Now Elon
| owns it, and is undoing the hiring decisions of previous
| management, to start with a clean slate. Seems to me this was
| simply an inexorable part of his takeover, and so you may as
| well be saying it "wasn't nice" of Elon to buy the company.
|
| Also, a completely different counterpoint: If an employee's
| layoff is inevitable, it is much nicer for that is be part of a
| mass layoff like this, rather than a surgical one later.
| Because these people have a perfect explanation for their
| dismissal when they apply at their next job.
| watwut wrote:
| > Elon's premise from day 0 was that Twitter was mismanaged
| -- bloated, misguided, bad as a business and broken as
| product.
|
| And then he bought misguided broken product for 4 time the
| price and took deep debt for it.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| And through a set of misguided decisions initially he
| caused advertisers to depart Twitter and revenue collapse.
|
| I imagine the last man is dying 500 years from now and
| thinking "... now we just could have gotten to Mars if Elon
| Musk hadn't posted that tweet"
|
| Selling advertising is all about the emotions of the buyer:
| you'd better believe that half the price of ads on the
| radio has to do with how the business owner feels when they
| hear their name on the radio and that the first, second and
| third tactic of the person who sells ads for your local
| newspaper is "I know this tiny ad in our paper costs about
| as much as an employee and it might not seem to pay for
| itself, but if you stop advertising your customers will
| think you went out of business."
| xapata wrote:
| > I imagine the last man is dying 500 years from now and
| thinking
|
| Women inherit the earth.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| or cats
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > If an employee's layoff is inevitable, it is much nicer for
| that is be part of a mass layoff like this,
|
| you mean an illegal one?
|
| I suggest you try it.
|
| Look the issue is this, Musk is creating a climate where it
| is expected that people effectively sleep at the office. Do
| you have a family? well you don't anymore.
|
| and through all of this pain, shit stirring and general
| "disruption", there is no strategic leadership, or clear
| headed product leadership. Unless you count "pay to
| spam/harass" & scaring away your advertising partners as a
| product strategy.
|
| Layoffs are not a strategy, they are a side effect.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Mixing a lot of issues:
|
| * Not treating employees "nicely" (original comment above)
|
| * Legality of layoffs (should be straightforward to
| determine)
|
| * Environment where people are asked to work unreasonably-
| long hours --> Irrelevant to layoffs.
|
| I would argue there is very clear leadership happening:
| Musk made the unambiguous (and by definition, clear)
| determination that Twitter's staff is bloated by 50%. Cut
| the fat, take the short-term hit in ads and usage, rebuild
| it stronger. Whether I agree with how he determined the
| "fat" isn't important.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| While the idea that Twitter was mismanaged is certainly part
| of his motivation, it doesn't explain Musk's behavior at
| Tesla or "SlaveX". In fact, flipping the table over the first
| week belies more than a little arrogance and little
| motivation to understand what he bought. (There's reports
| that he wants to cut half of infrastructure costs. Fail whale
| anyone?)
|
| He's a billionaire that treats employees like shit.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| That's not obviously unreasonable to me. "Half" is a
| suspiciously round number, but coming out of an era of very
| easy money, it'd surprise me if any large company doesn't
| have some double digit percentage of infra spending that's
| not really necessary.
| merely-unlikely wrote:
| > flipping the table over the first week belies more than a
| little arrogance and little motivation to understand what
| he bought
|
| Typically you want to make major changes as soon as
| possible after a transition of power. It sets a new
| baseline to work from and avoids an overhang of fear that
| more drastic changes may be coming. You change regime and
| set a calm new normal.
|
| It's also crucial to not then continue making drastic
| changes. Tbd on that.
|
| I say that both for the weekend work crunch and the
| layoffs. The long hours and removal of benefits should be
| harsher on day one than going forward. You want to set the
| tone upfront and shake out people who aren't willing to go
| along, but you don't want to make unsustainable practices a
| constant. And you especially do not want the overhang of
| fear of additional layoffs coming.
|
| So important to make harsh decisions day one and then back
| off a bit going forward.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| I don't think the point is that the layoffs themselves are
| "not nice"--I think most people are in agreement that Twitter
| was not particularly well-run. But there's a difference
| between e.g. the layoffs we saw at Stripe yesterday and
| what's happening at Twitter today.
|
| The Stripe layoffs came with a clear message from the top
| brass, solid severance and benefits continuation options,
| etc., while Twitter staff have received no communication from
| new management (until the unsigned and rather robotic letter
| last night), arbitrarily implemented deadlines that require
| extreme hours, and what appear to me at least to be attempts
| by Twitter to construct cause in order to weasel out of
| severance and notification requirements.
|
| Nobody is owed a job, layoffs are sometimes necessary, and
| Musk bought the company and can do whatever he wants within
| the bounds of the law, sure. But I think we're all better off
| when we treat each other with respect, and that doesn't seem
| to be happening here.
| Mouthfeel wrote:
| martius wrote:
| Even if we assume the changes are for good and will "fix" the
| company, asking people to work nights and week-ends while
| conducting mass layoffs in less than a week is a "treat
| employees nicely" issue.
|
| Actually, I think we're more on the level of "threat
| employees with basic decency".
| Test0129 wrote:
| We don't actually know the situation. If he wants people to
| work 84 hour work weeks regularly - yeah that's a problem.
| I looked at it charitably. Twitter is in such bad shape the
| only choice is to burn out engineers in order to fix it.
| This points to terrible product management, which points to
| terrible engineering leadership, which points to a terrible
| C-suite. It sucks, but once you pass the point of no return
| you can't hire more people (they take months to ramp up),
| and you're gutting the low performers (they will slow you
| down), so unfortunately the work has to be foisted onto the
| rest. It's not a fun time, it will cause more people to
| quit, but it's also the only solution to fix a trainwreck
| if you notice the speeding freight train too late.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Being this hostile though will end up chasing out the
| high performers too, since if they're good they can
| relocate easily.
| ahtihn wrote:
| > If he wants people to work 84 hour work weeks regularly
| - yeah that's a problem.
|
| No. The fact that it even crosses his mind as an
| acceptable demand at any time is a problem. No one, under
| any circumstance, should ever be asked to work that much
| in a week. It should be a criminal offense for an
| executive to even allow employees to work that much.
|
| > Twitter is in such bad shape the only choice is to burn
| out engineers in order to fix it.
|
| Nope. Even if it would otherwise go bankrupt that choice
| shouldn't legally be available.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| To be clear, that's not the only choice, it's the path of
| least resistance and framed as the only choice.
|
| The other choices are just more work.
| Volt wrote:
| We already know what's happening at his other companies.
| You're very optimistic if you think this isn't a continuation
| of that.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| nindalf wrote:
| I think deep down we all knew that burning people out has a
| decent chance of getting you solid results in the short term.
| The problem comes after, when people who understand best how
| your systems work will quit because they're burned out husks of
| their former selves.
|
| This is obviously not sustainable, because it's difficult to
| recruit after you've built a reputation as burnout central.
|
| Unless the business is run by a "tech visionary" who is "making
| the world a better place" and has millions of fans. These
| millions of fans would jump at the chance of working for him.
|
| Musk burning out Twitter employees by making them do twice as
| much work is fine, because he'll have no trouble recruiting. He
| might be able to turn the business around.
|
| It's quite possible there will copycats, but they'll have less
| success than Musk.
| chinathrow wrote:
| > then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion.
|
| To other CEOs: you can make a distinction right there when you
| fire people and do not need to look to Musk.
| titzer wrote:
| The same is true of leadership at all levels. The US political
| situation isn't looking that great because of the popularity of
| all kinds of jerk behavior that has become the norm.
| Ironically, Twitter itself is partly responsible for that, as
| crapping on your political opponents has become more important
| than having policy proposals or solving problems. It's a
| downward spiral when we accept shitty behaviors from
| leadership, because of exactly this copycat tendency of people
| --they emulate behavior of elites, sometimes unconsciously.
| tstrimple wrote:
| I don't think Twitter is responsible for a planned shift in
| political behavior decades in the making.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-
| gi...
|
| > But Gingrich had a plan. The way he saw it, Republicans
| would never be able to take back the House as long as they
| kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded
| civic desire to keep congressional business humming along.
| His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that
| were essential to legislating, and then seize on the
| resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the
| institution of Congress itself. "His idea," says Norm
| Ornstein, a political scientist who knew Gingrich at the
| time, "was to build toward a national election where people
| were so disgusted by Washington and the way it was operating
| that they would throw the ins out and bring the outs in."
|
| > Gingrich recruited a cadre of young bomb throwers--a group
| of 12 congressmen he christened the Conservative Opportunity
| Society--and together they stalked the halls of Capitol Hill,
| searching for trouble and TV cameras. Their emergence was
| not, at first, greeted with enthusiasm by the more moderate
| Republican leadership. They were too noisy, too brash, too
| hostile to the old guard's cherished sense of decorum. They
| even looked different--sporting blow-dried pompadours while
| their more camera-shy elders smeared Brylcreem on their comb-
| overs.
|
| > Gingrich and his cohort showed little interest in
| legislating, a task that had heretofore been seen as the
| primary responsibility of elected legislators. Bob
| Livingston, a Louisiana Republican who had been elected to
| Congress a year before Gingrich, marveled at the way the
| hard-charging Georgian rose to prominence by ignoring the
| traditional path taken by new lawmakers. "My idea was to work
| within the committee structure, take care of my district, and
| just pay attention to the legislative process," Livingston
| told me. "But Newt came in as a revolutionary."
|
| > For revolutionary purposes, the House of Representatives
| was less a governing body than an arena for conflict and
| drama. And Gingrich found ways to put on a show. He
| recognized an opportunity in the newly installed C-span
| cameras, and began delivering tirades against Democrats to an
| empty chamber, knowing that his remarks would be beamed to
| viewers across the country.
|
| Newt Gingrich and Roger Ailes have done far more damage to
| political discourse than anything social media could hope to
| do.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Yes, everything is a conspiracy orchestrated by ${group you
| don't like} for ${nefarious purpose}. There's no way that
| people legitimately change their own views.
| tstrimple wrote:
| Stating a goal of ending bi-partisan politics and
| following through on enacting that goal all in public in
| a very documented way isn't a conspiracy. There is a
| direct connection between the dysfunction in politics
| today and the explicit and public actions taken by
| conservatives to make it this way.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| > treat your employees right, and they'll be productive
|
| Until complacency settles in, blubber accumulates and the
| productivity takes a nose dive.
|
| You don't have to like Musk to agree that 7500 employees seem
| like few Ks too much for what Twitter is.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Are these layoffs even legal under the WARN act?
| tofuahdude wrote:
| It depends. People are jumping to conclusions on this point
| before full information is available.
|
| There are many carve-outs that will dismiss WARN liability:
| if severance packages are offered and accepted (with
| appropriate conditions), the WARN act is irrelevant.
| octokatt wrote:
| Nope. Lawsuit filed.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-04/twitter-s.
| ..
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| This is basically fake news and a performative suit.
|
| The WARN act states that companies that dont provide notice
| have to pay 60 days severance. the penalty is reduced by
| any severance pay from the employer. Twitter is already
| paying 60 days of severance.
|
| I know this is a heated topic with diverse opinions, but
| lets try to improve the quality of information and
| knowledge..
|
| https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySecti
| o...
| DannyBee wrote:
| Federal WARN act penalty is 60 days severance (California's
| calculation is more complicated, but it still limits
| penalty period to 60 days, AFAIK).
|
| So they won't care much - spin the wheel, see what a court
| decides, etc.
|
| It won't get people their jobs back - reinstatement is not
| a penalty in either WARN act.
| mbreese wrote:
| Yeah, but you know people will be given a severance package
| if they sign those rights away.
|
| That's the quid pro quo here.
| sedeki wrote:
| Do you think tech employees have ever been treated too good?
| This is the reality for a lot of working adults.
|
| Elon Musk would probably suck as a middle manager for the
| reasons you state. And probably as the big boss too.
|
| I believe his opinions are correct. But I wouldn't necessarily
| want to work for him. He is a machine.
| 131012 wrote:
| He is not a machine. He is a meatbag, like you and me, with a
| lot of money and ego.
| khazhoux wrote:
| I interpreted "machine" as "unburdened with empathy."
| DonHopkins wrote:
| "Lawnmower".
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246
| yafbum wrote:
| I think Apple (esp successful as it was under Jobs) and Amazon
| (known to put its employees in the wringer) have already made
| that point. China is going to make that point louder over the
| decade to come (eg TikTok is successful here, a lot of it on
| the backs of people working "996" over in China).
|
| Luckily we'll still have Oracle as a counterexample...
|
| Tech companies that treat their employees right might put a
| veneer of strategy to it in order to make it palatable to
| shareholders ("we're not wasting your money, we're retaining
| critical talent"), but I think the real reason that some CEOs
| and company cultures value treating people right is just for
| the sake of it, not because of ulterior motives. I guess, as
| the boss, it's kind of nice to work at a place where people
| don't hate your guts bc they think you're a psychopathic
| monster. Being nice to employees is a value that's easier to
| sustain when there's massive profitability growth but it is not
| necessarily done in pursuit of profit itself.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| Then stop being employees. Jesus Christ, you people take those
| massive salaried yet act like little children throwing tantrums
| because you fear your boss may not coddle you as much.
| mc32 wrote:
| It's funny how the most privileged act the most spoiled.
| Imagine steel plant workers or car manufacturing jobs. Demand
| goes down? So does your job --union or not.
|
| WallStreet is used to the ups and downs (they are somewhat
| comparable compensation-wise), and it's a way of life. You
| win big and you lose from time time. In tech you have some
| people who think it's their birthright to have good jobs with
| good pay and benefits and never have to go through a
| downturn.
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| You're right, everyone should just completely uproot their
| lives for the hell of it and start completely untested
| startups with no safety net whenever their boss cracks down,
| instead of justify complaining about his insanity
| protoc wrote:
| The crazy part is taking the huge salary then demanding your
| employer take on some social justice cause that they have
| been neutral on or actually already accommodating on.
| socialismisok wrote:
| It's not crazy at all. If you are a worker, you are the one
| actually making the company productive. If the majority of
| workers want their company to do a thing, that company
| should listen.
| milosmns wrote:
| I see the username, but I still want to ask... how would
| your ideal company deal with a situation where all
| employees want to run the business in the ground?
| socialismisok wrote:
| I'm a strong believer in workers cooperatives and
| democratic organization. Usually, people don't want to
| run their livelihood into the ground, but sometimes they
| make errors. (Just like executives, if Amazon games and
| stadia are any indication.)
| megaman821 wrote:
| People are absolutely free to do those things right now.
| There are tens of millions of people with those
| sentiments. Why don't we see more attempted co-ops?
| socialismisok wrote:
| So, we have some giant coops out there. Some making
| billions in revenue.
|
| But in the US it's really not well supported. If you want
| to found an LLC you click a few buttons on a form online
| and talk to any lawyer.
|
| If you want to found a co-op, you generally have to file
| the paperwork in person or via the mail. No one in the
| municipal government will help, because they don't know
| anything except LLCs. You'll need to find a lawyer who
| can draft not only the articles of incorporation, but
| also can advise on the issuing of shares, democratic
| operation, and how new members can join.
|
| Because profits are controlled by the workers,
| capitalistic investors won't know what to do with you, so
| you'll need to put in extra effort to find investors who
| are willing to be paid but not be made owners (or not
| more than any workers).
|
| It's a high, high initial cost. But once it's going it
| can be incredibly self sustaining. Every dollar of profit
| ends up back in the pockets of the people working there,
| equally. Or they can collectively choose to use that
| profit to expand.
| megaman821 wrote:
| Thanks for the thoughtful response. Sometimes the lack of
| cooperatives is framed as some sort of Capitalist
| conspiracy against them. It is much more tractable to
| point out friction in the system that make starting co-
| ops hard and then find solutions to solve those over
| time.
| socialismisok wrote:
| Yeah, I don't think it's particularly intentional, but it
| is systemic. And self perpetuating - there are few co-
| ops, so investing in making more is a low priority.
| michalf6 wrote:
| I like the idea in principle, but I can't imagine a
| situation where a worker cooperative would vote in favor
| of a risky, but necessary pivot / layoff / long-term
| investment. Sounds like a recipe for killing intra-
| company innovation.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Let's hope that's what happens to Twitter!
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Because they're nothing in the world worse than social
| justice, except for health care, not tolerating racism, and
| opposing fascism.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Social justice (communism) killed upwards of 100 million
| last century, by famines, gulags, mass exterminations,
| etc. and ruined billions of more lives. Fascism killed
| about 50 million (WWII + Holocaust), give or take. Both
| are abhorrent, but social justice wins the "Worst Thing
| Ever" award.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Absolutely ridiculous. Social justice is not communism.
| Calm down: Treating women and gays and minorities and
| poor people equally as human beings is not going to
| destroy civilization. You've been brainwashed and you're
| parroting fascist propoganda. Take a break from Fox News
| or cocaine or whatever you're on, because it's making you
| insane.
| protoc wrote:
| You forgotten to add that "Capitalism" has also killed
| 100s of millions.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| I thought higher pay tended to often to together with
| higher other benefits, like coworkers thinking you're
| important and management wanting your to think they're
| you're friend.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| They out here saying tech workers are the downtrodden
| proletariat... they are not. They are firmly within the
| bourgeoise--top < 5% of wage earners in USA, and top < 0.5%
| in the world.
| Technetium wrote:
| This belligerently screams "entitled". Maybe you should read
| this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| orange_joe wrote:
| Why is it the entrepreneur's moral right to seek the most for
| themselves, but when employees do so you act like they're
| children.
| luckylion wrote:
| Everybody does it. But many consider one side to be immoral
| while doing it.
| orange_joe wrote:
| Sure, but there is an actual moral distinction between
| seeking the most by endangering the livelihoods of
| ~7K-10k(the number of employees, dependents + indirectly
| supported workers) and seeking the most by ensuring the
| worlds wealthiest human can only remain in the top 10
| wealthiest humans. If the workers really push him, he
| might only have a hundred billion instead of hundreds.
| Tech workers are well paid, but their bosses have the
| wealth of kings.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Elon Musk isn't going to be kicked out of the country
| he's settled down in if he loses his Twitter job. Elon
| Musk isn't going to lose his healthcare, his livelihood,
| his means of housing and feeding himself, just as the
| winter holidays are about to begin in the United States.
|
| Yes I think it's immoral to put a person with a visa in a
| situation where they risk deportation unless they get
| hired just when hiring is slow, not just because of the
| job market but because other hiring managers are
| literally spending time with their family.
| orange_joe wrote:
| I don't actually disagree with you, I was just responding
| specifically to that one person.
| _vertigo wrote:
| Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I think a fair number
| of people think CEOs and entrepreneurs are immoral for
| acting in a self-serving, self-enriching manner, and a
| fair number of people think employees are immoral doing
| so.
| luckylion wrote:
| I see the moral point pretty much exclusively brought up
| against CEOs, managers etc, and virtually never against
| employees. Your (then ex-) boss might be angry that
| you've leaving because you've gotten a better offer, but
| barely anyone else will judge you (very rare cases exist,
| I'm sure, but they're rare).
|
| Everyone is optimizing their personal outcome, be it the
| CEO firing people, people quitting their jobs to work
| elsewhere, people quitting their jobs to live off of
| benefits, people having children early, or having
| children late, it's what we all do: look out for what's
| best for us.
|
| I find that totally okay, but I prefer to be honest about
| it, and don't pretend that it's not perfectly normal, or
| that people aren't doing it.
| kemayo wrote:
| I think the general take is that the higher you are up
| the money/power hierarchy the more strictly you should be
| judged for your choices, because acting in a self-
| enriching way becomes less and less _necessary_. An
| almost incomprehensibly rich person like Musk _should_ be
| given less leeway for acting in a grasping manner.
|
| In a sense it's the inverse of the "it's moral to steal
| bread to feed your family" argument.
| luckylion wrote:
| I agree. You have more options and fewer constraints the
| higher up you go, but I think that also applies to (most)
| Twitter/BigTech employees. A good chunk of those fired
| will be millionaires themselves, they're far from
| worrying about how to feed their families.
|
| Nobody has to be there to survive, everyone is there
| willingly because they saw it as the most advantageous
| place to work, and they'd switch to a different company
| tomorrow if they got the right offer. Loyalty is a term
| from a different era.
| kemayo wrote:
| Oh, yeah, there's definitely a scale to it. A twitter
| customer service employee is paid much less than a
| software engineer... though even the latter isn't going
| to have been at "will never need more money in their
| life" levels, particularly given the American social
| safety net or lack thereof.
|
| That said, I do find that people are fairly loyal to a
| company that treats them well.
| kingboss wrote:
| Who do you think has more leverage to optimize for their
| personal outcome? The CEO or the average employee?
|
| Why do you find it OK for the ones to have power to
| leverage it in order to get even more? Where do you think
| this will end up if allowed to continue longterm?
| luckylion wrote:
| > Who do you think has more leverage to optimize for
| their personal outcome?
|
| At Twitter? That's hard to say, lots of places are
| hiring, and getting good people is hard for all of them.
| Many of those that were fired will probably come out
| ahead financially. Twitter will probably continue to
| exist.
|
| > Why do you find it OK for the ones to have power to
| leverage it in order to get even more?
|
| What do you think salary negotiations are? You go in, say
| you want even(!) more money, and if your value is high
| enough, you have the power to make them do it. Again,
| both Twitter and the employees are playing the same game,
| they're just on different sides of board, but neither of
| them is a charity.
| wellpast wrote:
| This is the story of our industry. We are so lucky and don't
| even know it. I've been privileged to pull substantial salary
| and equity outcomes at various tech groups with "top tier"
| engineers who get away with murder because there are
| literally no stakes in the job performance. If you are
| approximately 'smart' and get a minimal amount of work done
| you can get away with murder. I've gotten junior engineers
| jobs in this industry, and when I check back in on some of
| them they are like yeah I work 1 hour a day and make well
| into six figures. And managers and bosses are terrified of
| asking for any outcomes lest they lose and have to try to
| rehire.
| rdevsrex wrote:
| I think by default you have to assume most billionaires don't
| care that deeply about their employees.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Jobs wasn't like Musk or Bezos, cared deeply about employees,
| despite the famous youthful tantrum stories (probably also
| true, but salacious so more famous): my friend's wife had a
| hard to diagnose condition (autoimmune it turned out, I
| believe) and Jobs offered unlimited use of his private jet to
| get her to any doctor anywhere.
|
| I was similarly told to be with my very sick parent, no time
| constraints, and I was part of an inner sanctum engineering
| team, and later similar when I had a pet get ill, in all cases
| because we all had one another's backs, and we all were NOT
| fungible assets, but, rather, harmoniously integrated by years
| of working together and a strict hiring filter in the first
| place.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| Yep. I had a stand-up row with Steve in the elevator in IL1.
| We stepped out to continue it, so others could use the
| elevator.
|
| At no time did I think there'd be any retribution or problems
| because of this. We both had strong (and in this case,
| contrary) opinions, and Steve respected you a lot more if you
| voiced those opinions rather than just accept whatever he
| told you. He was also perfectly happy to over-rule you if you
| didn't persuade him, but he didn't want Yes-(wo)men around
| him.
|
| I don't get that vibe from Musk. It's like he read some
| stories about how a maverick CEO can be an asshole and get
| away with it in some trashy red-top newspaper, and modeled
| his entire character around that.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I'm intrigued, what was the row about?
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| I'll say it was regarding one of Apple's Pro-Apps at the
| time, but to say much more would probably "out" me :)
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Perfectly said!
| vincnetas wrote:
| Did you had row with Musk?
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| >Jobs wasn't like Musk or Bezos, cared deeply about employees
|
| I doubt if any CEO can pull it off for the long run without
| being caring enough about his/her inner circle. Even ruthless
| dictators have to be 'mostly' nice to their inner circle (
| guards, butlers etc.).
|
| The larger point being that often they can be ruthless with
| people who are not in the 'inner circle', sometime
| justifiably so and sometime not so justified. I'm basing all
| of this on typical human behavior, not specifically on
| Jobs/Musk/Bezos, of whom I know nothing. You will see this
| trait even in families, the stereotype of the current
| ruthless man being a gentle and loving father to his kids.
| kasajian wrote:
| Kinda like when Steve Jobs refused to give early Apple
| employees stock, famously giving them zero shares. Yeah,
| cared deeply about employees.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Yeah bizarre and i suspect from the young bratty stage, pre
| attitude adjustment from being fired. Way before my time
| though
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Or withholding Woz's bonus from the Atari job.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| I've been at Apple for 20 years now, and I've received
| stock every single year. A fair amount of it, actually.
|
| If you don't accept that people new to something will make
| mistakes, then you're not going to get very far. Steve
| changed as much as Apple did over the years, and mostly for
| the better.
| RetpolineDrama wrote:
| >I've been at Apple for 20 years now
|
| Can you please fix CoreBluetooth? It desperately needs
| async-await APIs :)
|
| Also a non-location-permissions-based bluetooth
| background wakeup mode would be amazing
|
| While we're at it, not locking new Swift features behind
| iOS X would be incredible. WWDC each year is basically
| "here's all the stuff you can use in 3-4 years when you
| can up the min-spec iOS"
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| Funnily enough, my ability to change things is limited to
| the scope within which I work :) Sadly, none of the above
| fall within my purview...
| RetpolineDrama wrote:
| Darn, well it was worth a shot! If you happen to know
| people who might work in those areas feel free to pass
| along the request :)
| jm20 wrote:
| I feel like Hacker News might be the only forum online where
| you can reliably find ridiculous one-off anecdotes like this
| on a regular basis.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| The outliers compared to the famous stories, I think you
| mean. I think you're right. Thing is what I wrote is
| factual as can be.
|
| Your comment made me wonder, how much of Bezos and Musk
| sociopathy is innate, versus imitation of some excerpt
| popularly known of earlier successful albeit at times
| abrasive characters. And how might they be different if the
| decent stories were so well known, because they do exist.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| 90 Hours A Week And Loving It!
| neuronic wrote:
| > one-off anecdotes like this on a regular basis
|
| That's an oxymoron if I've ever seen one...
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| N=1 samples of M random variables.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I think the word you wanted was "tautological."
| lupire wrote:
| What's sad to me is, OK, if being a real hard-driving
| exploitative ass really is what it takes to organize people to
| make amazing products (mostly Jobs, a little of Musk), why
| aren't there any good people who do that to make their
| employees do great things for the world, and then put the
| profits to good use? (better use than Musk's "buy a $1M car and
| crash it immediately" style .)
|
| I think a lot of people would be OK with being pushed hard to
| really do something great, if they were paid fairly and the
| economic profits spent on good areas of society/customers, but
| not to enable a man-child's ego and waste.
|
| (It related to the philosophical idea (not the implementation
| details) of Gates's "tax my consumption, not my income".)
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Lots of companies are in this space doing what they can, but
| they're focused on actually doing the work and getting their
| hands dirty as opposed to Musk's wide noise making. Look at
| immunotherapy and age research, the trying to find a cure and
| mechanism for Chronic Fatigue (an illness which disables
| millions), the people who documented the genome of humanity,
| and NASAs astronomy stuff. There are biologists trying to
| prevent further extinct amphibians. There's linux, and git,
| and countless open source software we use daily.
| ttoinou wrote:
| Because no one has the same definition of what "great" is,
| and right when you start making money others will hate you
| and consider your vision bad (cf. Other comments replying to
| you)
| yafbum wrote:
| Musk indeed appears to see himself as an agent of
| humanity's salvation, including in its treatment of Twitter
| employees. And to be honest, while I and likely many people
| would see it as self-serving delusion of grandeur, it's
| hard to believe he's not at least genuine in his belief:
| you can't really suspect him of wanting to take over
| Twitter (and all of its headaches) for money.
| koonsolo wrote:
| > you can't really suspect him of wanting to take over
| Twitter (and all of its headaches) for money.
|
| In the end he didn't want to, because it probably became
| clear there was no money to gain.
| georgeg23 wrote:
| Sadly his whole save humanity thing is a schtick..
|
| If you investigate his back story, who he works with, it
| becomes clear it's not about Mars.
|
| His real enterprise is a massive DoD program, built off
| the Strategic Defense Initiative (the "real" Star Wars).
| Republicans have been trying to resurrect it for decades
| and Elon was part of it since at least 2001. The idea is
| to intercept ballistic missiles from space and end the
| threat of nuclear armegeddon. In that sense he is trying
| to "save humanity", but it's misguided because the
| project is already aggrevating China and Russia and is
| fundamentally destablizing to the nuclear
| stalemate/M.A.D.
|
| This project, operating under the Space Development
| Agency and working with the Missile Defense Agency,
| requires Republicans to fund--Biden and most Democrats
| been trying to stop it. Twitter helps Musk with the
| elections and boosting Republican power, while currying
| favor from them when it comes to these contracts.
|
| If you're interested to know more, Mike Griffin is the
| ringleader.. he goes way back with Elon. Read his career
| history:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
|
| Starlink is building up the basic tech for these
| constellations--currently just sensing ballistic missiles
| and hypersonics--but with Starship, putting kinetic
| weapons in orbit become feasible. Some good references
| here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_cap
| abilities
| georgeg23 wrote:
| Should clarify, this isn't the _only_ motivation for
| Musk, but building what is basically SkyNet is one of his
| main considerations and ties in with his AI threat
| commentary.
| naasking wrote:
| > why aren't there any good people who do that to make their
| employees do great things for the world, and then put the
| profits to good use? (better use than Musk's "buy a $1M car
| and crash it immediately" style .)
|
| You mean like the guy who's trying to address the main
| existential risks facing humanity right now? Last I checked,
| Musk created Tesla to counteract the existential risk of
| climate change, Neuralink to counteract the existential risk
| of AI, and SpaceX to counteract the existential risk of
| asteroids and other planet-killing catastrophes. Maybe that's
| why the people at his companies stay despite being pushed so
| hard?
|
| He could definitely stand to be less of an ass, but I can at
| least recognize that Musk is actually doing the kind of good
| work that you're talking about.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Musk is not solving climate change.
|
| if he wanted to do that, tesla would stop selling carbon
| credits. but that would cost $1.6b and stop tesla being
| profitable.
| fassssst wrote:
| He did all that to maximize government subsidies.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| How does Neuralink counteract the risk of AI? If it ever
| works, it seems like it would exacerbate that risk.
|
| How does SpaceX counteract the risk of asteroids? NASA has
| developed a successful asteroid-killing rocket, and
| SpaceX's work has nothing to do with that field.
| naasking wrote:
| > How does Neuralink counteract the risk of AI? If it
| ever works, it seems like it would exacerbate that risk.
|
| AI is a threat because of human information processing
| limits. Neuralink's ultimate goal is ostensibly to remove
| eyes and hands as inherent limits to I/O, and augment
| human information processing in the ways in which we are
| weak (formal computation).
|
| > How does SpaceX counteract the risk of asteroids? NASA
| has developed a successful asteroid-killing rocket, and
| SpaceX's work has nothing to do with that field.
|
| Cheap launch to orbit is critical in any efforts to
| counteract asteroid threats. Musk has also been very
| vocal about colonizing Mars in case something happens to
| the Earth.
| dekhn wrote:
| The idea behind neuralink- the real one, not the publicly
| stated mission- was to make it possible to put elon in a
| robot body so he could fight the AI singularity.
| EricDeb wrote:
| It would be funny if Musk's long con was to get all the
| liberals driving his electric cars and then change his
| political affiliation to get all the conservatives on
| electric cars all in the service of reducing co2 emissions
| f1refly wrote:
| You're a bit off on your points, but that's okay. He really
| talks a lot, doesn't he?
|
| > _Musk created Tesla to counteract the existential risk of
| climate change,_
|
| He created Tesla for the money that's in the growing
| electric car market
|
| > _Neuralink to counteract the existential risk of AI,_
|
| Neuralink exists for the possible future where neural
| computer interfaces are successful and popular so he can
| make lots of money
|
| > _and SpaceX to counteract the existential risk of
| asteroids and other planet-killing catastrophes._
|
| Actually, SpaceX exists because there's tons of money to be
| made with government and commercial contracts.
|
| > _Maybe that 's why the people at his companies stay
| despite being pushed so hard?_
|
| It's probably more because they like getting paid so they
| can afford nice things while they're not working. It might
| also be because Musk enterprises are in "interesting" areas
| of the job spectrum and thus workers might be more tolerant
| to bullshit because they get to tell themselves they
| launched a rocket into space.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Even if you assume he did it for the money, are you
| disputing the idea that those are net good ventures and a
| benefit to humanity?
| f1refly wrote:
| I don't know enough about the statistics to really give
| an opinion on that, but I'm usually in the "progress in
| technology is good fit humanity" camp, so I think I'll
| agree here until proven otherwise.
| naasking wrote:
| > He created Tesla for the money that's in the growing
| electric car market
|
| He arguably created that market. The same applies to your
| other points. Musk created the markets that didn't exist
| before. Others had tried and failed, so I'm sorry, but
| you just can't deny that. It could be luck, so I suppose
| we'll see.
|
| I have no doubt that Musk is interested in making money.
| I also have no doubt he enjoys that money from time to
| time. However, I think it's indisputable that no other
| billionaire works as hard as he does at his ventures, and
| I think a lot of his interest in that money is so that he
| can continue funding work to combat those existential
| risks.
|
| > It's probably more because they like getting paid so
| they can afford nice things while they're not working.
|
| Maybe you should read up on the working environment at
| these companies. There's not as much downtime as you
| imply. I personally wouldn't want to work for him given
| his management style, even on these existential problems.
| f1refly wrote:
| > _He arguably created that market._
|
| He didn't, he started the company at a time where
| governments all over the word started to really
| (depending on the country, obviously) kick companies
| butts for not innovating. There where electric cars
| before he started his company. Now, you could argue that
| he made it popular with the people, but I argue that the
| market penetration, especially during the early years,
| hasn't been sufficient for that.
|
| Musk also didn't invent space travel. You may have a
| point with neuralink, but I have yet to see a successful
| product come from that so if he is to create that market
| I'll give him that.
|
| He's really good at making his opinions heard though.
| Other companies don't have a relatively unfiltered
| channel like this, so it's easy to see how his viewpoints
| stick out.
| pmonks wrote:
| Furthermore he didn't start Tesla anyway - it was founded
| in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Musk
| didn't invest in it until 2004 and didn't become CEO
| until 2008.
|
| The guy is a loon, and while I think he's done some good
| for the world (mostly via Tesla), he's a walking, talking
| clusterfsck of Dunning-Kruger, narcissism, and unchecked
| ego.
| naasking wrote:
| > He didn't, he started the company at a time where
| governments all over the word started to really
| (depending on the country, obviously) kick companies
| butts for not innovating. There where electric cars
| before he started his company.
|
| Yes, and they all failed commercially. I'm not sure what
| point you think I'm making. It's undeniable that Musk was
| instrumental in creating the first commercially
| successful electric car. If he took advantage of
| government incentives to do so, that doesn't seem
| relevant, that's just good business sense.
|
| If your argument is that _anyone_ could have succeeded in
| that environment, then why was Tesla the only successful
| electric car manufacturer for literally _years_? Do you
| disagree that the roadster made electric cars cool, and
| changed public perception on electric vehicles?
|
| > Musk also didn't invent space travel.
|
| Again, I'm not sure why this is relevant. Musk created
| the first commercially successful private launch company.
| Do you agree or disagree?
|
| I'm not disputing that Musk is also after money and fame
| and probably a few other things. I'm not sure why that's
| relevant to my point either. Even if it's enlightened
| self-interest driving him, it remains the case that Musk
| either founded or took over and pushed successful
| commercial ventures that are tackling existential risks
| to humanity.
| f1refly wrote:
| > _then why was Tesla the only successful electric car
| manufacturer for literally years_
|
| Because every other car manufacturer had no incentives to
| invest in that space when their ICE technology was
| working well for them. Musk made the bet that he could go
| big and make lots of money with that missed opportunity,
| and he arguably did.
|
| Other electric car companies weren't competing because it
| takes absurd amounts of money or people willing to give
| you that money, which Musk has.
|
| > _Do you disagree that the roadster made electric cars
| cool, and changed public perception on electric vehicles_
|
| I don't live in the US and honestly, while I saw some
| tesla cars rolling around here, their popularity
| correlated very strong with the rise of other brands.
| It's almost like consumers aren't opposed to the _idea_
| of electric vehicles, it 's just that until that point
| all options where shit and tesla finally put some
| pressure on that market, so the other companies reacted.
|
| > _Musk created the first commercially successful private
| launch company. Do you agree or disagree?_
|
| He did, and I argue that it's just like the first point,
| it was inevitable and Musk made the right call to invest
| his money in commercial launch operations because there
| where tons of money to be made.
|
| This wasn't about _if_ he started those companies, it 's
| about the _why_. And the _why_ is: There 's tons of money
| to be made.
| naasking wrote:
| > This wasn't about if he started those companies, it's
| about the why. And the why is: There's tons of money to
| be made.
|
| Yes, the question is indeed _why_ : so _why_ did he just
| so happen to invest in the only ventures where humanity
| is facing existential risk, when there are so many other
| ventures that could also have yielded great returns with
| less risk? Are you suggesting it 's merely coincidence?
| Or is it simply more plausible that Musk recognized the
| problems that needed solving _and_ found a way to make
| lots of money from them?
| f1refly wrote:
| I disagree that those ventures, besides tesla, are things
| where humanity faces existential risks. We don't need
| commercial space travel to counteract asteroids. If there
| is an asteroid that will become a problem for _humanity_
| , the whole world will scramble to address it. Those
| things don't appear out of thin air.
|
| I have yet to see someone successfully explain how
| neuralink will protect anyone from "AI".
|
| Electric cars may have some success shifting our oil
| based man-transports to electric, but the world fails to
| use the advantages that brings and just burns more coal.
|
| Hyperloop doesn't address any urgent problem, it's a
| moonshot with potential to earn absurd amounts from
| public contracts.
|
| Twitter is actively harmful for humanity.
|
| So, besides tesla, for which there was probably the best
| monetary incentive, none of those companies achieve any
| higher function you advertise then to have.
| naasking wrote:
| > I disagree that those ventures, besides tesla, are
| things where humanity faces existential risks. We don't
| need commercial space travel to counteract asteroids. If
| there is an asteroid that will become a problem for
| humanity, the whole world will scramble to address it.
| Those things don't appear out of thin air.
|
| Firstly, you seriously underestimate the asteroid risk.
| They literally do appear out of the void and we do not
| have the resources to track them all, and existing
| efforts are seriously underfunded. Having a commercial
| entity that regularly performs multiple launches per year
| is invaluable as it means we can react more swiftly in
| case of a late detection, or have multiple attempts at
| deflecting it. NASA previously had very few launches by
| comparison, and the fact that their launch systems were
| not reusable without significant refits makes it
| ridiculous to claim that we would be just as safe without
| SpaceX.
|
| Secondly, asteroid risk is only one risk to planet Earth.
| Another is nuclear war, or climate change, or an even
| more deadly pandemic, or any number of other things.
| Making humanity interplanetary requires reliable and
| frequent launch capability.
|
| > I have yet to see someone successfully explain how
| neuralink will protect anyone from "AI".
|
| If you agree that artificial general intelligence is an
| existential risk to humanity, then why is it a risk,
| exactly? presumably because it has computational
| abilities that we cannot match with biology. Does it not
| then follow that augmenting biology with those same
| abilities would somewhat mitigate those risks? Whether
| that pans out remains to be seen, but AI performance is
| accelerating so this is going to become a serious problem
| within 20 years.
|
| > Hyperloop doesn't address any urgent problem, it's a
| moonshot with potential to earn absurd amounts from
| public contracts.
|
| The boring company is not one of his ventures to combat
| existential risk, and so is not something Musk cares
| about too much. Why do you think he called it the boring
| company? Because its products are boring by comparison.
|
| > Twitter is actively harmful for humanity.
|
| He literally just bought it, and he has explicitly stated
| that he thinks Twitter is important for a functioning
| democracy. How about you give him a chance to actually
| prove it out.
| seanw444 wrote:
| I'm not an Elon hater myself, but:
|
| He didn't create Tesla. He bought it. He may have _grown_
| it, which is impressive, but he certainly wasn 't the
| creator, or funder of the original creators. Ironically,
| he's more of a Thomas Edison than a Nikola Tesla, in that
| regard.
|
| Starting an AI/transhumanism company as a CEO who's known
| for software-locking and remote-controlling his sold cars,
| isn't very reassuring. I'm quite certain we're going to see
| "pay $80 a month to unlock your now-societally-vital brain-
| to-brain communications!" Or a tiered model to his probably
| inevitable digital eyeballs replacements. "$20 a month for
| 720p vision, $40 a month for 1080p, $60 for 4K..."
|
| As for SpaceX... so far that's been pretty badass.
| Government/NASA hasn't been doing crap for exploration or
| transportation innovation. Nor satellite internet
| advancements. He's doing all of it himself. To that, I
| applaud his efforts (and his impressive engineers, to that
| extent).
| megaman821 wrote:
| He bought Tesla before it had sold its first car. People
| try to use the fact that he didn't technically create
| Tesla as some gotcha that implies he bought his way into
| the car market.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Last I checked, Musk created Tesla to counteract the
| existential risk of climate change
|
| Musk didn't create Tesla, he bought it. I don't claim to
| know why he bought it, but here are two options: maybe it
| was to solve climate change, and if so it was a failure.
| Maybe it was to make himself immensely wealthy, and if so
| it was a success.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Why do you think it is a failure on the first count? Do
| you think Tesla EVs are bad and we would be better of
| without them?
| simiones wrote:
| Yes. To solve global warming, we have to greatly reduce
| our reliance on cars, and come up with other solutions in
| as many places as possible - replacing all ICE cars with
| EVs will not be anywhere near enough.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| How do you feel about Musks 100M X prize for atmospheric
| carbon removal?
| simiones wrote:
| I am very skeptical of atmospheric carbon removal as a
| viable path to stopping global warming - especially given
| the extreme systemic risks of most of the ideas I heard,
| such as seeding the oceans with iron; but also the
| extreme difficulty of others, such as re-seeding enough
| forest area to actually matter.
|
| So, my temptation is to say it's just a publicity stunt.
| But, I am prepared to praise it if it produces some
| viable solution, as unlikely as I believe it is.
| naasking wrote:
| "Needing" to reduce reliance on cars is debatable; that's
| certainly one way but not the only way. I doubt Musk
| would deny that replacing all cars with EVs would be
| enough. That's why Tesla also offers the solar roof
| (which needs more attention from Musk IMO) and grid level
| energy storage.
| simiones wrote:
| Tesla has discontinued the solar roof, as far as I know.
| That was basically just a stunt to use Tesla's money to
| bail out Musk and his brother. The solar wall is a better
| example of what you mean though.
| naasking wrote:
| It looks like you can still order the solar roof on their
| site: https://www.tesla.com/solarroof
|
| People are great at finding ulterior motives for people
| they've already decided they dislike. I don't think Musk
| is an altruist, and I'm certain he has multiple motives
| for the ventures he cares about, but I think it's hard to
| deny that he's found success where others have struggled,
| and that his ventures will ultimately benefit humanity.
| simiones wrote:
| You can order it, but apparently [0] they are deploying
| on the order of ~20 per week overall, so it's unclear if
| you'll ever get one. You're right though that it's not
| discontinued - sorry about that.
|
| [0] https://electrek.co/2022/07/07/tesla-tsla-achieves-
| best-sola...
| karaterobot wrote:
| Just judging by the outcome rather than the intent. Has
| global warming been solved? More generously: is it on a
| trajectory to be solved?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Was it a net contribution or not? Should we stop every
| activity that alone is an improvement but an incomplete
| solution?
| karaterobot wrote:
| I responded on the assumption that the original poster
| was saying Musk intended counteracting an existential
| risk to be an audacious goal, a visionary moon shot,
| rather than just a "net contribution". By that measure,
| he's not succeeded. In any case, he's not been as
| successful at solving climate change as he has been at
| increasing his personal fortune.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| What exactly do you support in terms of tackling climate
| change?
| naasking wrote:
| I mean, if you want to quibble over the precise meaning
| of "created", I'm not interested in that. Replace
| "created" with "drove to commercial success" if you
| prefer, the fact remains that Tesla as a brand didn't
| exist in people's minds until he invested and spearheaded
| the design on the roadster.
|
| As for whether it's a failure, that remains to be seen.
| Combating climate change is a long-term battle. All of
| Tesla's products are clearly geared towards this end
| though, from electric cars to solar roofs to grid level
| energy storage.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Buddy you've drunk too much of the kookaide. Musk is
| telling stories. Look at what he did to the ca bullet
| train. Don't believe his "vision" Is for good.
| roamerz wrote:
| If Musk did have anything to do with slowing or stopping
| that colossal waste of taxpayer funds I would say his
| "vision" is superior to any of the politicians who
| supported it.
| aunetx wrote:
| Yeah, a what a "waste" to build high-speed trains... I
| don't even understand how such a gigantic country can
| even exist without a safe, quick and inexpensive way to
| transport its citizens (so not by plane or by car).
| roamerz wrote:
| Safe? Shall we use BART as an existing example of that?
|
| Quick? No. Fast maybe. It's hard to replicate the
| quickness of jumping into your car and hopping onto the
| freeway to get somewhere. Little or no planning required.
| Yeah the train if it is deployed as envisioned would be
| faster.
|
| Inexpensive? The latest estimate is 107 Billion. Hardly
| inexpensive.
| trothamel wrote:
| How many citizens has the California High Speed Rail
| project transported?
| wittycardio wrote:
| You are an active detriment to progress
| roamerz wrote:
| Progress is a very subjective term. It's very okay that
| your view of progress is different than mine.
| roamerz wrote:
| How exactly does your opinion on transit exempt itself
| from being subjective?
| wittycardio wrote:
| Some aspects of progress are subjective but mass transit
| isn't
| themgt wrote:
| "Musk killed the California bullet train" is basically a
| pizzagate-level conspiracy theory. The NYT reporting
| among many others makes clear the tragicomic level of
| shambolic mismanagement from the CA gov't.
|
| _The state was warned repeatedly that its plans were too
| complex. SNCF, the French national railroad, was among
| bullet train operators from Europe and Japan that came to
| California in the early 2000s with hopes of getting a
| contract to help develop the system._
|
| _The company's recommendations for a direct route out of
| Los Angeles and a focus on moving people between Los
| Angeles and San Francisco were cast aside, said Dan
| McNamara, a career project manager for SNCF._
|
| _The company pulled out in 2011._
|
| _"There were so many things that went wrong," Mr.
| McNamara said. "SNCF was very angry. They told the state
| they were leaving for North Africa, which was less
| politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and
| helped them build a rail system."_
|
| _Morocco's bullet train started service in 2018._
|
| But sure, blame Elon for California setting tens of
| billions of dollars on fire with nothing to show for it.
| Also Florida just built a high speed rail in under a
| decade for about 1/30th the per-mile cost of the CA
| project and it'll be open early next year.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-
| speed-...
| enragedcacti wrote:
| This is what people are referring to w.r.t Musk and HSR,
| not that he caused the mismanagement:
|
| https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990
|
| Separately the Florida "HSR" isn't all that comparable
| because it only goes 80mph with a planned max of 125mph
| for future routes, and afaict a lot of it was built on an
| existing corridor. Again, not to say California HSR has
| been well managed, but imo it's not a particularly useful
| datapoint to compare against.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| So Musk was one of the huge number of people who could
| see the California HSR was a disastrous project before it
| even started.
|
| Is that really the meat of this "allegation"?
| enragedcacti wrote:
| No, the allegation is that he released a white paper to
| hype people about a nonviable technology he had no actual
| interest in building in an attempt to derail HSR,
| presumably because it will hurt his car sales.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| That seems so wrong to me that it's hard to take in that
| people would believe it.
|
| There is - to me - _obviously_ no chance that that would
| derail HSR, and Musk is definitely smart enough to
| understand that.
|
| Also, the effect on car sales 15 years in the future in a
| small corner of the global market is such a tiny thing.
| I'd easily believe that, as a California tax payer, he
| was annoyed at $100B being spent on something that
| probably won't work.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| > There is - to me - obviously no chance that that would
| derail HSR, and Musk is definitely smart enough to
| understand that.
|
| Well he seems to be that dumb then. That or Ashley Vance
| is a complete and total liar. fwiw I think it was a long
| shot but not as absurd as you see it. There was already a
| lot of opposition to it with decades of no progress and
| money spent without a single mile of track being built,
| meanwhile Elon was quite the rising star of green
| technology. He had a vision for transportation of
| personal automobiles + tunnels and hyperloop and all he
| had to do was get legislators to buy into it compared to
| an unpopular embarrassment of a project.
|
| But either way, you're right I probably shouldn't have
| included speculation as to why he did it.
|
| > annoyed at $100B being spent on something that probably
| won't work.
|
| So instead he proposed something that definitely won't
| work?
|
| Also I'm not aware of anyone at any point that thought it
| "probably won't work". A waste of money, mismanaged, is
| gonna get cancelled, etc? Sure, but it was proven
| technology 30 years ago.
| mc32 wrote:
| The HSR was boondoggle from the start. It's like
| designing a downtown to airport subway but then in the
| political process all political entities in between make
| it required it serve their community before approving the
| plan so you end us with a snaking line that takes 60
| minutes to get to the airport instead of a straight line
| taking 15 minutes.
| naasking wrote:
| My claim was not that Musk was "good" in whatever way you
| conceptualize that. My claim was that Musk's main focuses
| are commercial ventures that are very targeted at
| combating the main existential risks facing humanity.
| This is exactly the kind of good that the OP was talking
| about.
| simiones wrote:
| That's your claim, but it's simply and obviously false.
| SpaceX is not about "making humanity interplanetary", it
| is about selling cheap rockets for commercial
| exploitation of space (and/or it is a DoD weapons
| "defense" program). Tesla is a car company, aimed at
| making and selling cars.
|
| Stopping global warming requires more mass transit, and
| Musk is actively opposed to that. "Making humanity
| interplanetary" is simply impossible with current or
| forseeable technology, so there is no sense in attempting
| yet (especially since we can develop this technology on
| Earth, by creating self-sustaining habitats in the Arctic
| desert, if we really want to).
| naasking wrote:
| > SpaceX is not about "making humanity interplanetary",
| it is about selling cheap rockets for commercial
| exploitation of space (and/or it is a DoD weapons
| "defense" program).
|
| Sure, as an interim step to making humanity
| interplanetary. Are you suggesting that he could find
| commercial success without taking those intermediate
| steps?
|
| > Tesla is a car company, aimed at making and selling
| cars.
|
| Tesla make solar roofs and grid level energy storage.
| Like I said, it's portfolio is very clearly geared at
| climate change solutions.
|
| > Stopping global warming requires more mass transit, and
| Musk is actively opposed to that.
|
| Maybe he is (I've heard he's a bit of a germaphobe). I
| suspect he also recognizes that America is a car culture
| and that that won't change anytime soon.
| simiones wrote:
| > Sure, as an interim step to making humanity
| interplanetary. Are you suggesting that he could find
| commercial success without taking those intermediate
| steps?
|
| My point is that the rockets are the easiest part of
| settling Mars. We already had rockets, and scaling that
| up was never a huge unknown. The real problems with
| settling Mars are the things that Musk is spending
| nothing on - building safe self-sustaining habitats in
| extreme conditions. Until we have a 10000+ self-
| sustaining city underground in the Arctic, there is 0
| reason to send more than a handful of people to Mars
| (like we did to the Moon). So, if you actually care about
| that, you should be investing in the Arctic city, not
| Mars.
|
| > I suspect he also recognizes that America is a car
| culture and that that won't change anytime soon.
|
| We can try to guess what he believes, or we can look at
| his actions and their results - and in the latter case,
| he has repeatedly spoken and acted against public
| transport (in most hyper-loop and Boring Company
| presentations at least).
| somenameforme wrote:
| You mean Antarctica, not the Artic. The Arctic refers to
| regions/countries along the Artic Ocean which includes
| Canada, USA, and Scandinavia. The reason Antarctica is
| not developed is because of an series of treaties known
| as the Antarctic Treaty System [1]. It's an agreed upon
| 'pristine environment' for research. Development is
| prohibited and there are extreme measures to maintain its
| relatively pureness. For one fun example - poop cannot be
| disposed of on premises. It needs to be bagged up and
| shipped back home to be disposed of.
|
| Rocketry is a similar story. Rockets, since the 60s, have
| gradually become less capable and more expensive. For
| instance Boeing/Lockheed have been granted defacto
| unlimited taxpayer money to develop a basic functional
| 'homegrown' rocket system - the SLS. The goal was achieve
| little more than we did in the 60s. They started work 11
| years ago, have received more than $30 billion, and and
| have yet to manage to get off the ground. Stay tuned for
| their latest failure - they will [fail to] launch on
| November 14th! For reference, we went from nothing to
| putting a man on the moon in 9 years in the 60s.
|
| _If_ it ever manages to be fit for duty, the SLS is
| estimated to cost an average of $2 billion per flight,
| and is completely incapable of landing massive-load cargo
| on Mars, let alone transiting things back. It 's
| completely and absolutely unfit for duty. Most of
| everything Musk has done with SpaceX was being mocked as
| literally impossible by Boeing et al (by Tory Bruno)
| while he was struggling to achieve rapid reuse among
| various other technologies which have completely
| revolutionized the industry.
|
| We would not be getting to Mars had SpaceX (or a similar
| company) not emerged.
|
| [1] -
| https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Antarctic_Treaty_System
| simiones wrote:
| I was actually referring to the Arctic (North Pole),
| though I did forget how little land is actually there.
|
| Regardless, a self-sustaining habitat _is_ a research
| project, and it will not be successful without political
| /diplomatic agreement.
|
| Note that outer space is anyway in the same situation -
| you can't just settle outer space and claim it's your own
| - especially Mars, which is still a pristine environment
| that could even possibly harbor signs of life.
| naasking wrote:
| > We already had rockets, and scaling that up was never a
| huge unknown.
|
| Then why did NASA never create cost-effective reusable
| launch vehicles?
|
| > The real problems with settling Mars are the things
| that Musk is spending nothing on - building safe self-
| sustaining habitats in extreme conditions.
|
| I'm not sure how this refutes the claim that this is one
| of his ultimate goals. He's not going to invest in the
| kind of research you describe until it's necessary or
| will plausibly create a return. He has to keep a business
| focus to continue funding these efforts because
| governments have been seriously falling short.
|
| > We can try to guess what he believes, or we can look at
| his actions and their results - and in the latter case,
| he has repeatedly spoken and acted against public
| transport (in most hyper-loop and Boring Company
| presentations at least).
|
| OK, I still don't see why that's problem. Public mass
| transit is not going to save the planet on its own.
| Personal transport is something like only 20% of global
| emissions. EVs can get that down to below 5%, and public
| transit might make another single digit difference over
| that. It's just not a big change.
| simiones wrote:
| > Then why did NASA never create cost-effective reusable
| launch vehicles?
|
| Because NASA was usually about pushing the limits of
| science and engineering, not making money on space
| launches. Also, it has often been severely mismanaged.
|
| > I'm not sure how this refutes the claim that this is
| one of his ultimate goals. He's not going to invest in
| the kind of research you describe until it's necessary or
| will plausibly create a return. He has to keep a business
| focus to continue funding these efforts because
| governments have been seriously falling short.
|
| You're the one claiming SpaceX was created to address an
| existential crisis. I'm telling you SpaceX is not
| bringing us any closer to being an interplanetary
| species, and if Musk cared about this goal, he wouldn't
| have invested in SpaceX to begin with.
|
| >OK, I still don't see why that's problem. Public mass
| transit is not going to save the planet on its own.
| Personal transport is something like only 20% of global
| emissions. EVs can get that down to below 5%, and public
| transit might make another single digit difference over
| that. It's just not a big change.
|
| No, they can't. Replacing all ICEs with EVs would
| basically require doubling the electricity grid in the
| USA for example, and that is simply not a realistic
| possibility - especially given that the grid is already
| far too dirty and we need to replace a huge amount of it
| with green tech to reach CO2 emissions goals even without
| the extra pressure from EVs.
|
| So, the realistic goal is to significantly expand the
| much much more efficient public transport (trains, buses,
| trams, metro) to significantly reduce the amount of cars
| (which will also do wonders for reducing congestion), and
| convert just the remaining cars to EVs, at a rate that
| can be supported by the grid while also shutting down
| existing coal, oil and gas power production.
| naasking wrote:
| > Because NASA was usually about pushing the limits of
| science and engineering, not making money on space
| launches.
|
| Pushing science and engineering requires using money
| wisely, and creating a reusable launch vehicle is an
| obvious way to do that. In fact NASA did have multiple
| efforts that ultimately stalled, and literally none of
| them looked like what SpaceX did. You simply have no
| basis upon which to claim that SpaceX's reusable launch
| vehicles were not innovative.
|
| > You're the one claiming SpaceX was created to address
| an existential crisis. I'm telling you SpaceX is not
| bringing us any closer to being an interplanetary
| species, and if Musk cared about this goal, he wouldn't
| have invested in SpaceX to begin with.
|
| I honestly have no idea how you can conclude this. We're
| taking our first baby steps into space and you're saying
| baby steps are meaningless because they're far from
| running marathons. This argument is incredibly
| unconvincing.
|
| > No, they can't. Replacing all ICEs with EVs would
| basically require doubling the electricity grid in the
| USA for example, and that is simply not a realistic
| possibility
|
| The grid needs to expand anyway to handle renewable
| intermittency. You're also assuming that EVs would be
| powered from the grid. Tesla has the powerwall and solar
| roof tiles to address distributed power generation rather
| than reliance on the grid for everything.
|
| > So, the realistic goal is to significantly expand the
| much much more efficient public transport (trains, buses,
| trams, metro) to significantly reduce the amount of cars
| (which will also do wonders for reducing congestion), and
| convert just the remaining cars to EVs, at a rate that
| can be supported by the grid while also shutting down
| existing coal, oil and gas power production.
|
| What I'm reading here is that Musk's Tesla _is_
| addressing the existential risk of climate change, just
| not in the way you personally think it should be
| addressed. Seems beside the point frankly.
| simiones wrote:
| > You simply have no basis upon which to claim that
| SpaceX's reusable launch vehicles were not innovative.
|
| I didn't claim that they were not innovative, I claimed
| that they were not revolutionary - that is a big
| difference.
|
| > We're taking our first baby steps into space and you're
| saying baby steps are meaningless because they're far
| from running marathons. This argument is incredibly
| unconvincing.
|
| We have taken our first baby steps into space a few
| decades ago, and none of what SpaceX is currently doing
| is bringing us to any place new - we've already been to
| the Moon and to Mars, and we've been to plenty more
| exotic places.
|
| The problem of space colonization is just not the
| rockets.
|
| > The grid needs to expand anyway to handle renewable
| intermittency.
|
| The grid needs to expand, but the fewer consumers there
| are, the less it needs to expand, so the easier it is to
| close down the big polluters.
|
| > What I'm reading here is that Musk's Tesla is
| addressing the existential risk of climate change
|
| I am saying that overall EVs are at best close to neutral
| - they obviously pollute less than ICEs _if_ the grid is
| green enough, but they will also delay the green-
| ification of the grid if adopted in enough numbers to
| matter. Not to mention, Teslas are typically pretty big
| cars. If Musk cared about climate change and it weren 't
| just an afterthought, there are more important businesses
| he could have gotten into (such as green power generation
| directly).
| naasking wrote:
| > I didn't claim that they were not innovative, I claimed
| that they were not revolutionary - that is a big
| difference.
|
| Sure, but I'm not sure why SpaceX has to be revolutionary
| in that sense. It was revolutionary in the sense of
| taking space launches private. Or am I wrong in thinking
| SpaceX was the first company to successfully
| commercialize space launch, and the first company to
| successfully dock a commercially financed and owned
| vehicle with the ISS?
|
| > We have taken our first baby steps into space a few
| decades ago, and none of what SpaceX is currently doing
| is bringing us to any place new
|
| So what? You can't build a skyscraper without the right
| foundation. SpaceX is still building the foundations for
| routine space flight. Again, this seems like you
| complaining that you don't yet have a penthouse when
| they're still pouring the concrete foundation.
|
| > If Musk cared about climate change and it weren't just
| an afterthought, there are more important businesses he
| could have gotten into (such as green power generation
| directly).
|
| Firstly, the incumbents are too large in that industry to
| compete with. He was a millionaire when he started Tesla,
| and you wanted him to focus on building wind turbines or
| solar cells to compete with huge multinationals like
| Siemens? Come on. Electric vehicles was completely
| underserved market by contrast, a clear business
| opportunity that _also_ serves similar ends.
|
| Secondly, nobody is so altruistic that they'd work as
| hard as Musk does on something that they weren't
| passionate about, even if it were good for humanity. Musk
| clearly likes cars. Humanity arguably needs electric
| cars. Musk combined a passion for cars with humanity's
| need. This is what progress under capitalism looks like.
|
| To say he should work slavishly on something he's not
| passionate about for the betterment of humanity is
| setting up an ethical bar that nobody would clear. The
| people who do work on non-profits are passionate about
| that.
| simiones wrote:
| > It was revolutionary in the sense of taking space
| launches private.
|
| Good for him? I'm not sure why that is something to
| praise.
|
| > Again, this seems like you complaining that you don't
| yet have a penthouse when they're still pouring the
| concrete foundation.
|
| It's the other way around: cheap space flight is the
| penthouse of planetary colonization. The foundation is
| the ability to build a self-sufficient colony. Once we
| were able to colonize the least hospitable places on
| Earth, only then would it make sense to think about how
| we move this technology to Mars - 50 or 100 years from
| now, most likely.
|
| It's also worth noting that we have no reason to assume
| that a human population can even survive on Mars, as we
| have no idea if humans can live long term or even
| reproduce in Martian conditions (especially the very low
| gravity). Before even thinking about this colonization,
| we would actually have to establish whether it's possible
| for mammals to live long term and reproduce in low-G
| conditions. If it's not, there's a whole new world of
| technology we would have to discover before attempting
| it.
|
| SpaceX is to Mars colonization like buying your dream
| wedding dress not just before finding a boyfriend, but
| before even knowing if you're gay or straight.
|
| > Firstly, the incumbents are too large in that industry
| to compete with.
|
| You could say the same for the car industry itself.
|
| > Musk clearly likes cars. Humanity arguably needs
| electric cars. Musk combined a passion for cars with
| humanity's need.
|
| Fair enough.
| suzumer wrote:
| Elon musk is no friend of the climate. He proposed
| hyperloop to distract California from building its high
| speed rail system, a rail system that will do more to help
| the climate than any electric cars will.
| naasking wrote:
| I think this comment above clarifies what actually
| happened:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33467505
| jddil wrote:
| Wtf, no he's not. He's a narcissist billionaire who craves
| attention.
|
| None of what you said is grounded in reality.
|
| Wait, is this just a clever troll. Really hard to tell with
| Elon fanboys.
| falcolas wrote:
| > Last I checked
|
| Might want to check again. He didn't create Tesla, he
| invested in it. ~Musk didn't create SpaceX, he invested in
| it.~ EDIT: the SpaceX one is wrong.
|
| And IMHO, if he was really concerned about the existential
| risk for AI, perhaps he shouldn't have let the Ethical AI
| research team go from Twitter.
|
| To be clear, Ethical AI - being able to trace an AI's
| decisions and vet that those decisions aren't being biased
| by improper input data - is a big topic in research groups
| right now. It's actually quite fascinating.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| The problem is that improper input data can come from
| data scientists, or it can be a result of the same issues
| that cause society's bias. In that later case it isn't
| improper data so much as data properly collected from an
| improper society. That is super complicated to adjust for
| even if you decide to do so. Children of poverty that are
| malnourished grow up with deficits that might make them
| less valuable employees, extending the cycle. But the
| data and AI were not wrong to correlate childhood poverty
| with performance levels. Then there is
| the far trickier case of the AI picking up on real things
| that we choose not to accept or talk about. Perhaps it is
| safe to give an example using white men? When they go
| bald very early in life(prince William for instance), it
| generally is due to high testosterone. Which in turn
| leads to all sorts of predictable behaviors and health
| issues, good and bad. AI would spot all that from a
| simple picture, judging people on their appearance can
| occasionally work really well. But that doesn't mean we
| should do it. And again, it isn't improper data, just
| data we choose not to act on.
| naasking wrote:
| > He didn't create Tesla, he invested in it. Musk didn't
| create SpaceX, he invested in it.
|
| Even if true (Wikipedia disagrees), it's a distinction
| without a difference. Arguably, neither SpaceX nor Tesla
| would be where they are now without him.
|
| > And IMHO, if he was really concerned about the
| existential risk for AI, perhaps he shouldn't have let
| the Ethical AI research team go from Twitter.
|
| Arguably the kind of AI Twitter needs doesn't pose an
| existential risk. He's trying to make Twitter profitable
| so that's obviously a waste of money.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| falcolas wrote:
| AI (let's be real, we're actually talking about ML here)
| doesn't need to pose an existential risk to harm people
| in the real world. And given that tweets are displayed
| and promoted using ML algorithms, the ethicalness of the
| ML algorithms matters to Twitter's userbase.
| naasking wrote:
| Sure, but is that what the Ethical AI research team was
| actually working on? Because that's not what AI ethics
| typically means, which is a broader focus on AI alignment
| problems. Even if so, that may not be the most effective
| or efficient way to do it. We'll just have to see how it
| turns out, it's all speculation now, and impugning is
| character based on such moves is premature.
| falcolas wrote:
| This is pure speculation, but I'm guessing they were
| working on ensuring that the ML models built by Twitter
| to do things like content moderation, tweet promotion,
| identifying trending hash tags, customer service help,
| and more were behaving in an ethical manner.
|
| More concretely: Helping the teams who actually build and
| maintain these models ensure that the behavior isn't
| biased, that the model isn't being exploited by
| adversarial data, that the decisions made by the model
| are explainable, that the decisions are fair, coming up
| with corporate-standard-definitions for those various
| mutable terms (like fair), etc.
|
| The usual things handled by a team that is tasked with AI
| Assurance/Ethics.
|
| Now for my opinion: When it comes to impugning Elon
| Musk's character, he's done enough of that himself. He
| doesn't need my help. Additionally, firing an AI Ethics
| team in a company which requires AI(ML) to even operate
| speaks for itself.
| naasking wrote:
| > This is pure speculation, but I'm guessing they were
| working on ensuring that the ML models built by Twitter
| to do things like content moderation, tweet promotion,
| identifying trending hash tags, customer service help,
| and more were behaving in an ethical manner.
|
| Sure, but this is just a feature of the product in
| question, so if you have some metrics to measure such
| outcomes then the product developers themselves can do
| this checking as part of their development process. I'm
| not sure why this would need to be a separate division.
| Presumably Tesla's autonomous driving developers are also
| creating metrics to ensure they don't run over dogs and
| children, they don't need a separate ethics division to
| tell them this is important.
| falcolas wrote:
| Why assume that they are merely "tell[ing] them this is
| important" and not actually "doing the job" as an
| independent validation?
| naasking wrote:
| I'm making the point that there's no a priori reason why
| that work has to be independent. No other feature has
| such a special status.
| adoxyz wrote:
| Literally from the second paragraph from Wikipedia:
| "Tesla was incorporated in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard
| and Marc Tarpenning as Tesla Motors. The company's name
| is a tribute to inventor and electrical engineer Nikola
| Tesla. In February 2004, via a $6.5 million investment,
| Elon Musk became the largest shareholder of the company."
|
| How does Wikipedia disagree?
| naasking wrote:
| Look up the SpaceX entry.
| falcolas wrote:
| Mea culpa on SpaceX - I've already updated my post.
| yoshieee wrote:
| Also you weren't wrong about Tesla. Elon did basically
| create Tesla (as well as Straubel). Quick summary:
|
| Originally "Tesla" the brand, was started by Martin and
| Marc, but all they had was a brand and a vision but no
| physical product nor prototype.
|
| At around the same time, Elon wanted to build an electric
| car based off the tzero by AC Propulsion. He was
| introduced to Martin and Marc who had a similar vision,
| and basically Elon invested money into Tesla Motors.
|
| It wasn't until Elon put in money, that the first
| prototype was built (the tesla roadster). Arguably, if
| Elon didn't join the team and bring on Straubel, Tesla
| wouldn't be what it is today. Likely wouldn't even have a
| launched consumer product. Even Elon was the one that
| managed to get the trademark "Tesla Motors" which wasn't
| even owned by Martin or Marc originally.
|
| Lengthy source: https://youtu.be/AeeeEDSekG8?t=900
|
| Granted it's out of Elon's mouth but there's tons of
| other sources that corroborates with that story.
|
| source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MikKu6Juhok
|
| source:
| https://interestingengineering.com/transportation/the-
| short-...
|
| source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqPsdlQDOYQ
|
| source: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/27/with-jb-straubel-
| departure-t...
| shkkmo wrote:
| Musk was the primary initial investor in Tesla when it
| was company with 3 "employees", was chairman of the board
| and directly involved in the design of the Roadster. He
| didn't take on an operational role until he forced out
| the first CEO for allegedly lying about the financials.
| Musk is certainly more than just an investor in Tesla, it
| seems pretty nitpicky to argue he is not one of it's
| creators.
|
| Musk has been the only CEO of SpaceX since he founded the
| company. Gwynne Shotwell often doesn't get enough credit
| for her huge role in making SpaceX what it is today, but
| to say Musk isn't one of the creators of SpaceX is
| absurd.
|
| Musk has made plenty of bad choices and done unethical
| things that deserve to be criticized, but that is no
| excuse for the level of ignorant, misinformed hatred that
| is directed at him.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| That's true of Tesla, but if he didn't found SpaceX I'm
| curious who you would credit with that
| somenameforme wrote:
| On SpaceX this is false as it was entirely his vision
| alone from the get-go. There was (is) a joke in
| aerospace. How do you become a millionaire? Be a
| billionaire and start an aerospace company. Until SpaceX
| it was just a blackhole of money in spite of plenty of
| very clever individuals, including John Carmack, trying
| to their hand at it.
|
| On Tesla this your statement is technically true, but
| misleading. 7 months after the company was founded, and
| made up of just a handful of people, Musk invested and
| became the majority shareholder and chairman of the
| board. He would go on to eventually remove the original
| founders of the company (over disagreements that were
| never publicly revealed) before production began on their
| first product. The original founders played no meaningful
| role in the company we now know as Tesla.
| manmal wrote:
| Building more cars (basically racing cars that rub tires to
| dust 2-4x as fast) to save the planet? Sounds like quite
| the roundabout way to do so. I suspect he just likes
| driving fast cars?
|
| Digging tunnels and conceptualizing hyperloops instead of
| improving public transport and bikes? IMO he's just afraid
| of public transport and hates traffic jams.
|
| Ok, so maybe he needed to become the richest person in the
| world before tackling the really big issues? Yeah, not sure
| whether distracting himself with the Twitter acquisition is
| the best way of addressing climate change or even
| preserving survival of the human race long term.
|
| I think that, like Jobs, he's mainly scratching his own
| itches. And paints himself as the world's savior in the
| process.
| shkkmo wrote:
| I also have my doubts about the wisdom of the Twitter
| move, but it isn't hard to see a line of reasoning that
| puts fixing twitter as a key part of the path to
| addressing climate change.
|
| If you view the massive endemic corruption and
| polarization of our political system as one of the key
| reasons we are failing to solve climate change, and you
| also view Twitter as the core public square through which
| our political system can be fixed, then Twitter is not a
| distraction at all.
|
| I don't personally think that twitter has a major role to
| play in fixing our political system, but maybe I'm wrong.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Dude. If he wanted to make humanity link arms and sing
| Kumbaya, he'd be investing in water facilities and
| dropping LSD into it.
|
| Musk got bullied into buying Twitter by a bunch of
| WallStreetBets folks, took a puff and tweeted out a
| number, and surprise surprise, the offer was accepted.
| And he's been struggling to get out of the deal ever
| since.
| naasking wrote:
| I agree he's probably regretting it. I suspect he's going
| to try to make Twitter more profitable as fast as
| possible and then maybe sell it when it's on its way to
| being good. It's a distraction from things he cares about
| more, but it's not unimportant.
| [deleted]
| nucleogenesis wrote:
| It doesn't take being horrible and exploitative to build
| amazing things - it takes that kind of to _make insane
| amounts of money_ building amazing things.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| To me, at least SpaceX and Tesla _do_ do great things for the
| world.
|
| Not with their profits, but as their primary product. Tesla
| is getting the world off fossil fuels, and SpaceX is getting
| humanity into space.
|
| > _Musk 's "buy a $1M car and crash it immediately" style_
|
| When did that happen?
| sgarland wrote:
| He bought a McLaren F1 and wrecked it ~1 year later. [0] If
| you don't follow cars, this is an extremely special car. It
| was designed and built before the modern supercar era, long
| before computer design had the power it does not, and it
| still utterly destroyed anything that had come before it,
| and would come after it for quite some time. The
| engineering detail in it borders on absurd. They only made
| ~100 of the road-legal versions.
|
| [0]: https://www.thedrive.com/news/32191/did-you-know-elon-
| musk-w...
| BurningFrog wrote:
| So it was an actual accident, that he and Thiel were
| lucky to walk away from.
|
| The post I commented made it sound like he destroyed it
| for fun, perhaps to taunt poor people.
|
| Maybe you can see why I'm unimpressed with the quality of
| the anti Musk rants here?
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| We don't really have a plan to stop using fossil fuels for
| electricity generation so this is a bit overstated.
| Electric cars are good but it's not a complete solution.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Sure, I used too big words.
|
| Tesla is arguably doing more than any other company to
| decarbonize the world, but that is very far from a
| complete solution.
| yafbum wrote:
| Look up Bosch. It's a very large family-controlled company,
| and their dividends are 92% allocated to a foundation. I
| think in time we'll see similar examples in tech.
|
| EDIT: Bosch is a tech company too, just an earlier
| generation.
| LocalPCGuy wrote:
| The question I would ask - is that foundation just a tax
| haven for the family profits, or is it actually doing
| positive things (could also be both)? Same with Patagonia
| listed in a child comment - a lot of positive press came
| from the recent moves, but they were also incredibly self-
| serving for the family from a monetary point of view.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Both. Foundations allow HNW individuals to pass on large
| portfolios to descendants while also providing PR, Comms,
| and Political benefits to the family. (Note to Self -
| flesh out w/ source).
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I think what would help with that is that we start not
| contrasting Bosch with tech, given that Bosch is a
| technology company in the most literal sense of that term.
| A lot of tolerance for these mistreatments comes from the
| mistaken illusion that 'tech' somehow requires people to
| act like megalomaniacs. A fair amount of car parts in
| Musk's very own car company come from Bosch
| pedrosorio wrote:
| > I think what would help with that is that we start not
| contrasting Bosch with tech, given that Bosch is a
| technology company in the most literal sense of that term
|
| Took the words out of my mouth.
| yafbum wrote:
| Absolutely agreed. But they're also an old school
| manufacturer as opposed to the more modern form of IP-
| focused tech company that tries as hard as possible not
| to be in the manufacturing game.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Patagonia does the same.
| yafbum wrote:
| Yes (and it represents ~2% of Bosch by revenue)
| alephnerd wrote:
| To be fair, foundation ownership is used more as a way to
| bypass estate taxes in German businesses [0] as a
| charitable foundation can continue to give 30% of it's
| income to the family who founded the foundation. This is a
| common corporate structure for a number of other family run
| German companies (ThyssenKrupp, Aldi, Lidl, Bertelsmann,
| etc) to bypass estate taxes.
|
| In American terms, it would be the equivalent of the Chan
| Zuckerberg Foundation owning 60-70% of Meta's stock, and
| Zuckerburg's children continuing to get dividends and a
| significant ownership stake in FB while also bypassing
| estate taxes.
|
| [0] - https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=f1b666
| a8-1257...
| Medox wrote:
| He did "put the profits to good use", donating $5.7 billion
| of Tesla shares to charity in 2021:
| https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/elon-musks-
| philanthro...
|
| After the Twitter poll for offloading 10% of his stake.
| fishywang wrote:
| that was for tax reasons.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| You can't net money by donating to charity. This is a
| fundamental misunderstanding of what a tax deduction is.
| pmonks wrote:
| No one said you could. That doesn't mean it's not still
| financially beneficial.
| Jensson wrote:
| How can it be financially beneficial if you lose money
| doing it?
| vletal wrote:
| Or. Maybe, just maybe, he used it to avoid paying taxes
| like other billionaires do.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/03/business/donor-advised-
| fu...
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| What problem do you have specifically with donor advised
| funds?
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| This article is about DAFs. Is there evidence that's what
| Musk is doing?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| It is pure speculation
| bogomipz wrote:
| And yet there's reason to believe that that the unloading
| of those 10% of Tesla shares was to cover a looming $15
| billion tax bill. And he would have done so anyway.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/07/elon-musk-
| faces-a-15-billion...
|
| That not withstanding though, what genuine act of
| philanthropy requires conducting a Twitter poll to ask
| strangers if you should donate to charity?
| miohtama wrote:
| Unfortunately treating employees nice has never been a
| necessity, and we have Amazon as a prime example.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| To be sure, they treat employees nicely because they have to
| - lest their competitors get them.
|
| Altruism has never been a part of it.
| [deleted]
| WalterBright wrote:
| There are a lot of very wealthy people in Seattle from being
| employed at Amazon.
| socialismisok wrote:
| Anyone working as an engineer could get paid more and get
| better benefits from other tech companies. Leaving Amazon
| my pay nearly doubled.
| nfRfqX5n wrote:
| Amazon cash sign on bonus is absolutely insane in this
| market. Making pure cash while all stocks are down
| probably makes the Amazon pay $100k more than a
| competitor.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Any mid level tesla swe that joined five years ago is a
| multimillionaire most likely.
| [deleted]
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| Twitter employees were treated nicely. Too nicely. And yet they
| were not productive. The only new features they introduced in
| 10 years were losses in excess of 200MM to 1bn+ and the
| banning/shadow banning of those who went against the group
| think, fun police, and thought-gestapo. Each staffer had 10
| bosses and every department had a ton of waste.
|
| Musk could never show up again after some changes, and the
| company would perform better than under the previous
| leadership.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > those who went against the group think, fun police, and
| thought-gestapo.
|
| Yeah, "fun police" - it's not fun if your "jokes" are made on
| the back of minorities.
| thedorkknight wrote:
| >banning/shadow banning of those who went against the group
| think, fun police, and thought-gestapo.
|
| Why would they agree to a ToS that clearly lays out things
| like "don't intentionally misgender people" if they fully
| planned on breaking their agreement
|
| "But no one reads the ToS!" sure, but when you have your
| account suspended until you agree to delete a specific tweet
| and are given the exact area in the ToS you agreed to that
| you violated, then you should revoke your agreement to the
| ToS
|
| When it's brought to your attention that you signed a
| document agreeing to Twitter being the thought Gestapo,
| just... cancel your agreement. Don't continue to agree to it
| in writing while whining about it publicly.
|
| I agree with the rest of your comment though
| branon wrote:
| Some see it as their duty to fight back against unjust
| laws/rules. You and I might do it by breaking terms of
| service, Musk does it by purchasing the platform and
| adjusting the terms. Two sides of the same coin really,
| only difference being which end the agency is coming from.
| thedorkknight wrote:
| That's like agreeing to take your shoes off when entering
| a building, leaving your shoes on, and then complaining
| when the employees/owner/whatever asks you to leave if
| you're not going to take them off. If you think a rule is
| stupid, then rebel against it by not agreeing to it
| yanderekko wrote:
| >Why would they agree to a ToS that clearly lays out things
| like "don't intentionally misgender people"
|
| Where in the ToS is this explicitly stated, and when was it
| added there?
| aaronharnly wrote:
| Let's see!
|
| The Terms of Service:
|
| https://twitter.com/content/twitter-com/legal/en/tos
|
| states "You may use the Services only in compliance with
| these Terms and all applicable laws, rules and
| regulations", and links to the Twitter Rules and
| Policies:
|
| https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies
|
| Following the link to the "Hateful Conduct Policy":
|
| https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hateful-
| condu...
|
| Which states:
|
| > We prohibit targeting others with repeated slurs,
| tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize,
| degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes
| about a protected category. This includes targeted
| misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.
|
| In the Wayback machine, it looks like that direct
| language was added in an update between October 19 and
| October 28 of 2018, about four years ago:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20181028023901/https://help.t
| wit...
|
| The older version had this, which reasonably encompasses
| that behavior, though doesn't name it specifically:
|
| > repeated and/or or non-consensual slurs, epithets,
| racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades
| someone.
| yanderekko wrote:
| Thank you, I'm surprised it's explicitly called out but
| not too surprised.
|
| That said, I have trouble believing that "why would you
| agree to a ToS that you don't actually intend to ascribe
| to 100% of the time" is a question that requires serious
| consideration.
| thedorkknight wrote:
| The key part is how you react when the ToS gets enforced.
| Like I said, if your account gets suspended and the
| specific violation is brought to your attention, then
| either delete the offending tweet or revoke your
| agreement.
| cma wrote:
| The ToS says:
|
| > We reserve the right to remove Content that violates
| the User Agreement, including for example, copyright or
| trademark violations or other intellectual property
| misappropriation, impersonation, unlawful conduct, or
| harassment. Information regarding specific policies and
| the process for reporting or appealing violations can be
| found in our Help Center
| (https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-
| repor... and https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-
| account/suspended-...).
|
| So the ToS refers to the policies in question. The list
| of things is only "for example," with more in the
| specific policies you agree to.
| a_shovel wrote:
| Don't know about the TOS, but there's been an option for
| reporting misgendering in the report menu for a while
| now. Maybe a year-ish?
| lemmsjid wrote:
| Here: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-
| policies/hateful-condu...
| EMM_386 wrote:
| It is incredible to look at these companies and see the
| staggering amount of losses and costs they have, plus the
| headcount.
|
| There could be entire departments dedicated to figuring out
| whether or not the "like" and "retweet" buttons should have
| rounded corners or not, that sort of thing.
|
| At some point, reality has to hit and apparently, Musk is the
| one who's going to bring it.
|
| Is it being done in a shocking way to those who haven't been
| through this with other companies? Maybe. But how else is
| this company going to actually ever become profitable?
| watwut wrote:
| Musk paid huge money to get that thing. He paid multiple
| times the estimated price. The company is now in deep deep
| debt that was not nearly as large before - because company
| now owns the money Musk did not had.
|
| He is not hand of the market. He is someone who made pretty
| bad business and has very little chance to fix.
|
| And yes, there is likely someone doing UI decisions.
| Usually it is good idea to have special people good with
| visuals to make these artistic decisions.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > Usually it is good idea to have special people good
| with visuals to make these artistic decisions.
|
| The question is, how many people?
| watwut wrote:
| Neither I nor person I responded to knows. However,
| person I responded to took issue with mere existence of
| such position.
|
| I know that that comment was just pure emotion and hate.
| But, the fact is, there is nothing wrong with having
| department for visuals. Or department for marketing or
| department for communication with advertisers or what
| have you.
| BananaPelican wrote:
| Do you work at Twitter? My wife did until today, though not
| in the department of "rounded corners on retweet buttons".
|
| It sounds to me like you're repeating talking points and
| memes, but speaking from a position of ignorance.
| conaclos wrote:
| With this kind of mass and rapid layoffs, I will expect
| more losses in medium and long term since you destroy a
| working system. A lot of failures will emerge because no
| one is left for monitoring or fixing some issues.
| neuronic wrote:
| > thought-gestapo
|
| As a German, I actually take offense to this kind of
| expression. You apparently have NO IDEA what Gestapo really
| was if you think banning gaslighting assholes for hate speech
| is in any way comparable or even remotely in the same
| neighborhood as the Gestapo.
|
| These kind of phrases ridicule and downplay the horrific
| crimes and offenses against human rights committed by that
| organization and even the most unreasonable and idiotic ban
| on Twitter cannot ever be compared.
|
| Words matter - and that's why we deal with "free speech"
| differently than Americans. Btw it's also pretty clear what
| holds on court and what doesn't - independent of how strict
| or unreasonable private social networks moderate their
| content.
| contravariant wrote:
| Valid or not you do hit upon something I'm genuinely curious
| about. What do developers for something like twitter even do?
|
| Twitter does one very specific thing, and it doesn't look
| like it has changed its goal much over the past 10 years, so
| what is it they're trying to develop so rapidly they need
| hundreds (thousands?) of developers.
| rtatay wrote:
| I have this same question!
| fendy3002 wrote:
| My guess is for back-office or moderation-related told, as
| well as algorithm fine tuning.
|
| Though I think the number of developers are still too high.
| globalise83 wrote:
| The legacy border-radius assumptions regarding the "Set Up
| Profile" button may be no longer valid and need to be
| deeply investigated. We are therefore setting up a cross-
| functional taskforce to tackle this issue. MVP is due one
| year from now.
| meken wrote:
| Not a direct answer to your question, but it reminds me of
| the first chapter from The Mythical Man Month
|
| > One occasionally reads newspaper accounts of how two
| programmers in a remodeled garage have built an important
| program that surpasses the best efforts of large teams. And
| every programmer is prepared to believe such tales, for he
| knows that he could build any program much faster than the
| 1000 statements/year reported for industrial teams. Why
| then have not all industrial programming teams been
| replaced by dedicated garage duos? One must look at what is
| being produced. In the [attached figure] is a program. It
| is complete in itself, ready to be run by the author on the
| system on which it was developed. That is the thing
| commonly produced in garages...
|
| He then goes on to describe how you can take a program and
| make it a programming product (by generalizing it, adding
| testing, documentation, maintenence) and a programming
| system (requiring interfaces and integration with the rest
| of the system)
| Noe2097 wrote:
| > tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they
| will be productive"
|
| Is/was it? The shortage of qualified engineers have made some
| employers extra careful/generous, to attract and keep them. Or
| some others to divert brains away from their own occupations
| which could have ended up competing with them.
| yanderekko wrote:
| Alternatively, if Musk is successful then it will show that a
| lot of firms are bloated and this rot is maintained under the
| guise of "treating employees nicely", in the same way that
| union featherbedding is considered a "nice" practice.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Have employees taken license with being "treated right"?
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| This is the part that concerns me as well. WFH was a fluke of
| sorts and the timing allowed a lot of workforce to maintain
| rather adamant pose. My company's management is already using
| all the 'key' words in meetings like 'in person collaboration'
| and so on suggesting they are planning an RTO.
|
| They just don't seem to dare to do it yet, because they poached
| a whole lot of people from companies that did RTO. This would
| like leave a bad impression.
| golemotron wrote:
| > The issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful
| then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion.
|
| It's never been in fashion on the whole. Tech is little
| privileged bubble in the work world with little exposure to
| what happens outside of it.
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| A lot of people like working for Musk. Your thesis needs to
| grapple with that.
| bhawks wrote:
| 996 culture in China already highlights this as a valid
| strategy. Perhaps a little too obscure for the typical pointy
| haired boss. Elon will be a great poster boy.
| Test0129 wrote:
| > Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and
| they'll be productive".
|
| I can't verify the veracity of this claim. Tech spans a wide
| spectrum of job conditions. I have worked in traditional suit
| and tie places, and show up with pizza stained sweat pants
| places.
|
| Tech is a bastion of one thing in my opinion. It's a place
| where employees hold disproportionate power over the company.
| It's the one place where there is such a labor shortage, and
| enough smart people, that the companies will _do what the
| employee wants_ in order to keep them happy. Make no mistake,
| no company tech or not wants to bend over backwards like tech
| companies have. Hence, all of the effort in outsourcing and
| getting code camps running.
|
| Don't make the mistake of thinking tech is charitable. A lot of
| engineers I know are very soft because they think like this.
| Tech CEOs have a problem no other CEO has. A legion of smart,
| hard to replace, highly paid people that have enough power to
| demand more or less what they want.
|
| The whining about Musk has to stop. He's being a dick about
| this because he has a personal vendetta against the old guard.
| When you look past the personal vendetta he is doing what
| anyone would do when a billion dollar turd is dropped on their
| desk. Dramatic, fast, often negatively viewed change.
|
| Ask yourself, if Twitter was such an incredible company would
| the CEO have taken the offer? Probably not. The C-levels saw
| the ship sinking and rightfully jumped at the opportunity. Who
| is responsible for this lack of profitability? The old guard.
| So, task #1 is to get rid of them.
| merely-unlikely wrote:
| Investment banks also face the problem of employees holding
| disproportionate power but they have a somewhat different
| solution than tech companies - keep the harsh working
| conditions and pay top performers huge bonuses.
|
| If you're a fan of Matt Levine, "the modern investment bank
| is a socialist paradise run for the benefit of its workers."
|
| It's common for a top trader to make more than the CEO at
| major banks. You'll see this on occasion at tech companies
| but generally pay is far flatter and so they come up with
| other ways to entice staff.
| technofiend wrote:
| >Tech is a bastion of one thing in my opinion. It's a place
| where employees hold disproportionate power over the company.
| It's the one place where there is such a labor shortage, and
| enough smart people, that the companies will do what the
| employee wants in order to keep them happy.
|
| On the other hand employees hold the power to also enable the
| company. I'm not accusing you of personally holding the "the
| company must do what I want" mindset, but at least for me
| what motivates is the idea of solving problems and helping
| people rather than lording some kind of power of them. IT has
| always felt powerful to me (and I'll be honest made me feel
| powerful in some small way) because it let me automate away
| things or make them measurably better. Hopefully I'm not
| alone in that.
| christkv wrote:
| Payed fully until February 2nd. Is there anyway for me to sign up
| to be laid off ?
| bogomipz wrote:
| I was curious about the second Tweet on that page, which states:
|
| >"Yep, the team is gone. The team that was researching and
| pushing for algorithmic transparency and algorithmic choice. The
| team that was studying algorithmic amplification. The team that
| was inventing and building ethical AI tooling and methodologies.
| All that is gone."
|
| Does anyone if this team published any of their research on
| algorithmic transparency and algorithmic amplification? Could
| anyone say more about their work and what if any literature or
| tooling might be available to the public?
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I interviewed for this team and the interview experience was
| so, so bad. The manager was extremely rude, and I was treated
| poorly in general.
|
| I don't like Tesla, but Elon having trouble with this team in
| particular is no surprise.
|
| The ethical AI folks who wrote the fairseq library at Microsoft
| have done more for AI Ethics and fairness than every single one
| of twitters AI ethics and responsibility folks.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| kweingar wrote:
| It seems like people have a totally different thought process
| when it comes to Elon Musk and Twitter and I can't pin down why.
|
| Whenever a layoff announcement is posted on HN, many people
| closely scrutinize the wording of the announcement and the
| severance conditions. Words of consolation are given freely, and
| occasionally people will offer to help with finding new work. In
| this thread, though, I find people saying that former Twitter
| employees need to suck it up and not be entitled babies.
|
| Many who have ardently supported remote work policies (and would
| raise pitchforks if their employer tried to drag them back into
| the office) are calling Twitter employees entitled and coddled
| for attempting to push back.
| FortiDude wrote:
| hot take:
|
| big tech layoffs are actually very good because they release into
| the wild a slew of competent workers with great credentials who
| will hopefully get hired by a company which does something useful
| for humanity instead of selling ads
| robswc wrote:
| Big tech layoffs are never really "good." Even in the way
| you're describing. Its a nice notion... but I imagine most of
| the laid off workers will be doing the same thing, just at
| another company.
| mattwest wrote:
| hear hear
| alex_sf wrote:
| It's Twitter, though, so the 'competent workers' piece is
| questionable.
| busyreading wrote:
| Hot take, this was bound to happen at one point or another.
| Everything I've read, and witnessed from using the platform
| always came back to this thought: "how are they even making money
| on it?"
|
| Policies also placed were just not popular regardless from what
| you heard from the vocal minority.
|
| I personally hope Twitter develops into a platform that has more
| fair policies, and makes some sort of profit.
|
| It sucks to be laid off, but honestly it was a bubble waiting to
| burst. At least these people are getting some sort of severance.
|
| The only thing I hope is that the COs don't get their golden
| parachute. They haven't done much for the platform, and only made
| it worse for a majority of the user base.
| christkv wrote:
| The growth of employees between 2020 and 2022 was insane. There
| is no way you add 50% more employees over that period and have
| any sort efficiency.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/272140/employees-of-twit...
| browningstreet wrote:
| I'm personally quite curious how much alignment there is between
| Jack and Elon, and yet.. Jack was the CEO not too long ago. Jack
| didn't fix a lot of the things Elon is worked up about. Which
| makes their communication and cooperation perplexing.
| mikkergp wrote:
| Jack I think blamed the board for a lot of the inaction which
| is why he was supportive of Elon taking it private.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| What a bunch of ridiculous whining here.
|
| They are laying off a large portion of workers who have
| previously expressed being hostile to the new leadership. There
| is bloat, laziness, aimlessness, and the company is being taken
| in a radically new direction. It's pretty tactful so far, as far
| as I am concerned. We haven't even seen the severance.
|
| You have nothing to complain about. First priority is to protect
| Twitter systems, so locking everyone out temporarily (or as the
| case may be, permanently) makes a lot of sense.
| roflyear wrote:
| They are breaking the law by not giving 60 days notice.
| Disagree with it all you want it's still the law.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| Nope, that is not the law.
|
| I've seen more than a few of these things and had a partner
| in HR. You're confused.
|
| Employees can be terminated with 0 notice. (Which is how it
| should be).
|
| You're probably thinking about some payroll law. Termination
| is different.
| notacoward wrote:
| You can be terminated _for cause_ without notice. Layoffs
| are different, and different again in each jurisdiction.
| Both the federal government and California, where Twitter
| is headquartered, have specific laws for this exact
| situation, and Musk et al are in clear violation of those
| laws plus the agreement under which he acquired the
| company. Either your partner in HR (notably not legal) is
| misinformed, or you misunderstood what they told you.
| Regardless, you 're the one who's confused - and that's
| trying hard to give you the benefit of the doubt.
| roflyear wrote:
| Correct, the person you are conversing with is not aware
| of the WARN act, or they are aware of it and trying to
| spread misinformation.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| 60 days paid salary, (and usually additional severance,
| which is not relevant) makes them compliant.
|
| Happens all the time.
| roflyear wrote:
| 60 days pay counts as giving notice. Some have said they
| have been let go without notice. That's a different
| claim.
|
| I'm not trying to imply they are not giving notice, but
| if they don't give 60 days, they are breaking the law.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| Nope. Not in California. Employment contracts with a CA
| entity are "at will" / can be terminated with no cause
| and no notice.
|
| Which is how it should be IMO.
|
| Anyway just google "ca at will employment" and you can
| learn about how you are wrong here.
|
| Here's an article that explains it in paragraph 2
| https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-
| compliance/...
|
| I have been close to the counsel and HR during execution
| of several CA layoffs, within blocks of Twitter HQ :)
| notacoward wrote:
| Again, you're confused. Individual actions and mass
| actions are not the same.
|
| https://edd.ca.gov/en/Jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_W
| ARN
|
| There's also the issue of the agreement Musk signed in
| buying the company.
|
| https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312
| 522...
|
| Even your own source provides this important caveat.
|
| <<<It does not mean that an employer may not be sued ...
| for terminations that violate public policies set forth
| in statutes or regulations.>>>
|
| You idolize Musk, we get it, but please stop spreading
| misinformation.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| CA is an "at will" employment state. Employees or
| employers may terminate with no cause and zero notice.
| Simultaneous terminations are not exempt.
|
| That's a fact, friend.
| roflyear wrote:
| Stop spreading misinformation. The WARN act is a federal
| US law.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| Typically in a tech layoff you revoke all access, 2
| months paid salary, and effectively say "your project is
| complete, termination date 2 months from now".
|
| That's compliant and it happens all the time in CA.
|
| You're making the claim they are not compliant and you
| have none of the info needed to make that claim. (You're
| the disinfo, bub)
| roflyear wrote:
| If they are giving 60 day notice, they aren't breaking
| the law.
| [deleted]
| i_like_apis wrote:
| Right. That's why 2 months paid salary is standard. With
| any severance on top. I've had this done a few times and
| I've witnessed it a few times.
|
| You guys were going around essentially saying "THEY ARE
| BREAKING THE LAW!!!" it's a no notice layoff!!!
|
| And obviously there is no evidence for that.
|
| They are basically about to do the layoff "notice", which
| will also involve telling these people to stop working
| immediately and turn in their assets. Telling them to
| stop working is totally in compliance.
|
| I'll admit that I am not in HR. But, to be clear workers
| are still legally revoked all access and told to cease
| producing with no notice and that's fine.
|
| Layoffs exactly like this take place _all the time_.
| roflyear wrote:
| The context is if they are laying people off without
| giving 60 days, they are breaking the law. IDK what they
| are doing. But that is what people at Twitter are
| claiming (in some circumstances).
| roflyear wrote:
| No, US law states that companies with <100 employees must
| give 60 days notice for mass layoffs. I can only imagine
| this qualifies as mass layoffs.
|
| WARN act.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| Yeah that's about payroll, effectively. You revoke all
| access, and tell the employees their project is over. Pay
| salary until a termination date 60 days in the future.
|
| The termination is still "no cause". At least in CA.
|
| And all duties are typically over on the day of the
| layoff notice. Turn in your badge, take your stuff off
| the premises, etc.
| chappi42 wrote:
| The former owners of Twitter got 44 billion. Why don't _they_
| care about their ex-employees? It 's a bit cheap to blame Musk
| (only).
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| I got laid off but least I had the dignity of being told in
| person, given time to hand over my projects, allowed to remove my
| personal stuff from my work laptop (did not have any) and a
| generous severance package - it was about a month.
|
| So thankful I don't work in the US.
| s1k3 wrote:
| If you worked for a high profile company that just went through
| a tumultuous acquisition with a polarizing figure. Do you
| suppose you would have been given the same dignity?
|
| These actions aren't about you the individual. They're about
| protecting the business against malcontents. With large
| polarizing companies this is a likelihood. Not so much with
| random company b with a couple hundred employees.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| It is the 2nd biggest retailer in our country - 90,000
| people.
|
| I am a professional adult not some immature kid that is gonna
| delete databases or servers - did not even lose my dev rights
| to our SAP systems or company email until the last day.
|
| Maybe if you treat your employees like babies.
| trashtester wrote:
| If you lay off 4000 people where perhaps 1000 could
| seriously harm the company, and where you know that a large
| fraction hates vehemently, I think it's wise to take
| precautions.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Point taken.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Ex-Tweep here. US employees need to really thank the WARN act.
| Without it everyone would likely be fired on Oct 31 with no
| severance. Now everyone is kept on the payroll until Jan (NY
| until Feb!) and then getting one more month of base salary. We'll
| see what happens with lawsuit if they manage to get their Feb
| vest and bonus as well. (they deserve the bonus at least prorated
| to Nov).
|
| BTW, lots of ML people got hit, also some brilliant ones. Cortex
| org got hit hard. I guess Musk doesn't care about people running
| experiments in Notebooks on expensive GPUs.
|
| 50% layoffs and likely more attrition soon due to mandatory RTO
| and people who cannot work 996.
| rootos wrote:
| Who gives a shit?
| eddsh1994 wrote:
| "HN: Who wants to be hired?" is going to be wild next month
| tiffanyh wrote:
| I wonder how people will measure success for Elon/Twitter.
|
| Will it be based on revenue, earnings, MAUs, or some other
| metric.
| gregors wrote:
| Why would any engineer stay at this point?
|
| Either, you still believe in the long term vision and that some
| day it make you rich or you can't find another job. Is the first
| choice even plausible now?
| [deleted]
| yread wrote:
| Are there any successful stories of company turn-arounds that
| start with firing 50% of your workforce?
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| IBM
| OOPMan wrote:
| I imagine that, like a lot of big companies, Twitter has a lot of
| fat that could be trimmed.
| kweingar wrote:
| One thing I'm surprised to see such little commentary on is the
| fact that Musk violated California's WARN Act by not providing
| appropriate notice of layoffs.
| codeslave13 wrote:
| From posts elsewhere. They are still employed till feb. Just do
| not report for work. So no violation
| nostromo wrote:
| If you give those employees 60 days of severance, you would not
| be in violation.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| Saw a leaked video yesterday from a meeting that Elon wants to
| basically copy WeChat and become the "everything app" in America.
| He also laughed at the engineers when they told him that "edit is
| incredibly complex". Couple that with mass layoffs/restructuring.
| This saga is gonna be interesting to say the least.
| casey2 wrote:
| osullish wrote:
| If true, I find the 'print out the code you wrote in the last
| 30-60 days' very grim and a very blunt tool for evaluating
| productivity.
| firstfewshells wrote:
| The most productive engineers I've known all crank out a ton of
| code in any week. It's almost like an addiction for them to
| push commits on a daily basis.
| netsharc wrote:
| Why would anyone subject themselves to such humiliation? (Well,
| a fat paycheck is probably an answer). It feels more like a
| weeding-out process, if I were a giant jerkoff billionaire, I
| would know anyone who submits to this bullshit will submit to
| further humiliation...
| zmxz wrote:
| Why do you think it's bullshit and why do you think it's
| humiliation?
|
| Aren't all employees, in all companies on this planet,
| submitting to some form of dominance in exchange for money?
| cnity wrote:
| > I perform and you have to pay
|
| > Equal service at the end of the day
|
| > But I know what you think, you thought
|
| > 'Cause you've got the Ps, the ball's in your court, but
| it ain't
|
| JME - The Money
| pjc50 wrote:
| Here's the classic story about why weighing LOC is dumb,
| from 1982: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Nega
| tive_2000_Li...
| paulcole wrote:
| That's kind of like the complaints about Body Mass Index
| (BMI), "Well it misrepresents body builders and says
| world-class professional athletes are obese!" Yes, but
| are _you_ a body builder or world-class professional
| athlete?
|
| Everybody wants to think they're Andy Hertzfeld, but
| generally speaking for a whole lot of people not being
| able to show their productivity in a very simple way
| means they're unproductive.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > for a whole lot of people not being able to show their
| productivity in a very simple way means they're
| unproductive.
|
| No, this is completely nuts! It encourages all sorts of
| pathological behavior to fake the metric, and throws the
| thing you might actually care about - business value -
| under the bus. It's even worse for senior people and
| those with architectural responsibilities. Spend time
| helping a junior on your team? Well, that's going to
| count under his commit metric and not yours, so he can
| figure it out himself.
| firstfewshells wrote:
| How many hours out of a 40 hour work week are you
| mentoring junior engineers?
| paulcole wrote:
| I didn't say that LOC is _the_ metric.
|
| My point is that if your productivity can be easily
| measured by LOC, then don't tell me that LOC is a bad
| metric.
|
| If your duties are mentoring, show me the meetings you
| had, the action items from those meetings, and what
| changed as a result. Nearly every job's productivity can
| be showed in a pretty simple way. It's the people who
| argue that their contribution can't be simply shown that
| are often not that productive.
| ben_w wrote:
| > My point is that if your productivity can be easily
| measured by LOC, then don't tell me that LOC is a bad
| metric.
|
| OK, so, I fundamentally disagree with the if condition.
|
| This is in no small because of a previous coworker, in a
| place that shall not be named, who regularly duplicated
| entire class files rather than subclassing them, and his
| given argument when we challenged him on this was that he
| "couldn't subclass because the access specifiers were set
| to private" (yes really his defence was that bad).
|
| Worse, I'd already added some "TODO: deduplicate this
| method" comments to the original, because the original
| was already a mess of copypasta code, and the new class
| duplicated all of these too.
|
| So, a lot of new LOC that day, but none of them were good
| additions.
| paulcole wrote:
| If anything that guy's a great example of why to use LOC
| as a metric because when he shows you a huge number of
| LOC, you say, "That's a lot more than I expected, let's
| take a look..." and you see that his performance sucks.
|
| I think of metrics like this as a way to guide deeper
| looks and decision making. You just have to accept that
| "all models are wrong, but some models are useful." LOC
| can be useful when it guides you to the right questions.
| It's a starting point not the end of the conversation.
| netsharc wrote:
| To make the example extreme, if you got hired to be a
| developer, and your boss asks you to clean the toilets, is
| it okay because hey, he's paying for you to do whatever he
| wants?
|
| You'd probably say no, because his request is way over the
| line; to me having a jerkoff know-nothing telling me "Print
| your work and I'll judge whether you're worth it or not" is
| over my line.
| badpun wrote:
| It's apprarently fairly common for office workers in
| Japan to clean toilets of their offices. They see as part
| of taking care of their surroundings (something they
| perceive as required for harmonious functioning as a
| human) and not at all beneath them. It starts in
| elementary schools, where children clean up the school
| themselves.
| netsharc wrote:
| Sure, different cultures, different rules.
|
| If you interviewed at a company and got told "Every
| quarter, the know-nothing jerkoff CEO wants to see 50
| printed pages of your code", and you accepted the job,
| hey, you've accepted that this is the norm in that
| company...
| boringg wrote:
| What if the "know-nothing jerkoff CEO" also printed off
| his 50 pages of code at the same time? Would it make it
| an acceptable deal at that point?
| workingdog wrote:
| We've adopted "everyone cleans toilets" in our company
|
| 0) It keeps me (the CEO) humble 1) It weeds out the
| prima-donnas 3) It develops respect, everyone leaves the
| toilet better than they found it
| eitland wrote:
| Haven't experienced exactly that but I often did non-
| coding tasks:
|
| - lunch shopping and preparations, clean up
|
| - transport from one branch to another for Factory
| Acceptance Testing
|
| - at one point I worked as a consultant for a rather
| large Norwegian company and one thing I noted was the the
| most senior leader I ever saw in that company (that I was
| aware if at least) was also one of those I remember who
| would make sure to tidy the kitchen and make sure
| everything went into the dishwasher
| dthul wrote:
| It's humiliating because printing out code (or more
| commonly "printing out emails") is literally a meme, and I
| have read multiple articles alleging that after printing,
| the employees were instructed to shred the papers, without
| anyone having looked at them. That sounds a lot like Musk
| trolling by demanding his underlings print their code.
| boringg wrote:
| That sounds like a rumor.
| dthul wrote:
| Reported here:
| https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-30
|
| He usually has very accurate inside information.
| boringg wrote:
| Appreciate the sourcing. Still difficult to fathom.
| evan_ wrote:
| I think the implication was that they asked everyone to
| print the code out and then, realizing that nobody
| actually would be able to evaluate the code, asked
| everyone to shred the printouts lest they go into a
| dumpster where the code could be stolen.
| abdulhaq wrote:
| The sound of 1000 leetcode warriors printing out 2 pages of
| tumbleweed, sobbing over their multifunction copiers, then
| rushing home to record a YT video of why they left their faang
| dream job
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Fucking good and I hope leetcode warriors are knocked down
| several pegs.
|
| You shouldn't be paid more than folks with 10K GitHub stars
| on big projects just because you reinflicted DSA hazing on
| yourself.
|
| The person with 10K GitHub stars is overwhelmingly more
| likely to be a massive contributor than the leetcode warrior.
|
| I hope this recession kills or at least hurts leetcode
| warriors.
| spiderjerusalem wrote:
| > Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1 billion
|
| all sound and fury, signifying nothing
| chris_wot wrote:
| Didn't he take out $13billion in debt?
| aenis wrote:
| Yeah, but lots of the debt is actually on company's books -
| as is the case with LBOs. This is yet another case of
| barbarians at the gate
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarians_at_the_Gate) -
| corporate raider running a company into the ground.
| kortilla wrote:
| That only works when the company has enough cash or assets
| to buyout the new owner for more than they paid. Twitter
| was definitely not a case of sitting on a mountain of
| assets that can be broken up and raided.
| aenis wrote:
| For sure, as far as LBOs go, this is probably one of the
| worst ever. Normally the raider pays a bit of a premium
| over the assets, then divides them, props them up a bit,
| and collects a profit. I can't imagine this being
| possible with Twitter. Nothing to break up. Nothing to
| prop up. And if he gets his way, he will be competing
| with Parlor for the niche market it caters to. Or 4chan
| :)
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| maybe we don't know yet. Musk might be able to pull a Dell
| with Twitter.
|
| Dell went private loaded with debts then add more debts by
| buying EMC and now Dell is public again.
| nova22033 wrote:
| https://www.cultofmac.com/448147/today-apple-history-
| michael...
|
| October 6, 1997: Michael Dell makes an infamously bleak
| appraisal of Apple's fortunes. Asked what he would do
| with the struggling company, the founder of Dell Inc.
| says he would "shut it down and give the money back to
| the shareholders."
| jdub wrote:
| Dell had a way to make money and didn't have a halfwit
| with zero domain experience in charge.
| aenis wrote:
| Not sure how lean do they run their stuff - I'd assume at least
| lean-ish, considering they have (had?) a lot of good
| engineering talent working on it. Asking for a large reduction
| while at the same time culling staff seems like wishful
| thinking.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I went to visit a team at Twitter that seemed to have very
| little to do with their core business. They'd bought some
| company that my company was using (can't even remember,
| Fabric or some crash profiling thing?) and I got invited to
| see their fancy building on Market Street.
|
| But my sense was there were many peripheral teams that your
| average Twitter user would never notice if Twitter were to
| cut them.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| ,,The ML Ethics, Transparency, & Accountability team was one of a
| kind''
|
| Sure, something nobody has heared of and nobody knows why it
| should be at a company like Twitter.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Sure, something nobody has heared of and nobody knows why it
| should be at a company like Twitter.
|
| Because Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have gotten under fire
| _multiple times_ for the shit their artificial "intelligence"
| did - promoting content harmful to society (antivaxxers, flat-
| earthers, antisemitism, ...), sending them into outright
| radicalization spirals (YT autoplay), banning of people by
| automation based on shoddy input or without context...
|
| If you're running AI that has a direct impact on wide society
| and you're not running an ethics oversight program, you should
| be arrested for endangerment of society.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > nobody knows why it should be at a company like Twitter.
|
| If you don't know you're the problem tbh
| fullmoon wrote:
| If the layoff of this team elicits anger from the "you're the
| problem" crowd then Musk is doing something right.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Can you explain how the team added value to shareholders who
| want to maximize their long term ROI (which is the job of the
| CEO)?
|
| We're living in a world where voting rights of pensioners
| have been delegated to big companies like Vanguard and Black
| Rock. They clearly are not keeping the best interest of the
| shareholders which would be their duty, and vote politically
| instead.
| DoughnutHole wrote:
| Rising political opposition and talk of government
| intervention in companies like Facebook and Twitter is very
| much a threat to the future stability and ROI of said
| companies. Fewer and fewer people buy the argument that
| "The Algorithm" just does what it does and isn't influenced
| by its builder.
|
| As political discourse and more elections are swayed by
| rage-bait and disinformation pumped into voters retinas by
| these platforms, the political risks to these platforms and
| their bottom line will increase (and become wildly
| unpredictable).
|
| ML ethics and accountability is beneficial to both society
| and to any company which has an interest in self-
| preservation.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| I suggest people who are interested in the details to
| listen to this podcast, it details how politics get into
| the shareholder meetings.
|
| [Stephan Livera Podcast] SLP421 Vivek Ramaswamy - The
| Antidote to Corporate Woke-ism
| https://podcastaddict.com/episode/146353684
| tiahura wrote:
| People who talk about regulation of social media should
| spend 5 minutes reviewing the Supreme Courts' approach to
| regulating speech over the last 25 years. Never going to
| happen.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Spending even _one_ minute reviewing the Supreme Court 's
| 25 year history would discover a fairly significant shift
| in its makeup recently.
| summerlight wrote:
| I guess you have zero understanding on Twitter's business
| model, which even Elon has some degree of. Advertisers are
| extremely sensitive on their brand safety and they will
| simply cut their budget if they see a certain amount of
| risk on publishers. YT had to implement various brand
| safety measures after Elsagate to appease advertisers.
| After Elon took it over, advertisers immediately cut their
| advertising budgets on Twitter because they see it as an
| existential threat to the platform. This is a REAL problem,
| which just you don't appreciate.
| aenis wrote:
| That's easy. I work for a company that has a similar body.
| Its a PITA but they prevent over-zealous POs and engineers
| from building creepy things that get the brand in trouble.
| (E.g., "why don't we record our users and predict their
| sentiment from facial expressions and tone of the voice" -
| those people will tell you why it's a bad idea). There,
| hope it helps.
| majjgepolja wrote:
| lm28469 wrote:
| Do you have any source for that or are you an armchair
| statistician ?
| majjgepolja wrote:
| Just look at the armchair advocate fired from Google last
| year.
| chess_buster wrote:
| Just like your comment.
| krona wrote:
| That just sounds like your product owners and legal
| department have outsourced one of their core competencies
| to another department, perhaps to reduce their own
| accountability.
| aenis wrote:
| POs have different incentives - they usually get rewarded
| for features built. A good PO has lots of ideas, some of
| those may be good for the product ("we will serve more
| relevant ads if we spy on our users!") and bad for the
| brand. The ML Ethics teams are usually part of the legal
| teams and are staffed mainly with lawyers. Not sure how
| it was with Twitter. It's also entirely possible those
| teams did not do a very good job, considering what a
| sh1thole Twitter is, so they may as well do without one.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Why are you ok outsourcing to a legal department, but not
| an ethics one?
| threeseed wrote:
| It isn't one of their core competencies though.
|
| If you look in the medical industry for example ethical
| decisions are always managed by a different group than
| Product/Legal because it's a completely different set of
| skills and competencies.
|
| Even more so at places like Twitter which are heavily
| dependent on ML models to make real-time decisions. And
| so you need a dedicated team that is proactive rather
| then reactive like a Legal team would be.
| krona wrote:
| > It isn't one of their core competencies though.
|
| Putting the "what will our users think" question in an
| ethical framing is not obviously (to me) going to benefit
| users. (Especially when modern fashionable ethics centers
| around utilitarian normative ethics, but that's besides
| the point.)
| aenis wrote:
| Right. The real point is of course to make sure what gets
| built is good for the brand. That revealing how something
| works won't make people mad, disgusted, less likely to
| use its services, do business with it, etc. Of course
| hardly anybody really cares about the ethics per se -
| only for the perception of the company.
|
| Some companies, such as for instance Procter & Gamble or
| Apple care about their brand equity a lot, since they
| rely on it to charge above market premiums. Twitter needs
| to care about that too, since if they get caught doing
| something unsavoury they will turn toxic to their
| advertisers, or at least those who care about _their_
| brands. I am not a marketing exec but if Twitter now
| drops the pretense of caring about ethics you will see
| major advertisers pull out, and make a point of
| communicating why they do it. Thats the ROI on having
| functioning ethics teams.
| watwut wrote:
| Product owners and legal departments are not accountable
| for unethical features or behaviors is a big point.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Ah yes, the sole purpose of companies, making mad $$$
| without any care for anything else.
| vegai_ wrote:
| Ideally the society where the companies operate in should
| provide the safety rails, thus allowing the company to do
| whatever it legally can to maximize profits.
|
| But that wouldn't be the crony capitalism that we're
| stuck with now. Also, things have been moving too fast
| for a long time, making it nearly impossible for
| governments to keep up.
| aenis wrote:
| But even that approach does not work for very long. With
| regulators tightening the laws everywhere, and eying bans
| on fully automated decision making in some industries
| (e.g. mine - in HR), you either staff those internal
| ethics teams with intelligent, well connected lawyers, or
| you get truly nasty surprises and jeopardize the brand
| itself -- and lose $$$.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "What's the ROI on ethics and accountability?" might be a
| question to ask former Enron shareholders.
| kortilla wrote:
| Enron was breaking the law, there's a difference.
|
| I consider much of the practices of social media
| companies designing for dopamine hits to be unethical,
| but it had been very lucrative for shareholders for more
| than a decade. It's still lucrative but shareholders are
| taking it on the chin for other macro reasons.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Breaking the law often starts with unethical behavior.
| Bad ethics often leads to _new_ law (often impacting
| ROI), too; see the GDPR for an example.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Do they often publish transparency reports about their ML
| systems that cannot identify months-long spam campaigns where
| scammers post identical messages tens of thousands of times?
| zmxz wrote:
| I don't see the purpose of this condescending comment, you
| could have explained why and provide knowledge for the person
| posting the initial statement.
| threeseed wrote:
| > Sure, something nobody has heared of and nobody knows why it
| should be at a company like Twitter.
|
| Actually almost everyone who is in the Data/ML space knows
| about it.
|
| It's one of the biggest challenges in ML which is making sure
| that models don't amplify biases in the training datasets and
| cause harm to users and the company. There have been many
| stories with TikTok for example recommending accounts which
| promote unhealthy eating [1] to users with a known eating
| disorder.
|
| [1]
| https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
| jmull wrote:
| > nobody knows why it should be at a company like Twitter
|
| Social networks like Twitter use ML to boost engagement.
|
| It turns out this tends to lead to ML amplifying pretty
| destructive patterns... racism, conspiracy theories,
| ideological bubbles, anti-semitism, etc.
|
| A company might wonder how to boost engagement without
| promoting these things.
| trashtester wrote:
| > ideological bubbles
|
| Good points. I agree with all you write.
|
| However, Musk's stated intent when buying twitter, was to
| make it a non-partisan town square. This comes with a context
| of the US currently being divided more and more into two
| competing "tribes" of similar size and power. (Ie. the
| perfect setup for a civil war.)
|
| If you look at the "ethics" teams kind of like law
| enforcement, it's important that they are neutral to this
| partisan divide, and don't have a "My side good, other side
| evil!" attitude.
|
| If Elon is of the opinion that Twitter has been engaging in a
| partisan way, it is natural that roles like this are torn
| down and built from scratch, where the new teams are
| thoroughly screen to make sure they have as little
| affiliation with each of the tribes as possible, and to make
| sure that any affiliation remaining is balanced between the
| tribes. (Kind of like one does when recruiting a jury for a
| high profile court case, and also how presidents _should_
| select supreme court justices)
|
| Hopefully, Musk goes through with this the way he has stated,
| by aiming for non-partisanship, and not in a pro-Republican
| way.
| samstave wrote:
| When I interviewed with Twitter in ~2007 or something they
| asked me " _What do you think Twitter is_ "
|
| My reply was,
|
| "you're a global sentiment barometer"
| srvmshr wrote:
| 'Ethics, Transparency and Accountability' is a decently
| important part of any data warehousing company.
|
| If you are going to be hosting petabytes of data and in the
| business of showing advertisment, a lot of recommendation
| algorithms work in the background. A lot of times they aren't
| perfect and end up showing information which could be very high
| correlated but culturally sensitive, offensive or avoidable.
| People working in fairness and accountability run a lot of
| experiments to make sure biases don't get amplified in service
| offerings.
| code51 wrote:
| > "Twitter's newsletter service Revue will be shut down by the
| end of the year. Revue was acquired by Twitter in January 2021
| for an undisclosed amount. The report also says that Notes, a
| longform posting feature, is on hold, as is Twitter's plan to
| build crypto wallets."
|
| All these are look so distant to Twitter's core value.
| yabatopia wrote:
| What exactly is Twitter's core value?
|
| Some say it's the world's town square. Fine, but how do you
| support (pay for) that? Town squares are generally funded and
| maintained by public organisations and tax money. Twitter is a
| private company and I don't think there's much enthousiasm for
| giving Twitter public funding in order to run it.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| Why do you think that? Twitter has tonnes of journalists who
| are running a substack or patreon, Revue would have let Twitter
| get in on that revenue stream. Building a tool for longer form
| content seems like a totally reasonable leap for twitter, and
| crypto - whilst a bit bullshitty - would be a fine way of
| moving payments into twitter which is another great
| monetization strategy. All of those projects seem reasonable
| extensions of Twitters core business.
| mikkergp wrote:
| Also odd since Jason Calacanis promoted this idea via
| "essays":
|
| https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1515094823337832448
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I don't think the decision to lay off the teams is odd. It
| is quite clear that Elon Musk's plan is "We're going to fix
| this by firing 90% of you and expect the remaining 10% to
| work 10x harder". They're not dumping any of these ideas,
| they're just expecting to deliver them with far fewer
| engineers (who, btw, will _not_ be earning 10x salaries).
| mikkergp wrote:
| It wasn't the decision to layoff teams, it was the fact
| that he did tell them to stop working on the longform
| product. Maybe he'll take it back once they're done with
| paid verification.
| coffeeblack wrote:
| Awesome. Finally we get more honesty in the public debate again.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Where does Twitter fit in Musk's multi-planet strategy?
| john-radio wrote:
| A lot of the tweets that are quoted in the article have been
| removed. For example, Twitter employee Cristina Angeli is
| mentioned in the story for having tweeted an image of "staff
| members... flooding an internal Slack channel with blue heart
| emojis as they wait to learn their fate tomorrow", but that tweet
| is deleted on twitter itself because "This Tweet violated the
| Twitter Rules."
|
| This is ironic if you consider all the complaining that Musk does
| in the public sphere about "freedom of speech" (I know that the
| first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk
| likes to pretend not to), but it's also significant because -
|
| Smart journalists are going to stop relying on Twitter's API now.
| News and blog sites love to render Twitter URLs as a preview of
| the tweet; but if Twitter under Musk is going to start removing
| tweets that go against its corporate interests of the hour (is it
| against Twitter policy to post screenshots of any corporate Slack
| channel, or only Twitter's own?), then people had better take
| screenshots of the tweets they want to quote, just in case.
| rkapsoro wrote:
| AFAIK they haven't changed content management policy yet. This
| is application of the current rules/process.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules
|
| If there's a current publicly-stated Twitter rule that
| prohibits screenshots of an internal Slack channel full of
| blue heart emojis, I'm not aware of it; it's not abusive,
| it's not hateful conduct, it's not illegal, and presuming
| there wasn't personally identifying information in the
| screenshot, it's not private information by Twitter's own
| definition as linked above.
|
| If this was a screenshot from a Slack channel of any other
| tech company, do you _really_ think Twitter would have
| quickly taken it down? I honestly don't.
| karmasimida wrote:
| Twitter employees created this censorship machine now
| descending upon themselves is hellishly funny.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| This is literally no different than before.
| grammers wrote:
| > "This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules."
|
| Censorship at its best. Not optimistic about Twitter and where
| it's heading to.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| IMHO freedom in US is usually in fact 1) free for people who
| have $$ or 2) poor people who advocates for 1) for whatever the
| reason.
|
| Basically freedom means less regulation from governments, which
| is only good for super riches and large enterprises. If you are
| not you should welcome more government regulation to counter
| the other elephant in the room. Two evils is always better than
| one.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Yes, regulation is often pushed to protect the peasants from
| the aristocrats, to protect workers from the capitalists but
| by far not always: Regulation is also pushed to manifest the
| power of the powerful ... which means there are also freedoms
| for the weak to protect.
|
| It is a centuries long battle to find the balance in always
| changing times.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| unity1001 wrote:
| Amazing how the US is in knee-deep sh*t and Americans are
| still downwoting people when they say what you said...
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| Freedom is for everyone given that you stay out of the
| limelight and don't have something someone else more rich and
| powerful wants to take.
| q1w2 wrote:
| > Smart journalists are going to stop relying on Twitter's API
| now.
|
| This seems unlikely. Journalists are pragmatists and won't
| abandon Twitter unless there is an alternative.
| grumple wrote:
| The alternative is screenshots or direct quoting, both of
| which are actually easier than using the api.
| nicce wrote:
| But they have zero proof about being real. Using the API
| was proof. I can make any tweet from any user, take
| screenshot and you can't prove it was not real.
| pygy_ wrote:
| News site could fetch the tweet markup using the API at
| publication time, save it locally, and publish a static
| version along with the article.
| nicce wrote:
| It does not provide any additional value, since that can
| be faked as easily as the screenshot. Any validation
| requires something from Twitter end-point, that they
| check and verify publicly that it actually existed at
| that time... but that does not work since we are going
| against removals made by Twitter in the first hand.
| plgonzalezrx8 wrote:
| Thats a lot of effort going into something that 99% of
| the people couldn't care less.
| afterburner wrote:
| Exactly, so using a screenshot is in fact a good solution
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Apart from the inefficiency and inaccessibility.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| It'd be pretty easy to automatically implement in their
| publishing system, I think.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| That's only an issue if you distrust a particular news
| source more than you distrust Twitter itself.
|
| Now that Twitter is owned by a known bully (I don't use
| that word lightly), only the crappiest newspapers would
| fit that standard.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| You're reading news sources where you think it's a
| serious threat that the journalists might fake a tweet?
| Why would you care about what any site with that low of a
| reputation has to say?
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| It may not be an issue with established, reputable news
| sources you're already familiar with, but it certainly
| could be with every other website out there.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Did the general public start caring about news being real
| at some point?
| tptacek wrote:
| Only on Internet message boards is this a live issue.
| BirdPlusPlus wrote:
| > Smart journalists
|
| This seems unlikely.
| kcplate wrote:
| Do we know that the company did it? Or did the tweeter do it
| after it was suggested to them by someone knowledgeable that
| posting internal company communications might violate the NDAs
| and corporate policies on company owned communication
| platforms? And why are only _some_ of the tweets being removed?
|
| Always a lot of assumptions in the comments of every Twitter
| story I have read over the last week or so... and so far most
| of the assumptions tend to be pretty wrong when the dust
| settles.
| yanderekko wrote:
| >Smart journalists are going to stop relying on Twitter's API
| now.
|
| I somehow have a feeling that this is not the first time in
| history that an embedded Tweet in a news story has been
| removed, either by Twitter or the author.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Yes, but it is probably (one of) the first times it was done
| so blatantly in Twitter's own interest.
| yanderekko wrote:
| Perhaps, but unless this becomes a substantial portion of
| removals the hand-wringing about Twitter's APIs becoming
| "unreliable" seems overblown.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| How many other company internal communications tweets have
| there been that stay up?
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Are you claiming it is Twitter SOP to delete all tweets
| referencing internal communications from companies? Can
| you substantiate that?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| From _their_ company, yes, I am saying that.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| I'll take the lack of any evidence as you _can't_
| substantiate that?
| vkou wrote:
| As the old joke goes, we have freedom of speech in the
| USSR. We too can go to the middle of the Red Square, and
| denounce the American president there, with no negative
| consequences.
|
| It's not very interesting to see an alleged champion of
| free speech allow speech he likes. It's far more telling
| to see what he does about speech he dislikes.
| cronix wrote:
| Smart journalists screen capture the tweet and post it as a
| photo.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Sure, but a screenshot of a tweet is trivial to fake.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| People who post to drama sites routinely take screenshots of
| tweets and posts from other sites because it's an easy way to
| have permanence even in the face of hostile moderation. This
| will just extend to normal journalists now.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| At risk of finding out, what is a "drama site"? Do people
| actually have websites devoted to... drama?
| pjc50 wrote:
| You missed the KiwiFarms debacle?
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Sure did. Searched it, and am not disappointed to have
| missed it.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| What do you think TMZ is?
|
| There are tons of subreddits that are devoted to catching
| some person or another with questionable tastes or
| interests in saying something they shouldn't. In these
| instances, rather than linking to the post (which may
| result in a moderator taking it down or the poster
| realizing how badly they're being dragged), they instead
| take a screenshot since it's a bulletproof way to retain
| the content.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Right now there are 1200 comments here. The drama you are
| looking for may be closer than you expect.
| dunkelheit wrote:
| > This is ironic if you consider all the complaining that Musk
| does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech"
|
| Another ironic thing is the number of people who lectured
| anyone disagreeing with twitter's content moderation decisions
| that twitter is a commercial enterprise that can do whatever it
| pleases (usually this means yielding to activist pressure) and
| who are now acting indignant when Musk acts like he owns the
| place (which he does).
| mcguire wrote:
| Consistency is not Musk's strong suit.
| DHPersonal wrote:
| Is that fair? The criticism about these deleted posts seems
| to be pointing out the contradiction between the claim of
| widening the speech available and the way that it is being
| limited here, not that Twitter has no right to do it.
| dunkelheit wrote:
| > Is that fair?
|
| I don't know! Probably not. It is all a political struggle
| and Musk for sure pursues his own goals in it. But if all
| this results in a twitter that is more interesting, open
| and less prudish than before, I think it is worth it. You
| can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs.
| alldayeveryday wrote:
| Yeah, have you ever noticed that most people only
| complain about free speech when the voices they agree
| with our silenced, and never complain when voices they
| don't agree with our silenced?
| reactspa wrote:
| Twitter employee on October 21: "Slowly making the migration to
| Mastodon"
|
| Same Twitter employee today (November 4): furiously posting on
| Twitter about having gotten fired from Twitter.
|
| Karma?
|
| Ref:
|
| - https://twitter.com/ruchowdh/status/1583518479210393600
|
| - https://twitter.com/ruchowdh
| googlryas wrote:
| What's with the take off of "IYKYK"(in her bio)?
|
| Is it because people feel special advertising that they're
| part of some elite/secret ring of true knowledge sharers?
| Literally if the phrase was excluded, it's factualness would
| still be true.
|
| Basically, I find people who say "IYKYK" to commonly be
| completely insufferable performance artists.
| reactspa wrote:
| Can you imagine complaining about being fired from a
| company after publicly declaring that you were abandoning
| its product and that you preferred their competitor's
| product?
|
| IYKYK.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| Many of the child posts assume that Twitter deleted these
| tweets. That isn't clear to me. It's possible the original
| authors did (happy to see proof either way).
|
| When one is laid off, there are often clauses in the severance
| agreement that forbid disparaging the company or leaking
| secrets, or similar things.
|
| If I wanted that severance check and someone pointed out to me
| that the tweet may be in violation of the severance agreement,
| I would delete it too.
| nr2x wrote:
| 100%.
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| Enforcers: "Those are the rules"
|
| Everyone: what about our freedom of speech?
|
| Enforcers: those are our rules
|
| New Boss: You're playing by my rules now
|
| Ex-enforcers: what bout our freedom of speech?
|
| New Boss: Welcome to your machine
| toofy wrote:
| so the new boss doesn't actually believe in the ideology he
| loudly preaches?
| harlequinn77 wrote:
| And the censors don't like being censored. Everyone is a
| hypocrite
| toofy wrote:
| my suspicion is "the censors" are highlighting how elons
| actions are proving in real time that they've been
| correct all along: that the "free speech absolutist"
| position has always been detached from reality.
|
| he is, as we speak--and will continue to prove in the
| future--that "the censors" have been correct all along,
| social spaces of a certain number of people, if you don't
| want the visitors to flee en masse, will need moderation
| to keep things from breaking down.
| pojzon wrote:
| Lets first speak about the present and present shows that
| all the comments about censorship were correct.
|
| The outcry is real. Many many bot networks create massive
| amounts of cry content.
| deeblering4 wrote:
| "richest man in the world" and "free speech advocate" are
| two ideologies in direct conflict with one another
|
| substitute "richest" for "most powerful" and it gets worse
| Eupraxias wrote:
| I don't think either of these are ideologies, and if they
| were, I'm pretty sure they do not necessarily conflict.
|
| I guess it is just a numbers game, but this whole page is
| one of the more unintelligent threads on HN I have ever
| seen.
| kepler1 wrote:
| Where do our free speech rights say that you are entitled to
| publish an opinion / statement on a particular channel or
| someone's private media outlet?
|
| Somehow the notion of rights is being expanded as a catch-all
| of various hopes and desires, misunderstood or expected to
| put obligations on people or entities that those rights do
| not apply to. This makes rights soft and hard to disagree
| with, and actually less clear and less valuable.
|
| You have the right to say something. You can go say it at
| politicians making a speech, you can write a letter, publish
| an article in some newspaper that will publish it. Not the
| right to say it on Twitter. Or the New York Times, or
| whatever outlet. You don't have the right / specific private
| entities are not required to enable your opinion.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| I want to buy a book that shows every single Tweet from Donald
| J. Trump, ever since he descended that elevator to announce his
| candidacy, through Biden's inauguration, and a little beyond...
|
| ...annotated with fact-checking, and historical context.
|
| Probably with a few lines from speeches thrown in as well. To
| really document the heck out of how insane those years were.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >descended that elevator
|
| escalator
|
| My favorite was the Twitter account to see if it would get
| banned by only retweeting Trump's account(s). They wanted to
| show how the rules were applied differently between accounts.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Oh yeah, that's what I meant, thanks.
|
| Obligatory Mitch Hedberg:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHopAo_Ohy0
| VikingCoder wrote:
| My favorite is when like PBS tweets out the Declaration of
| Independence on the 4th of July, and right-wing nutjobs
| accuse it of being un-American.
| ipaddr wrote:
| I had to look that up.
|
| Here is what happened, the documents gets split into 5000
| tweets. Twitter will randomly include one tweet in a feed
| and someone will respond. For example one person said
| what npr is calling to overthrow the government because
| the specific text has a reference to that.
|
| Didn't see any unAmerican comments. Saw comments like
| tweeting 5000 tweets is a stupid thing to do.
|
| Not sure if nutjob should be used in 2022 to label
| someone you disagree with as having mental issues. Mental
| illness is a serious issue and using it a weapon is not
| something to be casually used
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Yeah, you're right I shouldn't say "nutjob," I should say
| "ignorant and unreasonable."
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-supporters-react-
| to-np...
| lupire wrote:
| Why do people only to evidence that disproves their
| claims? Do you think no one will click?
| VikingCoder wrote:
| I think you a few words there, but if you read that link
| and think the people who responded to NPR sound informed
| and reasonable, then you and I have very different
| definitions of those words.
| notahacker wrote:
| I quite enjoyed the creativity that went into setting up
| this physical world bot to respond to Trump tweets.
| https://twitter.com/burnedyourtweet
| nostromo wrote:
| > "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only
| applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not
| to)
|
| Freedom of speech is not the first amendment and vice versa.
| Freedom of speech is an ideal that applies to all people and
| all spaces, public and private, while the First Amendment only
| applies in America and to the government.
|
| People think they sound smart when they say freedom of speech
| only applies to government censorship, but they actually sound
| ignorant of the concept's millennia-long history pre-dating the
| discovery of America entirely.
| Rapzid wrote:
| The first amendment has very little to do with the "freedom
| of speech" most people are constantly arguing about. But they
| are conflated so the first amendment gets dragged into the
| same old tired conversations.
|
| To me the first amendment is much more interesting. Its roots
| in ancient Greece. Its importance in sustaining a democratic
| government. The paradoxical nature of trying to extend its
| reach to private entities...
| philjohn wrote:
| The Town Square metaphor is equally strained. If you act like
| an objectionable fool you'll soon be chased out of it.
| webinvest wrote:
| First Amendment:
|
| "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
| religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or
| abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the
| right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition
| the Government for a redress of grievances."
| chrisseaton wrote:
| That's 'First Amendment Freedom of Speech', not 'freedom of
| speech'.
|
| When people say 'freedom of speech should be protected',
| they're being more broad than 'First Amendment Freedom of
| Speech should be protected'.
| pif wrote:
| Your freedom of speech does not oblige me to provide you with
| a microphone.
|
| You are free to post on _your_ website and Twitter is free to
| manage _their_ website.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Can't we just all agree that freedom of speech should be some
| narrow technicality that can legally be ignored in most
| circumstances?
| anotherman554 wrote:
| "Freedom of speech is an ideal that applies to all people and
| all spaces, public and private"
|
| Since we can't agree on a definition of "freedom of speech"
| this doesn't mean much.
|
| In practice it seems to mean something is a "freedom of
| speech issue" when a speaker wants someone to not face social
| consequences for some action (For example an Elon Musk fan
| saying he shouldn't be charged with investor fraud because
| "freedom of speech"), and when a speaker wants someone to
| face social consequences they stay conveniently silent. (Say,
| an Elon Musk fan not complaining when he fires an employee
| for something they said).
| kenjackson wrote:
| The concept outside the context of legal sanctions is an odd
| one though. It's much like the anti-cancel culture argument.
| It seems some want freedom of speech with absolutely no
| chance of any consequence whatsoever. I think there's a
| reason why the more broad sense of freedom of speech has
| never been codified.
| alecbz wrote:
| The broader concept of "free speech" is not a legal one,
| and so is a lot "mushier" and more nuanced. "There should
| be no negative consequences of any kind for anything anyone
| ever says" is obviously way too strong. I think "free
| speech" is more like: "there's value in hearing ideas that
| are new, different, or that we actively disagree with, and
| we shouldn't discourage people from expressing ideas like
| that".
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| If you want a free society then that's the only way. If
| published in today's age, Samuel L. Clemens would have been
| cancelled by mercurial cry bullies.
| kenjackson wrote:
| I disagree. My ability to apply consequences is a
| necessary part of freedom. The consequences on their own
| shouldn't be illegal (e.g., murder), but applying those
| actions shouldn't in themselves be illegal when applied
| as a consequence of speech.
|
| For example, if I'm in line at McDonalds and the cashier
| tells me that I'm ugly and he hates my family, I should
| be able to say, "I've changed my mind, I'm not going to
| eat here". But not being able to apply consequence to
| speech prohibits me from doing even this simple act.
| ericd wrote:
| This argument comes up over and over in this debate, and
| it seems like the result of some misunderstanding. You're
| certainly allowed to react in a way that's punitive as
| long as it's a legal action, you won't be violating the
| law, and I don't think anyone claims otherwise, but
| you'll be violating the cultural norms of free speech by
| engaging in repression. If you generally believe in the
| freedom of speech as a principle, you believe that people
| who you disagree with should be able to say their piece,
| without your feeling the need to retaliate, because you
| know that that's what's necessary to maintain a culture
| of free speech and open, honest discourse. But when you
| try to punish or retaliate for someone airing a view you
| disagree with, you're going past civil discourse into
| actions intended to harm them financially, emotionally,
| or otherwise. And that's frankly harmful to democracy.
|
| If they say they hate your family directly to you, sure,
| don't eat there. But most speech that people disagree
| with and try to retaliate against the speaker isn't on
| that level - it's bits of speech taken out of context,
| indirect expressions of opinion like donations to
| candidates, etc. People are being manipulated by
| professional propagandists, and they're following along
| enthusiastically. It's polarizing the country, and it's
| actively harmful to the stability of the democracy.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| If companies do something I don't like I'm not gonna buy
| their shit. I am not violating free speech by choosing
| not to buy their shit. There is no _right_ for a business
| to have my dollars.
|
| And... that's really what it comes down to. Billionaires
| wanting to keep their profits.
|
| As far as going after a person personally, I don't agree
| with that, but that's usually not how this plays out.
| Some idiot says something stupid, then advertisers stop
| advertising, because they know people like me actually
| give a shit about this stuff and I can make do without
| random piece of shit #726 cluttering my house.
| kenjackson wrote:
| I don't understand this argument though. For example,
| "People are being manipulated by professional
| propagandists, and they're following along
| enthusiastically."
|
| Are you saying that pro propagandists don't have the
| right to their speech? Is the ability to persuade the
| problem? It seems like half of the reason why we speak is
| to persuade.
|
| We both stated in our posts that the reactions must be
| legal on their own. So lets take illegal actions out of
| the picture. But if it is legal for me to start a boycott
| about your product, I think it is problematic to say it
| is now illegal to do so as a reaction to something you
| said. If boycotting is so problematic, just make it
| illegal all up.
|
| The problem with our country isn't the speech. Its the
| fact that people are easily manipulated with bad data.
| But I don't see how prohibiting legal actions resulting
| from free speech is going to be helpful. All you've done
| is infringed on another "freedom". We should instead just
| be actively working on better educating people. Critical
| thinking and logic skills should be fundamental in our
| education system.
| 8note wrote:
| This isn't actually sufficient to uphold free speech.
| Rather, you need to fund your opponents -- buy them a new
| house, give them your car, retell their opinion to
| everyone you know, saying that you agree with it and that
| they should too, so that it can be seen in the most
| favourable light and have the most possible reach, and
| that they can put their full effort into it without
| having to prioritize their views against eating or
| housing etc.
|
| Just not adding punishments to one side while granting
| money, privilege, and respect to another is the current
| state of propaganda for folks like Bill Gates.
|
| If you make something that agrees, you'll be showered in
| funding, attention, and branding, but if you make
| something that disagrees, you're on your own. It's a
| retaliation for disagreeing
| pdpi wrote:
| > But not being able to apply consequence to speech
| prohibits me from doing even this simple act.
|
| Going a bit further: not being able to apply consequences
| to speech is itself curtailing _your_ speech, so you
| literally can 't have one without the other!
| simplotek wrote:
| > (...) not being able to apply consequences to speech is
| itself curtailing your speech,(...)
|
| No, not really.
|
| Your right to speech isn't infringed if someone does not
| share your personal opinion. You're always able to
| express your mind about how profoundly you disagree or
| how wrong you feel everyone around you is.
|
| What you cannot do is go around strong-arming people to
| shut up or stop expressing ideas you don't share. That is
| not a way to protect your right to free speech. That's
| just fascism 101.
| three_seagrass wrote:
| There's a difference between "strong arming" and showing
| someone the door.
|
| https://xkcd.com/1357/
| Plasmoid wrote:
| As an honest question. By what authority do you have the
| right to "show someone the door"?
| DFHippie wrote:
| "Showing someone the door" is just indicating that you
| would like them to leave. How much authority do you need
| to do this? If you believe the person being shown the
| door should have the right to say whatever they want, do
| you believe the other participants in the conversation
| don't have the right to say they would like to stop
| hearing from him?
| kenjackson wrote:
| No one is suggesting anyone get strong-armed. Unless
| doing things like writing letters or boycotting is
| strong-arming. Physical violence, or threats, or denial
| of service, etc... are all out-of-bounds. But saying that
| me and my group of colleagues is no longer frequenting
| your establishment because you said you support our
| extermination is fair play, IMO.
| 8note wrote:
| Denial of service is in bounds - I'm not required to do
| business with you.
|
| I can't stop others from doing business with you, though
| I could convince them
| kenjackson wrote:
| I meant someone overloading your email or phone so you
| couldn't use the service. I agree with what you're saying
| is in bounds.
| watwut wrote:
| Obvious example is that Jews don't have to stay at the
| party where someone is yelling nazi slogans. And their
| friends can leave too. Neither have to wait till first
| physical attack starts.
|
| I intentionally picked obvious example instead of
| anything nuanced.
| vkou wrote:
| Just like Joe Rogan (most popular podcast in the world,
| btw), Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh, John Stewart were
| all cancelled, as opposed to being wildly popular, but
| divisive media creators..?
| toofy wrote:
| by canceled you mean, people would have used their own
| free speech to say stuff he didn't want to hear. and then
| he would have published his books.
| [deleted]
| ytpete wrote:
| Ironically, "free speech" as a broader principle can also be
| interpreted to mean a private company should not be compelled
| to carry or broadcast anyone else's speech if they don't want
| to. Any private company can choose what kind of community
| norms and tone they want to set, and moderate accordingly.
| Some platforms may allow hate speech, others not. Some may
| allow porn, others not. Taking editorial control away robs
| that forum of its own free speech agency.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _Freedom of speech is an ideal that applies to all people
| and all spaces_
|
| Is it though?
|
| Those outside of the US who subscribe to this ideal seem
| heavily influenced by US culture in my experience. I'm not
| aware of non-US sources of the idea.
|
| Add to that I've never really seen anyone espouse this ideal
| that actually understood (or could articulate) what "free
| speech" even means...
|
| Certainly in the context of Musk's campaign, neither he nor
| most of his followers are genuine in their support for "free
| speech". Musk in particular has been a staunch supporter of
| censorship _in practice_ , and has only paid lip service to
| free speech for clicks.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > Those outside of the US who subscribe to this ideal seem
| heavily influenced by US culture in my experience. I'm not
| aware of non-US sources of the idea.
|
| The idea predates the existence of the US.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech
| lucideer wrote:
| An article on a wholly US topic, that has one small line
| saying the following:
|
| > _It is thought that the ancient [Athenian democratic
| principle](hyperlink) of free speech may have emerged in
| the late 6th or early 5th century BC._
|
| The hyperlinked page on democratic principle notably has
| no mention of free speech.
|
| I've replied to a sibling commenter on Athenian "free
| speech" parallels - much of their association with modern
| concepts is appropriation.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| Freedom of speech isn't a "wholly US topic". It's
| understood and accepted in most democratic countries.
|
| > The right to freedom of expression has been recognised
| as a human right in the Universal Declaration of Human
| Rights and international human rights law by the United
| Nations. Many countries have constitutional law that
| protects free speech.
|
| > The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the
| Citizen, adopted during the French Revolution in 1789,
| specifically affirmed freedom of speech as an inalienable
| right.[7] Adopted in 1791, freedom of speech is a feature
| of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution
| mancerayder wrote:
| >Is it though? >Those outside of the US who subscribe to
| this ideal seem heavily influenced by US culture in my
| experience. I'm not aware of non-US sources of the idea.
|
| Individual rights of expression predate the US and are part
| of a collection of ideals in a long tradition that finally
| exploded in the Enlightenment in Western Europe. Don't
| forget how much of a grip the Church had on suppressing
| books and ideas, including meting out punishment.
|
| The erasing of the history of freedom of speech including,
| within the US, forgetting the facts within the 20th century
| where it was primarily conservatives who advocated for
| suppression and censorship, is a very awful misreading of a
| general principle, especially by, today, people who
| identify as left.
|
| Freedom of speech is an ideal intended to protect unpopular
| opinions. It's an individual right in the sense that the
| individual may be at odds with others, and just because it
| is a minority view it should not be suppressed.
|
| Today the Zeitgeist is saying: freedom of speech is a silly
| American concept, and it's just to defend people on the
| hard right who should be deplatormed.
|
| False, and false.
| virissimo wrote:
| > Those outside of the US who subscribe to this ideal seem
| heavily influenced by US culture in my experience. I'm not
| aware of non-US sources of the idea.
|
| I think it unlikely that Ancient Athens was heavily
| influenced by US culture on the topic of free speech as an
| ideal: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Socrates/The-
| Athenian-i...
| lucideer wrote:
| In ancient Athens they spoke (ancient) Greek, so no they
| didn't have an ideal of "free speech", as in the modern
| US, they had ideals of isegoria and parrhesia - separate
| concepts that Athenians at least recognised were often
| irreconcilably in conflict with another. Any such nuance
| is completely lost in most modern applications.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| For sure. People many other places dont really care about
| free speech. They are totally OK with government censorship
| in favor of social harmony.
| lupire wrote:
| Those tend to be places where saying "I believe in free
| speech" lands you in jail, so there is reporting bias.
| steve76 wrote:
| simplotek wrote:
| > Those outside of the US who subscribe to this ideal seem
| heavily influenced by US culture in my experience. I'm not
| aware of non-US sources of the idea.
|
| No, not at all. There are plenty of countries who go to
| greater lengths to protect their individual rights without
| the US even registering as a suggested influence. Most
| countries which managed to transition away from
| authoritarian oppressive regimes did grew political
| antibodies to ensure the right to freely express your ideas
| without being subjected to persecution as it happened in
| the not so distant past.
| gdy wrote:
| I don't think that the Bill of Rights, for example, was
| influenced by US culture.
|
| "the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in
| Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any
| court or place out of Parliament;"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689#Provision
| s...
| lupire wrote:
| That's a Safe Space for specific people, not Freedom of
| Speech as a general principle.
| gdy wrote:
| I don't think that slaves in the US enjoyed free speech.
| pdpi wrote:
| The first amendment isn't even particularly strong protection
| - it only forbids Congress from restricting freedom of
| speech, but doesn't set out any specific rights, or preclude
| states from setting their own laws restricting rights.
|
| E.g. the Portuguese constitution has much stronger
| guarantees. It explicitly recognises freedom of exprssion as
| a right, but it _also_ explicitly recognises freedom of
| access to information as a right: you have a right to inform
| yourself, and the exercise of that right cannot be limited by
| any form of censorship.
|
| It also specifically recognises a bunch more rights
| associated with media. Some rights protect journalists, such
| as the right to source confidentiality (which isn't even
| _law_ in the US, let alone a constitutional right), and the
| right to elect representatives to their employers 'editorial
| team. On the flipside, there's also rights protecting the
| public from media interference: regulators have the power
| (and responsibility) to prevent the consolidation of media
| ownership, and the media's ownership and sources of income
| must be made public.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > The first amendment isn't even particularly strong
| protection - it only forbids Congress from restricting
| freedom of speech, but doesn't set out any specific rights,
| or preclude states from setting their own laws restricting
| rights.
|
| This has been true when 1st Amendment has been passed, but
| has not been true since SCOTUS ruled that 14th Amendment
| incorporates 1st Amendment for states. Today, states are
| just as bound by 1st Amendments as the federal government
| is.
|
| > but it also explicitly recognises freedom of access to
| information as a right: you have a right to inform
| yourself, and the exercise of that right cannot be limited
| by any form of censorship.
|
| That's interesting, but what does it mean in practice? Can
| you give me an example of a situation where this right
| applied in Portugal? I want to know if this would actually
| protect us Americans from something that the government is
| currently not prohibited from doing.
| alecbz wrote:
| > or preclude states from setting their own laws
| restricting rights.
|
| 1A on its own does not do this, but AIUI a subsequent
| amendment (I think one of the reconstruction amendments?)
| has been interpreted to apply the restrictions in the
| constitution to state governments as well.
| aamar wrote:
| A good explanation of the incorporation doctrine, with
| citations:
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/incorporation_doctrine
| sib301 wrote:
| Every time this debate comes up, someone suggests that
| companies like Twitter are in violation of the first
| amendment when they remove a user's post. To me they often
| sound like the ignorant ones.
| artificial wrote:
| More from The Intercept, here's a document from DHS on
| disinfo discussing using 3rd party non profits as a
| "clearing house for information to avoid the appearance of
| government propaganda."
| https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1587257992449208320 in
| the same thread there's a Draft DHS quad review, which
| plans agency policy, leaked that shows growing focus on MDM
| (misinfo, disinfo, malinfo) to protect homeland against
| spread of "toxic narratives." How the agency defines false
| info and what narratives are prioritized isn't clear.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I see people refuting this a lot. I don't see many people
| asserting it. Reeks of strawman.
|
| The real debate is if society should value free speech.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > in violation of the first amendment
|
| I've never seen this. I _have_ seen people point out that
| Twitter isn 't promoting freedom of speech and the somebody
| _else_ conflating that with the first amendment of the U.S.
| constitution though.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| The general sentiment is that if tech companies can censor
| arbitrarily their special section 230 liability protection
| should be removed. They are no longer acting as an internet
| service, but as a publisher that curates publications.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Section 230 grants them immunity without regard to some
| nonexistent "publisher vs. platform" criteria.
| willcipriano wrote:
| This[0] is probably a first amendment violation.
|
| [0]https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-
| disinformat...
| jimt1234 wrote:
| Conversely, people often reference "First Amendment" in
| situations that have nothing to do with government
| censorship.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _people often reference "First Amendment" in situations
| that have nothing to do with government censorship_
|
| At least on HN, I've never seen this, except as a totem.
| danenania wrote:
| The principle that the first amendment is based on goes
| beyond government censorship. If large numbers of people
| are afraid to express their opinions because they fear
| being cut off from essential services, that's troublesome
| to anyone who believes in the _principle_ of free speech,
| regardless of whether the source of the censorship is the
| government, private entities, or some murky conjunction of
| both.
|
| It's quite akin to opposing systematic racism from private
| businesses. You could argue that a private business should
| have the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason,
| and it shouldn't concern any outside parties. But when
| these actions begin to interfere with the ability of large
| segments of the population to go grocery shopping, use the
| toilet, get a job, or get an education, it becomes a larger
| social issue that is deeply concerning to anyone who
| believes in the principles that underly a free society.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| > _You could argue that a private business should have
| the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason,
| and it shouldn 't concern any outside parties. But when
| these actions begin to interfere with the ability of
| large segments of the population to go grocery shopping,
| use the toilet, get a job, or get an education, it
| becomes a larger social issue that is deeply concerning
| to anyone who believes in the principles that underly a
| free society._
|
| I disagree. Historically, the only time people were
| _refusing service to anyone_ , the people being refused
| service were black. Hippies were sometimes discriminated
| against. We've come a long way since the 1960s, but there
| are more than a few politicians/people who want to drag
| us back into the 1950s.
|
| In Colorado, such an act would be illegal. Which makes
| many people in today's polarized society extremely angry
| as they want to discriminate as much as possible.
|
| Rule 20.4 (page 18 of the PDF):
|
| > _No person shall post or permit to be posted in any
| place of public accommodation any sign that states or
| implies the following:_
|
| > _"WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE."_
|
| > _Such signage implies that management may rely upon
| unlawful discriminatory factors in determining access to
| a place of public accommodation and thus is prohibited_
|
| https://www.sos.state.co.us/CCR/3%20CCR%20708-1.pdf?ruleV
| ers...
|
| These are regulations issued to support the
| administration of the state government.
| bink wrote:
| And freedom of speech also includes to the rights of private
| individuals and companies to determine what they share on
| their own platforms, and what they can or cannot be compelled
| to host or say.
| overrun11 wrote:
| It's a huge stretch to apply the same rights to companies.
| Companies are not people and do not automatically get the
| same rights individuals do.
| lupire wrote:
| Companies are groups of people. It's right there in the
| word "company".
| krapp wrote:
| It's impossible to deny freedom of speech (or freedom of
| association) to a company without denying those same
| freedoms to the people forming the company, or its
| customers or users of its service. That's one of the
| reasons companies _do_ have freedom of speech, and exist
| as quasilegal "entities" in and of themselves. Rights
| don't cease to exist in aggregate.
|
| Any legal pretense one could use to deny freedom of
| speech and expression to a company could also be used to
| deny any group - political parties, religions, specific
| races or genders, the press, etc.
| [deleted]
| pojzon wrote:
| But when someone buys out this company and changes
| guidelines what can be shared and what not -> ppl get
| instantly mad and baby rage.
|
| Why? Its a private company..
| yummies wrote:
| I think there's a much simpler and less juicy angle here:
| someone posted a _screenshot of an internal communication_ ,
| and it got removed. It's not surprising or controversial that
| Twitter would try to contain a leak of its own internal comms
| (a screenshot of their slack). This isn't "Twitter took down a
| disparaging post about Twitter", it's that they tried to stop
| the sharing of internal data.
|
| That being said, I don't disagree with the sentiment here in
| the sibling comments, this just isn't the steelman you're
| looking for.
|
| Best of luck to all remaining and recently parted Twitter folk.
| tomhallett wrote:
| I think the question is - did the twitter employee delete
| their own tweet, regardless of their reasoning, or was the
| tweet deleted in the backend by a different twitter employee?
| isx726552 wrote:
| > someone posted a screenshot of an internal communication,
| and it got removed
|
| Yeah, except Musk himself already did that:
|
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586885887341645824
|
| I mean it's his company he can do as he likes, but that was
| one of the first things he did after the buyout.
| viscanti wrote:
| So did Elon look up every private message in company chat
| that had the word Elon in it? Then he's sharing some of the
| juicy ones on twitter?
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Now I'm genuinely curious if that constitutes a violation
| of GDPR (if Twitter was European) or CA's regulations
| (but Twitter is in CA, so maybe?)
| adventured wrote:
| Corporate communication is corporate property and fully
| accessible as it pertains to investigations of corporate
| wrong-doing. You can be certain Twitter's new legal team
| is looking at everything. The issue is whether the
| persons in question were communicating in the capacity of
| working for Twitter. It's very clear that they were, and
| it wouldn't be at all surprising if the clown show at
| Twitter did all manner of unethical things in conflicting
| with Musk.
| viscanti wrote:
| > Corporate communication is corporate property and fully
| accessible as it pertains to investigations of corporate
| wrong-doing.
|
| I guess it depends on your definition of corporate wrong-
| doing. If Elon just looked for all posts that include his
| name and he's firing everyone who was critical of him,
| that might stretch the definition for most people. That
| could even cross over into creepy big-brother like
| oversight and might dissuade people from working at Elon
| led companies (or maybe attracts people who want him
| searching their private messages for references to him).
| lupire wrote:
| Elon bought the company. That includes internal DMs
| between managers who violated their training and admitted
| breaking the law.
|
| Everyone who works for Elon, and half the people who
| don't, how heanages his companies.
| [deleted]
| sjm wrote:
| Is Twitter going to remove all screenshots/leaks of any
| company's internal comms? If not, this is not a good look.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Any company can request that Twitter take down screenshots
| of their own internal communications. Both before and after
| Elon, I imagine Twitter would comply if the request went
| through the legal channels (i.e. lawyers sending letters).
| padheyam wrote:
| Agree re: the less sinister explanation. I think only this
| particular tweet has been removed and the other tweets
| referred in the article are still up.
| smcl wrote:
| This one's still up:
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586885887341645824
| lupire wrote:
| Is that Elon publicly accusing one of his own execs, who
| still works at Twiqtter, of fraud?
|
| I can only imagine how much collateral the banks demanded
| to fund Musk's boondoggle.
| [deleted]
| ehfeng wrote:
| Hanlon's razor except s/stupidity/corporate policy/g.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Oh, please. This "internal communication" was a bunch of blue
| hearts if the source is to be believed. What vital business
| information did that leak?
| blueprint wrote:
| the fact there's an internal communication system and what
| stack it's built on, for starters. I'd imagine employees
| were required to agree not to disclose that sort of info
| but I could be mistaken.
| qaq wrote:
| If it had anything that's PI under GDPR for example like
| names
| mcrad wrote:
| Why does it matter how vital the info it is? You "oh,
| please" people love to split hairs until you miss the
| overarching point.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It's much easier to have a rule that says "no public
| posting of internal communications" than "make a judgement
| call about whether an internal communication is vital or
| not". And with an upheaval going on at Twitter at the
| moment, nobody has the time to do the latter.
| [deleted]
| lamontcg wrote:
| > "no public posting of internal communications"
|
| If you're really a free speech absolutist then this is a
| violation of that principle (not of a law, but of a
| principle).
|
| Workers should be able to freely talk about their
| condition with other workers, both internally and
| externally to the company. And as an absolutist, then the
| ability of individuals to freely speak without any
| chilling effects must take precedence over the companies
| concerns. The employees are effectively being "cancelled"
| and much more effectively than the people who most
| complain about that actually have their ability to speak
| being impaired.
| mathattack wrote:
| This! Sometimes it's not bad behavior, it's "we just
| don't have time for this sh!t."
|
| Their HR and PR people are busy enough today.
|
| This isn't a broad defense of Musk or Twitter. Just a
| comment that there doesn't have to be a conspiracy around
| any corner.
| jrumbut wrote:
| Whether it is malicious or lazy, it shows where "free
| speech" ranks among their values.
|
| You have time for the things you really care about.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| But it's one thing to have that rule and punish people
| that leak and another to delete the leaks from your
| platform. Particularly if you profess to be pro-freedom
| of speech.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Leaking confidential information that you agreed to not
| leak is actionable as a contract violation.
|
| It's not a free speech issue.
| pelasaco wrote:
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Of course it is. The contract is merely an agreement that
| you won't exercise your right. It's actionable in a civil
| court obviously. That however says nothing about your
| right to publish or that the content _must_ be removed
| just that changing your mind might have repercussions.
| johnbellone wrote:
| It isn't.
| brookst wrote:
| Are you suggesting that Twitter will similarly remove
| leaks of other companies' confidential information? Or is
| this just a special case where they will be free speech
| absolutists for everyone else but carefully curate what
| people are allowed to say about Twitter?
| mcrad wrote:
| Twitter has a responsibility to its shareholders to
| protect its information. Why on earth are people jumping
| to the conclusion they would take on any similar
| responsibility for another company??
| ytpete wrote:
| Because not doing so would fly completely in the face of
| everything Elon claimed he wanted Twitter to stand for.
| They would be putting their finger on the scale to censor
| speech critical of Twitter, and Twitter only. (Or maybe
| other favored groups and politicians too, who knows?
| Starting off like this on day 1 kills any trust in
| neutral moderation immediately).
|
| Edit: that said, I'm not sure it's been confirmed yet
| whether the employee just deleted the tweet themself -
| which would be a very different story.
| mcrad wrote:
| Twitter is a beast. I think it would be a mistake to
| evaluate what it "stands for" based on some edge case of
| who/what/why behind a single tweet. Consider the fact
| that most execs at the top of this thing we call
| capitalism, are routinely caught in ethical dilemmas.
| Even the individuals you have decided are on your "side"
| morally, are forced to occasionally compromise their
| ethics in the short term, to achieve a longer term goal
| that is far more complex than people are giving credit
| here when they use terms like free speech so casually.
| lupire wrote:
| Wow. Who besides Trump and Musk gets this treatment of
| "no reasonable person would believe what he says, yet
| what he says should be taken seriously"
| mcrad wrote:
| uhm, paul pelosi?
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Will Twitter apply that standard to other leaks of data?
| dpweb wrote:
| I don't believe this is always true. For instance,
| whistleblower cases, or NDAs that can be broken by
| supeona.
|
| Considering there is already some legal questions being
| raised about the firings - and I'm not arguing in favor
| of the merits of those cases - there is some possible
| scenario where an internal leak may be justified.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Again, _what information was leaked_?
| three_seagrass wrote:
| Being banned from Twitter for breaking their TOS
| agreement is just a contract violation too.
| scarmig wrote:
| It makes sense to punish or reprimand someone internally
| for leaking confidential information. Something like a
| firing could be appropriate.
|
| But banning someone or their Tweets on Twitter for
| posting an internal corporate communication is wrong (at
| least, it's not the Twitter I want to see). That's using
| one's privileged position as steward of a public platform
| to enforce internal rules in an extraordinary way. If how
| Twitter moderates users on its platform is a free speech
| issue (I believe it is), this is just as much of one.
| [deleted]
| maxerickson wrote:
| Are the Twitter terms of use different for employees than
| they are for other users?
|
| Cause if they use the service under a personal agreement
| with Twitter that is separate from their employment, then
| removing the Tweet isn't really so actionable under their
| employment agreement.
|
| I mean, I guess it probably isn't separate, but I'm also
| not sure why people are so eager to pat Twitter on the
| back for using their position to control the public
| communications of employees/former employees.
| maxbond wrote:
| It seems far more likely removing this tweet was a
| response to the publicity it was getting, and was an
| effort to keep such dissent from being aired publicly
| (and thus a contradiction with Musk's stated principles
| and goals for this takeover), than that it was an
| ordinary moderation process that just happened to produce
| this outcome. The disruption you cite makes it far less
| likely that this is by the book, not more.
| shawnz wrote:
| What makes that explanation more likely than the other?
| Imagine there was no optics problem here, and it was just
| a highly publicized tweet of some internal comms with no
| PR consequences, it would still obviously need to be
| removed, right?
| maxbond wrote:
| That's not obvious to me, no. What I'd imagine is
| something like this being escalated, and that there would
| be reasonable cases to be made either way; that all
| internal information should be removed on principle, and
| that removing this tweet would harm the company without
| improving it's security posture. Twitter has historically
| been pretty reluctant to remove tweets, so I wouldn't be
| surprised if, under normal circumstances, they ended up
| keeping it up. But I wouldn't be surprised the other way
| either.
|
| But closing our eyes to the optics of the situation would
| be a mistake. These are not normal circumstances by a
| long shot. Given the turmoil Twitter is going through and
| the heavy handed approach the new management is
| employing, it seems likely to me that very little work is
| being done through the normal channels (who's to say
| there's even someone on the other side of that channel?),
| while much is being done by direct instruction from the
| new management.
| politician wrote:
| Isn't it more likely that organizational inertia is the
| culprit? Elon doesn't have the capability to change the
| day-to-day activities of 7,500 people following
| established policies and procedures in the amount of time
| that he's had the authority to do so.
|
| There are some coarse-grained things that he can do, like
| fire the the top execs. The idea that he can strategize
| and effect change at the fine-grained level of emergent
| phenomena like a picture of an internal comms channel is
| bonkers, conspiracy theory stuff. He's got to lay off
| half the company to begin to even get some kind of handle
| on all of the machinations going on outside of his team's
| review.
| maxbond wrote:
| I'm not suggesting he orchestrated a conspiracy, or even
| personally ordered that this tweet be removed, who knows,
| it's more likely someone else on his team, but the new
| management sure does seem to be able to change the day to
| day activities, given that they've laid many people off
| and eliminated the entire data science team. Why wouldn't
| they be able to say, remove this specific tweet, or
| perhaps, investigate this tweet for violations of our
| policy? That's not a conspiracy, that's what a company
| is; management is able to give instructions to the people
| who carry out the work.
| lupire wrote:
| > eliminated the entire data science team.
|
| That was completely fake news indspired by a comedian
| calling himself "Rahul Ligma [Balls]"
| maxbond wrote:
| On cursory inspection I'm not finding the articles I saw
| on HN about this, so I'm assuming you're right. My bad;
| thank you for calling it out. I'm barely over the time to
| edit my post, or I would remove that part.
| rurp wrote:
| > The idea that he can strategize and effect change at
| the fine-grained level of emergent phenomena like a
| picture of an internal comms channel is bonkers,
| conspiracy theory stuff.
|
| You're right, but Elon himself is pushing this narrative.
| Remember when he pretended he was going to personally
| review the code of a bunch of Twitter engineers? There's
| also the Twitter blue pricing exchange and a number of
| other topics he's trying to appear deeply involved in the
| details for.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| There is no expedience exception for free speech. If they
| want to claim to value free speech, they need to actually
| do so, and that includes making that kind of judgement
| call.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > It's not surprising or controversial that Twitter would try
| to contain a leak of its own internal comms (a screenshot of
| their slack).
|
| It's not surprising or controversial, but it's in direct
| opposition to the idea that Twitter should allow all legal
| speech.
| [deleted]
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > It's not surprising or controversial, but it's in direct
| opposition to the idea that Twitter should allow all legal
| speech.
|
| The world is full of hypocrisy and Elon has his share. But
| I don't really care if the guy is a hypocrite; I'd be more
| interested in discussing if the move is _right_. If it
| violated internal company policy, or revealed internal
| identities or anything of that sort, then maybe it was the
| right move?
|
| I'm just glad I don't have to make these decisions.
| mc32 wrote:
| Also possible the user(s) deleted some themselves in order
| to not violate terms and thus retain their severance
| ---which typically hinge on such things.
| blueprint wrote:
| But is it what you're calling "legal" speech to disclose
| confidential info? If so, is it not just like they issued
| themselves a takedown notice and immediately executed on
| it?
| [deleted]
| lupire wrote:
| It's a potential antitrust violation to serve themselves
| better than other users of the platform. This is what
| Google and Apple get in trouble for all the time.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Yes, it's legal. Twitter can always sue the person that
| tweeted it to have them remove it, let a judge decide.
| throwaway858 wrote:
| This isn't how it works. If a website is hosting content
| that infringes on some NDA, then you are supposed to sue
| the website (and not the person who posted it to the
| website -- who are often anonymous and can't be directly
| sued).
|
| So Twitter would need to sue itself to demand that it
| take down the content. And the judge would reject the
| suit and scold Twitter for wasting the courts time, and
| tell Twitter that if it wants something removed from its
| own website then it should just remove it.
| ytpete wrote:
| I don't believe that's true. For _copyrighted_ work, you
| can issue a takedown notice to the website - but
| copyright is federal law. NDAs are just private
| contracts. If you could sue someone for hosting /posting
| NDA content, then any leaks or whistleblower content
| could be hidden from the public just by suing the all the
| news websites.
|
| Generally I think you can only sue the person who
| violated the NDA, not anyone further down the chain who
| posted the material. The same is even true for classified
| info in most cases - the NY Times won a famous Supreme
| Court cases about that over publishing the Pentagon
| Papers in the Vietnam era. Same principle that protected
| publishing the Snowden leaks, etc.
| olliej wrote:
| > This isn't how it works. If a website is hosting
| content that infringes on some NDA, then you are supposed
| to sue the website (and not the person who posted it to
| the website -- who are often anonymous and can't be
| directly sued).
|
| That's nonsense, because under that interpretation of the
| law no news agency could ever report anything with
| anonymous sources, or people "familiar with the
| situation", because under your definition they are now
| violating an agreement about which they know nothing.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| You could sue the website, but it wouldn't go very far,
| because website operators are not liable for user
| uploaded content because of Section 230 of the CDA.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > If a website is hosting content that infringes on some
| NDA, then you are supposed to sue the website
|
| > So Twitter would need to sue itself to demand that it
| take down the content.
|
| is this how it actually works, or is it make a request to
| the website and sue if request is deemed unduly denied?
| if the latter, then some Twitter HR/lawyer person can
| make a request to a Twitter moderation person and the
| request would be immediately approved. At that point,
| there's no "difference" in the procedures for
| internal/external moderation requests.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > But is it what you're calling "legal" speech to
| disclose confidential info? If so, is it not just like
| they issued themselves a takedown notice and immediately
| executed on it?
|
| I think there are a lot of things that are legal that may
| cause civil penalties. E.g. there's no law banning the
| dissemination of screenshots of Twitter's internal Slack
| (so the screenshot is legal speech), but Twitter may have
| grounds to sue the leaker for breach of a private
| contract.
| lupire wrote:
| You are conflating "illegal" with "criminal". Civil law
| is still law.
| hn_go_brrrrr wrote:
| Is a bunch of heart emojis confidential information? If
| so, lol.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Did the screenshot actually expose any confidential
| information though? Musk seemed fine with leaking
| confidential information when Mudge was doing it, but now
| he is suddenly concerned about it?
| boc wrote:
| IANAL but restrictions on confidential information only
| apply to government classification of information.
| Private classification isn't a "real" thing, it's just a
| breach of a private contract.
|
| If you're a "free speech platform", who are you to
| adjudicate whether a leak of corporate information is
| malicious vs a brave whistleblower?
|
| This is why we have a court system. Twitter needs to
| decide what they are actually trying to accomplish with
| their direction, because right now it appears that this
| was all about changing the censors, not removing them.
| moistofreason wrote:
| All those employees signed NDAs that said they would not
| disclose private company communications... this is way
| different than censoring a user who is under no such
| agreement.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The difference is that Twitter does not _enforce_ those
| agreements as quickly for any company that 's not
| Twitter.
|
| Hence what people are complaining about: one set of rules
| for Twitter (the company) making requests of Twitter (the
| platform) and another set of rules for everyone else.
|
| And really, it's the own-goalness of this that's likely
| irking everyone. Musk wants to get the high ground of a
| public space... and then he/someone at Twitter
| immediately burns that narrative on something trivial
| that doesn't even matter.
|
| The sheer stupidity of taking it down makes me think it's
| probably internal HR.
| hbrn wrote:
| But that's because Twitter has no capabilities to enforce
| them at the same speed for other companies. If processing
| speed depends on proximity to their legal department, of
| course Twitter will be able to verify their own
| agreements faster. That's just physics, not necessarily
| double standards.
|
| It's like complaining that Amazon ships faster to areas
| that are close to Amazon warehouses. Well duh.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| That's the HFT/exchange problem in a nutshell -- if you
| want to claim an equitable platform, then you have to
| artificially slow some requests to what you can guarantee
| for all.
| hbrn wrote:
| But they never claimed to be an equitable platform with
| regards to that issue, did they? Musk might idealistic,
| but not _that_ idealistic.
| jsight wrote:
| To be fair, some of his early comments indicated that all
| legal speech was to be allowed.
|
| That was obviously wrong, as lots of legal speech makes
| the platform worse (eg, spam or spam-like behavior), but
| it was one of the claims made.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > Twitter (the company) making requests of Twitter (the
| platform)
|
| Is this an actual distinction or just being thorough for
| specificity? I know some companies are like Mozilla
| having the browser and the foundation, but just not
| familiar with Twitter.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Was illustrating conceptual. I don't think they have an
| actual like Mozilla or Wikipedia. Though maybe they
| should?
| boc wrote:
| But does Twitter have a signed copy of all those
| agreements? No. How could they?
|
| Either they comply without hesitation to all takedown
| requests, or they don't take anything down unless ordered
| by a court. Doing something in the middle injects a level
| of moderation that goes against their "free speech"
| principles.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Uhh, not from Twitter the product's vantage it's not.
|
| So Twitter will now take down leaked internal comms from
| Facebook? What about from NYT? What about from CIA?
|
| Obviously they have the right to do this, but yes it's
| also _obviously_ hypocritical given Musk 's approach.
| jonas21 wrote:
| I am also not a lawyer, but it seems like there is a
| large gray area when it comes to theft of trade secrets.
|
| For example, Anthony Levandowski was sentenced to 18
| months in prison for copying a confidential spreadsheet
| containing Waymo status updates (out of the charges
| against him, that's the only one he pleaded guilty to -
| the rest were dropped).
| lamontcg wrote:
| Calling layoffs "trade secrets" is some real double-speak
| and overreach.
|
| Sociologically it is interesting that we've hit the point
| where that can even be considered a point of debate.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Nobody is calling the layoffs trade secrets. The thread
| is about pictures of an internal slack channel, and other
| private information.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| It's not about censorship per se. There will always been
| censorship. Removing spam is censorship, removing
| copyrighted material is censorship.
|
| There's a difference between removing a politically
| neutral piece content which violates some arbitrary rules
| and censoring political news which benefit a certain
| party.
| memish wrote:
| That's a conflation of two different things. Twitter Inc.
| the Company and Twitter the App.
| yccs27 wrote:
| But they did take down content from Twitter the App...?
| thevardanian wrote:
| Would NYT publish scathing remarks about itself, or
| publish leaked internal data on itself? If not, I don't
| think such a thing should be expected of twitter either.
| yunwal wrote:
| The NYTimes has investigated itself from time to time and
| publishes remarks that reflect poorly on themselves. Last
| example I can remember is the Caliphate podcast scandal
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/world/middleeast/calip
| hat...
| codyb wrote:
| Yea doesn't the NYTimes have a section pretty much
| devoted to retractions? I'll see them in their morning
| news letter and I think it's pretty common at most news
| organizations with integrity to understand that sometimes
| they'll get things wrong like we all do, and just be
| candid about it and post retractions where necessary.
| foldr wrote:
| The BBC certainly broadcasts criticism of the BBC from
| time to time. Here's one of the more trivial examples
| (easier to bring to mind because it's amusing):
| https://youtu.be/MBWfCV4PjyU
| lostlogin wrote:
| Crude, and hilarious to watch those two keep straight
| faces. Have I Got New For You has very regular criticism
| of the BBC too, slightly higher brow but entertaining.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| Do you mean Twitter in it's entirety is like a
| respectable newspaper that should edit all their content
| for correctness and propriety?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I can't remember the details now, but I remember a couple
| years back the New York Times published a big expose on a
| screwup in the Middle East perpetuated by... The New York
| Times. My understanding is that this type of thing isn't even
| so uncommon.
| UpToTheSky wrote:
| Does Twitter have any way to prevent/punish using screenshots
| instead of the Twitter embed thing when you put Tweets on your
| website?
|
| Twitter can probably not use copyright to fight this, a Tweet
| probably does not fall under copyright because it is too short,
| right?
| staticman2 wrote:
| Short works can fall into copyright in the U.S.
|
| Heck, even taking a photo of the Mona Lisa is subject to
| copyright in the U.S under the theory there is creativity in
| the composition of the photo.
| buggeryorkshire wrote:
| I'm sure the BBC did exactly that for ages, iirc because
| somebody who got their tweet embedded by them changed their
| display name to "big dogs cock" or something.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| That sounds like a flaw in the embedding technology --
| surely the display name should be whatever it was when the
| tweet was created?
| r00fus wrote:
| How do think embeds actually work? There is not
| snapshotting of data - it's simply a URL that renders at
| request - an HTML iframe.
| darrenf wrote:
| Sure, but there's no reason Twitter/whoever couldn't
| decide to offer a parameter like `at=<timestamp>` - which
| is really not that different to, say, a link to a file on
| github at a particular commit.
| r00fus wrote:
| Sure. I don't think Twitter has such an "look up as of
| effective date" enterprise feature though. Have you been
| able to access that data that way either through the UI
| or API?
| darrenf wrote:
| No, I don't use the API (or twitter at all, for that
| matter). I was just reacting to your statement:
|
| > _There is not snapshotting of data - it 's simply a URL
| that renders at request - an HTML iframe._
|
| "Simply a URL", the resource to which it refers being
| rendered in an iframe, could easily be a snapshot - as it
| is on other sites. Hence to me this read like a non
| sequitur.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I didn't mean to suggest that it would necessarily be
| possible today - I doubt twitter keeps a full history of
| username changes, for example, and they'd probably need
| to introduce more restrictions around changing them if
| they were to do so. That can all be part of the 'flaws'
| in the embedding technology I referred to.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Would the copyright even belong to Twitter, as opposed to the
| author of the tweet?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It's the same thing you see with millions of people, especially
| in some political demographics: Freedom for me, not for thee.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Smart journalists are going to stop relying on Twitter's API
| now.
|
| Yay! Journalists that do nothing but build a story around
| Tweets is not journalism. That's BuzzFeed. The fact that legit
| news sources decided to follow BuzzFeed is just a very sad
| comment on the state of affairs we live in now.
| Chyzwar wrote:
| Actually, BuzzFeed aside garbage reporting have also decent
| investigations journalism as well
| https://www.buzzfeed.com/investigations
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment
|
| Freedom of speech is different than the first amendment. The
| first amendment prohibits the government from limiting freedom
| of speech, but the concept itself is more general than the law.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| > _This is ironic if you consider all the complaining that Musk
| does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech" (I know
| that the first amendment only applies to government censorship,
| but Musk likes to pretend not to), but it's also significant
| because -_
|
| He hasn't made any major changes to algorithms / policies yet.
| They're tripping over their own pre-Musk rules.
| jurassic wrote:
| When you layoff 75%, that is a change of policy. Lots of
| people are needed to operate the system as it was.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > This is ironic if you consider all the complaining that Musk
| does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech" (I know
| that the first amendment only applies to government censorship,
| but Musk likes to pretend not to)
|
| It's not ironic or remotely unexpected if you've taken notice
| of any of his actual actions involving freedom of speech.
| e40 wrote:
| Elon is the type of person where action and words tell a very
| different story. In that way, it's expected. It's still
| ironic as hell, given his words.
| vkou wrote:
| It's not particularly ironic if you just set as your prior
| that he is being dishonest, unless there is clear third-
| party proof otherwise.
| elmomle wrote:
| I would say he (and other billionaires like Thiel) is
| immature in a very classical sense: he goes through the
| world like a child without appreciation for how difficult
| it was to create a society in which everybody could (say)
| engage in discourse safely; he sees some flaws in the
| system and thinks that because he is a special person and
| he saw what he thinks is a flaw he is entitled to pull it
| apart. But there is no methodical improvement being
| proposed. People like this are simply destroying the work
| of their forebears (of creating a stable pluralistic
| society) for personal benefit. It is not the behavior of
| responsible humans, much less leaders.
| frumper wrote:
| What does it mean to engage in discourse safely?
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| You don't get tortured for criticizing the current
| administration for one.
| frumper wrote:
| Is that something you see as a danger because of Elon
| taking over Twitter?
| innocentoldguy wrote:
| I don't know if this is necessarily true. There are
| plenty of people sitting in federal prison for
| criticizing Biden's legitimacy and his policies. I'd
| consider that torturous if I was in that situation.
| frumper wrote:
| They're in prison for actions they took, not voicing
| criticism.
| elmomle wrote:
| As just one example, not intended to be partisan: the
| elderly husband of the Speaker of the House was violently
| attacked and a sizable portion of the country either
| tacitly or openly endorses it. That is not a safe
| society. And it's very, very well-documented by now that
| social media in which violent / hate speech are not
| moderated are a key factor driving the increase in
| political violence and extremism. For people in positions
| of great power to ignore the complexity of what's
| happening to society, and to lean on populist (and
| reductive/misleading) arguments about censorship and
| freedom of speech for personal gain, comes across as
| either unintelligent or profoundly irresponsible.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| It's starting to feel like Musk is playing this political
| game to me.
|
| Pretending he is championing the little guy, that
| he/twitter/everyone is somehow being repressed and they/he is
| fighting against it. His recent tweet on how 'activists' are
| the cause of twitters recent revenue drop for example.
|
| Even with the blue check marks, he is framing it as it being
| open to all and the little guy taking the power back, all you
| have to do is pay him $8 a month for it. Viva la revolution
| indeed!
|
| It feels like social engineering to me and the same game that
| has been played very successfully in division politics.
| yehCuz wrote:
| Elon is heavily dependent on politicians keeping taxes low
| for billionaires, and policy that pushes NASA and other
| government agencies to hire private companies.
|
| Crony capitalism it's called colloquially.
|
| Marc Andreesen was tweeting a few months about the pressure
| from DC to curtail behavior that the politicians felt was
| undermining them.
|
| Around the time Powell began raising rates, memes in
| finance changed to "save", banks raised rates on savings
| accounts to get people to park cash they can leverage
| rather than get free cash from Powell they can leverage.
|
| Pulling cash out of the economy means fewer lattes and
| avocado toasts; being a bit glib, but those are the workers
| most likely to be hurt long term.
|
| So yeah it's basically division politics. The only reason
| it works like this is because of memory this is how it
| works.
|
| NPR reporter literally just said employers offering higher
| and higher wages is what's creating inflation, and they
| want unemployment to go up to bring inflation down.
| Manufacturing consent by repeating "truth".
|
| Behavioral economics runs the country. Politicians prefer
| behaviors like fealty to politically correct traditions.
| They are protecting the net worth class based system that
| keeps them from growing potatoes and determines which
| families thrive or die.
| yehCuz wrote:
| _jal wrote:
| > Pretending he is championing the little guy
|
| Are you just noticing this?
|
| Step two is whining endlessly and loudly. Step three he
| figures out a way to game government subsidies while
| whining about government.
| lupire wrote:
| SolarCity and Tesla did step 3 years ago.
| mmustapic wrote:
| It is quite common for some kinds of politics (you can
| deduce which ones) to create an enemy of the common people
| from thin air, and use it to justify your actions.
| jcbrand wrote:
| This happens on both sides of the spectrum.
|
| For the left the common enemy is often greedy
| exploitative capitalists. For the right it's often
| socialists and/or communists.
| watwut wrote:
| For right, it is libs and anyone who treats transsexuals
| well. Or people who want abortion.
|
| Or people who believe in democracy and voting lately.
| mmustapic wrote:
| Yes, it's orthogonal. Lately, it's "the people" vs "the
| elites"
| mym1990 wrote:
| I have never in my life thought that Musk would champion
| the little guy. If anything, Musk will run the little guy
| over 5 times in the quest for interplanetary domination.
| mcrad wrote:
| To champion the little guy has nothing to do with
| rhetoric, right? In my exprerience it's the uneducated
| masses that pretend to champion the little guy but don't
| understand that their actions have unintended
| consequences that often produce the opposite result. I
| would think people are starting to understand the inverse
| correlation between words and actions, at least where
| power politics are at play (not to mention specifically
| in corporate entities that make their dough by
| brainwashing)
| slg wrote:
| Or maybe he is just a dumb guy who believes his own
| bullshit but ultimately doesn't know what he is doing. How
| much do we have to hear about the chaos behind the scenes
| at his companies before people start to realize this whole
| thing possibly isn't a well orchestrated plan?
| greedo wrote:
| He's the poster child for Dunning Kruger...
| runarberg wrote:
| Distinction without a difference in this case. When you
| are as rich and powerful as Elon Musk, you usually get
| away with your own stupidity and it will ultimately turn
| to your benefits no matter what. The law of the
| accumulation of wealth also applies to social capital.
| brookst wrote:
| I think it's healthy to calibrate one's own beliefs to
| reality. So maybe you're right and there is no difference
| in outcome.
|
| But strictly for my own mental model, I think it is far
| more accurate to model this as "super rich guy makes shit
| up on the spot and has no master plan" rather than "this
| is part of a massively complex plot that relies on
| second- and third-order psychological effects planned
| years in advance."
| runarberg wrote:
| It is really human to over value intentions at the cost
| of the outcome. Even our legal system does this to a
| pretty large extent. However when looking and trying to
| grasp the amazing amount of share stupidity the rich
| folks do, we have to ask: ,,how does this much stupidity
| yield so high rewards?"
|
| IMO it is way more damning to us as a society that people
| can be this stupid and still become so insanely rich,
| then if someone had an evil masterplan to manipulate
| others into making them more and more.
|
| But at the end of the day, this concern is dwarfed by the
| fact that in either case we let them get away with it and
| ultimately reward them with insane wealth. This is the
| true damning of our society that these people are given
| all this wealth and power in the first place, and after
| the fact, honestly they can do whatever they like. And
| what they do isn't pretty at all.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > But strictly for my own mental model, I think it is far
| more accurate to model this as "super rich guy makes shit
| up on the spot and has no master plan" rather than "this
| is part of a massively complex plot that relies on
| second- and third-order psychological effects planned
| years in advance."
|
| B.b.but a bunch of his PR guys convinced a lot of
| Redditors that he's the real-life Tony Stark who's saving
| humanity as we speak. What have you done? How could the
| PR not by true, if so many people repeat it?
| simplotek wrote:
| > When you are as rich and powerful as Elon Musk, you
| usually get away with your own stupidity and it will
| ultimately turn to your benefits no matter what.
|
| I'm yet to see how that idiotic "pedo guy" episode turns
| out to benefit Elon Musk.
| runarberg wrote:
| How the accumulation of wealth works statistically is
| that when transacting with less wealthy players, you have
| a lot more to win and a lot less to loose, while the
| other player has everything to loose and--relative to you
| --hardly anything to win. Over time this results in
| gradual accumulation of wealth.
|
| I see the accumulation of social capital no differently.
| This particular transaction might not have benefited him,
| he might even had lost some from it. But over time, other
| transactions more then made up for that mistake, and this
| one became irrelevant, which really is to his benefit.
| briga wrote:
| All publicity is good publicity when you're in the game
| of monopolizing the world's attention market, c.f. the
| constant publicity stunts of figures like Trump and
| Kanye.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Everything Musk does in the public sphere is a performance.
| He's putting on a show, and the show is always crafted
| according to whatever he thinks will sway the public in the
| direction he wants them to go.
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| [deleted]
| davesque wrote:
| I think Occam's razor applies here. In other words, it
| seems the more likely explanation is just that Musk is an
| egomaniacal rich guy. Imagining that Musk is playing 3D
| chess with the public psyche is overcomplicating things.
| 93po wrote:
| This is a really tired take since it's not something that
| could possibly ever be known by you or anyone else not
| immediately close to Elon, and it's impossible for anyone
| else to refute it because they have the exact same lack of
| insight into whether Elon is putting on a performance every
| time he leaves the house.
| lrvick wrote:
| The dude ran around saying he is a founder of Tesla which
| is provably false. He is no stranger to making things up
| to craft the image he needs.
| innocentoldguy wrote:
| The same could be said of Ray Kroc and McDonald's, but it
| typically isn't because the McDonald brothers aren't the
| ones who made McDonald's ubiquitous on a global scale.
| Most of the time, Ray Kroc is considered the founder of
| McDonald's because he was the one to lead its global
| success.
| 93po wrote:
| Tesla was worth, at most, a few million dollars when Elon
| became their largest investor. They had no products. They
| had no sales. He turned a $2 million company into a $700
| billion company, but he's not the founder because he
| wasn't in the paperwork for the first year of its
| existence in which very little happened? Ok.
|
| Additionally, a settlement was reached to literally call
| himself a founder. At this point it's boring semantics of
| what "founder" means.
|
| But go ahead and keep trying and failing to poke holes to
| push your unfounded narrative.
| lupire wrote:
| "He paid someone to not dispute his lie" is not the
| defense you seem to think it is.
| woah wrote:
| It's entirely valid to be allowed to judge other's
| behavior, and guess at their motives, especially the
| (former?) richest man in the world. Mental models of
| other people are a core part of being conscious.
| 93po wrote:
| There's a difference between an intelligent and
| meaningful observation of behavior to guess at motives
| and just outright calling someone a liar and manipulator
| without any real basis or evidence because you don't like
| them as a person.
| SantalBlush wrote:
| Dogecoin is plenty of evidence. There is more.
| watwut wrote:
| Musk is pro free speech, when it is speech he likes and finds
| funny. Not at all with speech he dislikes.
|
| It is stupid, but free speech became codeword for "my opponents
| should shut up while my friends can arbitrary harrass them".
| And that is me being euphemistic about it.
| pojzon wrote:
| Didnt you just explain how current social media work ?
|
| Who decides what is ,,news" and what is ,,fake-news" ? (Few
| PC ppl in big corpos?).
|
| Why sayin that ,,sure you can say what you want, but you have
| to defend your words" is so controversial ?
|
| Are ppl afraid of being proven wrong or look stupid ?
| m-p-3 wrote:
| I will send a request to archive a copy of a tweet in the
| Wayback Machine just in case, especially if the tweet is
| critical of Twitter from now on.
| ignoramous wrote:
| _archive.is_ works nicely too. Esp, since it strips any
| archived page of javascript and ads.
| ggreer wrote:
| Wayback Machine will remove archived tweets. For example,
| Taylor Lorenz's tweets were erased after she requested it.[1]
| Other archives get removed if the people running the Internet
| Archive dislike the content. Similar to how Paypal isn't a
| bank and eBay isn't an auction site, The Internet Archive
| isn't an archive.
|
| 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://twitte
| r....
| staticman2 wrote:
| Tweets are subject to copyright so I doubt the Wayback
| machine has any legal leg to stand on for continuing to
| host someone's tweets after a takedown request.
|
| When copyright expires in 125 years or whatever if the
| archive still exists they can publish them again.
| ugh123 wrote:
| It may not be violating "twitter rules", but it's likely
| violating company policy not to expose internal dealings (even
| as trivial as screenshots of slack emojis).
| pornel wrote:
| So Twitter's corporate interests can trump the free speech
| ideology. What a surprise.
|
| Leaking a private slack can be political activism for
| worker's rights. I'm not saying these particular heart emojis
| are, but here Twitter is still in position of judging whether
| particular tweet was acceptable or not.
| ugh123 wrote:
| > Leaking a private slack can be political activism for
| worker's rights.
|
| Unless she's acting as a "whistleblower", then that
| argument carries zero weight.
| pornel wrote:
| But who's judging whether she is or not? Twitter is,
| still.
|
| The whole point of free speech ideology is that
| corporations aren't supposed to be unaccountable judges
| and executioners, and this should stay up until she is
| actually convicted of breaking some law.
| ugh123 wrote:
| Wait a minute, corporations can't police their own
| platform? Sure they can. "Freedom of speech" is a
| political freedom -> free from persecution from the
| government.
|
| If Twitter (or Elon as owner of his private company)
| wants to take down a post that exposes internal dealings
| then they're completely within their right to do that.
| But that doesn't relate at all to the other, more
| important conversation of Twitter limiting certain voices
| (Trump, et al). Stop mixing the two.
|
| I remember some years back when Microsoft fired an
| employee for taking pictures of some boxes of brand new
| Macintosh computers on their campus and publishing it on
| the internet as a way to lightly smear the company (for
| using non-MS products apparently). MS was fully within
| their right to do that and nobody screamed "freedom of
| speech" back then.
| JSchmoe wrote:
| The irony is that Musk was proclaiming that Twitter is
| now going to focus on free speech (as in, everything non-
| illegal goes), and just now they removed an instance of
| non-illegal speech.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Violating an NDA seems clearly illegal.
| pornel wrote:
| Maybe a court would decide that heart emojis aren't a
| company secret covered by an NDA, but are expression of
| solidarity with workers which is legally protected speech
| regardless of what the employer thinks about it. Or maybe
| not. By the free speech ideology you can't know, and are
| supposed to assume innocent until proven guilty, and keep
| it until a court orders taking it down.
|
| But here a private company is executing its own
| unilateral judgement by their own clearly biased
| moderators.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If a non-Twitter employee posts a tweet with an image of
| their corporate internal communications, does Twitter take
| those tweets down automatically or at the other corp's
| request or does the person that made the tweet have to remove
| it when their corp overlords demand? I honestly don't know
| the mechanisms for getting a tweet removed that is deemed to
| violate some policy some where.
| camhart wrote:
| I don't see any mention of that tweet?
| Chinjut wrote:
| I think that Christina Angeli tweet was voluntarily deleted,
| according to https://twitter.com/CA_CrissyAngel/status/15883478
| 2975154995....
| anonu wrote:
| Usually your employer has confidentiality and non-disparage
| clauses in your employment contract and separation agreements.
| So "This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules." probably would be
| more like "This Tweet violated your contractual agreement to
| your employer".
| 93po wrote:
| This is exactly right and it's ridiculous people don't see
| this. Free speech isn't equal to breaking confidentiality
| agreements on a platform owned and operated by the company
| you work for.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ytpete wrote:
| But so does this mean on Twitter, leaks and whistleblowing
| about Twitter will be censored but leaks and whistleblowing
| about any other company will not? Because that sure doesn't
| sound like the neutral "free speech" moderation style Elon
| has been talking about so loudly nonstop for the past
| months.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Free speech and breaking confidentiality agreements are
| orthogonal to one another. The latter might result in legal
| action or firing but it has nothing to do with the right to
| publish.
| delfinom wrote:
| Non disparage clauses are usually non-enforceable in normal
| employment contracts once fired, hence why they have those
| separation agreements.
|
| But separation agreements need to be signed by both parties,
| they can't fire you and immediately say "btw no talking bad
| about us".
| cragfar wrote:
| Just looking at her account, her tweet about being fired/laid
| off is still there. I don't know what it originally was, but it
| seems like a picture was posted and depending on what it was
| might have been the issue. Like if it was a bunch of her
| coworkers in the office maybe that was against the rules for
| whatever reason.
| [deleted]
| 4dregress wrote:
| How is this affecting no US employees?
|
| For example you cannot just fire people in the UK like you can in
| the US, it is against the law.
| exitb wrote:
| It's interesting how the firing process presented in the movie Up
| in the Air (2009) was supposed be inhumane and insulting. Well,
| look where we are now.
| swores wrote:
| Either you or I, and I suspect you, have misunderstood the
| film's intention if you think that we the viewer are meant to
| agree with any of the options used by Clooney's character's
| company, that they were the humane option.
|
| Humane would be telling the person who works for you that you
| can no longer employ them, not hiring some stranger to come and
| tell them.
| exitb wrote:
| I don't think that either the direct or remote methods
| presented in the film were humane. Certainly not what I
| meant. I do think though, that checking your e-mail at 9AM to
| see if you're fired is considerably worse.
| swores wrote:
| Definitely agree!
| lm28469 wrote:
| Remotely logging off employees without telling them anything says
| a lot about the people in charge
| zmxz wrote:
| What does it say about people in charge and what does it say
| about employees? Asking without implying anything.
| lm28469 wrote:
| I might be a bit idealistic here but I like the notion of
| respect. Disabling badges, laptops and email addresses of
| your employees with no direct communication isn't very
| respectful in my book.
|
| Regular companies do meetings, shady companies send a pre
| recorded video to their employees, and then you have Musk,
| just logging you off. I guess he missed the part were
| "transhumanism" still contains "humanism"
| kortilla wrote:
| I don't think you've witnessed many mass layoffs. What
| you're describing is how companies do relatively small
| cuts.
|
| Even Stripe's layoff was far less than 50% but it got
| pretty impersonal. They just paid severance better from
| what we know so far.
| zmxz wrote:
| > I might be a bit idealistic here but I like the notion of
| respect
|
| Doesn't respect work two ways? You give respect, you get
| respect?
|
| It's easy to make Elon Musk the bad guy, but people who
| were let go were freeloaders. Let's not try to make them
| anything but that, we've all seen plenty of Twitter
| employees using up work-time to be active on various social
| media. They didn't show respect to the employer because
| their work and demeanor did not reflect it.
|
| The "boss bad, worker good" just doesn't apply here.
| Twitter is a troubled company, I'm surprised Elon bought it
| in the first place but I'm absolutely not surprised by the
| wave of layoffs.
|
| You can assume the moral high ground and employ the talent
| that Twitter has decided to part with and prove your words
| with actions. Are you ready to do so?
|
| Should we, the IT experts, not be thrilled by so much
| experienced talent being available for employment?
| i_like_apis wrote:
| It says they are smart and know how to protect their
| infrastructure.
| pavlov wrote:
| In four years Musk will be bored to death with Twitter and will
| sell it to private equity and the Saudis for $5 billion. At that
| point it will be mostly a platform for porn creators and crypto
| pumping, the only two verticals where Twitter seems to be
| actually growing lately.
| notacoward wrote:
| Do you really think it will be four years? Considering his
| attention span, and the rapidity with which Twitter is already
| deteriorating, I suspect it will be much less than that.
| robswc wrote:
| I know this is cliche to say... but I have been reading this
| comment for the past 10 years. Maybe one year it will be true
| but it has a terrible track record.
|
| I was assured Tesla would be "dead" by 2018 and in the 2000s
| you would get comments about how re-usable rockets were just
| impossible.
|
| For the record, I think twitter is a different beast but at
| the end of the day, I think life will go on.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| On the other hand, Hyperloop and the Boring Company went
| about as well as everyone said they would...which was not
| very well.
|
| You win some, you lose some, I guess.
| cal85 wrote:
| Yeah he's only seen like a handful of new space rocket
| designs through from conception to profitability, and he only
| created one major car company before moving onto other
| things. He can never stick to anything.
| [deleted]
| pwinnski wrote:
| I agree that "short attention span" doesn't seem like it
| belongs on Musk's very long list of negative qualities, but
| a reminder: he was not an initial founder of Tesla, he
| bought in a year later and claimed to be a founder until he
| was sued and reached an agreement[0].
|
| 0. https://www.cnet.com/culture/tesla-motors-founders-now-
| there...
| notacoward wrote:
| It's worth noting that Tesla was founded 19 years ago.
| People often change quite a bit in that time. Look at
| Musk's _recent_ behavior.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _At that point it will be mostly a platform for porn creators
| and crypto pumping, the only two verticals where Twitter seems
| to be actually growing lately._
|
| Like justin.tv/twitch, they might do well to identify the
| _pivot_.
| mlatu wrote:
| didnt elon get a loan from a saudi crownprince and paying
| interest of around a billion$ per year?
| VectorLock wrote:
| We know what they do with journalists that tick them off, I
| shudder to think what they'd do to someone who doesn't repay
| their debts...
| JshWright wrote:
| Someone who owes you a debt is useful. A journalist who is
| shining light on things you'd prefer to keep hidden is not
| useful at all.
| VectorLock wrote:
| There are, some say, things worse than death.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| No to both.
|
| The crown prince already owned a large stake of twitter, and
| decided to maintain ownership stake after the buyout. They
| are still a shareholder, like before, not a loan holder.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2022/10/31/saudi-
| prin...
| DesiLurker wrote:
| financing table at the end says otherwise:
| https://danluu.com/elon-twitter-texts/#47
| kristjansson wrote:
| No it doesn't, that table (from [0]) lists equity
| investors, not lenders.
|
| > Each Equity Investor listed in the following table has
| committed to contribute to Parent, at or immediately
| prior to the closing of the Merger and subject to the
| conditions set forth in the Co-Investor Equity Commitment
| Letters, cash in the amount set forth opposite such
| Equity Investor's name in the following table in order to
| fund a portion of the Merger Consideration contemplated
| by the Merger Agreement. Certain Equity Investors have
| retained an option to satisfy such Equity Investor's
| equity commitment with shares of Common Stock held by
| such Equity Investor (valued at $54.20 per share).
|
| [0]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/0001
| 10465922...
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| The table is wrong.
|
| If you click the link to the actual SEC filing, it says
| otherwise. Alwaleed put stock, not cash towards the
| purchase and will "retain an equity investment in Twitter
| following completion of the Merger"
|
| https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000110465
| 922...
| pjc50 wrote:
| Given that Twitter the company owes $12bn to Morgan Stanley,
| that will be a serious problem for them.
| medina wrote:
| MS led consortium (and underwrote largest), 21-27% each
| spread out across MS, BofA, Barclays, MUFG + smaller to
| others. (ref:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-07/morgan-
| st...)
|
| (Edit: typo)
| SkipperCat wrote:
| Meh, Morgan Stanley has had bigger losses. How much of it is
| actually their money anyway? My guess is the losses will be
| passed down to the individuals who gave MS the $$$. Morgan
| probably bundled it all up, made a nice fee, and passed it on
| to Musk.
| [deleted]
| lultimouomo wrote:
| > Morgan probably bundled it all up, made a nice fee, and
| passed it on to Musk.
|
| It has not. The debt was conditional on the acquisition of
| Twitter by Musk, so Morgan Stanley could not sell it before
| the acquisition was completed. But the debt was necessary
| for the acquisition, so the acquisition could not be
| completed without the debt money. Therefore, they had to
| happen at the same time, with M&S fronting the money.
|
| Of course the terms of the debt, and the price of the
| acquisition, had to be both defined for everything to move
| forward, so they were finalized months ago.
|
| When Musk signed a contract with Morgan Stanley, money was
| cheap, so the debt has very low interest. When the debt has
| actually been issued, a few days ago, money had become more
| expensive; Morgan Stanley won't find anyone to buy it as-
| is. To sell it they will have to discount it quite deeply,
| losing a bunch of money; otherwise they'll be stuck with
| it.
| napolux wrote:
| !remindMe 2027
| iorrus wrote:
| I'd be more likely to work with Twitter now to be frank. Elon is
| obviously trying to implement an engineering lead organisation
| where coding and productivity are valued.
|
| A lot of these companies tend to be manager heavy, I've worked in
| places where it seemed over half the people in meetings were
| managers or other unproductive people. It frequently felt like
| these people were stifling the work as they all had their own
| agendas etc.
|
| Elon is an engineer first and has s big vision. If you're one of
| the people left it must feel like the company has taken a new
| direction.
| duhast wrote:
| Entrepreneur, salesman, celebrity or populariser? Sure.
| Definitely not an engineer.
| topspin wrote:
| I don't see how his ventures could have made the progress
| they have with a business/finance/sales person calling the
| shots. Elon is adept at engineering; you can see it whenever
| he is interviewed and goes down rabbit holes about
| metallurgy, simulations, manufacturing, etc. The achievements
| of Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink and others would not have happened
| without thousands of correct evaluations of and decisions on
| technical matters, and Elon is the singularity around which
| all of that orbits.
| VHRanger wrote:
| Given how Musk treats employees, I was wondering where the kind
| of sycophant ready to sacrifice their life at the altar of an
| uncaring billionaire actually existed.
|
| Glad to know they exist
| [deleted]
| aliljet wrote:
| I'm pretty curious about how and where Twitter employees were
| distributed. For a company ostensibly worth $44 billion, having
| 7,500 staff feels pretty damn lean. It feels like Musk isn't just
| purging people, he's purging the Twitter culture...
| ben7799 wrote:
| Depends on how you value the company. Twitter is very
| overvalued if you look at accounting & finances more than
| influence and popularity and hype.
|
| Consider revenue and income (losses) and Twitter doesn't look
| good at all, they look horrible. They don't have that many
| employees, but they must be very very highly compensated and
| concentrated in very high cost areas. Otherwise the company is
| wasting serious money somewhere else, because to lose money on
| $5B/yr revenue with 7500 employees year after year in a
| business that's as high margin as pure software is incredibly
| terrible performance.
| bluescrn wrote:
| For comparison, SpaceX runs an entire private space program on
| ~12,000 employees. Near-weekly launches. Rocket
| development+production. Building+deploying Starlink.
|
| (Although that's just a number from a quick googling. Maybe
| they outsource a lot of manufacturing etc?)
| tqi wrote:
| And Walmart has over 2M employees, and they're just running a
| retail store!
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| To be fair software at space X is likely much less complex
| than Twitter's stack.
| threeseed wrote:
| That comparison is however completely irrelevant to Twitter.
|
| It may seem to ignorant people that a space program is more
| advanced than "just a website" but actually running these
| kind of websites is extremely complex. Especially when you're
| needing to compete with Facebook and Google at serving ads in
| a relevant and effective way.
|
| It is really interesting reading through their infrastructure
| challenges alone:
|
| https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc.
| ..
| pushkine wrote:
| It's crazy the number of people on HN somehow claiming that
| Twitter is this well run and well functioning tech company
| now that bad rocket man took the reigns and decided to lay
| off everyone... Isn't it a consensus among tech people that
| Twitter is the absolute worst tech company?
| cheeze wrote:
| > Isn't it a consensus among tech people that Twitter is
| the absolute worst tech company?
|
| I don't think so. I see far more hate towards Meta and
| Amazon.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Twitter _was_ a bit shit. But its up and running more or
| less in real time for millions of users. Thats pretty
| impressive. Its business is shit, yes.
|
| Musk looks like hes done the classic: "the office is
| clean why do I need cleaners" dance. I am surprised he
| can fire that many people that quickly and still expect
| momentum.
|
| It doesn't help that he appears to be shitting out
| product ideas that he's just "dreamt" up. Rather than
| talking to people to see why twitter didn't do it in the
| first place. He clearly has a low opinion of the entire
| company.
| type-r wrote:
| There's a ton of websites that are up and running for
| millions of users. That should be table stakes for
| running an online service.
| kristjansson wrote:
| I think a lot of people viewed Twitter as poorly-
| monetized and -managed as product and business, but
| generally competitive as a technical organization.
| alex_sf wrote:
| Not really. It's been known for a while that the tech
| side of Twitter is incredibly low-performing.
| Strom wrote:
| Over the years in various hiring threads it's been common
| to describe Twitter as the giant tech comapny you go to
| when you can't get hired anywhere else. Twitter has
| definitely had a reputation for a long time for being
| bloated and filled with less-than-competent employees.
| It's only earlier this year that I've seen the discussion
| shift towards this idea of Twitter being a competent
| group.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| Whew - even with your empty caveat against saying what I'm
| about to say:
|
| Designing reusable rockets and launching hundreds of them
| into space for profit, is more complicated and requires a
| different caliber of frankly higher IQ worker, than
| building and maintaining the existing Twitter.
|
| Not that there aren't some smart web people, obviously.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Well up till now, Twitter paid better and was considered
| a near FAANG caliber gig.
|
| Tesla is known for fucked up WLB and low compensation
| compared to FAANG.
|
| I bet Twitter employees have higher average IQ.
| Especially compared to whoever at Tesla authorized
| removing radar and parking sensors.
| EricDeb wrote:
| I assume tesla could attract talent at those salaries due
| to the stock prospects. Wonder if that's the case
| nowadays.
| throwaway29303 wrote:
| Especially compared to whoever at Tesla authorized
| removing radar and parking sensors.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W1JBAfV4Io
| jkachmar wrote:
| i used to work on rockets and now i work in software, so
| i think i'm pretty qualified to say that you have no idea
| what you're talking about.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| Really? You don't think the aerospace folks were smarter?
| MAGZine wrote:
| Just because it's easy for you, doesn't mean it's easy
| for everyone.
|
| rocket science and software engineering are two skills
| that take years of experience to hone. they come with
| their own set of challenges.
|
| i feel like this sentiment belongs alongside "isn't
| netflix just an ftp server and a media player?"
| stevenally wrote:
| My guess is you have no idea what you are talking about.
| swalsh wrote:
| I've worked on a large scale website everyone knows.
| There are lots of interesting problems, and lots of super
| clever people who solve them in clever ways, but it's not
| literal rocket science.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| About rockets? Or websites?
|
| I'm writing from a faang office with a few decades of
| experience. I know some people in aerospace. They're on
| average smarter than 4/5ths of my colleagues (who are
| also clever).
| insightcheck wrote:
| I'm much more junior, but to exchange anecdotes, I think
| it's difficult to accurately say that people in FAANG are
| less, equal, or more intelligent than people in
| aerospace. To define intelligent, I will use the everyday
| definition that mixes speed of learning with the ability
| to solve hard problems (acknowledging that the academic
| definition of intelligence is different).
|
| For one, I anecdotally know people in FAANG who were
| smart by effectively "studying for the test" by focusing
| more on leetcode than projects/intellectual exploration.
| In contrast, the people I know who went into aerospace
| tended to have a genuine interest in physics (and some
| with more interest in philosophy), and had more
| experience with projects (e.g. worked on an aerospace
| team in university), with many of them having little-to-
| know experience with software development.
|
| Interestingly, the aerospace people I know anecdotally
| happened to be better at soft skills/networking for
| getting into companies, whereas the FAANG people focused
| on leetcode for admissions. After getting into a company,
| also from my anecdotal experience, more FAANG people
| focused on metrics/compensation, whereas more aerospace
| people tended to focus more on the mastery of the craft.
| I acknowledge that my anecdotes shouldn't be generalized,
| but it aligns with the motivations of many people looking
| to get into each company (it seems more people go into
| FAANG for compensation/prestige, whereas more people go
| into aerospace for the passion).
|
| So, I would say that people from both categories tended
| to be very smart at learning quickly and solving hard
| problems, though anecdotally, the aerospace people seemed
| to be generally more intellectually curious. Then again,
| perhaps the aerospace people were better at soft
| skills/presenting themselves so they appeared smarter,
| whereas the FAANG people didn't focus on presenting
| themselves as intelligently. For limitations, note that
| the people I'm thinking of are at the junior level.
|
| In any case, I don't think one can conclusively say that
| people in FAANG have more/less/the same intelligence as
| people in aerospace companies, though maybe one can
| tentatively say that people who go into aerospace tend to
| be more curious and interested in mastery of one's
| profession (versus material compensation).
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Is any of that suppose to be convincing in any way? I
| also have been in faang and wouldn't use "I am or know
| people" argument, silly.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| Is "I know; I am" not what knowledge and experience boils
| down to?
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > at serving ads in a relevant and effective way.
|
| Anyone ever seen a relevant Twitter ad?
|
| Just seems very dumb location based placement. Nowhere near
| the level of IG.
| threeseed wrote:
| > Nowhere near the level of IG
|
| Facebook and Google are in a completely different league
| which is why for most brands ~95% of online ad spend is
| spent there.
|
| Twitter has been slowly getting better until now when
| Musk's attitude has frightened the brands off i.e. GM,
| L'Oreal, Pfizer etc.
| marsven_422 wrote:
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| How many employees would it take to just maintain the
| status quo? Code freeze, no more features and bug fixes.
| Just keep the lights on and keep selling ads.
| WalterBright wrote:
| For comparison, 400,000 people worked on the Apollo space
| program.
| esoterica wrote:
| Spacex also makes less revenue than Twitter with their higher
| headcount.
| parkingrift wrote:
| It's privately held so we don't actually know that.
| However, SpaceX was valued at around $120 billion in their
| last funding round.
| petesergeant wrote:
| SpaceX has many fewer customers and users though
| wreath wrote:
| But this is not a burger joint where you have to scale your
| number of employees as your number of customers increases.
| petesergeant wrote:
| Sure you do, just not linearly
| wildrhythms wrote:
| NASA has 18k permanent employees which I thought was
| surprisingly low. https://www.nasa.gov/about/index.html
| breezedream wrote:
| Government typically has a whole ton of contractors,
| sometimes twice the number of FTEs, but a cursory Google
| indicates NASA has only about 1000 contractors.
| Interesting, but the contract money probably goes to
| acquisition and commercial partnerships
| (https://www.osbp.nasa.gov/docs/top20_2020_contractors-
| TAGGED...).
|
| That said, their FY22 budget is "only" $30B, which is less
| than Elon just paid for all of Twitter. This number usually
| surprises people but a lot of other space-related work is
| within the USAF and NRO budgets.
| acdha wrote:
| About a decade ago I was working on websites for NASA and
| just the contractor I worked for had over a thousand
| contractors. They were far from the largest, too.
| mirker wrote:
| That's because recent focus on the space program is
| nonexistent. It's been getting on life support since the
| moon walk.
| LightG wrote:
| Perhaps that's the point. It's not worth $44bn.
|
| Twitter rinsed Musk on the way out, which I deeply respect
| considering his behaviour.
|
| That will only be some salve for the employees losing their
| jobs, but hopefully their packages get some of that.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Pretty significant salve. I imagine the buyout netted most
| employees with stock hundreds of thousands of dollars.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > I imagine the buyout netted most employees with stock
| hundreds of thousands of dollars.
|
| One of the theories knocking around last week was that
| these layoffs are just before a stock vesting was to
| happen, presumably in an attempt to avoid paying them.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| However, that theory was proven false. Today is Friday
| and vesting was Tuesday.
|
| I find it very odd that people keep mentioning it despite
| it not panning out, and not sure what to make of it.
|
| Out of honest curiosity, what was your intent for
| bringing it up?
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > I find it very odd that people keep mentioning it
| despite it not panning out, and not sure what to make of
| it.
|
| Has anyone confirmed that the stock vests actually
| happened? Or did they get postponed whilst the layoffs
| where being organised? Haven't seen anything either way.
|
| And I don't think it's that odd to consider that a man
| well known for flaunting the law would flaunt the law on
| this as well.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I haven't seen any screenshots of pay stubs to verify it.
| Given that it was a conspiracy theory to begin with and
| there is no confirmation to follow up, my assumption is
| that no, it did not happen.
|
| Elsewhere it has been announced that laid off employees
| are getting quite generous Severance packages, so this
| would be out of line with that.
| martin8412 wrote:
| Which is just hilarious. He can't do mass layoffs without
| 60 days notice as per WARN, so the idiot just bought
| another lawsuit against him.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| But he didn't violate WARN because the employees are
| getting severance.... The warn act is an either/or
| xeromal wrote:
| Right, isn't it basically 60 days notice or 60 days
| severance?
| martin8412 wrote:
| The lawsuit has already been filed against Twitter.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Should be quite easy if it is about the warn act then.
| You can read it yourself or one of the many very easy
| summaries.
|
| https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/labor/wrongful-
| termination/warn...
| LightG wrote:
| Good to hear. Thanks.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| we'll find out soon if Twitter really need 7500 employees.
| (IMO, i just don't see how and why you needs that many people
| to run Twitter)
| lkschubert8 wrote:
| Out of curiosity what do you think is a reasonable number?
| swalsh wrote:
| I have no doubt Elon expects to hire a bunch of people to
| replace those hire laid off.... but I suspect he wants
| _different_ people.
| beowulfey wrote:
| I was curious about the numbers that other tech companies may
| employ as a comparison... from some cursory googling:
|
| * Meta: 71,970 [2021]
|
| * Apple: 164,000 [2022]
|
| * Amazon: 1,298,000 [2020]
|
| * Netflix: 11,300 [2021]
|
| * Alphabet: 156,500 [2021]
|
| * Microsoft: 221,000 [2021]
|
| * The New York Times: 5000 [2021]
|
| * Fox Corporation: 9000 [2020]
|
| * Reddit: 700 [2021]
|
| (Anyone else I should add?)
|
| I can't really find any trends. I think Reddit is an outlier,
| and my impression is having only 3750 employees would
| probably put Twitter on the smaller end of the scale too.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| I think Reddit is an outlier because they offload a lot of
| their moderation to volunteers.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Reddit can barely stay up and constantly has weird bugs so
| they likely need more!
| duderific wrote:
| I've been using Reddit daily for a couple of years and
| have never seen downtime or any weird bugs. I use the
| mobile app, not sure if that's what you were referring
| to.
| thethethethe wrote:
| These numbers are misleading as many of these companies
| have an army of contractors that are not included in the
| official headcount numbers.
|
| Google, for example, has more contractors than full-time
| employees, bringing the total employee count up to over
| 300,000
| thinkingemote wrote:
| We'd need to also see the money (income/revenue/profit) of
| these companies, and then see the ratio of employees to
| money. Musk saw that list and noticed that Twitter had the
| lowest ratio.
|
| To get the ratio metric up, they have to increase income or
| reduce employees.
|
| This rationale, given by Musk (and I imagine VC friends) is
| all outlined in the discovery documents of the twitter vs
| musk legal case.
|
| edits, i dug it out and made it a top level comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33467305
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Also product market type. Building pure software and ads
| is different than building consumable hardware, data
| centers, etc
| davedunkin wrote:
| Craigslist: 50
| ryanwaggoner wrote:
| Reddit planned to double to 1400 in 2021 alone [1], it
| wouldn't surprise me if they were at 1500-2000 by now.
|
| 1. https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/9/22274077/reddit-
| funding-ro...
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Too many variables changing at once to do proper attribution
| thomond wrote:
| I wonder does this number include moderators or are they
| contractors who are not included in the headcount. I could
| see half that number being made of moderators if so.
| usrusr wrote:
| Imagine what the company would be "worth" if it did everything
| it does but with only three and a half employees. Company
| culture is a cost center.
| tsujamin wrote:
| Imagine what it would be worth if it did everything it does
| but with just Musk employed
| poulpy123 wrote:
| yeah but he wouldn't be able to fire himself
| threeseed wrote:
| Australia newspapers are reporting [1] that local staff have
| been locked out of their accounts.
|
| They were responsible for local marketing and news curation.
|
| [1] https://www.theage.com.au/business/companies/musk-starts-
| mas...
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Doesn't seem like a big add
| redwood wrote:
| In my view no single medium (the media is the message) has done
| more to weaken the quality of public discourse in the world than
| Twitter. But maybe Facebook proves that even if you're allowed to
| use prose crazies dominate so maybe the issue is deeper
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Twitter is the most interesting on the internet, by far. If the
| discourse quality sucks, you're following the wrong accounts.
| koheripbal wrote:
| All the nobody asinine replies are noisy. It can definitely
| do better.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Isn't that the point of the subscription? People that don't
| pay will be buried and you won't see them.
| blippage wrote:
| I checked out Twitter again after a few months absence. There
| is good content, for sure, but by crikey, most of what passes
| for political discourse amounts to a stream of non sequiturs
| and ipse dixit (assertion without proof).
| fny wrote:
| I'll go out on a limb and say it's not entirely the specific
| medium's fault. It's the people.
|
| It did not used to be this bad with the exception of 4chan (of
| course), and the state of discourse in life has degraded so
| far, we even see it at the highest levels of government. Every
| year that goes by I fear we're losing more and more of our
| common decency and appreciation for our shared humanity. I have
| seen families torn apart because of this.
|
| I've started going out of my way to meet my neighbors and smile
| at strangers.
| boringg wrote:
| Out of all the most heart breaking things that the internet
| you choose this example? Agenda much?
| fny wrote:
| I deleted that because it colored what I said enough for
| you to miss my message. I have no agenda, but I think your
| comment proves my point that there's something off about
| how we're communicating right now.
| boringg wrote:
| Fair but I didn't miss what you wrote, you choose to
| explicitly choose an example that would get eyes rolling.
| Which, if I read your comment correctly, you accept the
| responsibility with "there's something off about how
| we're communicating right now".
|
| Inflammatory language get's more reaction - well
| documented and your probably aware of that.
| fny wrote:
| I seriously was not attempting to be inflammatory or get
| a reaction. I was just expressing how I felt.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| In Brazil it's WhatsApp.
|
| That's just to say everyone is in a bubble and people are the
| problem.
| faizshah wrote:
| I read this kind of comment all the time on HN, it's so
| confusing to me. I only joined twitter 2 years ago because
| there are a large number of high quality tweet threads on
| finance, ML, NLP, breaking news etc. A lot of the time I get
| information earlier on twitter than I do on any other platform.
| If anything, for me, twitter has strengthened the quality of
| public discourse.
|
| If some big event happens I can read an expert's tweet thread
| on the matter 30 minutes after the event happened instead of
| reading an editorialized piece with a bunch of random comments.
| I was reading tweet threads on the recession 1 year ago with
| deep analysis from experts. When the FOMC meeting happens 1
| hour later I get a thread on the financial implications,
| another on the economic implications and another on the
| political implications. You don't get that quality of
| information at that speed on any other platform.
|
| I strongly suspect most of these comments about the quality of
| twitter are actually angry that the people you follow post
| opinions you don't like. I see political opinions I don't like
| all the time from my finance follows, I just scroll away not
| sure why that is a problem?
|
| If anything Facebook and YouTube's algorithm were the most
| damaging in 2010s because they heavily promoted extremist
| content to random people. I don't see that from twitter
| especially not at the same volume as 2010s FB and YT.
| ramg wrote:
| If you don't mind me asking, which accounts are you following
| for your financial news? Thanks!
| faizshah wrote:
| Too many, you can start with:
|
| - https://twitter.com/saxomarketcall and their podcast
|
| - https://twitter.com/macroalf
|
| - https://twitter.com/unusual_whales
|
| Then you'll see their retweets and likes in your feed and
| thats how you can build a good list.
|
| I would stay away from anyone whose primary focus is
| crypto, biotech or tech stocks unless you are a critical
| reader.
| ronnier wrote:
| Reddit. Reddit is by far the worst and has the most impact.
| uni_rule wrote:
| I think Reddit is more centralized in its younger age range
| than the other popular social media sites.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| I personally feel like the lows of Reddit are just as low as
| Twitter, but the highs are much higher.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > Reddit. Reddit is by far the worst and has the most impact.
|
| I think this may be viewing things through a bubble - my baby
| boomer parents don't know what reddit is, neither do any of
| their friends, but you better believe they and all their
| Facebook friends are all aware of all the latest crazy
| conspiracy theories. I think Reddit, while popular for
| certain demographics, is far less wide spread than some of
| the other social media.
| tomp wrote:
| Really?
|
| On which other platform can you directly communicate (or at
| least listen to, unfiltered) to the worlds dictators, political
| leaders, and billionaires?
| thundergolfer wrote:
| You're missing the point of their comment. If the _medium_ is
| the problematic thing being focused on in their comment then
| who the communicating parties are is not significant.
|
| Checkout Postman and McLuhan.
| whoooooo123 wrote:
| A lot of people reading this aren't going to understand
| what you mean by "checkout Postman". I'm guessing you mean
| "read Neil Postman's books"? If so, I agree - especially
| _Amusing Ourselves to Death_.
| trgn wrote:
| Technopoly too, for an easy to digest mash-up of McLuhan
| and Ellul.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Nonsense. This a big beef with me about Twitter. It purports
| to be an egalitarian platform where you can "directly
| communicate" with significant people, but the sheer volume
| and signal-to-noise ratio of popular accounts means that they
| will never even see your comment, let alone reply, except in
| _extraordinarily_ rare examples.
| bogomipz wrote:
| Why is it important to directly communicate with or even
| "listen to unfiltered" the world's dictators and
| billionaires? As for communicating directly with politicians
| it's very unlikely that the vast majority of them manage
| their own social media accounts. You probably have the same
| level of direct communication as you do sending their office
| a letter or an email.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| that's literally the very mechanism that weakens public
| discourse because it turns discourse into a 280 word
| soundbite popularity contest.
|
| Productive and democratic discourse consists of people
| assembling a community of their peers eye-to-eye to solve
| local issues, not billionaires and dictators addressing a mob
| like Mussolini on the Palazzo Venezia with a megaphone.
| wussboy wrote:
| Any idea of significance has subtlety and complexity, both
| of which are anathema to Twitter.
|
| Rage, on the other hand, can be perfectly encapsulated in a
| few characters.
| s1k3 wrote:
| Twitter has destroyed public discourse. It has turned
| conversations into contents to be as short and as edgy as
| possible.
|
| I'm sorry you don't see that.
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| Hey, that sounds like the mainstream press!
| tomp wrote:
| Do you even use Twitter?
|
| You can find a lot of very deep, long-form content. I'd
| recommend following Samo Burja or Doomberg for example.
| falcolas wrote:
| 153 characters, in response to a message 152 characters in
| length. Did these shorter-than-twitter lengths destroy this
| discourse?
| notacoward wrote:
| Is that really Twitter's fault? Please go through _this
| thread right here_ and see how many of the comments would
| fit in a tweet. Many of them also match (or exceed) the
| Twitter standard for lack of basic humanity. The appetite
| was there. If Twitter hadn 't provided the outlet, some
| essentially identical alternative would have. It's quite
| likely that some other will do the same after Musk finishes
| driving Twitter into the ground.
|
| The platform isn't the problem. The people using whatever
| platform they can find to spread an anti-democratic anti-
| intellectual anti-humanitarian message are. I'm sorry you
| don't want to see that.
| blibble wrote:
| in the vast majority of cases it's going to be their PR team,
| not them
| rdtwo wrote:
| I don't think that's true. Twitter is/was the only remaining
| news medium where experts had a voice. During the pandemic
| doctors and infectious diseases experts were using it to call
| or government blow hards. Now that's going to die as well and
| we may return to complete darkness.
| devwastaken wrote:
| I saw the opposite. "Experts" being totally wrong and fear
| mongering without evidence. It was rural governments that
| said "prove it".
|
| Recall how various studies on covid lethality, vaccination
| and masks were wildly different. The Israel study is a quick
| one. This is exactly what happened when influenza was new in
| the 1920's.
|
| Yet the "experts" made it sound like everyone is going to die
| if you are not wearing a mask 24/7 and isolating. This is
| what "do no harm" ideology becomes - causing mass harm to
| everyone to potentially protect a few.
| sophacles wrote:
| If you believe "influenza was new in the 1920's", you have
| bigger things to worry about than this discussion. I
| suggest going to check on the paperwork for that bridge you
| bought.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| I see Twitter as possibly working up to the ideal of "crowd
| sourcing" the truth. If Musk does what he seems to be
| saying he will do -- and take the training wheels off the
| moderation, and get the government out of it -- we might be
| left with a system that really can sort out the truth from
| fiction. Or, at least, present both sides, and let people
| decide for themselves, without hiding one side.
| [deleted]
| goldenchrome wrote:
| Absolutely based. There are more morale virtues than just
| "prevent harm".
| systemvoltage wrote:
| What you're witnessing on HN and elsewhere is politics
| masquerading as objective and ostensibly, a thoughtful
| discourse.
|
| None of the articles on HN have much of good faith
| discussion. I just see it as "progressives are pissed
| because their platform of power is being seized". A lot of
| that relied on platform censorship on places like Twitter.
|
| Just now, the WhiteHouse account is being fact checked.
| That doesn't sit well with progressives.
|
| This isn't some conspiracy theory, we have the current
| Biden Administration working with Big Tech to censor
| speech. "Public health" is just a trope under far more
| insiduous political agenda for power:
| https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-
| disinformat...
| cronix wrote:
| > Just now, the WhiteHouse account is being fact checked.
| That doesn't sit well with progressives.
|
| And the WH deleted some of those tweets after being fact
| checked.
|
| White House Deletes Misleading Tweet Giving Biden Credit
| For Social Security Check Raise:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2022/11/02/w
| hit...
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Isn't White House supposed to keep records? They are not
| supposed to delete stuff.
|
| The white house press releases have been a total
| disaster. I thought we had it bad in the previous admin.
| Lies after lies told to American public. Much of this
| stuff goes unchallenged on all social media.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Maybe we have different definitions for "expert"?
|
| I've been following epidemiology experts and no one implied
| "everyone dying", nor recommended "24/7" mask wearing
| (rather cited lowered transmission rates) and yes isolation
| lowered transmission rates too.
|
| The flak they had to take for inconveniencing the lifestyle
| of people in the interest of prioritizing health outcomes
| for all, is insane.
|
| If anything, we learned that the thought of care for others
| at a small cost to the self is extremely triggering for
| many Americans and is easily politicized as a wedge issue
| to influence voting.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Agreed , the experts showed us that a minor lifestyle
| change can significantly reduce covid transmission.
| Instead we as a country did all the wrong things and
| blamed experts when government officials failed by
| instituting random non evidence based policies
| tgv wrote:
| Complete darkness? O no, not the dark ages before 2006, when
| we had walk uphill to school and uphill to go back home. Or I
| could try to more direct and say: that's utter crap.
|
| > Twitter is/was the only remaining news medium
|
| And twitter is an important reason that other, more reliable
| and informative news outlets went under.
| rdtwo wrote:
| There were still some newspapers left in 2006. By 2022 they
| are all basically dead.
|
| Also standards of journalism integrity were bad then but
| they are abysmal now. Very few journalists actually
| investigate stories, most just re print press release.
| [deleted]
| rpastuszak wrote:
| FB would still be #1 for me on this scale.
|
| The panopticon they've build is bigger and wider (sharing data
| between Insta, WhatsApp etc). I don't know what would be the
| "Cambridge Analytica of Twitter" but time will tell.
|
| Twitter's catching up though.
| bambataa wrote:
| Gonna be weird when journalists have to start digging up
| stories rather than just reposting tweets.
| dayvid wrote:
| During the initial COVID outbreak, it was one of the only
| decent information sources I could find.
|
| Twitter's nice because it gives you fast and easily available
| tools to curate your own feed. I could quickly follow a variety
| of professionals across different disciplines and regions to
| parse together some useful info.
|
| You have to work at it, but anyone who assumes quality
| information will passively flow to you is mistaken and being
| misinformed in some way.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Have you not noticed tiktok? People are being trained to have
| the attention span of a gnat.
| alistairSH wrote:
| And the class action for WARN Act violations has already been
| filed. Sounds like the Chief Twit didn't give 60 days warning OR
| severance, as required by law.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/4/23440304/twitter-mass-fir...
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| And we all know that fines are just fees for rich people.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Sadly, as best I can tell, there are no real fines for WARN
| violations - at worst, Musk as to pay 60 days income and
| benefits, as he should have done in the first place. There
| might be a $500/day penalty as well (not sure if that's per
| person or total - either way, chump change to most employers
| that are subject to the WARN act).
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Doesn't seem unreasonable to me at all.
|
| The point of the law is to provide worker stability. 60
| days payed severance does that just as well if not better
| than 60 days notice and no severance.
| q1w2 wrote:
| This is a non-substantive comment more appropriate for other
| social media platforms.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Well people don't seem to get it, so I guess you're right.
|
| As others have pointed out, Elon has already been involved
| with WARN lawsuits from former Tesla employees. He surely
| understands that the law exists, and what Twitter's
| obligations are under it. So what else could result in this
| apparent indifference, which so many other people see, and
| care about so deeply? Ergo, he must not care about the
| legal implications of how he is going about these layoffs.
| Hence, he must be ready to just pay the fines.
|
| But, sure, expecting people to connect those dots must be
| more appropriate for other social media platforms.
| alistairSH wrote:
| And not just Musk. Big companies regularly put themselves
| in a position to be fined by regulators. Either their
| lawyers are stupid (they probably aren't) or it's just a
| cost of doing business (it probably is).
| q1w2 wrote:
| If you actually read the lawsuit - it was filed preemptively to
| ensure that Twitter give 60-days severance/notice period.
|
| There is no evidence listed in the suit that says these
| employees were not given such notice.
|
| Further, it specifically states that employees _assumed_ that
| they were laid of without severance because they were locked
| out of their accounts and hadn 't been yet presented a
| severance package.
|
| The lawsuit is routine legal nonsense.
| voxl wrote:
| You are assuming both: that there was in fact 60 days notice
| (how!?) and that there is in fact a severance package. Yet,
| why would you not be openly communicative of this if you
| intend to give it?
|
| So how is it legal nonsense if the lawsuit has good faith
| reasons to believe that neither of your assumptions hold?
| [deleted]
| kevstev wrote:
| It appears they did not file a WARN notice:
| https://edd.ca.gov/en/Jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WARN
| Direct link to the list of recent WARN notices received: http
| s://edd.ca.gov/siteassets/files/jobs_and_training/warn/w...
|
| I am not an expert on these things, but I believe this notice
| is required. I am surprised there is not an easier way to
| receive this information, this is certainly something I would
| want an alert set up on.
| jfk13 wrote:
| And here come the lawsuits...
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-04/twitter-s...
| jayess wrote:
| Just reason number 4893 that my company will never hire anyone
| residing in CA.
| randyrand wrote:
| good luck.... Twitter is at-will.
|
| Companies usually fire people on Friday, and show you the door
| the same moment.
| choult wrote:
| They're suing under Californian law, which requires 60 days'
| notice for mass layoffs AFAIK.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| I just don't understand that. It is very common to give the
| layoff notice on the date of termination and to then pay
| them for 60 days. That complies with the Warn Act. I'm not
| a California lawyer, it that must be true there too.
| There's no way they'd make you bring in hostile workers.
| teraflop wrote:
| As the first paragraph of that article points out, advance
| notice is _required_ by federal law, if the company is
| sufficiently large and if sufficiently many people are being
| laid off at the same time. At-will employment is not
| relevant.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini.
| ..
| hcurtiss wrote:
| Yeah, the Warn Act doesn't require you let them work for 60
| days. If it's triggered, it just means you have to pay them
| for 60 days. It is very common to not let them work,
| particularly when concerned about sabotage.
| teraflop wrote:
| Sure. I haven't seen the actual legal complaint, so I
| don't know if it's just a publicity stunt, or if they
| actually have evidence that Musk is planning to not pay
| out the extra wages that he's (presumably) required to.
| randyrand wrote:
| I don't see how you could give legitimate advance notice
| before you are in control of the company.
| [deleted]
| raverbashing wrote:
| I don't see how you decide how and who to fire before you
| are in control of the company, but that's just me
| alkonaut wrote:
| You can give them notice when the decision is yours to
| make. And the then the termination can be legal at X days
| beyond that, if the legal requirement is X days notice. I
| don't see how "I Just bought it" matters?
| swores wrote:
| By paying them for the 60 days notice period from the day
| you notify them, that's how.
| jfk13 wrote:
| That probably works in the US but in some jurisdictions
| (e.g. parts of Europe) -- where I presume Twitter has [or
| had!] employees -- there are requirements for an actual
| _consultation_ process before substantial layoffs.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| The NY Times makes it sound like there might be a legal case
| for a different reason:
|
| > While federal and California laws require companies to
| provide advance notice of mass layoffs, it was not clear
| whether Mr. Musk had done so. A spokesman for California's
| Employment Development Department said on Thursday evening
| that it had received no such notices from Twitter, which is
| based in San Francisco and is expected to report mass layoffs
| to the agency.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/technology/twitter-
| layoff...
| suyash wrote:
| Too much bloat, lazy workers who are overpaid. The whole Silicon
| Valley needs a big cleanup.
| thexumaker wrote:
| Is anyone actually looking to hire Twitter people? It was known
| as a rest and vest place with a bunch of leetcode engineers lmao.
| Kye wrote:
| Their posts on Linkedin are being bombarded by recruiters. So
| yes.
| rob74 wrote:
| > _"To help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter
| systems and customer data, our offices will be temporarily closed
| and all badge access will be suspended," the email reads. "If you
| are in an office or on your way to an office, please return
| home."_
|
| Welcome to the dystopian future... I find it a bit galling how
| companies can _force_ you into home office nowadays if it suits
| them (you want to avoid your underlings congregating in the
| office in such a situation), but also force you to come to the
| office when it suits them.
| infecto wrote:
| I am assuming this is a hint at how large the layoff will be.
| If are getting rid of 5-10% of your workforce, no issue with
| using the office but if you are axing some number
| greater...lets say 25%, it sounds like a security nightmare.
| koheripbal wrote:
| This comment seems very hyperbolic.
|
| Working from h for a day hardly seems dystopian.
| rob74 wrote:
| Maybe it wouldn't rub me the wrong way if it wouldn't come
| from the same guy who said that Tesla employees have to come
| in 40 h per week, the rest they can work from home
| (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/06/musk-to-tesla-
| an...). Well, he seems ready to embrace home office when it
| suits him...
| xiphias2 wrote:
| What about Foxconn China not allowing employees to go home
| because of ,,zero COVID policy''?
|
| For me that is dystopian.
| leereeves wrote:
| Not allowing employees to leave the office is very different
| from not allowing them into the office.
| culturestate wrote:
| _> Not allowing employees to leave the office is very
| different from not allowing them into the office._
|
| Yes. It's _much_ worse.
| leereeves wrote:
| Agreed. That was dystopian.
| culturestate wrote:
| _> What about Foxconn China not allowing employees to go home
| because of ,,zero COVID policy ''?_
|
| It _is_ a little dystopian, but (assuming you 're talking
| about the Zhengzhou story from a couple of days ago) it's
| also not Foxconn's decision. The local government mandated
| that the industrial park be locked down.
|
| It's also worth noting that many workers at places like
| Foxconn live in on-site dorms anyway.
| PuffinBlue wrote:
| This is quite a curiously Pavlovian response. It assumes so
| much from that "please return home". The whole comment stands
| as a window into a life lived under abusive working conditions
| where the Individual knows only the control of the Company.
|
| Nothing in that 'please return home' is anything to do with
| forcing anyone to have a home office, to go there and work, to
| do anything really. The company doesn't control you.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| I don't think you understand how mass layoffs in big companies
| work. There's nothing new or dystopian about it. You probably
| haven't heard of garden leave as well?
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Why would you want to drive into work just to get fired?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| They're not 'forcing' you to do anything, they're offering to
| pay you to do it.
|
| Unless you think every time I buy some bread from my baker I'm
| stealing it from him?
| goodpoint wrote:
| > They're not 'forcing' you to do anything, they're offering
| to pay you to do it.
|
| And if you refuse to work you are not 'forced' to become
| homeless and have no healthcare?
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| If you go from earning $250k+ at a highly recognizable
| company to homeless then you fucked up severely somewhere
| along the way. You'd have to have 0 savings, massive debt,
| and completely fail at every job interview afterwards.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Missing the point huh?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| If that's how you think then we can say all kinds of stuff
| that clearly doesn't make sense:
|
| 'Professional footballer forced to play football game!'
|
| 'Teacher forced to speak to children!'
| chii wrote:
| so does nature force the lions to hunt or face starvation?
| goodpoint wrote:
| Ever heard of social contract?
| idop wrote:
| What?
|
| If anything, this is more akin to the baker calling their
| employees to say "you'll be baking from home today, I'm
| firing a lot of people today and need to protect the bakery."
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > What?
|
| They aren't 'forcing' you to do something - they're
| offering you money in return for doing it. If you don't
| like the money they're offering you don't have to accept
| the deal.
|
| "Really dystopian that they're offering me $300k a year +
| benefits to be able to ask me to work in one of two
| locations" doesn't really work does it?
|
| "Really dystopian that I can walk up to a baker and force
| him to give me a loaf of bread by offering him the agreed
| price in money."
| alxlaz wrote:
| Did you read the article, or at least the quote that the
| parent offered? This isn't about Twitter changing work site
| expectations/status. It's about blocking physical access for
| employees who were expected to show up at the office, without
| prior notice or any change in contract terms -- i.e. without
| their work site actually having formally changed.
|
| This isn't even dystopian, it's just a management
| clusterfuck. Whoever thought this is the right way to handle
| this kind of a situation should be the first to go in these
| layoffs. Wow.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > without prior notice or any change in contract terms
|
| Pretty sure it's within their contractual rights to deny
| people access to the office for any reason or no reason at
| all? Did you put a contractual clause in about the right to
| office access when you signed?
|
| > This isn't even dystopian
|
| Well yeah my comment agrees.
| alxlaz wrote:
| > Pretty sure it's within their contractual rights to
| deny people access to the office for any reason or no
| reason at all?
|
| Of course it is. The point I am making is that it's
| extremely bad management to handle layoffs and firing
| like that. You have the team leads schedule an
| appointment with the people who have to be let go. They
| tell them they are being let go, effective from X, with
| such and such terms (including access rights if they're
| in any way more specific than "you can't come to the
| office after X"). You have them thank them for their work
| and offer them a recommendation if they need it. This
| isn't some advanced HR management guru advice, it's
| common sense that should be standard adult behaviour.
|
| Telling people _who you have not yet fired_ that they can
| 't come to the office anymore, possibly minutes before
| they come in to work, but also insisting that they go
| home so they can get the email that they've been fired is
| just about the worst way to handle it.
|
| There's a potentially infinite set of actions that are
| within a company's contractual rights to do. Not all of
| them are okay.
| jleyank wrote:
| Well, they did a "lockout go away" back in the 90's when my
| company died. Fear of 'rm -rf' or some other act of digital
| vandalism or theft. Doesn't say much about the business I
| guess,
| forgotusername6 wrote:
| What are the chances that someone motivated to do
| something like that has put in dead man's switch code
| somewhere?
| jleyank wrote:
| I would say less as that requires a bit more skill and
| risks being found upon code review. Acting in the heat of
| the moment seems far more expected. Although perhaps this
| situation points out up that "planning against all
| eventualities" is a good skill to have?
| parkersweb wrote:
| Had a similar experience back in the early 00's. Kinda
| back-fired though - one of the developers had happened to
| notice that a .com domain name they'd been desperate to
| buy for some time (because it was the name of their
| licensed IP) had become available a few days beforehand.
|
| He'd bought it immediately planning to hand it over to
| the business... wasn't quite so keen once they laid him
| off!
| dasil003 wrote:
| What do you mean "whoever decided should be the first to
| go"? Musk decided. He's pissed he overpaid and he thinks
| the whole company is a clusterfuck. This isn't a
| "management failure", it's by design. Elon is cleaning
| house. Speed, not collateral damage, is his priority.
| alxlaz wrote:
| I mean whoever decided that the proper way to handle a
| layoff is to tell someone who has not yet been fired that
| they can no longer access company premises while they're
| on their way to work, or possibly wondering why their
| badge doesn't work, and should instead go home and wait
| to be fired from there. This breaks just about every
| management rule about how to handle a layoff, not to
| mention common sense.
| dasil003 wrote:
| What makes you think the person "responsible" did not
| make that point and Elon overruled them?
| chess_buster wrote:
| Firing the employees to be able to pay interest. Like he
| did with the marketing team at Tesla when it was nearly
| bankrupt.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| > It's about blocking physical access for employees who
| were expected to show up at the office, without prior
| notice or any change in contract terms
|
| For 1 day, maybe a week or so by the sounds of it. It's not
| like they're suddenly closing all the offices permanently
| yebyen wrote:
| So Twitter employees can work at home "forever", but they
| should work 80 hours a week while under explicit threat
| of layoffs, and return to the office for 12 hours a day,
| meanwhile the office is closed, go home if you are in the
| office now!
|
| This is really what has happened inside of just the last
| 8 weeks. I can't blame anyone who just can't keep up,
| especially while that 12 hour a day death march was going
| on. This is really not how you should treat people, even
| for a day.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| I mean, if you don't like it then quit. I think that's
| the point. Elon is going to run Twitter like his other
| companies which means he only wants people who actually
| want to be there and want to put in the hours to make the
| business work. Anyone not willing to do so should leave.
| It's a private company so he can set whatever
| expectations he wants, if the former employees don't like
| it they can start their own business.
| yebyen wrote:
| I can't quit working at Twitter because I already don't,
| but I am downloading an archive of all my tweets as we
| speak and I'll be having my finger on the trigger to
| delete my whole account, which I'm totally sure coming
| from me, a nobody you never heard of, is, like, an
| equally serious threat - I mean seriously though, have
| some solidarity with the workers. Do you want to work
| under those conditions?
| naijaboiler wrote:
| Some people blame victims aa a defense mechanism. It's so
| they can justify in their head that it can never happen
| to them because they are smart, and hardworking and
| deserving and whatever else. It usually takes such
| tragedy happening to them personally for them to gain
| empathy. Even then, some of them don't. They only end up
| having empathy for their own tragedies, other people's
| tragedy is deserved
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| I've been laid off before and I've lost jobs for a
| variety of reasons including the company going under.
| What I've learnt from it is that you just have to keep
| moving forwards. If you try to cling to the past or hold
| on to a mental framework or lifestyle that isn't working
| it'll just drag you down. I get that people want security
| but in the end the only real security is that which you
| provide for yourself, if you put blind faith into systems
| that you don't have any control over at some point they
| will fail you, most of the time through no fault of their
| own and you'll be left to fend for yourself. That's why I
| always start from that position, I make sure I'm able to
| protect myself first. Everything else is window dressing.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| If it paid well then yes I would work under those
| conditions. I don't have to stay at a job for life, I can
| put in extra work to earn extra money and then quit when
| the schedule or environment no longer suits me. I'd much
| rather have that option than be stuck in some crappy
| unionized shop where everything moves at a glacial pace,
| get underpaid, and have it be nearly impossible to find
| another job because all other workplaces are the same and
| no one is hiring, firing or growing.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| Especially if they're making something excellent or world
| changing.
| yebyen wrote:
| If you want to work there, fine, I hope it pays well! But
| I'm telling you, I saw a tweet when this all began about
| how someone once set about $2B on fire to buy Yahoo! and
| what fun they were looking forward to having (as a
| Twitter user) helping Elon set the new record for cash
| bonfire volume and speed-run, and from my perspective we
| are now watching that play out in real-time. I don't want
| to work there, I don't even want to be mentioned in the
| same sentence as there. You can find me on Mastodon from
| now on.
| tremere wrote:
| pjc50 wrote:
| The not showing up to the office is kind of irrelevant.
|
| Not having a consultation period, whether people are working or
| on "gardening leave", is _illegal_ in CA, NY, the UK, and many
| other places for an employer of that size.
| bfung wrote:
| Reading the article and not having a stake in twitter (no
| account, no stocks, don't use it at all), seems reasonable.
| It's basically, we're closing office tomorrow, exit the
| premises please.
|
| Not dystopian at all and there was nothing in the article about
| go home and work, just go home and receive decision
| information.
| kortilla wrote:
| What are you talking about? The announcement says people should
| leave the offices. How is that dystopian?
| rob74 wrote:
| In the past such a thing wouldn't have been possible because
| of the need to keep up day-to-day operations. Now companies
| can just decide if you should work from home or from the
| office as they please. And home office was initially promoted
| as giving more flexibility to the employees - looks like the
| companies are now exploiting this flexibility to their
| advantage while restricting the employee's flexibility (x
| mandatory office days etc.).
| moron4hire wrote:
| It's really to keep people from talking about details and
| exchanging contacts last-minute.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > How is that dystopian?
|
| You could generate all the electricity needed for the next 20
| generations by harvesting the energy generated by the eyes
| rolling of people who live in countries with workers rights
| who just read that comment
| fullmoon wrote:
| I live in a modern central European nation.
|
| There is nothing dystopian about denying people that are no
| longer employed office access.
| rob74 wrote:
| That email went out to _all_ employees, not just the ones
| that were laid off.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| So? If they need specific people to come in then they'll
| probably just call them, I'm guessing they're running
| with a skeleton crew while they do the lay offs. Most of
| the people in the office probably won't even be Twitter
| employees.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > There is nothing dystopian about denying people that
| are no longer employed office access.
|
| That conveniently leaves out the dystopian parts. Being
| logged off remotely, no personal communication, no delay,
| &c.
| oytis wrote:
| That's just modern technology. I'm not aware of any
| country where labour laws would prevent logging employees
| out remotely. There are some where you can't be laid off
| immediately, but even there you could be denied access to
| the systems and just get paid for the rest of your tenure
| I believe?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Correct. Places with a statutory consulting period _can_
| lock you out, but they have to pay you for the
| consultation period.
| Hamcha wrote:
| I live in a modern central European nation.
|
| All our contracts are managed by unions and you can't
| just fire someone out of the blue, there's notice periods
| on both sides (unless there's just cause for termination)
| tomp wrote:
| Which is a large reason why people in Europe are so much
| poorer than US, and not getting any richer either over
| time (in contrast to the US).
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/xgoouz/americans
| _ha...
| bitcharmer wrote:
| What are you talking about. USA has a serious problem
| with poverty and homelessness. It's much worse than in
| Europe.
|
| Also we can have a heart surgery here without going
| bankrupt.
|
| https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-
| rankings/poverty-r...
| oytis wrote:
| Average Joe (or median Joe) has it significantly better
| in the US. Poor Joe would probably do better in EU.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| I would say upper middle class joe has is better in the
| states. Everyone else is barely clinging on to their
| lives in perpetual serfdom because of no universal
| healthcare, extreme housing costs, extremely expensive
| education, etc...
| oytis wrote:
| Statistics about average and median income in the US and
| EU is widely available. Also the graph linked above about
| disposable income shows that only in the lowest 10th
| percentile people in Europe are (marginally) richer that
| in the US. Starting with lower middle class the gap
| becomes quite significant already, and what's important
| is only growing.
| fullmoon wrote:
| So what? They might be in the books or twiddle their
| thumbs but union or not they're is no right to location
| or remote system access post termination.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| I live in a modern central European nation.
|
| Yes, and most of the time the fired employee will be sent
| home during his notice period, so im not sure what you
| are talking about?
|
| The thing is, mass layoffs are often discussed widely in
| Europe since its mostly blue collar employees and the
| unions and politicians are often trying to prevent the
| layoffs.
| trashtester wrote:
| Precisely. Most places in Europe, you're able to find
| ways to fire individual tech workers with whatever notice
| period dictated by the contract terms. Mass layoffs of
| tech workers is quite rare.
|
| Mass layoffs (or some kind of forced unpaid leave) is
| typically something that happens for blue collared jobs
| when there is a reduction of demand for their products.
|
| The twitter case is different, though. Twitter was a
| hostile takeover (even in the end, it was the company
| that forced the transaction). The takeover was not done
| for economic reason (or that was what was claimed), but
| because the new owner wanted to radically change the
| values of the company.
|
| For employees that base their personal identity on those
| old values, this makes them natural enemies of the new
| owner. When Musk carries the sink in, he is like an enemy
| warlord accepting the surrender of an enemy tribe.
|
| After a short tally, the enemy warlord lets half the
| prisoners go, after disarming them (takes away access to
| accounts and buildings), while the other half are allowed
| to join his forces, if they desire to.
|
| This is probably the way this had to go. Letting everyone
| keep their access to the infra would be crazy. Now the
| question that remains, is how much does he have to pay
| those that got fired.
| leereeves wrote:
| Now you've got me wondering: is there any nation that
| guarantees any "workers right" that would forbid this?
| xwolfi wrote:
| No, and workers rights are usually about the amount of
| compensation for all this. In France, which we cant argue
| is laissez-faire capitalist, they can burn the company to
| the ground with all your work stuff for all we care so
| long as they compensate heavily, financially, for all the
| surprise unemployment.
|
| People think work is democratic but it s not: it's
| transactional and worker rights are just here to pay
| workers more, not give them any sort of novel ownership
| of the work tools.
|
| That can be done, but it s called communism and never
| works because workers want money not access to their work
| pc, and leaders want money not management oversight of
| every single work tool. So you end up with people
| pretending to work for people pretending to pay them in a
| lunatic worker paradise where there are no humans
| anymore, just workers and their work tool mindlessly
| fullfilling the glorious work tasks assigned to them by
| mindless work allocators.
| jmclnx wrote:
| deleted, wrong thread. Was aiming for this one:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33465770
| thepasswordis wrote:
| How many of these employees signed a letter of "demands" towards
| their new CEO?
|
| I'm sorry, but I have a _really_ difficult time feeling anything
| other than schadenfreude for these people. You guys are making
| _how much_ money working at a company which appears to be unable
| to actually make money, and at which you appear to see yourselves
| more as activists than employees.
|
| The gall of these people to then put together a letter of
| "demands" (not suggestions or requests, DEMANDS), and then the
| next week complain that they're being asked to show what they've
| been working on for the last month is just...
|
| Sorry guys, but the gravy train of $250k/yr as a 23 year old
| product manager working 2 hours a week remotely while making tik
| toks about how cute your life is are over.
| barbazoo wrote:
| It's Schadenfreude btw.
| ergonaught wrote:
| Musk lost the thread a while ago but it's weird watching people
| complain about someone doing what he wants with something he
| owns.
|
| Like, it's his. It is his property. He bought it.
|
| Big fan of judgement swarms over what you do with your property,
| are ya?
|
| No?
|
| (Not an endorsement of his management techniques nor this idiotic
| purchase, but, it is his now.)
| maxpowersage wrote:
| You could say, they were 'deplatformed'
| bigbluedots wrote:
| Took you a while to think of that one eh?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| gdubs wrote:
| Be Civil. Really shouldn't have to be said.
|
| Lots of gross comments here today, and I don't have the time to
| go check every last username but I only hope it's not long-timers
| here who are being so snarky and callous at people losing their
| jobs.
|
| And if it is, y'all should remember that the best developers have
| long memories. Would be wise to have a little empathy and delight
| a little less in the turning of the business cycle, even you
| think it benefits your interests.
| sidcool wrote:
| And they are being handled abysmally badly so far. We don't need
| more Elons. Growth at such human cost is best avoided.
| seydor wrote:
| _djo_ wrote:
| I remain constantly surprised that people on Hacker News of all
| places can be so wrong in their underestimations of how
| technically challenging a company's problem space is.
|
| Building and maintaining a distributed system like Twitter is
| far from easy, as any one of the talks their engineers have
| given and papers they've written should tell you.
|
| Let's at least base this discussion on realistic and reasonable
| determinations of the company and its operations.
| seydor wrote:
| > a distributed system like Twitter
|
| how is it distributed?
| boringg wrote:
| Your comment belies how little you understand Twitter. You
| think it's a simple technical solution on a simplistic product.
| seydor wrote:
| I understand it enough to know that your comment sounds like
| a tweet
| jameshart wrote:
| Twitter is hundreds of millions of authenticated messages a
| day, delivered with an expectation of instantaneousness and
| simultaneity, to hundreds of millions of clients.
|
| There are images and video embeds and URL previews on tweets.
| There are fraudulent and abusive users who are trying to spam
| the user base. There are users whose threat model includes
| 'will be attacked by the concerted cyber-offensive capabilities
| of sophisticated nation states', as well as 'will be cyber-
| bullied by the collective force of 8chan', or 'will be cyber-
| stalked by legions of k-pop stans'. Not clear which of those is
| more dangerous.
|
| The SEC considers statements made on Twitter by corporate
| officers and company accounts to be material disclosures.
| Tweets are embedded in New York Times and bbc news articles.
| Courts take Twitter messages as evidence. Law enforcement
| organizations throughout the world have frequent interest in
| finding out what activity users have had on the platform.
|
| And on top of that, it's trying to run an ad business that
| takes that firehose of craziness and turns it into a marketable
| stream of attention that can be sold to advertisers.
|
| Don't downplay what Twitter does as 'just moving 280 character
| messages'. It's way, way more than that.
| pushkine wrote:
| Facebook has had a better service since 2014, RSS feeds
| aren't rocket science.
| jameshart wrote:
| Facebook had 9000 employees in 2014. Over 70,000 today.
|
| Twitter yesterday was about 7500?
| seydor wrote:
| I 'll keep downplaying it. It's a 280 character asynchronous
| telegraph office that crashes more often than whales wiggling
| their tail, has had 100 awful iterations of the interface ,
| spam issues, terrible search etc etc. But it's popular
| because it's the Chosen One by the mainstream media, which
| brought politicians and CEOs in it. If the MSM decides that
| it's too rightwing, they will take their toys to the next
| twitter clone that barely works and all of their audience
| will follow.
| jameshart wrote:
| When did you last see a fail whale?
|
| Twitter's reliability record is pretty impressive these
| days. Last major outage was July 14?
|
| Remember a few months back when Facebook had to break into
| their own data center with axes to get back online?
| seydor wrote:
| very rarely indeed. but the fail whales did not hinder
| their growth, nor are they going to make people leave
| until there is an approved alternative
| thedorkknight wrote:
| >Twitter is hundreds of millions of authenticated messages a
| day
|
| Twitter is -currently- hundreds of millions of messages
| daily. Whether or not it _stays_ that high, we 'll see...
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Yeah, but they have lots of people working on PR and "ethical
| algorithms".
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I think people need to take a step back and ask themselves,
| "are the projects I'm working on directly increasing
| revenue?" If not, bye bye.
| cgeier wrote:
| It sounds like you are implying Polish workers are smart enough
| for 280 char messages, but not much more?
| magic_hamster wrote:
| I believe that was sarcasm. Obviously the challenges running
| a platform like Twitter are not coming from the length of
| tweets.
| seydor wrote:
| They are pretty good and cheaper than SV probably
|
| Twitter is still worth it for the 280 chars. Sure video and
| images and 27/4 availability are desireable, but not
| essential
| jameshart wrote:
| 27 hours a day, 4 days a week. Reliability goals.
| seydor wrote:
| on Mars
| malfist wrote:
| Almost like the outsourced it
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I think it has something to do with Polish notation.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Polish devs have a pretty good reputation.
| alex_duf wrote:
| The difficulty was never in the length of the messages
| xivzgrev wrote:
| Elon Musk is great at building new things. Time will tell if he
| can re-invent an existing thing. So far, it's not looking great.
|
| Corporate raiders / PE usually have a well defined thesis and
| plan to hit the ground running - Elon clearly does not. His plan
| seems to be "I need to double free cash flow ASAP, we'll figure
| out how along the way". Trying to figure out how to lay off half
| of the company, without negatively impacting free cash flow, in a
| week seems like a fool's errand.
|
| I think his success has gone to his head. But time will tell.
| pphysch wrote:
| > Corporate raiders / PE usually have a well defined thesis and
| plan to hit the ground running - Elon clearly does not.
|
| He clearly does, but most people don't care to engage with it
| in good faith.
|
| Something like:
|
| - Twitter's value is its integrated GLOBAL network of
| professionals/leaders/celebrities
|
| - Twitter Co has not remotely leveraged this, going for a
| FB/Reddit/etc content-centric advertiser model instead
|
| - Sprinkle in some "super app" ambitions. If the new KYC
| subscriber model is successful, then Twitter could disrupt
| LinkedIn, then possibly payments too.
|
| SV has been captured by advertisers and many people think
| "there are no alternatives". But there clearly are.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| > - Twitter's value is its integrated GLOBAL network of
| professionals/leaders/celebrities
|
| This seems to directly contradict Musk's plan to start
| charging these people $8/month (previously was going to be
| $20/month).
| philjohn wrote:
| It doesn't sound like the subscriber model will be KYC (no
| verification of identity).
| twawaaay wrote:
| > Musk's team has already tried to evaluate the productivity of
| Twitter employees by asking engineers to print out the code that
| they have written in the last 30 to 60 days. Musk also brought in
| Tesla engineers to look over Twitter code.
|
| At one company I worked we had a bug in the software for the
| device we were manufacturing. There were millions of units at
| peoples' homes and the bug caused couple hundred of these units
| to loose the content of their flash, every day. This in turn a
| huge ongoing loss both financial and reputational for the
| company.
|
| Because of the nature of the bug, we spent something like 3
| months trying to find it. We even built a special lab with dozens
| of units hooked to specially designed rig to have a chance to
| observe one unit in the process of getting wiped.
|
| Finally, one guy with an oscilloscope cracked it. It was
| electromagnetic interference between two different circuits
| within device causing the flash to receive a command telling it
| to wipe itself clean.
|
| The fix was one line, two characters really.
|
| I am sure Tesla engineers will do a good job evaluating worth of
| each one of those lines people printed out.
| marvin wrote:
| If I had planned and written those two characters, I would have
| appended a comment like yours and any sensible engineer would
| have praised the solution.
|
| It's fairly obvious their metric isn't <<number of lines of
| code>>.
| losvedir wrote:
| And so the grand experiment begins. I feel bad for the folks
| losing their job because that always sucks, and I hope there's a
| decent severance package.
|
| Now we'll see what happens to Twitter... I hardly use it, so if
| it implodes it won't bother me too much. But I am curious to see
| if all the "how do you need X people to do Y?" commenters are
| correct in this case. The app is simple but doing simple things
| at scale is hard. I wonder if we'll see more downtime and issues
| now.
|
| I think this is also a great experiment for everyone who either
| thinks Elon is a genius and the greatest thing to bless this
| Earth, or those who say he's overrated and Tesla and SpaceX were
| successes independent of him. I think Twitter has been around
| long enough that we've all formed impressions of it. Let's see
| what this single change of replacing ownership actually results
| in.
|
| Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a
| few years?
| [deleted]
| chasd00 wrote:
| > Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in
| a few years?
|
| what I hope is that it shrinks to about 1/20th its current
| size. And then many many smaller platforms spring up. I think
| one thing that makes social media hard to manage is the sheer
| scale. It's likely much easier to manage/moderate a smaller
| social network than a huge one. Also, it wouldn't be as
| dramatic to be kicked off a platform because then you'd just go
| somewhere else.
|
| if not that, then i hope Musk moves it from the users being the
| product to the users being the customer. Charge $10 for 1,000
| tweets but keep it free to read. Or maybe charge money for rate
| of tweets like $10 gets you 5 tweets a day. Make it cost money
| to engage. Twitter would probably shrink (which is good IMO)
| but also make more money ( which is good ) and make mobrule,
| massive information warfare etc cost actual money.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Having to pay to tweet would be the death of Twitter. It
| wouldn't just _shrink_ , it would be thoroughly decimated. It
| would initiate a vicious spiral in which Twitter becomes less
| attractive to read because fewer people are using it to
| tweet, which causes fewer people to feel the need to tweet,
| etc. As the audience shrinks big names leave the platform
| (because getting attention was the name of the game for
| them), causing even more of the rank-and-file to leave.
| Advertiser revenue would plummet. Any Twitter that does
| possibly survive would be a zombie, so minimally profitable
| there'd be no conceivable way of keeping up with those
| interest payments.
|
| I get the point information warfare, but you may as well just
| wish for Twitter and other social media platforms to outright
| die.
| LanceH wrote:
| > And then many many smaller platforms spring up
|
| and they are successful by interoperating, until one becomes
| more popular than the others and turns proprietary. (I just
| want to get my prediction in also)
| guelo wrote:
| > 1/20th its current size. And then many many smaller
| platforms spring up
|
| That's not how social networks work because the bigger they
| are the more useful they are to users.
| chasd00 wrote:
| No, the bigger they are the more useful they are to
| advertisers. The best social network i've ever been a part
| of is one dedicated to a hobby i'm in with about 1k users
| max.
| pookha wrote:
| Twitter is a toxic clown party lama joust. It's nothing but a
| means for millions of narcissistic people to decorate
| themselves with signifier quotes and feel-good platitudes.
| twitter is where progressives go to sniff each others farts...
| So good for Elon for charging them 8 dollars a month for their
| little blue checks. What an embarrassment to my generation
| twitter is and it makes me ashamed that people in my industry
| created such a heinous (platform).
| chillfox wrote:
| My guess is they will be forced to retreat from a lot of
| international markets as they don't have the legal and
| moderation staff to keep up with regulation.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'm curious how they decided who to fire and how they can do it
| so quickly without accidentally axing critical people.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Critical is mostly subjective to whom you ask. In one way
| everyone is critical, in another no-one is critical (Except
| E.g. Ive or Jobs).
|
| That said, I would think they are axing critical people. Then
| struggle and either fix it or go under. Whenever I was
| involved in layoffs, critical people have been laid off (from
| my perspective).
|
| As a manager I was forced to lay off critical people before
| M&A. Because they we're critical positions I did rehire the
| positions after acquisition.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I dont understand the SpaceX argument since he was an actual
| original founder if I'm not mistaken, I could see the Tesla
| argument, but those people never provide any true insight into
| how he is riding on Teslas former success whenever I run into
| those (not to mention, if it was so good... why did they need a
| new CEO). I think it's pretty obvious he is a capable
| individual, overly ambitious at times, but hey, he somehow
| makes it work.
|
| I try to be neutral about him, but as a Software Engineer, he
| is easy to admire, he is able to work on various tech related
| companies at once and make it work. That is no small feat. We
| have discussed on HN before that companies like Amazon having
| employees peeing in bottles usually those sort of issues come
| down from the top (CEO tier) and trickle down to the bottom, if
| that's true, and Elon is awful, it would show in all his
| companies, but he manages to delegate correctly enough to keep
| a few large companies going.
| maxbond wrote:
| Keeping factories open during the initial COVID lockdowns
| because of your personal belief that it's "just the flu", and
| thus putting the lives of your employees at risk, seems like
| a direct analog to peeing in bottles to me.
| jsight wrote:
| Tesla was only singled out for that because of their
| location. They weren't the only auto plant still operating
| or reopening when they did.
| beanjuiceII wrote:
| yet everyone was ok
| maxbond wrote:
| I'm not going to accept that assertion without evidence,
| but even if we grant it, it's not an okay thing to do to
| put hundreds of your employees, and their families, at
| risk because you have a fucking hunch. Even if Musk were
| a superhuman thinker with really great hunches it
| wouldn't be an acceptable thing to do.
| origin_path wrote:
| Do you really think he made such a call based on a hunch
| and not on the actual IFR data ?
| V__ wrote:
| He basically bought Twitter on a hunch, so yes, this is
| totally believable.
| maxbond wrote:
| I'm not really interested in the distinction of whether
| it was a hunch based on gut or a hunch based on a cursory
| inspection of the data. I'm fully willing to believe he
| was as glued to the data as I was during those early
| months of the pandemic, or more so. He's not an
| epidemiologist or a public health official, and even if
| he were those things, decisions about other people's
| lives shouldn't be made by a a small group of people (or
| one person), unaccountable to those impacted by the
| decision, with a massive interest in the decision.
|
| Again, you can grant that Elon is a super genius, and it
| doesn't impact the moral dimension.
| CountSessine wrote:
| 522368 excess deaths in the US in 2020 suggests
| otherwise.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| No, hospitals are still catching up on the years of
| "elective" procedures they and to postpone to make room
| for Covid cases. (Like cancer treatment and the like..)
| InsomniacL wrote:
| That's not the problem. I can't speak for the USA however
| this perspective is from the UK.
|
| At the height of covid cases, hospitals were nearing
| their capacity, some did and had to declare major
| incidents rerouting patients to other nearby hospitals
| which were also nearing their capacity...
|
| Even if the death toll from covid would have been ZERO
| for every infected person, assuming they were able to get
| a hospital bed, without lockdowns reducing the
| transmission, we would have ran out of hospital beds.
| Ambulances would have been sat outside the hospitals
| unable to unload their patient's. At this stage all
| elective/emergency surgery would have stopped. The 999
| operators would have been swamped which wouldn't matter
| anyway because there is nothing they can do as all the
| ambulances are stuck. Imagine calling for an ambulance
| after a car crash, or for a family member after a
| household accident, not only do you not get one but the
| hospital wont accept a patient if you drop them off.
|
| Elon is no doubt highly intelligent, he would have known
| this.. He also would have known that if he kicked up
| enough of a fuss, and sent his own employees in, this
| would have little effect on the overall hospital bed
| status and he could avoid fines by threatening to take
| his business elsewhere or just pay them and still make a
| profit by having the factory open.
| VancouverMan wrote:
| How many of those patients actually needed to be at the
| hospital, never mind in a bed once there? How many
| actually needed to be transported to hospital by
| ambulance?
|
| How many were at the hospital purely out of an abundance
| of media-stoked and politician-stoked fear, and would
| have recovered just fine had they stayed home and waited
| it out like they would have for any other cold?
|
| We know that there was massive overreaction and
| unjustifiable paranoia exhibited by many people and
| organizations to pretty much all aspects of this
| situation, and this went on for over two years in some
| cases.
|
| It's not unreasonable to expect the same irrationality to
| have affected the medical community and the decisions
| they were making.
|
| Even before mid-2020, it was clear to any rational
| observer that the situation was severely overblown, and
| there was a lot of completely nonsensical behaviour
| taking place for no good reason at all.
|
| The main reason this foolishness went on for years was
| because of the overt censorship and demonization we saw
| of those who were merely taking a rational look at the
| situation and expressing how irrationally others were
| behaving.
| maxbond wrote:
| Hospitals were not taking people in willy nilly (because
| they were _running out of beds_ ). I wasn't in the UK,
| but in my area they were telling people only to come to
| the hospital if they were having trouble breathing. Have
| you ever had a cold that made it difficult for you to
| breathe and put you in danger of suffocating? Is that the
| sort of thing you just shrug off in your mind? When I was
| a child I had what I would consider a severe cold every
| year (due to a deviated septum); I coughed out some
| impressive phlegm gobs, but never had any shortness of
| breath.
|
| You're accusing other people of being paranoid, while
| _wildly_ downplaying the severity of COVID. Every
| reaction must seem like a paranoid overreaction from the
| perspective that it 's "just a cold," but the cold does
| not have a 1% mortality rate (as we were seeing at the
| time).
|
| I remain baffled by how some people will look at someone
| fighting for their life on a respirator and say, "wow,
| what a weak, entitled person, coming to the hospital for
| life saving care when they could recover from sheer force
| of will in the privacy of their own home."
| VancouverMan wrote:
| You may want to reevaluate your claims, such as the
| mortality rate one, now that we have more information
| available to us.
|
| Let's look at the situation in the Toronto area, for
| example. Remember, greater Toronto is Canada's most
| populous region, and the seventh-most populous
| metropolitan area in North America.
|
| We know that the counting of deaths was done very
| questionably. Toronto Public Health itself admitted that
| as early as June of 2020:
|
| "Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a
| result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for
| COVID-19 deaths in Toronto."
|
| https://twitter.com/TOPublicHealth/status/127588839006028
| 596...
|
| Later on, we saw news reports like this one:
|
| "Patients died from neglect, not COVID-19, in Ontario LTC
| homes, military report finds: 'All they needed was water
| and a wipe down'"
|
| https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadian-
| mili...
|
| We should also consider the role of ventilator-associated
| lung injury and ventilator-induced lung injury, as well.
|
| We also saw news reports like this:
|
| "Hamilton Health Sciences takes down field hospital that
| didn't see a single COVID-19 patient"
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/hhs-field-
| hospital-c...
|
| Like I'd mentioned earlier, there was severe overreaction
| displayed by many people and organizations, and it
| resulted in irrational behaviour.
| maxbond wrote:
| None of this moves the needle on your assertion that
| COVID was "just a cold" or that it was a sort of
| collective psychosis. You've identified measuring errors
| and some badly done logistics - hazards we have when
| considering a large scale under any circumstances - and
| from there you leap shear light-years to your conclusion.
| 4laska wrote:
| In other news like in the ones from Saxony at some point
| there were so many deaths that the crematoriums ran too
| hot as they had to burn dead people non-stop. Article
| just like these were the norm for some months in 2020.
| https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/politik-
| gesellschaft/dunkle-...
|
| That one field hospital didn't see a single COVID-19
| patient could have a lot of reasons for example, patients
| went to another one.
|
| From my experience, people around me who got COVID
| suffered and/or died. Others had mild symptoms. You are
| either lucky or your were not. :(
| clavalle wrote:
| No matter how the deaths were counted in the moment,
| excess death counts after the fact saw an increase of
| 12.8% during Covid in Ontario. So, unless there was
| another mysterious cause of death taking out around
| 75,000 people a year there, the mortality rate estimates
| pre-vaccine were pretty spot on.
|
| https://covid19-sciencetable.ca/sciencebrief/excess-
| mortalit...
| origin_path wrote:
| _" At the height of covid cases, hospitals were nearing
| their capacity"_
|
| Hospitals in the UK go near or exceed their capacity in
| any flu season, it happened many times before 2020 and is
| due primarily to badly managed nationalized health and
| social care where supply/demand aren't joined up. This
| doesn't mean anything was wrong with Elon's position.
| clavalle wrote:
| It happens in the US, too.
|
| Primarily due to badly managed privately held, for-profit
| care where supply and demand aren't joined up. (because
| it's a hospital and avoiding death is inelastic).
| toofy wrote:
| > due primarily to badly managed nationalized health and
| social care.
|
| i'm not so sure this is because of socialized medicine
| considering how often american hospitals run into
| capacity issues and the general state of wreckage that is
| US health care--which by the way is a significant amount
| the most expensive per citizen in the world.
| jedberg wrote:
| How could you possibly know that? Sure maybe none of the
| people who worked at Tesla died from COVID, but what
| about their families? What about every single person in
| public they interacted with? There is no way to know how
| many people, if any, they spread the virus to, who then
| died, and whether they got the virus at work.
|
| But we do know that states with more lockdowns had lower
| excess deaths. So in the aggregate we know that lockdowns
| saved lives.
| afterburner wrote:
| "everyone"? Bold claim
| aardvarkr wrote:
| As an ex spacex employee I can definitely say that it
| wouldn't have been half the company today if Musk want in
| charge. Not a fanboy but trying to give an honest evaluation.
| Space is crazy hard and doesn't happen without brilliant
| people so of course the credit for the success of the company
| goes to the engineers and everyone that gave some of their
| best work to making it happen though that type of success
| doesn't happen without Musk at the helm. When it comes to
| space, he is truly a visionary that pushes for the craziest
| ideas and then challenges these brilliant people to make it
| happen. He truly loves space and has embraced learning
| everything there is to know about the engineering side of
| things so it's not like what he's proposing is impossible.
| It's just batshit crazy, moon shot type of ideas and then the
| brilliant people that he's been able to recruit are able to
| make it happen. It's a BRUTAL work environment from a work
| life balance perspective but you don't mind because you're
| working on SPACESHIPS with some of the most brilliant people
| you've ever met and doing some of the most impactful work of
| your life.
|
| I try to separate the visionary tech genius side of him from
| the public crap that he's done to ruin his public image. He
| has achieved the impossible so many times that he's developed
| a god complex. I can't speak to the electric car part but I'm
| impressed that he was able to will the country into caring
| about electric cars. He literally reinvented the space
| industry and made it cool again. But personally he's a shit
| show that has gone unchecked for too long.
|
| When it comes to Twitter I doubt his magic is going to carry
| over to running a social media company. His style works
| because of the culture he's able to build and the vision that
| he's able to sell. From what I can tell he's ruining the good
| parts of the Twitter culture and he doesn't have a vision.
| Good luck to anyone working there. The years that I spent a
| working at spacex were the best years of my life that I'd
| never want to repeat again.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > From what I can tell he's ruining the good parts of the
| Twitter culture and he doesn't have a vision.
|
| Maybe? But I think he and others would argue that Twitter
| was gradually losing popularity and had no direction. So
| I'm not sure "slow death" is such a great culture to hold
| onto.
| the_cat_kittles wrote:
| "It's just batshit crazy, moon shot type of ideas and then
| the brilliant people that he's been able to recruit are
| able to make it happen"
|
| you can read this sentence and come away with the
| conclusion that he doesn't do anything, or that he is
| responsible for everything. To me, it mostly seems like he
| has a bunch of money / financing so he can pay people to
| try lots of often _very_ dumb ideas and some might work.
| His core "skill" being an accumulation of immense wealth.
|
| you might say "you need both ideas and execution, and he is
| an ideas guy", which is correct, but i think the level of
| credit (and compensation) is wildly skewed towards the
| "ideas guy" in this case
| indecisive_user wrote:
| If all it took was money and trying a bunch of dumb ideas
| then Bezos' Blue Origin wouldn't be so staggeringly
| behind SpaceX
| evandale wrote:
| I've said the same about Branson and Virgin Galactic.
| He's been trying since 2004 to commercialize spaceflight
| and I don't think they've done anything worth mentioning.
| It seems to take more than an eccentric rich guy with big
| ideas to tackle space.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Nothing good worth mentioning. They got some Scaled
| Composites employees killed though. :(
| aardvarkr wrote:
| You can't have one without the other. If all it took was
| assembling a team of ace engineers then Musk would be
| unremarkable and we'd have no end to amazing things. Musk
| doesn't propose ridiculous things. He's an engineer at
| heart and truly understands the science of space flight
| to an insane degree so when he proposes something it's
| within the realm of possibility but no one else is doing
| it because it's never been done and the chance of failure
| is so high that any sane business would shut it down. He
| can't achieve anything without his employees but those
| employees wouldn't be doing a single moonshot idea
| without leadership willing to invest in those ideas.
|
| You say his core skill is accumulating wealth but that's
| a reductive way of looking at the world. His core skill
| is his ability to sell you on his ideas. He sold the
| world on electric cars and he sold the best rocket
| scientists and engineers on his space ambitions. He's a
| tremendous leader and you'd be foolish to underestimate
| him.
|
| Again, I don't fanboy him but I do give credit where
| credit is due. I worked there and I even briefly worked
| with him on a project that he cared about. He's brilliant
| at some things but his god complex is off the charts.
| He's an asshole and his deadlines were insane, but he's
| not selling snake oil. It takes a team, and that includes
| leadership.
|
| Our culture tends to deify leaders when it's really a
| team effort. Don't blindly hate the guy because others
| fawn over him. He's human, and a deeply flawed one at
| that, but wow can he motivate a team to achieve the
| impossible.
| the_cat_kittles wrote:
| the number of things he has proposed that were lies /
| scams (solar tiles, tesla self driving), or incredibly
| stupid (hyper loop, whatever these shitty robots are now,
| boring company etc) is too high for me to think he is a
| particularly gifted engineer. he is a salesmen as you
| say. to me he is more elizabeth holmes than nikola tesla
|
| "If all it took was assembling a team of ace engineers
| then Musk would be unremarkable and we'd have no end to
| amazing things" ever heard of bell labs?
| googlryas wrote:
| It's not all ideas, but an ideas guy is a necessary but
| insufficient condition for the ultra talented "do-ers" to
| do their amazing things. Elon could have bought a big
| chunk of Google or apple if he wanted to with all his
| wealth and just generated nice returns, but t we probably
| wouldn't have boosters that return to land and can be
| reused if he did.
| edwardotis wrote:
| Funny, how a Series A investor in someone else' pre-
| existing company got people to think that he was the
| "ideas guy". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.#Fo
| unding_(2003%E2%...
| googlryas wrote:
| You can still do that. Just "electric battery car" was
| not a novel idea in 2003.
|
| Jobs was viewed as the idea guy when he went back to
| apple, and it wouldn't have been really different if that
| was his first time there instead of returning.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Musk essentially _was_ the A series, which led to him
| becoming the chairman and majority owner of the 7 month
| old company, which at that point just had a handful of
| guys. He ended up dismissing the original founders of the
| company before production began on their first product.
|
| Their impact on the Roadster is debatable. Their impact
| on Tesla, as a whole, is effectively zero.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| He has done a fantastic job at fundraising for SpaceX. Most
| other companies can't get past Series G as a private
| company. I think SpaceX is on series N, or around there.
| The talent pool available to SpaceX and Tesla is also very
| smart and motivated, and will put up with a lot of BS from
| the companies because they are so mission-driven.
|
| That is his really great talent: getting smart people to
| put their resources behind ambitious projects. That was
| also Elizabeth Holmes's talent, and Adam Neumann's. So far,
| he has done well at pivoting that inspiring message to real
| results, unlike the other two.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Is SpaceX the most valuable privately held company in the
| world now?
| shasts wrote:
| There are privately held companies that has 100B+ revenue
| per year.
|
| Cargill to Ikea
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Sure, but that is revenue, not valuation, which can be
| lower (or higher).
|
| For example, Walmart has 560B+ revenue per year and a
| market cap of 380B.
| protomyth wrote:
| Cargill would have an amazingly high valuation just due
| to all the assets owned.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| You may very well be right! I didn't mean to come off
| saying you are wrong, just that Revenue isn't a proxy.
| IKEA on the other hand I very highly doubt has a higher
| market cap. Retail typically has high Revenue and low
| margin, like Walmart
| protomyth wrote:
| For a bit of information
| https://m.startribune.com/minnesotas-cargill-is-largest-
| u-s-...
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Not even close. It might be the most valuable one that
| uses venture funding (which would be normal given that
| they might also be the most highly funded venture-backed
| company, I'm not sure if anyone is beating them on that),
| but there are a ton of huge private companies that don't
| use venture funding.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Now I'm curious. Do you have some examples? I know there
| are some huge companies that are state owned like saudi
| aramco, but dont know if any other privately held
| companies with 100+ billion valuation
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Most of them are companies whose owners either want to
| keep them private or who are not well-served by "tradFi"
| as the cryptobros say. As such, they don't have
| valuations over $100 billion (they don't have valuations
| at all, usually), but they are worth over $100 billion.
|
| Several big law firms are likely worth over $100 billion
| if they ever were equity financed, but use a partnership
| structure for legal reasons. The same for large hedge
| funds, which use partnerships for tax reasons.
|
| This list has some more traditional companies that have
| stayed private but have high revenue:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/largest-private-companies/list/
|
| Some of them would crack $100 billion valuation, but not
| all (eg Publix at #3 on the list probably wouldn't, but
| Mars at #4 would).
|
| Here's a worldwide list with the same caveat:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_private_n
| on-...
|
| These lists only include companies that report their
| revenue for one reason or another (eg to get a loan).
| Many profitable private companies don't - their owners
| like to stay private and extract cash from the business
| rather than having to keep the profit in the business.
|
| State-owned companies are another group entirely, and are
| often worth a ton.
| rurp wrote:
| Thanks for sharing a nuanced take and some first person
| experience.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Have you considered for a second that sending people to an
| irradiated hell hole planet where conditions are worse than
| earth even with 1000 years of climate change isnt the idea
| it's cracked up to be?
| aardvarkr wrote:
| Lmao you must really hate progress. Clearly anything
| risky is not worth doing and tough problems can't be
| solved
| tsunamifury wrote:
| I think understanding the difference between a poorly
| considered plan and real progress is very important. Elon
| seems to demonstrate repeatedly (even if he has a mythos
| otherwise) he does not think multiple detailed steps
| ahead as illustrated by several failures like Boring
| company.
| maxbond wrote:
| The notion of "progress" is just mythologizing the past
| and fetishizing a particular version of the future. It
| only serves to portray alternatives as "anti-progress";
| it is a rhetorical cudgel devoid of substance. We have
| problems that need solving, climate change is one of
| them. Musk's notion of Mars as "Planet B" is an entirely
| unworkable idea, and dangerous in that it invites
| postponing action in favor of a silver bullet that will
| never arrive.
|
| Things are not worth doing simply _because_ they are
| risky - that 's just more fetishism. They are worth doing
| because they solve problems. Space travel has the
| potential to solve certain problems, and is already
| solving lots of problems today. Mars colonization is not
| a serious proposal to any problem, because it can't be
| accomplished on any time horizon we're planning for. Mars
| colonization will likely never happen, and if it does, it
| is far beyond the foreseeable future (>100 years).
|
| So; SpaceX's rockets (and satellites) could certainly be
| useful, and are certainly useful today, but as GP pointed
| out, Musk's stated purpose is nonsense.
| bink wrote:
| SpaceX is unique because there are a whole lot of people
| who want to work on space exploration and very few big
| companies that are making serious progress in the field.
| Many people will put up with lower pay and extreme working
| conditions just for the chance to be a part of something
| like that. I don't think we can say the same for Twitter.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your ex-space-x perspective. I too, am
| skeptical about any good coming from this.
|
| I observe that Musk's biggest wins is where he has used his
| enthusiasm and large cachet of celebrity capital to
| challenge the status quo. Tesla and SpaceX both embody
| elements of society that sci-fi has been dreaming since we
| were kids. Self landing rockets flying all the time!
| Electric robot cars that drive themselves! He challenges
| entrenched industries to do a thing that people wish they
| would do, but the bean counters say isn't worth it. It
| least that's how the fanciful narrative goes.
|
| The problem with Twitter (or any social network/super app)
| is that it is not clear what that "go big, go beyond, dream
| big" trajectory is. For me personally, it'd be about open
| source, open walls, federation, and above all no fricking
| advertisement/surveillance economy. I don't see how Musk's
| acquisition here achieves that or any other "dream for the
| stars" aspiration one has for Twitter.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in
| a few years?
|
| 1: Profitable
|
| 2: More signal, less noise
|
| 3: Significantly less misinformation
|
| 4: (Maybe) A reliable way to get news
|
| Personally, I'm eating popcorn on this one. I think Musk got
| himself in trouble for letting his big mouth yap, and he fired
| the execs as revenge. As a software developer who's seen good
| and bad organizations, I'm very curious about the layoffs.
| pjc50 wrote:
| His "free speech" views seem likely to result in more
| misinformation, more noise, and especially more harassment
| and annoying Firstname Bunchofnumbers making people's
| mentions even more unusable.
|
| I can't see a path to profitability. In particular, "cutting
| to profitability" never works in momentum driven tech
| companies. I think he's underestimated how many people love
| _their twitter community_ but hate _twitter as a platform
| steward_.
| martin8412 wrote:
| He has already added 1b in annual expenses.. More than
| Twitters' annual profits.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| %50 headcount reduction will be more than 1b in savings.
| mplewis wrote:
| Your math doesn't add up here.
| seydor wrote:
| I think he will try to make it more "facebook like" in terms
| of moderation line, which is generally considered to be too
| rightwing by the MSM , and they will attack him viciously,
| like they attack FB. He either will sell it or it will be the
| new Yahoo, my bet is the former.
| jleask wrote:
| 1 possibly we'll see, but 2-4 with less people and no obvious
| plan to get there I really I don't see it.
| VectorLock wrote:
| >Significantly less misinformation
|
| Considering day 1 the new head of Twitter posted false
| information about the Pelosi attack from a site known to
| publish fake news, I'm going to guess this probably won't be
| the case.
| h3rsko wrote:
| And on day two the Biden white house was "fact checked" so
| brutally on a tweet that they ended up deleting it. That
| would never have happened under the previous regime. A
| republican white house - sure, but not to Biden.
| boc wrote:
| Biden's statement wasn't wrong. The fact check just
| provided a statement stating that the reason social
| security payments were the highest they've ever been is
| because they are automatically tied to CPI.
|
| It's weird to editorialize fact checks. If Biden said the
| payments were the highest ever, but the payments were
| actually lower, then sure add a fact check and provide
| the real number.
|
| It's honestly an example of how much of a mess Elon is
| stepping in with this venture.
| rhino369 wrote:
| >Biden's statement wasn't wrong.
|
| Bullshit. ". . . through President Biden's leadership" is
| objectively false. It's through the CPI adjustment he had
| nothing to do with. Even if you leave that out it is
| intentionally misleading.
|
| It's the sort of lie the media (rightfully) wouldn't let
| Trump get away with.
| Gene_Parmesan wrote:
| Except he did get away with it. My wife works in Medicare
| compliance for a large insurer and under Trump, every
| single communication they received from Medicare about an
| initiative literally included the language "Through the
| leadership of President Trump, ..."
| nullc wrote:
| > Bullshit. ". . . through President Biden's leadership"
| is objectively false.
|
| Unless you want to take the position that it was "biden's
| leadership" that caused the high inflation, then you
| could say it was objectively true but uhhh... not
| something they should be bragging about.
|
| The "fact check" specifically said it was providing
| context: https://twitter.com/cwt_news/status/158786349207
| 7330432/phot... it was written in a very neutral and
| factual style. I think it was well placed.
|
| If it were the Trump whitehouse though people would
| probably be asking if the administration broke the law by
| removing the tweet and thereby causing the removal of the
| 1A protected 'fact check'.
| robswc wrote:
| This is my issue too. Politicians have seemed to
| abandoned reality. Why not though, its what they get
| rewarded for.
|
| Politician X makes a claim that would be torn to shreds
| in a setting where people are at least trying to be
| honest. Politician X then gets thousands of supporters
| blindly agreeing or having meta discussions about almost
| anything besides what matters.
|
| Until we as a people stop rewarding this behavior, it
| will only continue.
| EricDeb wrote:
| It's good that both sides are held to account. I just
| hope this is being applied evenly.
| pelorat wrote:
| Sure. Bankrupt.
| seydor wrote:
| This is an opportunity to go back to RSS with perhaps some
| extensions. Nothing would feel more satisfying than downloading
| your tweets to host them wherever by yourself.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Doesn't Craigslist have like 12 employees?
| flashgordon wrote:
| So looking at other siblings comments in this subthread, sounds
| like Elon is a genius, rigor in future Twitter, high calibre
| talent blah blah blah.
|
| Even if that may end up being true that suggests Twitter today
| is full of mediocre/subpar employees. Were Parag and other
| execs just rewarded for bringing Twitter to a sacrifice at the
| altar? Dang indeed!
| flashgordon wrote:
| Damn sorry folks. Not sure how this got posted twice. Is
| there anyway I can delete this one (i understand deletions
| are not on).
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > The app is simple but doing simple things at scale is hard. I
| wonder if we'll see more downtime and issues now.
|
| So, here's what I've never figured out...
|
| Once your app is built, and you've figured out how to scale it,
| and everything is autoscaling nicely, and you've reached the
| critical mass Twitter has...why do you still need all the
| engineers? Why do you need to keep growing?
|
| At some point, isn't the scaling solved? Once you have a
| platform that can handle 400M MAUs, what more is there to
| build?
|
| Does it really take 1,000 engineers to maintain? I'd think
| automation could take care of most grunt work involved with
| maintenance.
| btgeekboy wrote:
| Once your app gets to that level, even keeping the lights on
| requires work. Third party dependencies don't stop updates,
| security or otherwise. Laws and regulations change.
| Advertisers demand features that aren't seen by the general
| public. Multiple SRE teams are needed to handle oncall
| rotations, outages, etc. And now that you have thousands of
| employees, you need to start building automated HR and IT
| tooling.
| dstola wrote:
| I think the issue with these massive scale apps is that
| people want better and fresher features which are not always
| well defined and get lost in the maze of product development
| of a huge company. They have to make decisions, do we go with
| web3 stuff or do we improve current NLP system etc etc.
| Making decisions is much easier for a small startup than a
| behemoth of twitters size. And yes, it takes many people.
| 1000 engineers? Maybe not, bloat has set in at that point,
| but a few hundred for sure.
| flashgordon wrote:
| So looking at other siblings comments in this subthread, sounds
| like Elon is a genius, rigor in future Twitter, high calibre
| talent blah blah blah.
|
| Even if that may end up being true that suggests Twitter today
| is full of mediocre/subpar employees. Were Parag and other
| execs just rewarded for bringing Twitter to a sacrifice at the
| altar? Dang indeed!
| irae wrote:
| To me the key factor is not if Elons other companies would have
| succeeded without him. The key factor is that he started all
| other companies or joined just after the start. Twitter on the
| other hand has a lot of history and past leaderships.
|
| On the other hand, I think Twitter has so much momentum, it
| will take a lot of time to implode if Musk makes (even a lot
| of) mistakes.
| kenjackson wrote:
| > I hope there's a decent severance package
|
| If Musk's behavior with exec termination is any indication,
| there will be no severance package.
| thebradbain wrote:
| And then there will be a huge class action in violation of
| California's WARN Act.
|
| He's going to have to be paying out at least 2 months pay as
| severance.
| kenjackson wrote:
| The class action in violation of WARN has already started.
| eftychis wrote:
| It's _not_ like he took over a hard job.
|
| Twitter had a loss but had been profitable before. Twitter has
| a huge following/user-base worldwide. The hard part of creating
| the brand has happened.
|
| He just needs not to break it, trim some fat and appease
| advertisers. (In a possible recession, so that is the hard part
| of his job.)
|
| The HARD problem Elon has is of his own creation. He leveraged
| massively to bring this deal to fruition. During a downturn. So
| if let us say Tesla stock goes down considerably that might be
| an issue.
|
| If Twitter does not get called for its debt, Elon is going to
| make lots of money when he "brings it back to the people," out
| of pure kindness mind you, and it goes public again or there is
| a secondary offering. He bought it in bad times at "low brand
| value."
|
| The other value to Elon is he will increase his brand. Elon's
| value is in his name. Twitter can help him there, as it does
| daily.
|
| Edit: P.S. Oh, a bit more related: It will get sued. In fact it
| already is in the process from my understanding for
| botching/ignoring California WARN act regarding layoffs. So...
| good way of spending money. And he can not demand them to waive
| it off with a severance letter.
| hn2017 wrote:
| The reason he's laying off people. Due to his financing, he has
| to pay $1 billion per year just in interest.
|
| "Love to borrow money to buy a company and then saddle that
| company with the debt so I can lay off thousands of people"
|
| https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1587457450311122945
| suzzer99 wrote:
| It should be illegal to buy a company with money you borrow
| against the value of that company. When your primary
| financial goal is servicing debt over building long term
| value - the incentives become completely misaligned.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| agree to an extant, but we do it all the time with
| mortgages, as in buy with loan against value of the asset.
| the only difference is that bank wouldn't give me a 2M loan
| against 1M house. In this case this seems like a play on
| credibility of Musk that banks & other investors are
| willing to overpay. IMO its a mistake & misaligns the
| incentives but lets see.
|
| I do however feel that there should be civility in these
| layoffs regardless of what Musk's belief's about
| performance of these employees (or Musk fanboi's). There
| should be proper severance/healthcare and prorated vesting.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| But it doesn't hurt the pubic good if my house gets
| repossessed. When companies are run into the ground, it
| results in massive layoffs and less consumer choice. Or
| in this case the loss of an important and unique
| disseminator of information.
|
| Similar stuff is happening with most of the local papers
| in the country. Although in that case the whole business
| model is dying. But vulture capitalists are hastening the
| demise by squeezing every the lifeblood out of the
| business and destroying what's left of the public
| goodwill.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| >But it doesn't hurt the pubic good if my house gets
| repossessed...
|
| Actually it does when large number of houses get repoed.
| it did happen in 2008. that was because of securitization
| & rating mistake by banks but that speaks to my point, if
| the banks have a bad valuation model & give out
| unservicable loans then they have to eat the loss, just
| that everybody was doing that in 2007 because of repeal
| on many laws around such speculation.
|
| this seems to be a similar thing as long as it does not
| happens to be systematically tilted towards overvaluation
| but I'd argue businesses (esp public ones) are more
| closely watched and market does a semi reasonable job of
| valuing them _over time_. personally there is not a whole
| lot of growth left in twitter (or FB) except for changing
| to a new business model like identity verification or eat
| into FB 's lunch ;-). But as I said we'll see.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I also wonder about the social effect. Twitter rapidly settled
| its position as some kind of global heartbeat.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| > I hardly use it, so if it implodes it won't bother me too
| much.
|
| that's akin to saying, I hardly drive so I don't care about the
| price of gas. Doesn't bother me.
|
| twitter has influence and reach far beyond what the mDAU
| implies.
| bioemerl wrote:
| This isn't a too great demonstration of "you only need" because
| there will be a lot of brain drain issues with this company,
| worry and drama internally resulting in bad productivity.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| He sought out the drama so if he's capable he should've
| predicted it and been fine with it because he has ways to
| resolve it, something like that.
| bioemerl wrote:
| Oh absolutely, but at that point you're judging more the
| qualities of Elon's ability to lead a company then the
| consequences of having too many or too few people to run a
| big website like Twitter.
| Loughla wrote:
| >Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in
| a few years?
|
| I'll bite on this one. For reference, I personally believe Elon
| Musk is a degenerate blowhard who has literally zero concept of
| what life actually is like for billions of people on the
| planet, nor does he care. I believe he belongs to the class of
| people known as 'parasites'. Here's my take:
|
| 1 year: Initially, we'll see improvements. Dead weight is cut,
| along with some live branches, but we see improvements. More
| free and open speech, I believe he will follow through on that.
| Fringe groups have a louder voice and can find people to join
| their causes, leading to further polarization of politics
| across the globe, and especially in the US.
|
| 3 Years: Quality and use is declining as celebrities and
| politicians have begun to move away from Twitter due to
| constant abuse from toxic individuals, up to and including
| "vague" threats of violence. A minor celebrity blames Twitter
| for their recent issue with a fan stalking them.
|
| 5 Years: Twitter is dead. There was a political assassination
| that was formed, planned, and tweeted/broadcast from Twitter
| live. This may be a state level politician or federal, but it
| will be someone many people know the name of. Elon Musk blames
| the engineers for not properly implementing his AI software
| intended to prevent this sort of thing from happening.
|
| Edit: If you disagree, could you tell me why?
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| > up to and including "vague" threats of violence.
|
| I'm no expert in Twitter, but I have heard many people of
| note complain about receiving death threats on Twitter. One
| example:
|
| https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-
| dea...
|
| > Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has revealed that some mornings
| she starts her day by reading the death threats she has
| received from men on Twitter.
|
| Making a death threat, or a threat of violence, is not
| protected speech, it is a crime. Can you clarify why you
| think the new owners will look the other way at crimes being
| committed on their platform?
|
| Also, if it was already happening (up to and including "minor
| celebrity blames Twitter for their recent issue with a fan
| stalking them"), is this the trajectory you see regardless of
| ownership? And if not how will new ownership contribute to
| it?
| notatoad wrote:
| The new owners have quite loudly and explicitly promised
| that there will be less content moderation than their was
| before. And specifically less moderation of conservatives.
|
| If Twitter, under the previous leadership was full of death
| threats to leftists, and the new leadership is promising
| less moderation actions taken against the sort of people
| who make those threats, it seems reasonable to assume that
| those threats will continue or get worse
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| > The new owners have quite loudly and explicitly
| promised that there will be less content moderation than
| their was before.
|
| Less moderation to the point of not taking actions
| against content which is criminal, i.e. threatening
| violence?
|
| > new leadership is promising less moderation actions
| taken against the sort of people who make those threats
|
| I think there is some leap in logic here, which is that
| conservatives are more likely to be criminals, but if
| that holds then banning them from the platform for non
| criminal offences will reduce the amount of criminals on
| the platform, however you will also be banning people who
| are not criminals in the process, and this does not
| really seem like a terribly morally sound thing to be
| doing. How many steps from banning people from twitter
| for conservative views to reduce crime to jailing people
| who frequent bars because they are more likely to be
| criminals? If your only value is to reduce crime, then
| I'm not sure I see where the breaks are.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > Less moderation to the point of not taking actions
| against content which is criminal, i.e. threatening
| violence?
|
| Yes, obviously. Because Musk sure isn't pushing for
| _more_ of this oversight.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > conservatives are more likely to be criminals
|
| The correlation runs the other way. Mass shooters and
| people who carry out acts of political violence in the US
| are overwhelmingly driven by conspiracy "logic" that has
| recently been embraced by the right; Qanon, pizza parlor
| conspiracies, racism, etc.
| [deleted]
| eropple wrote:
| _> Can you clarify why you think the new owners will look
| the other way at crimes being committed on their platform?_
|
| Because, put plainly: I don't think there's much reason to
| expect Musk to take them seriously.The previous management
| had only minimal capability to curb this behavior, or
| claimed they did, because of scale. They'd deal with cases
| that rose to the top, but not a lot more. Musk, on the
| other hand, is ideologically congruent with much of it, and
| there are no indications that his yelling about "free
| speech, especially for the right wing" comes with
| consequences or even minor disapproval for that speech when
| you use it to threaten to kill somebody.
|
| Maybe I'm wrong. I don't think so, though.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| I always wonder why the management needs to deal with
| this. I believe in state run services of which one is the
| police. If someone threats you, go to the police (and
| then with proper procedures the company needs to be
| forced to help prosecution E.g. by a judge). I do
| understand the police is reluctant to do something (at
| least here in Germany, "Die Polizei ist nicht im
| Internet, oh wei oh wei!"), but privaticing crime
| management is not the future. And I did go to the police
| several times because of things that happened "on the
| internet" and was helped.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| > Musk, on the other hand, is ideologically congruent
| with much of it, and there are no indications that his
| yelling about "free speech, especially for the right
| wing" comes with consequences or even minor disapproval
| for that speech when you use it to threaten to kill
| somebody.
|
| Absence of indication is not indication of absence
| though.
|
| Another way to look at it that by having less strict
| moderation, and keeping moderation mainly focused on
| unprotected speech such as incitement or threats, you
| have more resources to go after unprotected speech.
|
| > Maybe I'm wrong. I don't think so, though.
|
| Fair enough.
| Loughla wrote:
| Good questions!
|
| >Can you clarify why you think the new owners will look the
| other way at crimes being committed on their platform?
|
| The old owners only did what they had to when the threats
| floated to the surface of the lagoon. The new owner has
| explicitly said that free speech means free speech. I
| believe overt threats of violence (read: I will kill X on
| June 5, 2023) will be addressed, but anything that can be
| played off as "satire" or "joking" (Read: somebody should
| kill X. lol jk) will be ignored, if not promoted for the
| extra eyes and clicks.
|
| >is this the trajectory you see regardless of ownership?
|
| No. I believe with old ownership we would see what we
| currently have in perpetuity. There was no innovation from
| Twitter, but there was also no real negative change either.
| Status quo.
|
| >And if not how will new ownership contribute to it?
|
| From what I read/see, Elon Musk espouses the view that
| people who disagree with him are lesser than. I believe he
| genuinely thinks he is better than everyone else; smarter,
| stronger, faster, better. I believe he will see people who
| act and think the same way (read: toxic) on Twitter, and
| automatically defend them if not outright promote them.
| This group will include people who incite violence.
| bilvar wrote:
| At some point I think there was a trending hashtag on
| Twitter #killallmen - a direct call to commit violence of
| the worst kind on a demographic. Did the previous
| ownership take it seriously? What was their response? Did
| they just dismiss it as a joke?
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I'm not sure why the downvotes. Your predictions don't seem
| any wilder than a higher post that's all sunshine and
| unicorns, and in 3-5 years yours can be definitively
| answered.
| nullc wrote:
| Twitter has already done essentially nothing about overt
| threats, much less vague ones, against anyone who wasn't a
| twitter-staff legible good-guy celebrity.
|
| The toxic threats even sometimes come from twitter staff and
| insiders, for example when Coinbase announced their no-
| politics-at-work policy, Twitter's former CEO Dick Costolo
| tweeted in reply that that Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong would
| be "lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution.
| I'll happily provide video commentary".
|
| The fish rots from the head.
| wesapien wrote:
| There has always been Fringe groups on Twitter but it's more
| on the left or the regressives.
| delfinom wrote:
| >1 year: Initially, we'll see improvements. Dead weight is
| cut, along with some live branches, but we see improvements.
| More free and open speech, I believe he will follow through
| on that. Fringe groups have a louder voice and can find
| people to join their causes, leading to further polarization
| of politics across the globe, and especially in the US.
|
| Twitter has no real impact on polarization on politics
| especially in the US. The problems of the US are first past
| the post elections, the broken 19th century style primaries,
| people literally not having enough money to take a day off to
| vote and/or being too burnt out daily to give a shit about
| politics.
|
| The result is the extremes get a very very loud voice since
| they are the only ones with nothing better to do. Twitter
| suddenly being more "free and open" means the extremes get an
| even louder voice.
|
| Your average person making up most of the population just
| wants to kick back and relax from the daily grind. Not go
| argue on twitter.
| yanderekko wrote:
| >5 Years: Twitter is dead. There was a political
| assassination that was formed, planned, and tweeted/broadcast
| from Twitter live.
|
| The internet has existed for decades with laxer moderation
| and nothing like this has happened - seems like you're making
| some hidden assumptions about how the political climate will
| evolve that are pretty questionable.
| Icathian wrote:
| I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. I think you're
| probably off the mark, but these are very reasonable and
| falsifiable predictions and this is what most of this comment
| chain should be.
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| I think where elon will take twitter is a sort of idea ->
| project -> mass colaberation, society sized incubator, were
| news and policy discussions are just a byproduct. But may im
| just projecting. But it would make kind of sense, to have it
| all in one app, from pitch, to finance, to realization
| ZanyProgrammer wrote:
| > is a sort of idea -> project -> mass colaberation, society
| sized incubator, were news and policy discussions are just a
| byproduct.
|
| This is VC speak that is gibberish and means nothing.
| psadri wrote:
| There is at least one extreme data point that says you can do
| an incredible amount with very few people: WhatsApp (~30
| engineers @ 500M daily users)
|
| At that point WhatsApp had first class clients for iOS,
| Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Nokia and Web + a server
| backend that scaled to 2B+ daily users.
|
| This doesn't happen by accident. WhatsApp founders created an
| environment where this could happen:
|
| - focusing on a few things (saying no a lot)
|
| - everyone on the team is highly capable
|
| - a work environment that allows people to focus on work
| (minimal meetings, good long term planning, fixing root causes
| vs constant firefighting...)
| mabbo wrote:
| > Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in
| a few years?
|
| Myspace still exists in some form.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Sure, no social network has maintained prominence ever.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > And so the grand experiment begins.
|
| If Elon "pulls it off" and shows other tech company leadership
| boards "you can get by with 1k employees instead of 7k" (or
| whatever the final number ends up being), what does that mean
| for the future of tech jobs?
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I'm curious about whether a paid-for social media business can
| survive. We so thoroughly educated everyone that social media
| is free, and there seems to be such resistance to the idea of
| paying for it, that I doubt it. But I tend to agree with ol'
| Musky that this has to move from the ad-supported model to
| improve.
|
| I'm also curious at the rumblings from US politicians. What
| would happen if the USA nationalised Twitter? Given that
| politicians from all over the world use it too. A case for a UN
| intervention?
|
| So many people I know are leaving Twitter, but the political
| class seems to need it, so I don't see it dying any time soon.
| throw2022110401 wrote:
| One thing is for sure: It will be absolute hell for those who
| will have to keep things running in the coming months. For
| better or worse Twitter infra is extremely comlex. 50% gone
| would be very rough even if the cuts were made thoughtfully and
| things were in KTLO-only mode. But that's not the case. Musk
| has already been pushing changes through skipping the normal
| process and will likely continue doing so, aggressively. Not a
| good combination.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > I feel bad for the folks losing their job because that always
| sucks
|
| I'm not trying to minimize the fact that this sucks for those
| affected, but let's not also forget that prior to the
| acquisition, the employees were given multiple opportunities to
| unionize and/or turn Twitter into an employee-owned company.
| This is the direction they collectively chose to go in instead.
| ink_13 wrote:
| Were they, though? Or would Twitter have employed the
| standard Big Tech response, which is to immediately terminate
| anyone who does the barest amount of serious organizing?
| bentt wrote:
| In a few years, if not sooner, Twitter will be right there with
| Tesla/SpaceX in terms of resume cachet. Everyone will see their
| culture has been transformed to one of rigor and performance.
| The "A" players will surface and they will do more with half
| the staff (or less even) than they ever did with 7500 people...
| and it will be noteworthy. Musk will be in the mix heavy for
| about 6 months. He'll make executive hires that work for him
| and then will wander back over to SpaceX as they get closer to
| Starship getting off the ground.
|
| People will be flipping out the whole time and a few Twitter
| competitors will rise, which will be great. Each Twitter alike
| will take on its own culture and the bubbles will now be
| network wide, much like they are with big press outlets like
| Fox and NYT. But Twitter will be the big daddy that all the
| journalists are on and if you want to broadcast something it
| will be the best place.
| jasmer wrote:
| Twitter is not 'SpaceX' in every way.
|
| It's 'social' and 'media' which are completely different
| operating environments.
|
| Twitter is long, long established as another company.
|
| The 'user base' of Twitter is entirely different kind of
| customer.
|
| He has no 'big government subsidies' to rely on, aka neither
| Tesla nor Space X would exist without major budgetary support
| from Big Gov.
|
| I suggest Twitter under Elon may be more profitable. Or
| different in some other way as well, but I'll give it only
| 25% chance it becomes like you're suggesting.
| mavhc wrote:
| No company would exist with major budgetary support from
| the government.
|
| Energy is subsidised, roads exist, international commerce,
| the internet, laws, money.
| stonogo wrote:
| The commenter you're replying to was obviously talking
| about direct government payment for SpaceX services and
| direct government rebates for Tesla (and other electric
| car) customers, not infrastructure investments.
| johnsillings wrote:
| That is an extremely expansive definition of "budgetary
| support."
| conductr wrote:
| > The "A" players will surface and they will do more with
| half the staff (or less even) than they ever did with 7500
| people
|
| It's still not obvious to me what they did with 7500 people
| that couldn't have been done with 10% of that
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Content moderation?
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| In a way, I agree. Twitter's moving into an era where they
| have way fewer people but also huge pressure to release a
| bunch of changes on nightmarishly short schedules. I
| guarantee there's some senior tech lead who's just been
| handed a "make $8/month blue checkmarks happen, you have two
| weeks" assignment.
|
| In an environment like that, "rock stars" who can knock out
| projects in short order are going to see their careers
| skyrocket. But the trick is, they're going to pull this off
| by taking every shortcut they can. Code reviews are out,
| refactoring is out, performance and scalability concerns are
| out, etc. They will successfully launch the thing and then
| flee to the next glorious launch opportunity.
|
| This will work very, very well for a while. The thing about
| taking on a lot of debt is that it allows you to accomplish
| big things in short order. But the debt will be hidden, and
| over a year or two, they will start to find that suddenly
| getting projects done is becoming nearly impossible, even
| compared to the pre-Musk days. And things will slowly fall
| apart.
|
| It might be that all of the technical debt they're about to
| take on will have been worth it. Debt's a tool, and maybe
| making big changes to adjust their company's heading is worth
| it. And maybe to Musk, it's VERY worth it, because technical
| debt doesn't show up on financial ledgers, and he probably
| wants the company to look as solvent as possible.
|
| But I wouldn't want to be a software engineer there in a
| year.
| galdosdi wrote:
| Good analysis IMHO. Hmmm. Maybe the plan is to flip the
| company before the chickens come home to roost?
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Bahaha. Rigor and performance?? Teslas kill people. SpaceX is
| cool, but pays fuck all because it's cool.
|
| I once watched the YouTube video of musk talking about
| battery prices and buying raw materials on the London
| exchange, and I thought, wow this guy is so insightful, no
| wonder his companies do well. It's not till later that I
| found out that everything he says is someone else's idea that
| he takes credit for.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Tesla's AIs save people too. And looking at the balance
| it's quite good.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > It's not till later that I found out that everything he
| says is someone else's idea that he takes credit for.
|
| There are a zillion ideas out there. The idea (!) is to be
| able to pick the right ones.
|
| For example:
|
| 1. never give up
|
| 2. don't beat a dead horse
|
| Which idea is correct?
| hcurtiss wrote:
| This is true of every CEO and corporate leader. They
| coordinate profound talent around them. That alone is a
| talent, and a very valuable one.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Right. Being an effective CEO is not about having
| original ideas. It's about _selecting_ the best ideas,
| and creating a team to realize them.
| galdosdi wrote:
| This makes no sense. Tesla, SpaceX, like video game
| companies, are able to punch above their hiring weight
| because the domain is "sexy" (engineers get excited about
| electric cars, space exploration, and video games)
|
| Social media just isn't these days, from an engineering
| perspective. The fun parts (scaling distributed
| infrastructure) are already old hat and it's mostly a
| business rules complexity problem. Most of what all these
| people are doing relates to complicated and boring business
| details. It's a corporate job. It won't pay, for engineers,
| in excitement, so it has to pay in money.
|
| So I'm not sure where all these people that are so excited to
| work their asses off for something that will be boring for
| them will come from (exciting for the businesspeople, as
| there are very hard business problems, but not for the
| engineers, as there are no hard tech problems in this domain
| anymore).
|
| The only option will be to do what FAANG and hedge funds have
| always done, and either really overpay to force top talent to
| care about these boring problems, or just settle for average
| talent with average productivity and average outcomes.
| kaashif wrote:
| Even if all of that is true, I'd be surprised if Musk manages
| to make a positive return on his investment.
|
| However good you are, if you pay way too much for something,
| you're worse than someone who just didn't overpay and made no
| other changes.
| nemo44x wrote:
| I think it's about more than money for Musk. It's about
| influence and nudging the world closer to how it "ought to
| be". This is why wealthy people buy newspapers that will
| never make money. It's about power and influence.
|
| And I agree with OP - all this will be forgotten when
| Twitter is considered an elite place to work in a few
| years. Love him or hate him, but the guy attracts really
| talented people that want to work with really talented
| people.
| bentt wrote:
| Great point. Bezos didn't buy WaPo to make money. But I
| think Bezos is far less idealistic than Musk. Personally,
| I don't like Bezos one bit, and not just because his
| rockets are shaped like dildos (though that does not
| help).
| hodgesrm wrote:
| > Even if all of that is true, I'd be surprised if Musk
| manages to make a positive return on his investment.
|
| +1. It's hard to see how the ROI works out here. The price
| was 50% overvalued if not more, and Twitter has had severe
| problems with monetization.
|
| On the other hand, Musk actually uses Twitter at scale
| unlike the previous management of the company. That might
| give him more insight into the possibilities than his
| predecessors.
| bentt wrote:
| Well, how do you measure return?
|
| People seem to think one of three things about Elon Musk:
|
| A) Musk is a typical rich asshole who only loves money. B)
| Musk is a typical power hungry asshole who loves power and
| money is a side effect. C) Musk is a big nerd who thinks he
| can solve big problems better than other people, and power
| and money are side effects.
|
| I believe he's type C (Hopeful Nerd). So for that type of
| person, his positive return is solving the problem. He
| thinks he can fix social media. He thinks social media is a
| big problem. He thinks humans need to fix social media or
| they are fucked, just like if they don't get off oil they
| are fucked, and just like if they can't leave Earth they
| are fucked. Fundamentally, he does think humans are worth
| saving.
|
| I would bet that the vast majority of people that choose to
| work with Elon believe he is type C (Hopeful Nerd) and
| believe in humanity as well. That's why they put up with
| all of his flaws and toxicity - because they believe in the
| cause and know it's a broken eggs == omelet situation.
| HyperSane wrote:
| Why does Musk tweet lame conspiracy theories he is
| obviously smart enough to know are false?
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Why does he have to be _one_ of those things? None of
| them are mutually exclusive. You can be a big nerd with
| lots of money and a narcissistic power-hungry attitude.
| Just because you're obsessed with money doesn't mean you
| also don't crave power (the two routinely go hand in hand
| as money is a form of power).
|
| He seems to embody all three "types" fairly well.
| bentt wrote:
| Well it's less that HE is mutually exclusive, it's more
| that the polarized social media world tends to see
| through these extreme lenses. And probably some days he's
| more one than the other.
| Febra33 wrote:
| I see you only listed three options but where's the
| fourth: D) Musk is the saviour of humanity and everything
| he does is perfect and in no way, shape or form subject
| to criticism.
| bentt wrote:
| Yeah extremists gonna extreme
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Twitter already has more "resume cachet" than Tesla/SpaceX.
|
| Feel like there are more and more people here who know
| nothing about the industry.
| Febra33 wrote:
| This reads like sarcasm
| voxl wrote:
| Imagine being this far down into a cult of personality and
| people reading it and thinking to themselves "yeah _this_
| comment is fine"
| idiotsecant wrote:
| SpaceX and Tesla have no 'resume cachet'. They are widely
| known in engineering circles as hiring huge numbers of entry
| level or just barely above entry level engineers, exploiting
| their interest in technology to work them like rented mules
| until they burn out, and then discarding them. It's not a
| _negative_ having worked at one of these places necessarily
| but unless the next employer is looking for an engineer with
| soul burned out of them it 's not a positive either.
| memish wrote:
| The social media hive mind noise does not reflect serious
| engineering circles.
|
| John Carmack reflects the latter:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQro0rkg2DE
|
| George Hotz reflects the latter:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P_Y8CUcqks
|
| Andrej Karpathy reflects the latter:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbxladysbTE
| pvarangot wrote:
| I work in embedded/systems software and worked in
| aerospace, have been in hiring committees in the Bay Area
| for years. While what you say about how Tesla churns Jr.
| engineers, SpaceX is not much like that. Also they both
| carry significant 'resume cachet', and I hired both in
| projects ran by "ex Tesla" and also ran by "Tesla haters"
| and making a career in SpaceX and in Tesla do signal that
| you are pretty serious about your performance as an
| engineer.
|
| I don't like Musk, I don't like Tesla, I don't like (most
| of) what SpaceX does. But as a professional I can't agree
| with your Reddit-AntiWork-MuskIsEvil portrayal of those
| companies. It's just not true.
| swalsh wrote:
| > I don't like (most of) what SpaceX does
|
| What do you not like about SpaceX?
| bentt wrote:
| Yeah, and then there are those that make it and stay. I
| doubt you hear from them. Anyone still at SpaceX/Tesla feel
| free to pipe in.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| Is this a real statement? At least in SV the last few
| years, ex-tesla and ex-spacex in terms of getting funding
| for projects was a big win. Some went to apple et al as
| well for pretty good money.
|
| I know of a few folks from what I would call older line
| engineering (thinking boeing / SLS type places) actively
| looking to get onto a musk company (younger folks generally
| pretty eager to do work).
|
| It's pretty visable when you see NASA administrators doing
| presentations and then SpaceX folks (who all seem like they
| are in their 20's to me). Pretty clear you are getting a
| lot more experience at SpaceX then in the big SLS
| subcontractor stack for example. I'm adjacent to this space
| a bit and I think most of the senior folks leaving tesla /
| spacex (plenty of them) have all landed pretty well despite
| your claims.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > SpaceX and Tesla have no 'resume cachet'.
|
| Among hiring managers at big companies, they absolutely do.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| At my company, I promise you someone on my team would see
| the resume and shout "Holy shit this guy/gal worked at
| SpaceX!"
| brian-armstrong wrote:
| This. And everyone would stand up and clap.
| dwater wrote:
| That doesn't differentiate between fame and infamy.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Hiring manager at big company: no cachet. One of the
| people in a team adjacent to mine got a job offer from
| SpaceX and rejected over perceptions of chaotic
| management.
| masterof0 wrote:
| I agree, those people saying that Tesla and SpaceX are
| not a great experience to have in your resume, are
| pushing wishful thinking to new boundaries.
| kenjackson wrote:
| As a hiring manager I can say that SpaceX has very little
| cachet, but Telsa has some. At least not in the SW space.
| Maybe in areas more related to their domains they have
| more.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| A prediction - trump will get back on Twitter and will again
| use the hell out of it, with corresponding election results
| pelorat wrote:
| I don't think so. That would mean admitting his Truth Social
| platform is not as good as Twitter. I don't think he'd do
| that.
| nostrademons wrote:
| "When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a
| business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the
| reputation of the business that remains intact." -- Warren
| Buffett
| xeromal wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this.
| edderly wrote:
| I think it'll be fine. You don't need 7000 people to run a
| micro blogging service. It's really that simple.
| [deleted]
| SalmoShalazar wrote:
| Not sure how this is relevant given that Twitter is not a
| "micro blogging service"
| CountSessine wrote:
| What is it then? That seems like the best description to
| me.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| It's a messaging service that has a broadcast feature.
| And for that multicast/broadcast feature you get to have
| a crappy peer to peer message experience, be limited to
| small messages, look at ads, surf through unknown
| algorithm manipulation of what you read, locked in a
| single system, and be told you might need to pay to
| either a) prove you're "real" or b) not see the ads. Sign
| me up!!
|
| (A blog is also a broadcast messaging service, so I think
| you're both right).
| falcolas wrote:
| > I think it'll be fine. You don't need 7000 people to run a
| micro blogging service. It's really that simple.
|
| When you're generating and distributing and moderating
| multiple TB of tweets in real time every day to billions of
| people and also feeding other corporations parts of that
| data... maybe you do.
| joshribakoff wrote:
| Maybe, maybe not. I don't think the number of engineers
| needs to scale with the servers. You can scale out servers
| without scaling out your number of engineers. As far as
| moderation, Twitter is already poorly moderated and
| moderation can be outsourced.
|
| The types of things that require scaling out engineers is
| supporting video embeds from 100s of different video
| hosting platforms.
| jlangenauer wrote:
| Twitter has around 190m daily active users. You're going to
| struggle to run something like that with an engineering
| team of 20-30 people (although WhatsApp did exactly that
| for many years), sure.
|
| But I don't see why an company and an application of that
| size couldn't be run by a company of, say, 1500 people,
| instead of 7000. 250 engineering staff, 250 doing
| moderation/support, 800 doing sales & account management
| and 100 in management and 100 doing sundry tasks.
| falcolas wrote:
| 250 people moderating AND supporting 190m daily active
| users??
|
| Let's do some napkin math here:
|
| 500 million tweets, let's say 10% are reported, and
| evenly distributed. That would make for reviewing 200,000
| tweets per employee per day. That's 7 tweets that need to
| be moderated per second for a standard 8 hour day.
|
| 190m active users, .1% of which need support daily. On
| top of 7 tweets per second, that's just shy of three user
| support tickets per second that they need to manage as
| well.
|
| And that's without weekends, holidays, sick days, etc.
|
| EDIT: Let's go the other way with napkin math too.
|
| Let's say each content moderator can review 6 tweets per
| minute.
|
| 50m tweets to be moderated at that velocity means you
| need around 136,000 man hours per day. For an 8 hour day,
| that's 17,000 employees. Too many.
|
| So you make an ML algorithm that processes the reported
| tweets, but needs backup and spot checking on 10% of
| those. 1,700 content moderators (and a team dedicated to
| building/maintaining the ML report checking algorithm).
|
| Now, about those support requests. Based on my experience
| from being a CSR for Amazon years ago, you'll probably
| want 2-3 minutes per support request, and that's if
| you're sending a form letter back. 1.9m requests at 20
| per hour means some 95,000 man-hours per day, or 12k
| CSRs. Too many. Another ML algorithm (and team to
| maintain it) and we're down to 1,200 CSRs.
|
| About 3 thousand employees plus their support structure,
| just to handle tweet reports and CSR requests.
|
| Based on napkin math, 7,000 employees makes a lot of
| sense to me.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Exploring this further. I don't have real numbers but I
| suspect yours are pretty far off.
|
| 10% reported seems high, possibly by as much as an order
| of magnitude. The overwhelming majority of tweets are
| vapid and innocuous.
|
| It seems like an ML algorithm could do better than 90%.
| It doesn't have to be as perfect as driving a car; if it
| screws up occasionally it will merely annoy users (and
| probably the users that are most troublesome).
|
| If twitter becomes a more permissive environment, less
| censorship is necessary. Agree or disagree with it, it
| means less work for the censors.
|
| Paid subscriptions give you a significant new trust
| metric for users.
|
| The rest you can farm out to mechanical turk?
|
| 250 seems within the realm of possibility. People will
| complain about you the same way they complain about
| Google, but they'll keep using your product.
| falcolas wrote:
| I pointed this out in a sibling, but 10% would also
| include automatically reviewed tweets for misinformation,
| covid, and any other language filters they have in place.
|
| Also, having worked for a company that did ML sentiment
| analysis and content analysis against the twitter
| firehose, the accuracy of ML was closer to 65% than it
| was 99%. Yes, the company had a huge in-house crew
| dedicated to checking that 35%, and monitoring twitter
| manually for anything missed.
| jlangenauer wrote:
| The idea that 10% of tweets are reported is a huge over
| estimate. I'd say at most 1% of tweets are reported, and
| it's probably more like 0.1%.
|
| Twitters actual numbers (from
| https://transparency.twitter.com/en/reports/rules-
| enforcemen...) show that 11.6m reports were generated in
| the period July to December 2001, which is roughly 65,000
| reports per day. ML could easily reduce this number
| further, but with 100 employees doing moderation, even
| without ML, that's 650 reports per day. That's getting
| towards doable.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > ML could easily reduce this number further
|
| Seeing how poorly ML works for moderation (Too many false
| positives), I don't think it belongs anywhere near it.
|
| The problem is that you could offer a user a path to
| request a human review moderation action taken by ML, but
| bad actors that knowingly break rules will just request
| human review and at that point, the ML is worthless.
| philistine wrote:
| Are those employees able to speak all the world's
| languages?
| falcolas wrote:
| 10% would also include automatically reviewed tweets for
| misinformation, covid, and any other language filters
| they have in place.
|
| Not all reviewed-for-moderation tweets would happen
| because of user reports.
| klooney wrote:
| Isn't the grunt work of moderation mostly outsourced
| today anyway, meaning those employees aren't on Twitter's
| books?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| You guys have never worked at a major social media
| platform and it shows. It takes around that many
| engineering staff just to run a passable advertising
| platform. There are so many technical nuances that you
| cannot even imagine.
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| For context, when I worked at _The Guardian_, roughly
| half our engineering staff worked in Commercial - doing
| things for advertisers
| humanistbot wrote:
| You don't if you don't need any content moderation.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| It's possible you need 100 engineers and 6,900 moderators.
| idlewords wrote:
| I believe a lot of the moderation is contracted out and
| isn't part of employee headcount.
| duhast wrote:
| Why do you think so?
| reitanqild wrote:
| Look at early WhatsApp until they were aquired.
|
| Vastly more innovative and scaled crazy fast without fail
| whales or anything.
|
| Or look to Telegram today. Delivering a vastly more complex
| product with a fraction of the company size it seems.
| chillfox wrote:
| Messaging services don't need the same amount of
| moderation as micro blogging do.
| jameshart wrote:
| Aren't WhatsApp and telegram _messaging_ services rather
| than _microblogging_ services?
|
| The difference between a messaging app and a
| microblogging app is basically the difference between an
| O(n) problem and an O(n^2) problem.
|
| If you don't think that adds some complexity, you're
| kidding yourself.
| vidarh wrote:
| It adds some complexity, but consider that we know _very
| well_ how to scale this type of service: E-mail +
| reflectors (mailing lists), and we know _very well_ how
| to do parallel mass delivery for the small proportion of
| accounts with huge numbers of followers.
|
| Scaling this is easily done with decomposition and
| sharding coupled with a suitable key->value mapping of
| external id to current shard. I first sharded e-mail
| delivery and storage for millions of users 23 years ago.
| It was neither hard nor novel to do then, with hardware
| slower than my current laptop handling hundreds of
| thousands of users each.
| jameshart wrote:
| Those models are predicated on every user having an
| 'inbox'
|
| Do you believe that every Twitter user has an inbox
| stored on disk somewhere that just contains every tweet
| posted by someone they follow?
| vidarh wrote:
| I have no idea if that is how Twitter ended up doing it.
| But building it that way is _vastly_ easier to scale than
| trying to do some variation over joining the timelines of
| everyone you follow "live" on retrieval, because in
| models like this the volume of reads tends to _massively_
| dominate.
|
| You also don't need to store every tweet, you need to
| store the _id 's_ of the tweets (a KV store of the tweet
| id to full tweet is _also_ easy to shard), and since they
| 're reasonably chronological the id's can be compressed
| fairly efficiently (quite a few leading digits of tweet
| id's are chronological).
|
| You also have straightforward options for "hybrid"
| solutions, such as e.g. dealing with extreme outliers.
| Have someone followed by more than X% of total userbase?
| Cache the most recent N tweets from those accounts on
| that small set of timelinesyour frontends, and _do_ joins
| over _those few_ with users who follow them.
|
| Most importantly, it's an extensively well tested pattern
| in a multitude of systems with follower/following graphs
| whenever consumers/reads dominate over a period of
| decades at this point, so behaviours and failure modes
| are well understood with straightforward, well tested
| solutions for most challenges you'll run into, which
| matters in the context of whether it'd be possible to
| build with a small team.
|
| Put another way: I know from first hand experience you
| can scale this to millions of users per server on modern
| hardware, so the number of shards you'd need to be able
| to manage to deal with Twitter-level volume is lower than
| the number of servers I've had ops teams manage (you'd
| need more servers total, because your read load means
| you'd want extensive caching, as well as storage systems
| for e.g. images and the like - there's lots of other
| complexity, but scaling the core timeline functionality
| is not a complex problem)
| jonfromsf wrote:
| It seems likely.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| Telegram is also a microblogging service. With far more
| users.
|
| It's clear you are totally clueless about how many
| features telegram has.
| reitanqild wrote:
| I might be underestimating how hard it is to scale
| microblogging. I most certainly am.
|
| But have you looked at the scale of what Telegram
| provides both in width and at scale?
|
| Certainly there are celebrities with more followers on
| Twitter than the largest Telegram channels, but Telegram
| scales surprisingly far, and I haven't seen it struggle
| more than once or twice since the start.
| scarmig wrote:
| They're different problems, but messaging isn't some
| trivial thing. And a user having a single unified public
| view of their tweets is pretty much O(n).
| jasmer wrote:
| WhatsApp is not 'vastly more innovative', and they solved
| different kinds of problems.
|
| Twitter is a 'universe of 100M connected people'.
|
| WhatsApp mostly connected single entities together.
|
| So, for example, 'real time search' and 'relevant
| updates'.
|
| Imagine taking a firehose of 100M people's random
| thoughts, putting that into an index, making it instantly
| searchable. Now pull up the most relevant thoughts from
| those 100M to each and every other 100M user.
|
| Now moderate all of it in really subtle ways, whereupon
| most of the 'negative activity' is tantamount to spam or
| annoying behaviour, and not anything we might normally
| consider 'abuse'.
|
| That's an incredibly different challenge and that's only
| two small artifacts of what they are doing.
|
| Twitter is not rocket science, but it's not trivial
| either.
|
| Also consider that R&D is usually maybe on 20% of
| overhead - yes - it takes 'all those other jobs and
| expenses' to run a company.
|
| Some of these statements are a bit glib.
| efsavage wrote:
| > Look at early WhatsApp until they were aquired.
|
| Look at what they didn't do, which was make any revenue,
| or support any customers, or moderate any content.
| reitanqild wrote:
| Wasn't WhatsApp on track to be cash flow positive?
|
| I know I at least was shouting at them to take my money:
| it was the perfect HN product, reasonably priced,
| technically superior and with no ads or tracking.
|
| And yes, I paid as well.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i think 7000 is too high as well but don't forget, in a
| business, the technology part is maybe 10% of the overall
| effort. There's a lot that goes into running a business
| beyond the tech.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Yes, where would businesses be without a fleet of energy
| sucking middle managers.
|
| I don't like EM at all, but truth is internet companies are
| making so much goddamn money, they have employee pools
| absolutely full of turds.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| I've seen this statement a lot, and I think it's missing
| something.
|
| Public companies typically have growth as a goal. Twitter was
| not making a lot of money. Some of these people were working
| on building a future Twitter that would grow bigger and
| richer. I'm not saying they were on the path to success, just
| that I expect a lot of the activity there could be described
| that way.
|
| Five years ago you could say of Uber 'You don't need 5000
| people to run a freelance taxi app', when they had hundreds
| (thousands?) of people working on autonomous driving. Amazon
| didn't seem to need scores of backend engineers to run a web
| store, but now AWS is a huge business. Google employs vast
| numbers of people but has a relatively small number of
| impactful products, only some of which make money.
|
| Again, not claiming they were doing it well, just that they
| were trying stuff beyond maintaining what we see.
| harlequinn77 wrote:
| To be frank, twitter hasn't changed in 10 years.
|
| So in this hypothetical, the people building the future of
| the company have achieved nothing during this time and
| should absolutely be removed or replaced.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| No argument there. Just pointing out that it's common for
| head count to be larger than the visible product
| justifies.
|
| Uber cut their losses. Twitter needed a change of owner
| to get there.
| rockostrich wrote:
| I don't disagree that 7000 people is too many for what
| Twitter has become but Twitter has been at the bleeding edge
| in terms of building web and data systems that can handle
| scale (while also open sourcing most of that work).
| [deleted]
| mikkergp wrote:
| It will be interesting to see how Elon defines success. Twitter
| in it's current form is a dead end, and there's no way "more
| free speech" is going increase either revenue or users. So if
| you think Elon is going to succeed at making Twitter a better
| Twitter as we know it, then I'm confident this take is wrong.
|
| Which is why he's focused on the everything X app or whatever.
| Now, I wouldn't want to underestimate Elon, he is good at min-
| maxing, but I don't know that Twitter has a great competitive
| advantage to build on. It's one of the smallest social networks
| and Twitter as Twitter, i.e. the one big open forum with
| politicians, journalists scientists etc _is_ it's competitive
| advantage. So I don't know how you get from Twitter to X when
| almost every other social media does the things X would do
| better than Twitter. The biggest thing Elon would have to do is
| build trust with users and partner companies and that certainly
| does not seem like the direction he's heading. On the one hand
| I wouldn't bet against Elon, on the other hand the deck seems
| stacked against him. He'll have to prove he can run a SASS
| Twitter with minimal staff, which may be possible. But I don't
| know he does that and goes into al these other areas (payments,
| advertising, trust and safety) that seem very hands on to build
| relationships with partner companies, PCI Compliance, handle
| customer concerns, fraud etc.
|
| Managing people requires people. He wants to make the
| moderation process more transparent? He'll either have to
| invent perfect text analysis AI, or he'll need people to
| process and respond to abuse complaints and petitions.
|
| This TC article sums up the X challenges pretty well:
| https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/08/elon-musk-x-everything-wec...
| naasking wrote:
| > It's one of the smallest social networks and Twitter as
| Twitter, i.e. the one big open forum with politicians,
| journalists scientists etc _is_ it's competitive advantage.
| So I don't know how you get from Twitter to X when almost
| every other social media does the things X would do better
| than Twitter.
|
| Being the elites' gathering place is indeed its biggest
| advantage, and the fact that consumers can get public
| visibility on issues they're facing helps companies with
| their public image. There are many times where I or friends
| have posted about issues after exhausting the standard
| support channels, and quickly cut through the bureaucratic
| red tape and got our problem solved. I think that's a
| monetizable angle.
|
| I think something similar would apply to other elites as
| well. Politicians can get direct feedback from constituents,
| music artists get direct feedback from fans (see the recent
| Lizzo "spaz" thing), and so on. However, in the current
| climate, elites are getting skewed feedback, so "more free
| speech" could actually help, if it's done right.
| mikkergp wrote:
| Maybe, but most of these things would require "brand
| safety" which is in the opposite direction of free speech.
| Maybe if twitter had billions of users like facebook, they
| could strongarm companies and get away with it, but all of
| the things you describe are probably going to require
| twitter directly interfacing with said
| celebrities/politiians/journalists, which will require lots
| more employees and a different tact than Musk seems to be
| taking.
|
| Besides the fact that "more free speech" seems to involve
| making fun of trans people and bringing back donald trump,
| which do not correlate with more accurate feedback to
| elites.
| snotrockets wrote:
| Death threats are not "making fun of".
| mikkergp wrote:
| You are correct, my purpose was to diminish the value of
| so called "free speech" for a platform like Twitter, not
| to diminish the negative impact on those targeted. I did
| not mean to exclude those targeted by death threats but
| you are correct that there are many other consequences of
| "free speech", and I also don't believe death threats
| provide value to twitter as a platform.
| naasking wrote:
| We'll see how it goes, but "making fun of trans people"
| is an unfair summary of the situation. Megan Murphy and
| Rowling were not making fun of trans people, for
| instance.
| pjc50 wrote:
| No, they were calling for their elimination from the
| public sphere, forced outing etc.
| naasking wrote:
| No they weren't.
| matthewaveryusa wrote:
| He won't need PCI compliance. He's going to attempt to make a
| wechat with cryptocurrency as a method of payment in
| collaboration with binance. We'll see if it sticks.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Isn't this the Facebook Libera plan, which got lolnoped by
| regulators before it even got off the ground?
| notahacker wrote:
| Pretty much, although Musk might be more persistent in
| the face of being lolnoped by regulators than Facebook
| and the financial institutions they invited along to try
| to add credibility to their project.
| mdaEyebot wrote:
| It'll probably stick for however long it takes for Musk to
| publish a history of someone's paid-video purchases in
| response to a mean tweet.
|
| Not sure what problem a cryptocurrency would solve in this
| case.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| There's a lot of porn on Twitter. The "paid videos"
| feature that you get with a blue check seems to be
| focused on this crowd.
|
| Can you imagine someone as volatile and vain as Elon Musk
| having your porn viewing history? There's a good reason
| why most sex entrepreneurs stay off the radar.
|
| I personally can't wait for him to kinkshame a Twitter
| influencer who makes him mildly upset.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| >Twitter in it's current form is a dead end, and there's no
| way "more free speech" is going increase either revenue or
| users.
|
| Twitter was on its death bed until Trump signed on and became
| the shit-posting President. This is not an endorsement of
| Trump or bringing him back, but the type of "free speech"
| people are talking about saved Twitter, made it a pile of
| money, and made other media/press companies billions of
| dollars covering the chaos.
| r00fus wrote:
| I do not have that impression at all. Twitter was made more
| relevant by Trump's presidency but you'd have to show me
| revenue numbers that somehow he saved it.
| mikkergp wrote:
| According to this:
|
| https://www.zippia.com/twitter-careers-11916/revenue/
|
| It seems like Growth was actually lowest during Trump's
| presidency.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Trump announced his run for the Presidency and began
| shit-posting his way into the White House in 2015, the
| year Twitter had over a 50% increase in revenue.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Trump's presence on Twitter was a major factor in
| deleting my account a few years ago. Have not regretted
| it.
| brightball wrote:
| The one thing Twitter has going for it is network effect.
| Tons of people are trying to spin up competitors and
| encouraging people to go there based on political leanings or
| other reasons. The fragmentation will just lead to Twitter
| remaining as the place where everybody comes back.
|
| I'll be shocked if it doesn't work out for him because
| network effects are really hard to overcome.
| rockostrich wrote:
| I have no doubts that a super app will succeed in the US like
| Pinduoduo has in China but I highly doubt that's going to
| come from the environment that Elon is already establishing
| at Twitter. You can't successfully build dozens of new
| products by laying off a big chunk of the staff and telling
| people to work 12 hour shifts 7 days a week when they've
| gotten comfortable with a reasonable work-life balance (I
| know Tesla and SpaceX are notorious for rejecting work-life
| balance in general but they aren't software companies).
| kibwen wrote:
| We already have super-apps. They're called "Android" and
| "iOS".
| giobox wrote:
| This is true, today. But look at things like the Digital
| Markets Act in the EU; there is a significant chance
| those "super apps" iOS and Android are forced to submit
| to government regulation in the future, which will create
| new opportunities - if/once the App store monopoly is
| removed for example, the ability for any app to become
| the "super-app" is greatly enhanced, even if very hard.
| Twitter as brand and platform I could imagine playing in
| a post-mandatory App store landscape - but so too will a
| lot of others of course.
| im-a-baby wrote:
| Exactly. Why would you want a single app that has other
| apps? You could easily go download a standalone app from
| the app store that delivers a superior experience. There
| would need to be some competitive advantage or economy of
| scale of the single app. But what that advantage is
| remains to be seen.
|
| Just as an example: both Facebook and Snapchat (and I'm
| sure others) have tried adding games to their platform.
| Both efforts have failed because you can get a better
| gaming experience by playing a standalone game. If you
| want to play with a friend, you can message them and say
| "hey, let's play X." There is limited upside to playing
| in Facebook or Snapchat, and a lot of downsides (limited
| catalog, performance restrictions, etc.)
|
| One exception to this is any feature that requires
| exposure to an audience. Social media is very good at
| exposing people to content. Something like Facebook
| marketplace can be successful because sellers want their
| listings to be seen by people and buyers want to go to
| places that have the most sellers.
| nomel wrote:
| > you can't successfully build dozens of new products by
| laying off a big chunk of the staff
|
| Considering the leadership culture that grew twitter to
| nearly ten thousand, for Twitter, I don't think "dozens"
| was anywhere near feasible. I suppose it depends on your
| definition of "product".
| lupire wrote:
| 996 (72hr weeks) apparently works in China, so why wouldn't
| it be made to work here, especially if all the rich
| companies use the economic headwinds to collude and reduce
| compensation/QoL/perks? Also a massive fraction of young US
| techies are Chinese immigrants -- are they as vulnerable to
| 996 in US or are they a select group who escaped it?
|
| And can Musk and others staff up _in China_ (if US and
| Chinese politics /government allows it)?
| throw8383833jj wrote:
| China has a vast vast oversupply of software engineers.
|
| In order to make 996 work in the US, there would need to
| be a pretty big oversupply of talent (and a lower
| standard of living) to make people desperate enough to
| give up their entire lives to their work. Unfortunately,
| I think we may be getting close to that about now or at
| least heading down that path.
| mikkergp wrote:
| Apparently it's illegal and ByteDance (TikTok's parent
| company) stopped doing it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system#Byt
| eDa...
|
| I think you'd have to provide a lot more research to "996
| (72hr weeks) apparently works in China". What type of
| companies, what type of jobs, ubiquity etc.
| danans wrote:
| > Twitter in it's current form is a dead end, and there's no
| way "more free speech" is going increase either revenue or
| users.
|
| I think this is failing to imagine how bad things could get
| societally. Imagine if more consumers and advertisers start
| enjoying consuming and being associated with malevolent,
| hateful, and violence-inducing speech.
|
| Many in the 1930s-40s enjoyed the hateful caricatures of Jews
| that the Nazis produced in their propaganda, and hateful
| people also buy refrigerators and sneakers today.
|
| Yes, that would mean a majority of people would have to adopt
| those perspectives - to the detriment of society at large -
| but it's happened before in many parts of the world, and
| could happen again. That is a long-term goal of fascists
| anyways - to re-normalize that kind of thing, and to re-
| combine industry and media with a religious ethnostate.
|
| At the very least, the previously quiet pre-existing
| enjoyment of malevolent speech has been exposed for all to
| see over the last several years. The question is whether it
| has a growing audience.
|
| I'm not saying that's Elon's goal, but accelerationism seems
| to be something he is aligned with as long as it doesn't come
| at a cost to him.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| My read on the libertarian, free-speech Twitter pitch was
| that the mainstream media typically uses a straw man to
| dismiss it.
|
| If you start with the proposition "Anyone should be able to
| post anything on Twitter"...
|
| ... and want to get to "Everyone enjoys reading Twitter,"
| then there's a lot of black box space in the middle.
|
| You can have the most vile things on your platform, but
| your userbase self-censors. E.g. crowdsourced shadow-
| banning / down-voting. Or reputation with verified
| identities underneath.
|
| Or just... more transparency.
|
| Empowering the public to data-mine Twitter opens some
| interesting windows to a platform that has terrible things,
| but empowers interested parties to fruitfully research who
| they're coming from.
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _libertarian, free-speech_
|
| Incidentally, in the US at least, the idea of "free
| speech" is now firmly associated with the far right
| conservatives.
| josteink wrote:
| > Imagine if more consumers and advertisers start enjoying
| consuming and being associated with malevolent, hateful,
| and violence-inducing speech.
|
| > Many in the 1930s-40s enjoyed the hateful caricatures of
| Jews that the Nazis produced in their propaganda, and
| hateful people also buy refrigerators and sneakers today.
|
| I may be sidetracking the conversation here, but I must
| admit I find it fascinating how "hatefulness" online is
| almost always assumed to be right-wing extremism.
|
| Have everyone forgotten the BLM and Antifa riots going on
| for months where innocent people had their property,
| livelihood and in some cases even their lives taken?
|
| That was fully encouraged and endorsed by the left, en
| masse, and especially so on Twitter.
|
| Was that not "hate"? If not, what is?
| JohnBooty wrote:
| You are correct. There is no difference between
| oppressing people, and fighting against oppression. Nazis
| are the same as anti-Nazis, racists are the same as anti-
| racists. Remember when India rebelled and cast out the
| British? Literally no difference between the two sides.
| Racist police versus civil rights marchers in the 1960s?
| Hey, both sides were mad. Totally the same.
| [deleted]
| danans wrote:
| I think (and sincerely hope) that you forgot to include
| the "/s"
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| No he's thinks it's some edgy, never heard of stuff and
| he's made some compelling argument.
| danans wrote:
| Their comment history doesn't demonstrate trolling or
| false equivalency making, so by principle of charity I
| will believe it's sarcasm, until proven otherwise.
|
| But such equivalencies appear to be an idea you've
| promoted though, if I'm reading your past comments
| correctly.
|
| Also, give Azamat a hug for me. I miss that guy.
| josteink wrote:
| It may be obvious, but just in case it isn't: _Everyone_
| think they are fighting the good fight. Nobody sets out
| to be evil. Liberals thinks they are fighting for
| positive change. Conservatives wants to preserve what
| they think is good.
|
| Ofcourse the people burning the city down and looting
| think they are doing the right thing, or at least doing
| it for the right reasons. Ofcourse the black people
| "taking the streets back" feel entitled to it, after
| whatever backstory there was.
|
| But during the Antifa and BLM riots, actual businesses,
| owned by innocents bystanders got ruined. Innocent people
| got murdered. There were real tragedies to real people,
| mostly white.
|
| When that gets cheered on at social media-sites like
| twitter (or live on CNN!), it's hard to frame it as
| anything except _hate_ against white people.
|
| Maybe they thought they were fighting oppression. But at
| the same time they were oppressing. They became what they
| claimed to fight.
|
| Who are to say they are better than the people they
| claimed to be fighting, which _didn 't_ burn down cities,
| didn't kill innocent civilians?
|
| The ends does not justify the means. Not in a lawful
| society at least. These were hateful acts. EOT.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| Which cities did BLM protestors burn down? What crime did
| George Floyd commit that merited his public execution? Or
| Breonna Taylor, who was shot by police while sleeping?
| What was she guilty of?
| twoWhlsGud wrote:
| I think it's perfectly reasonable to rank acts by the
| threat they post to the Republic. The left wing riots you
| speak of were a problem in few very limited locations
| (parts of a few cities). They didn't threaten to end
| democracy. Major parts of the Republican party are
| actively trying to bring American democracy to a close.
| It's hard to see the benefit of both-siding in the
| presence of that threat.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| Government fetishism. The threat they "post" to some
| abstract concept like "the republic" is not more
| important than the threat they pose to their fellow man.
| josteink wrote:
| I'm not taking trying to take any absolute sides. Even
| the best of people will do bad things. You can find dirt
| on anyone, if you like.
|
| What I was originally responding to was the fear of
| twitter allowing hateful speech, which ofcourse had to be
| right-wing "hateful" speech.
|
| My comment was more directed towards how I found that
| (default) assumption weird, since I see tons and tons of
| clearly hateful content and attitudes from _all_ sides of
| the political spectrum online and in social media.
|
| When I see people complaining about all that "hateful"
| speech online from one end of the political spectrum, I
| have a hard time seeing that as something else but denial
| about the hateful speech their side of the political
| spectrum themselves are promoting, or worse deliberately
| ignoring.
|
| The fact that you find someone else's opinion
| disagreeable, distasteful or "hateful" is not a blanket-
| license for you yourself to act disagreeable, distasteful
| or "hateful" in response. It's a chance for you to be a
| better person.
|
| If you want to fix our divided world, you need to show
| people there's a middle way, and you do that by calling
| out bullshit on both sides.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| It's easy to say "I'm not trying to take any sides" but
| way harder to practice. For example, repeating the same
| rhetoric used by the hateful right-wing groups, while
| having to repeatedly put "hateful" in quotes, as if those
| groups aren't hateful or something, is taking a side.
| ytpete wrote:
| No one "burned down cities" and the vast majority of
| protests in the BLM movement were peaceful. In some
| cases, property damage and at least one actual murder
| were traced back to right-wing provocateurs, as well. You
| have to take that into account when framing things this
| way.
| nr2x wrote:
| I heard somebody got fired by Antifa because they had a
| second job with BLM. Both organizations really
| micromanage people. I think we should start holding the
| leadership accountable.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| Can you show me where the left was, en masse, supporting
| people having their livelihood and lives taken? Which
| prominent members of the left were cheering on killing?
| Biden? Bernie? Hell, was it Internet personalities like
| Vaush? I didn't see that at all.
| mikkergp wrote:
| Ironically? I think in order for this to happen we would
| have to be _less_ polarized. I don't think in the current
| state you could _increase_ revenue from it's current place
| by splitting the customer base.
|
| On the one hand if this keeps going bad maybe he just says
| fuck it and goes accelerationist like you said. On the
| other hand, there's a lot of people who put money into
| this. I truly hope it remains sensible, and do still have
| faith that our nation isn't this bad off.
| lupire wrote:
| If the guy can make a fully self-driving car, he can make a
| fully self-moderating social network.
|
| He'll either be the GOAT or the goat, but the gamble is
| clearly on the table, and Musk being Mush will declare
| victory before the dice even start to roll.
| mikkergp wrote:
| He hasn't made a self driving car, but I think this applies
| here:
|
| https://xkcd.com/1425/
| humanistbot wrote:
| I think this one is even more apt:
|
| https://xkcd.com/1831/
| compiler-guy wrote:
| If the guy can blow enough hot air about self driving cars
| to make people buy the hype, he might be able to blow
| enough hot air about a self-moderating social network to
| make people buy the hype.
|
| Unfortunately, eventually you need more than hype before
| the public and regulators come for you because you haven't
| delivered.
|
| And musk hasn't delivered.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| He hasn't made a fully self driving car. Not even close.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think you missed the point. He is saying that Musk will
| either do these things or fail spectacularly.
| [deleted]
| rednerrus wrote:
| My guess is that very few Ops people are going to be part of
| this layoff.
| mshenfield wrote:
| Twitter won't die, but it won't make much of a profit either.
| Elon Musk will find another buyer in 2 years for $25 billion
| and make most of his money back while leaving the company
| saddled with most of the $11 billion in debt financing.
| maxbond wrote:
| Erring on the side of things often changing less then we may
| anticipate, my guess is that Twitter becomes a sort of Tumblr
| for people of a certain persuasion, that being the people who
| like the ideas Musk is putting forward. It still exists, it
| puts out new features from time to time, there's a large group
| of people who simultaneously love and hate it and spend
| enormous time and energy there, but it's role as the primary
| town hall forum is passed on to some other community or set of
| communities. Maybe ones we know today, maybe ones we don't.
|
| But my confidence that I can forecast this is low, I'm mostly
| taking a stab for a bit of fun and to look at this comment in a
| few years.
|
| One thing I have a high degree of confidence is that Musk will
| declare victory in almost any outcome, and if it's really so
| egregious that he can't declare victory with a straight face,
| he'll find some way to blame everyone else in the world.
| dont__panic wrote:
| In an ideal world, we'd see municipalities, schools, and
| community services like fire/police move to an open platform
| like Mastodon.
|
| In reality... they'll probably move to TikTok because "that's
| what the kids use these days".
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > Airing on the side of things
|
| Pretty sure you mean "erring", here.
| maxbond wrote:
| Darn homophones! Thanks
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Oh, I get it, I've been a victim of homophonia myself in
| the past.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| saisundar wrote:
| A grim day. As a tech worker, my solidarity is entirely with the
| employees of Twitter.
|
| The irony is that Twitter, more than any other social platform,
| helped create the aura around Elon, Tesla in particular. In some
| sense, Twitter was quintessential to what Elon is today.
|
| For him to now - make a bid for twitter - back out of it in
| futile - acquire it, lay off execs - lay off half the force
|
| Is surreal. If this had been anyone apart from Elon, they would
| have been ostracized.
|
| I am saddened, but also a bit terrified since I see strong
| parallels between Elon, and... Other such figures. But Elon now
| owns a social media platform that "informs" upwards of a
| 500million users a month.
| davesque wrote:
| It's really an ironic saga that's unfolded between Musk and
| Twitter. I've said many times that I think Twitter facilitates
| a Jekyll-to-Hyde-like transformation in people that are
| predisposed to it. I think the fantastically rich are
| disproportionately represented in that group. If you're
| surrounded by yes men (and that includes Twitter followers),
| you're going to turn into an awful person. So Musk has come
| back to ruin the very thing that created him. This story is not
| new to humanity. The golem has returned to destroy its creator.
| matt_s wrote:
| What a contrast in leadership when you compare the way Twitter is
| doing this (rumor is right before bonus/stock vesting and cold
| impersonal email) and how Stripe is conducting their layoffs
| (empathy, 14 weeks severance, bonus payouts, etc.)
|
| Which company is going to have an easier time hiring after the
| dust settles and they have a growth stage again?
| kortilla wrote:
| > Which company is going to have an easier time hiring after
| the dust settles and they have a growth stage again?
|
| The one with the better offer, taking a possible layoff payout
| into account. The comp ranges can be so drastically different
| between companies that a possibly generous layoff (that is no
| means guaranteed if Stripe has to do this when circumstances
| are more dire) is negligible financially.
| threeseed wrote:
| > The one with the better offer
|
| Is the only thing that determines whether you take a job the
| salary ?
|
| Because for many people how much you get paid is important
| but far from the only factor.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > Is the only thing that determines whether you take a job
| the salary ?
|
| If that ain't a major reason why people relocate from all
| over the world to SV, then I am missing something. Of
| course the salary is one of the major factors.
| akudha wrote:
| Are we deluding ourselves here? Why do you think hundreds
| of thousands of extremely bright people work for
| horrific/products companies like Facebook, Palantir etc?
| Money. Money talks and talks very loudly.
|
| Most people have a price at which they will sell out. Those
| who don't, are too few to make any significant difference
| threeseed wrote:
| Because despite _you_ thinking they are horrific
| companies many other people don 't.
|
| Billions of people love and use Meta products every day
| and their tech stack is one of the world's best with
| technical challenges almost no other company faces.
|
| Palantir also has many parts of their business that
| benefit society e.g. combating human trafficking etc.
| habibur wrote:
| > Because despite you thinking they are horrific
| companies many other people don't.
|
| The same goes for twitter.
| akudha wrote:
| lol. Suppose their salaries reduced to half of what they
| are making today, how many of them do you still think
| will continue to work at these places, for the technical
| challenges and whatever else they have told themselves is
| the real reason for them to work there in the first
| place?
|
| I don't doubt the technical excellence of these
| companies. They are technically very capable because of
| the talent they hire, and they are able to hire top
| talent because of the high salaries they pay, not because
| of some altruistic or egoistic reasons
| instagraham wrote:
| Also neither of those companies are necessarily known as
| terrible places to work. I know people who'd be miserable
| in most 9-5 jobs who are happy in Meta.
|
| Working at Twitter now means a daily grind means being
| subject to the whims of an increasingly petulant emperor
| who does not respect anyone's expertise. What good does
| it for your career if he's just going to drop the ball at
| a moment's notice anyway?
| cal5k wrote:
| If that were actually true, why do so many people love
| working at Tesla/SpaceX? Clearly they don't have the same
| view of Elon's management style as you do.
|
| The reality is that Twitter as a business (and, imho, as
| a product) was sorely in need of a course correction.
| Layoffs, if they need to be done, should be done crisply
| and thoroughly so that remaining employees don't feel
| like the other shoe is about to drop.
|
| You rip off the bandaid, it sucks, then you refocus on
| the work ahead.
| akudha wrote:
| I don't know why people work for Tesla/SpaceX. I can take
| a guess though - there are only a handful of companies
| that work in space related field and only a few companies
| that make electric cars. So it is _somewhat_
| understandable, if one really wants to work at these
| places.
|
| Twitter is different - there are other big companies that
| provide as much tech challenges or more (whether they are
| better/worse than Twitter is another question). Twitter
| employees have many more options (relatively speaking)
| than SpaceX employees
| ptero wrote:
| I agree that "good company" and "bad company" are a
| reflection of personal preferences, but the fact that
| FAANG comp is much higher than elsewhere tells us that
| the companies strongly suspect that a lower salary will
| not be enough to attract such a strong talent pool.
| ghaff wrote:
| No. The companies feel they can afford to pay top drawer
| wages so they do so in order to hire what they hope is
| among the top talent, subject to among other things the
| randomness of their hiring processes.
| plgonzalezrx8 wrote:
| > Because despite you thinking they are horrific
| companies many other people don't.
|
| Thats exactly how a lot of people will view Twitter. You
| might think its horrible and they are terrible for laying
| of people, but plenty of good engineers ready to fill
| those roles for the money without the need of having free
| snacks, free coffee, rest booths, ping pong area, LED
| illuminated reading rooms, etc etc etc. Twitter will be
| fine.
| TheCondor wrote:
| >> Are we deluding ourselves here?
|
| Yes.
|
| Pornhub, Exxon, Smith and Wesson, all the big tobacco
| companies, the guys that manufacture fentanyl, infowars,
| they all have IT staffs. Some have extremely
| sophisticated IT staffs. Money talks, but there other
| factors. when you're working on migrating from .net to
| cloud native at Exxon and you're building some kind of
| new container registry or something you probably don't
| spend your days pondering climate change; you get paid
| every two weeks, you are learning some cool stuff and
| you're building some cool stuff. Most people _need_ jobs
| too.
|
| A pay check and some sort of plausible rationalization is
| all that is needed. "Twitter is free speech" sounds
| pretty strong. "Twitter connected Ukrainians during that
| invasion" sounds strong.
| Herbstluft wrote:
| > horrific companies
|
| A workplace can actively kill humans and still treat its
| employees very good.
|
| You are mixing very different factors together here.
|
| Prestige, to name another example, is very important to a
| lot of people. Having "worked at FAANG" on your resume
| opens many opportunities afterwards that don't have
| anything to do with money.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| This is the question being discussed.
|
| > Which company is going to have an easier time hiring
|
| The one that people want to work for and don't have to
| "sell out" to do it.
|
| > Most people have a price at which they will sell out.
|
| Sure. Agreed. But now you've tripled your OpEx vs your
| competitors. And the people that sold out aren't in any
| way loyal, so will bounce. But if they aren't offering
| substantially more, the money doesn't matter. It's all
| basically the same anyways.
|
| And then you have to consider financials and leadership.
| Twitter financials got substantially worse (20x) from my
| understanding after Musk took over because of the debt he
| now has.
|
| And as far as leadership goes: he was forced to buy it.
| That really doesn't look good.
| paganel wrote:
| > extremely bright people work for horrific/products
| companies like Facebook, Palantir etc
|
| For what it's worth those companies have not brought any
| real innovation in the last 10 years, give or take,
| because if they had they would have been on top of the
| world (quite literally). Which makes me hopeful that some
| of the real geniuses out there (today's von Neummanns and
| the like) might still avoid those companies out of
| principle.
| js8 wrote:
| I doubt real von Neumann would avoid working for Palantir
| out of principle.
| epicide wrote:
| I certainly have a price at which I will sell out, but if
| they aren't offering "retire decade(s) earlier than
| normal", it's unlikely to make a long term difference to
| me compared to the alternatives. Yes, a 20% bump for a
| few years would be nice, but paying half of my paycheck
| in therapy bills for a decade cancels that out and then
| some.
|
| Basically, if they aren't offering "f** you money", pay
| has a diminishing effect on my employment choices. And if
| they _are_ offering that kind of money, I 'm assuming
| that'll come with even more consequences. My resume is
| alright, but it's not enough for an offer of way more
| money without strings attached.
|
| I can't speak for everybody of course, but I think not
| heeding the above leads to burnout.
| dangerface wrote:
| > Is the only thing that determines whether you take a job
| the salary ?
|
| I mean yea I work for pay.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Eh.
|
| Does the pay by itself mitigates some of the following
| shitty behavior:
|
| - Timing bathroom breaks - Requiring lengthy security
| check prior to entering work location - Micromanaging and
| invasive monitoring
|
| Just small things that would drive some people livid
| regardless of pay. Scratch that, at the higher end of the
| spectrum it could easily drive them away.
| dangerface wrote:
| Timesheets, Security and Command and Control management
| has been a constant at every job I have worked. I have
| never heard of some one working on a job where these
| three things where not an issue.
|
| The only time those things haven't been an issue is when
| I do charity work which isn't really work as I don't get
| paid for it, which I think is the only reason the
| charities take what they get and are happy with it as
| they have no other choice.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I was lucky enough to work in both types of places. Ones
| where the manager was hovering over me and literally
| micromanaging my every interaction. It was beyond
| maddening. But I also worked in places like now, where my
| output matters, but I have a lot of autonomy on how I get
| there.
|
| Oddly, my most recent volunteer gig was very..
| structured. It may not help that it is sponsored by
| corporate so maybe they started demanding a lot of data.
| green_on_black wrote:
| Twitter would have to pay me something like 3 times more than
| Stripe for me to consider it, if I were back in the market
| and had those two.
| koolba wrote:
| Without questioning you specifically, I doubt any
| substantial number of others would feel the same. Few would
| pass up a even a 20% pay bump for the same role, so forget
| about it if it's a 200% bump.
| [deleted]
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| It genuinely depends on the person. In some places, WFH
| policy difference can alone amount to 10K difference not
| spent on childcare or traveling. You might be right on
| average, but I would assume most people do basic internal
| calculus of whether the move is worth it.
|
| For me, knowing Musk's reputation for demanding
| workaholic mentality.. %20 might not be enough and that
| is before WFH issues.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| >> Twitter would have to pay me something like 3 times more
| than Stripe for me to consider it, if I were back in the
| market and had those two.
|
| Twitter was a public company with quarterly vests where you
| could get liquidity on your compensation (and from what i
| understand you were cashed out at buyout.) Stripe remains
| private and much of your money remains locked. Not sure if
| they issue RSUs, options, or what, but quite possibly you
| lose a lot or your historical compensation 3mo later. They
| were two different beasts. (Of course, now both are
| private, so going forward they might be similar.)
| thunky wrote:
| Why? If you stayed for more than a few months you'd be
| better off with the higher salary.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Humans!=robots
| matt_s wrote:
| The day to day work life is probably the same level of huge
| contrast as these layoffs. I think that matters more to
| people than a few thousand dollars difference in pay, when
| that pay is likely to be in top 2-3% of all US jobs (over
| 200k).
| kilbuz wrote:
| 500k TC is the new table stakes for these sorts of jobs.
| Agreed with your point though.
| analyst74 wrote:
| There is a reason why Facebook had to pay more than peers and
| why Amazon struggle to hire.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| I was thinking of the covid layoff at Airbnb, which seemed to
| have been handled better (iirc).
| brightball wrote:
| If I remember correctly, the rumor about layoffs ahead of
| vesting said he was going to do it before Nov 1st. That part at
| least, seems to have just been a rumor.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| It was a rumor. I think it didn't happen because of the WARN
| act. Even if happened before Nov 1 he would still need to pay
| the vest.
| prepend wrote:
| Isn't the difference that Slack is profitable while Twitter is
| not?
|
| I worked for a couple startups and the severance package for
| companies losing money was pretty bad. The package for
| profitable was ok. And the package for insolvent was "your last
| paycheck was your last."
| MrDresden wrote:
| Android engineer with 12 years experience beneath their belt
| here.
|
| Would never consider Twitter as a possible employeer after what
| just went down.
| recuter wrote:
| I suppose it depends whether you view a company as kindergarten
| for adults or a place of business.
|
| Is there such a thing as a warm personable firing email? You
| think HR drones are your buddies whose role is to make you feel
| good? Egads.
| onetimeuse1234 wrote:
| Take this: You take over a company that was full of bad
| behaving managers and employees. The previous CEO supported
| this situation. The new CEO who bought the company need to
| quickly turn the ship around. Severance, bonus payouts? Yes, if
| the staff you take over was really good and they deserve it. Is
| it the same case with Twitter? Can we compare Stripe and
| Twitter on this level?
| macNchz wrote:
| > You take over a company that was full of bad behaving
| managers and employees.
|
| Is one week of ownership enough to actually understand this
| and identify those people?
|
| It seems they had a preconceived notion of how much revenue
| the business should have per employee, and that's a key
| driver of this: https://mobile.twitter.com/sf_mills/status/15
| 758387853712220...
| bayindirh wrote:
| From a neutral point of view, if the behavior of current
| employees is the result of the management grooming them to
| behave like this, is the resulting behavior is employees'
| fault?
|
| I don't know internals of Twitter. I'm just asking a
| theoretical question.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| If you compare them on financial terms, I think the twitter
| employees are in a better spot
|
| Stripe gave one more month of severance, but twitter employees
| get to cash out of company stock.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Add to this, rumor has it Elon fired the 3 executives (CEO,
| CFO, chief legal counsel) _with cause_ to try and avoid paying
| out the golden parachutes (eg the CEO would otherwise get
| $40-60m+). I guarantee that 'll end in a lawsuit and probably a
| settlement for less. But I expect that to impact executive
| hiring.
|
| As for hiring peons, it's hard to say. A bigger factor (IMHO)
| is Elon himself. Fans will probably go there. Those who don't
| like him probably won't. I expect that to have a far bigger
| impact than firing a bunch of employees right before bonus time
| several years earlier.
|
| My read of the situation is that Elon never really wanted to
| buy Twitter. I mean he did try and get out of it but the
| Twitter board crafted a good contract and I believe Elon
| realized he was going to get dumpstered by the Delaware
| Chancery Court.
|
| So what does he do now?? The private equity playbook is my
| guess. He'll massively cut costs, repackage it somehow, claim
| victory (for "free speech" or whatever) and then sell off a
| minority stake or even the whole thing. He may even try and do
| the tech thing where he sells most of the equity but retains
| all the voting power.
|
| In such an environment, short term hiring probably isn't on the
| cards.
| cloutchaser wrote:
| Frankly I am pretty sure there is a long list of talented
| execs who don't care how Parag was fired and would love to
| work for Musk.
|
| He's too successful now with too many fans for this to have
| an impact. People know he demands a lot and can do crazy
| things. That's just part of the package.
| trashtester wrote:
| Here is one possible outcome: Elon splits up Twitter into two
| parts:
|
| 1. An infrastructure element that creates an open
| API/protocol for sharing/pushing messages, contacts and media
| between content/social media platforms. The basic idea is to
| have a generic interface similar to email.
|
| 2. A content company that provides aggregation, search,
| moderation (possibly based on user preference) and possibly
| editorial features, as well as a front-end for users.
| Basically what gmail is to email.
|
| As soon as Republicans gain control of congress (and possibly
| the presidency), he starts lobbying to make it mandatory for
| all social media platforms to allow their users to connect
| through the API/protocol under (1) with a generalized
| account, similar (or identical, at least in form) to email
| addresses.
|
| This would kill the monopolies of Facebook, Insta, Tik-Tok,
| etc, by allowing a user to use only one of them to connect
| with user on all of them, similar to how they can use an
| email client of choice.
|
| Twitter could then charge some small fee for communicating
| over this protocol, or could simply sell the protocol company
| to the government, who could make the protocol publicly
| owned, like email/smtp.
|
| Would this make him a huge profit? Not likely. At best he
| would get his investment back, perhaps. But it _could_ help
| break down some echo chambers and counteract some of the
| crazy polarization that 's currently going on in the US.
|
| And if I'm reading Musk correctly, profit is no longer his
| primary motivation, if it ever was. Rather, it seems that he
| has some Messiah complex where he wants to be seen as the guy
| that saves the world.
|
| Whether you see that as a sign of genuine altruism, a severe
| case of Narcissism or just a sign that he's really an
| insecure nerd that seeks social validation, is up to you.
| jmyeet wrote:
| First, I don't see this kind of split ever working. How do
| you monetize it? Email is federated and has huge problems
| because of it. Moving a centralized service to federated
| would be a massive destruction of value. Let's not forget
| Elon is on the hook for $44 billion so I expect him to
| protect his investment first and foremost. Why do you think
| one of his first actions was to apease advertisers?
|
| In politics corporate interests transcend politics and
| cross party lines. There is no shot any Congress would
| destroy the value of all these American companies that way.
|
| > But it could help break down some echo chambers ...
|
| Nobody wants this. The idea that any of this is about free
| speech is a complete myth. The idea that an "echo chamber"
| is even a thing is problematic. People are going to engage
| in content they like and not engage with content they don't
| like. It affects what websites you go to, what TV you
| watch, what channels you subscribe to and so on.
|
| The post on HN yesterday from the ex-CEO of Reddit was
| great in this regard. He put forth a cogent argument that
| none of this is about _content_. It 's simply a user
| behaviour problem.
|
| So when Kanye goes on Twitter and launches into an anti-
| semitic screed he gets banned. Not because of the content
| per se but because he's annoying and he's making the
| experiene worse for everyone else. Whenever conservatives
| (in particular) talk about "free speech", they really mean
| "hate speech" and wanting to avoid getting silenced even
| when everyone else just wants them to stop being anti-
| semitic, homophobic, transphobic, racist or whatever.
| trashtester wrote:
| > First, I don't see this kind of split ever working. How
| do you monetize it? Moving a centralized service to
| federated would be a massive destruction of value.
|
| Maybe Elon can afford to take a loss to achieve this?
|
| Or maybe the platforms ARE able to find ways to split add
| revenue (and other revenues) in ways that don't really
| destroy value.
|
| > In politics corporate interests transcend politics and
| cross party lines.
|
| How much financial support is Meta and Tik-Tok giving to
| Republicans? In fact, I think it's primarily Meta that
| has a lot to lose from this, out of the American
| companies. Alphabet/Youtube may actually benefit, as they
| are specialists when it comes to video, and if Facebook,
| Whatsapp and Instagram are forced to permit sharing of
| Youtube videos through their platforms, they may gain
| traffic at the cost of native video alternatives.
|
| > Nobody wants this.
|
| Well I do, for one.
|
| > The idea that any of this is about free speech is a
| complete myth.
|
| I'm pretty sure quite a few people care about free
| speech, and even more are worried about American
| polarization. Even many non-Americans, like me.
|
| > The idea that an "echo chamber" is even a thing is
| problematic.
|
| That's an interesting point of view. You're not only
| saying that they don't exist, but actually that the mere
| IDEA is problematic? Isn't 4chan an echo chamber?
|
| > People are going to engage in content they like and not
| engage with content they don't like.
|
| I agree. People should be able to filter content they
| find problematic, just like we do with email spam or how
| we can restrict porn in browsers, etc.
|
| > So when Kanye goes on Twitter and launches into an
| anti-semitic screed he gets banned.
|
| I watched Kanye's appearance on Lex Fridman's
| podcast/youtube a few days back, and it was mostly sad,
| tbh. Lex, being Jewish himself, pushed back pretty hard
| when Kanye started his Anti Semitism. But Kanye WAS
| allowed to speak, and neither Spotify or YouTube have
| take it down.
|
| > It's simply a user behaviour problem.
|
| On Twitter, maybe that's what it looks like. But if you
| sit through the podcast, maybe your conclusion is that
| this is more of a symptom that Kanye is going through a
| very rough time than some intent to be evil. Obviously he
| DOES have racist thoughts when it comes to Jews (or,
| depending on your definition of Racist, they would be if
| Blacks had as much power as Jews, or if he were white).
|
| But then again, the basic conspiratorial pattern he's
| using doesn't seem very different from how BLM talks
| about "white" people. One could argue that white people
| have some obligation to avoid Anti Semitism due to the
| Holocaust. But the left seems to be quite accepting with
| Anti Semitism that comes from Palestinians, since they're
| "punching up". Aren't African Americans also "punching
| up" in this case?
|
| Anyway, Kanye is a lot more than his prejudice against
| Jews. It IS interesting to hear his story and point of
| view, even if it did make me quite sad.
|
| So, in conclusion. Let's say social media gets a protocol
| similar to smtp, they would be able to add optional
| moderation/spam filters against content like this. But I
| think users should be able to check their "junk folder"
| and whitelist content they don't think should be block
| listed, as long as the content is not illegal.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I've seen no evidence Elon is willing to burn Twitter to
| the ground to make a political point. to the contrary, he
| tried to back out the deal he hastily entered into and
| only went through with it when it became clear he was
| going to get railed by the Delaware Chancery Court.
|
| Even if he is, it's a massive risk. Another platform that
| he doesn't own could simply rise and take its place.
|
| > How much financial support is Meta and Tik-Tok giving
| to Republicans?
|
| The Trump administration tried to block Tiktok (briefly).
| Many officials and politicans call it a national security
| risk, most recently the FCC chair just this week. While
| there are noises made about a break up of Meta, I suspect
| it's going nowhere.
|
| > You're not only saying that they don't exist, but
| actually that the mere IDEA is problematic?
|
| I'm saying anywhere people can in any way filter their
| experience, what they see will differ from the unfiltered
| view. Even if they see the same things, they will engage
| with things they like. Basically, this is inevitable. The
| problematic part is this only tends to get lablled an
| "echo chamber" when people filter in such a way that the
| criticizer doesn't like.
|
| > But Kanye WAS allowed to speak, and neither Spotify or
| YouTube have take it down.
|
| In case you didn't see it, I encourage you to read this
| HN submission from yesterday [1]. I'll also bring up the
| Paradox of Tolerance [2]. Free speech absolutism is the
| extreme view where anything can be posted. Not even 4chan
| has this. So when I say "nobody wants this", I mean
| everyone agrees there are and should be limits on speech
| so it's just a question of what those limits should be.
|
| Any site that has attempted unmoderated free speech
| descends into a cesspit of Nazis and racists where
| everyone else leaves. Moreso, advertisers (who still pay
| for the platform) don't want to be associated with it so
| they leave too.
|
| As you mentioned, Kanye still got an incredible amount of
| exposure for his views between various podcasts and the
| right-wing media (eg Tucker CArlson, Ben Shapiro) so it's
| not like he's been silenced. There's just one thing out
| of many he couldn't do because Twitter didn't want to be
| associated with it.
|
| > But then again, the basic conspiratorial pattern he's
| using doesn't seem very different from how BLM talks
| about "white" people.
|
| Free speech is fundamentally a political issue, otherwise
| I'd try not to get into this topic. I understand your
| confusion, which I certainly believe to be in good faith.
| I'll scratch the surface of this as neutrally and briefly
| as I can.
|
| "Whiteness" and "blackness" as concepts are not
| equivalent. "Blackness" is an invented concept for
| various people who were robbed of their heritage, culture
| and language through chattel slavery. It's why we say
| "African-American" for black people but "Italian-
| American" or "Polish-American" or whatever for white
| people.
|
| "Whiteness" as a concept is defined by two properties: 1)
| The proximity to power and 2) Not being black. It is a
| concept rooted in white supremacy. Who counts as "white"
| also changes. Ben Franklin, for example, didn't count
| Germans as "white". Now we count Italians as "white".
| That wasn't alwyas the case.
|
| You are correct in that part of this is "punching up" vs
| "punching down" but you should also know that this idea
| of equivalent concepts is used by white supremacists.
| "White power" was a reaction to "black power" as an
| emancipating force in the 1960s. "White Lives Matter"
| (and even "All Lives Matter") are the same response to
| "Black Lives Matter" (BLM). They're also insidious
| because they imply that BLM means white lives don't
| matter. It's more accurate to say "Black Lives Matter
| Too" even though no one was suggesting white lives don't
| matter.
|
| Kanye is actually pushing white supremacist views. You
| don't have to be white to be a white supremacist.
|
| > But the left seems to be quite accepting with Anti
| Semitism that comes from Palestinians
|
| Anti-semitism (hatred of Jewish people) isn't the same as
| anti-Zionism (opposition to the policies of the state of
| Israel). People try and conflate the two to deflect any
| criticism of Israeli actions. There are very valid
| criticisms to be made of Israel's treatment of
| Palestinians (eg [3]). The ADL is extremely active in
| American politics and spends a lot of money in races to
| defeat candidates critical of Israel.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33449791
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
|
| [3]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/
| israels-...
| hardware2win wrote:
| It wouldnt change anything for me tbf
|
| There are laws that take care of it in my country
| cocochanel wrote:
| whichever pays more
| watwut wrote:
| I have seen multiple people making decision of "this place
| pays more, but the environment looks toxic" or "this place
| pays more, but the business seems borderline unethical" and
| taking lower offer. I think that is why famous toxic places
| had to have very high salaries - cause the people were not
| interested otherwise.
| naijaboiler wrote:
| People will do this in a good job market. In a bad one,
| even crappy employers will have their fill of willing
| employees. Too many in her have never experienced a bad
| market
| aenis wrote:
| Nah, people do remember what companies do and many avoid
| shitty companies. I work in HR, and on macro scale this is
| clearly visible. Some of our clients have a hard time filling
| roles despite paying competitively or even generously. Sure,
| for some people thats not an issue, but it is a thing, and it
| gets more visible with engineering roles, for some reason.
| luckylion wrote:
| Yeah, that's why they all avoid working at Apple, Google
| etc because those companies illegally conspired to keep
| their salaries down.
| watwut wrote:
| Google does not have reputation for particularly toxic
| workplace. They are not super clean of course as you
| mentioned, but their reputation is not bad at all. And
| while Apple has worst reputation then google, it is still
| fairly good one.
| luckylion wrote:
| Sure, my point was that "past behavior" barely matters.
| Compensation, social status and work expectation is what
| makes people go for or avoid companies. If Google didn't
| pay as much, fewer people would bother jumping through
| hoops. If Apple had an oil-industry level social status,
| Californians would think twice about working there (or
| they'd get a cover job to use when talking to neighbors
| and friends).
|
| How they fire people means very little, because very few
| people in tech think of themselves as the ones being
| fired in the near future (most likely also why few people
| in tech are into unions, they don't feel as replaceable
| as factory workers).
| watwut wrote:
| But that is the thing, I dont think you are right. You
| picked up companies with good reputation as examples ...
| they pay well and have good reputation, of course people
| want to work there.
|
| There are companies with actually bad reputation and they
| either have problem to find staff or have to pay a lot
| more while still having issues.
| luckylion wrote:
| They literally formed an illegal conspiracy to harm their
| employees by suppressing salaries -- this type of thing
| apparently simply doesn't matter much if they keep
| offering some of the highest salaries in the industry.
| And neither will this behavior at Twitter, I believe.
| watwut wrote:
| > They literally formed an illegal conspiracy to harm
| their employees by suppressing salaries
|
| Yes and that is bad. And still, if you work inside one of
| those companies, the environment does not have reputation
| of being toxic. It just dont, in case of google the
| reputation is that they treat you well most of the time,
| but it is slower speed then, say facebook. And facebook
| does not have toxic reputation either.
|
| Their reputation is not bad, actually. People who work
| there criticize some, but also are generally content and
| happy. Because, even with that agreement, neither company
| is overly toxic.
| aenis wrote:
| Exactly. There are better examples.
|
| Take for instance booking.com. They unceremoniously
| dumped lots of their employees at the beginning of the
| pandemic despite being flush with cash. Then they tried
| hiring people back. Guess what, lots of people didnt want
| to even hear how much they are offering. There are other
| such companies.
|
| But yes, there are people who would not, for instance,
| work for AWS due to their, shall we say, internal
| culture.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Some of our clients have a hard time filling roles
| despite paying competitively or even generously.
|
| By definition, if they were having a hard time filling
| roles, they were not paying competitively enough to offset
| their bad reputation.
|
| I bet they could have easily filled the role if they added
| a zero or two to the compensation offer.
| meragrin_ wrote:
| Well, when you have employees with irrational hatred of the new
| owner, you have to take some precautions.
| cmatthias wrote:
| I think there are some very rational reasons for hating or at
| least strongly disapproving of the new owner.
|
| For example, if the new owner of the company I worked for
| demanded on a Saturday that a new feature needs to be ready
| for testing by Monday, I'd be pretty upset.
|
| Or, if I was on a team working on the problem of trust and
| ethics, and the new owner personally and un-ironically posted
| a completely false and inflammatory "news article" about a
| current event, and then several days later laid off my entire
| team, I wouldn't consider it irrational to be quite upset.
| zenexer wrote:
| Irrational? It would seem to me that their fears were
| warranted.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > Which company is going to have an easier time hiring after
| the dust settles and they have a growth stage again?
|
| Not all companies die after massive layoffs. Sometimes all you
| need is to contract before building a better place again.
| Whoever is hired next by Twitter is going to be coming for the
| future potential, not for what happened during the layoffs.
| zer0tonin wrote:
| I seriously doubt Twitter will have a growth stage again
| esoterica wrote:
| Don't tell Elon then, because he definitely paid a growth
| multiple for Twitter. If Twitter never grows beyond its
| current size then his investment is a giant failure no matter
| how much he manages to cut costs.
| the_duke wrote:
| Well, he tried very hard to get out of it but failed.
| anthropodie wrote:
| Hell I don't like what Elon does most of the times but you
| have to admit he did built successful companies from ground
| up in fields no one was even looking into.
|
| Twitter might succeed or it might fail but Twitter in its
| current form both as a company and social media paltform was
| bad.
| _djo_ wrote:
| Twitter was a mixed bag, but it was genuinely useful for
| news, niche interests, and helping under served issues and
| communities get more prominence. It's where the kind of
| open source intelligence that helped to expose Russia
| trying to cover up its role in the MH17 shoot down emerged,
| coalesced, and achieved prominence, as one example.
|
| I worry much of that will be lost without having a natural
| new home with the same reach and impact.
|
| Musk might be good at building and running engineering
| companies, but Twitter is not that. The social aspect is
| far more important than the underlying technology, and Musk
| and his advisors are terrible at that. I don't see any way
| out of this that leaves Twitter better.
| anthropodie wrote:
| > Musk might be good at building and running engineering
| companies, but Twitter is not that. The social aspect is
| far more important than the underlying technology, and
| Musk and his advisors are terrible at that.
|
| Agree
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| >successful companies from ground up in fields no one was
| even looking into.
|
| NASA, ESA, and all the other space agencies might disagree
| with you here.
| anthropodie wrote:
| I was talking about private space company. I mean who
| thinks like I'm going to start a private space company
| that will launch freaking rockets in space. I don't think
| any private company did that before SpaceX
| kaba0 wrote:
| A huge amount of government subsidies does help
| tremendously at that...
| _djo_ wrote:
| Like United Launch Alliance, Rocket Lab, Northrop
| Grumman, Virgin Orbit, etc?
|
| Also, SpaceX would not exist were it not for a US
| government decision to fund and develop private
| spaceflight launch capabilities for NASA and the US Air
| Force. In fact the idea was given to Musk by Mike Griffin
| who at the time headed up In-Q-Tel, the CIA's investment
| arm and could also source the right technical experts to
| form the core engineering group. Shortly after he became
| NASA's administrator and gave SpaceX a huge development
| and launch contract before it had flown anything.
|
| The idea that SpaceX emerged from nothing and
| bootstrapped its way to success has always been false.
| That doesn't mean they don't deserve praise for doing a
| ton of things right and having an impressively bold
| engineering strategy, of course.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| Please see https://www.celestis.com/about/conestoga-1/
| shmatt wrote:
| Well, lets skip the fact he didn't build those companies.
| Both companies rely heavily on government subsidies. He's
| in part 3 of his dependence on big government, demanding
| they start subsidizing Starlink
|
| Remove those subsidies tomorrow and the companies fold, all
| of them
|
| Can Elon figure out a way to get the government to
| subsidize Twitter? Maybe, but it's going to be harder
| smcl wrote:
| You have to admit that he _invested in_ some companies in
| fields that no-one was looking into. He 's made a few big
| bets that have paid off extremely well. That's not nothing,
| and is impressive but it's not building a company. By all
| accounts he's a bit of a micro-manager, but I suspect
| there's only so much he could micro-manage or actually
| contribute directly in ventures like SpaceX or Tesla (he
| did make a door-handle patent tho).
|
| Twitter on the other hand is another matter - no huge
| technical barriers stopping him from getting his hands
| dirty, no lives are at stake or regulatory bodies that are
| going to tell him "no that is dangerous" - so we're finally
| seeing what Elon unleashed looks like. So far it can
| probably be described as "chaotic" at best, it remains to
| be seen whether this chaos will disperse and Twitter will
| emerge leaner and better.
|
| My belief is that he doesn't understand Twitter and its
| users quite as well as he thinks, and that Twitter will
| slowly get a bit more annoying and less profitable until he
| loses interest or gets distracted by something else. We
| will see, I use Twitter a lot so I hope that I'm wrong.
| randomsearch wrote:
| Are you saying musk's role in SpaceX and Tesla is as an
| investor? That seems so disingenuous that it's impossible
| not to conclude this post is purely emotional.
|
| If you hate Musk, fine, but please just stick to the
| facts and articulate why you hate him.
|
| I don't understand why there is so much emotion around
| Musk. He has done good things and bad things. He has done
| incredible, near possible things. He works ridiculously
| hard. He's rich. He has said and posted things he
| shouldn't. I don't feel that I am in a position to say he
| is a terrible person. I don't even know the guy. I
| wouldn't want to live in a world without SpaceX and
| Tesla. I am genuinely fascinated by this hatred.
|
| I've tried to compile a list of why people might hate
| him:
|
| - posted a conspiracy theory on Twitter (which he did
| then delete)
|
| - childishly insulted a diver
|
| - is a shameless self promoter
|
| - fires staff brutally
|
| - makes huge and sometimes unreasonable demands on his
| workforce
|
| - disagreed with covid policy, partly on the argument
| that the fatality rate is low and there's not much you
| can really do about it
|
| Ok, these are bad. But he's hated as if he is the new
| Hitler. I don't get it. I'd really appreciate it if
| someone could rationally explain why Elon is deserving of
| such great hatred.
| llamaLord wrote:
| IMO - my theory is that 5 years ago Musk was successful
| enough that regular people in the tech industry admired
| him, but not so successful that most people who admired
| him realised he was substantially more successful than
| they were ever going to be.
|
| These days though, it's quite clear to the 250k a year
| tech-guy that, even though they're making bank, they're
| never going to be "Elon rich", and so the jealousy
| disguised as virtue has come out in full swing.
|
| Is he perfect? Of course he fucking isn't... we work in
| tech, we all work with atleast one "brilliant ass-
| hole"... they're the ones that make our days a little bit
| more painful but also write the fucking insane code that
| makes most of our workplaces profitable.
|
| Elon is just the end of that bell-curve.
| random314 wrote:
| So the 250k tech guy thought he could level up to the 20B
| elon musk, but once musk crossed over the 200B mark they
| got jealous?
|
| Personally, I thought he was a cool guy building a
| revolutionary car.
|
| But once I saw his hour long talk on how he was going to
| build a Mars colony, the fact that he was actually a
| Tesla investor - not a founder(the super fast LI ion
| lotus had already been demonstrated to him when he
| invested) and his absurd claims about AGI - I realized he
| was completely out of his mind. I have been skeptical of
| his personality since 2014, even as I held TSLA shares.
|
| Yes he is able to manage and productionize probably the
| best car on the road right now and maximize Tesla
| shareholder value, but he is a shell of a person beyond
| that.
| sylens wrote:
| Five years ago was also before he showed his ass throwing
| around the term pedophile to describe people working on
| the Tham Luang cave rescue
| refurb wrote:
| I don't think it's jealousy. I think his politics are
| clearly making him "the bad guy".
|
| It's pretty clear he leans right so that makes him an
| enemy of a lot of people automatically.
|
| If he leaned left, nobody would care. Hell, they'd
| probably encourage it.
| smcl wrote:
| There are a lot of people here very clearly articulating
| the issues they have with Musk - usually related to some
| bad tweets, but also more serious things like the sexual
| harassment - so there's no need to speculate that it's in
| any way related to his political leaning. Besides, it was
| only recently that he declared himself to be a supporter
| of the GOP, long after the tide of public opinion started
| to turn on him (and even perhaps because of it)
| kaba0 wrote:
| > he was substantially more successful than they were
| ever going to be.
|
| Yeah, no. He was that much richer even at birth, whose
| father owns an emerald mine?!
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| Are you suggesting that being born into wealth negates a
| person from being successful in their own right?
| kaba0 wrote:
| Doesn't negate, but it is such a huge boost that it is
| basically playing the tutorial vs on hard mode.
|
| And regardless of wealth, Elon's only actual contribution
| was paypal, which is.. well, paypal (I quite literally
| left some money in that because it was so scammy I
| couldn't even rescue it by donation..), and funding tesla
| (not _inventing_ anything!). The latter is pretty much
| impossible without some form of privilege.
| this_user wrote:
| Whose father _claims_ to own an emerald mine, for which
| there is no actual proof. Not to mention that it is well
| established that Musk does not have a good relationship
| with this father, so whatever wealth Musk Sr. may or may
| not have, doesn't help Elon. So what's your point other
| than trying to spread misinformation?
| kaba0 wrote:
| Yep, sure. We all know how humble Elon is and is
| absolutely not the type of person who would sell this
| "self-made men" image of himself to the public to look
| better? "He came to the US with a few hundreds dollars
| and everything is his accomplishment"...
|
| Even if family wealth _only_ helped him through insanely
| good relations to other people in the top 1%, it is still
| all that much more than you will likely ever achieve
| /get. And I frankly don't buy this "daddy doesn't love
| me" BS.
| ambicapter wrote:
| > they're the ones that make our days a little bit more
| painful but also write the fucking insane code that makes
| most of our workplaces profitable.
|
| People like to think that but in my experience there are
| far more brilliant nice people than brilliant assholes.
| This is the mythos antisocial engineers tell themselves
| to justify their poor social skills.
| smcl wrote:
| > People like to think that but in my experience there
| are far more brilliant nice people than brilliant
| assholes
|
| Yep 100%, this has been my experience too
| jesuscript wrote:
| And it takes some emotional evolution to realize that. I
| too once upon a time was the former, until I realized
| that such a person is the most annoying and unremarkable
| personality ever. I wouldn't hang out with me 8 years
| ago, was kind of a grade A douche, and my code wasn't
| great. But I made money, so I always thought the ends
| justified the means.
| Macha wrote:
| Alternatively, 5 years ago the reaction was "oh, the
| tesla/spacex guy? those are cool companies, guess he must
| be pretty cool", but since then he's made himself more of
| a celebrity which comes with much more visibility on
| those actions. As a result people are now judging based
| on actions they've heard about rather than the top line
| of a bio summary
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| epistasis wrote:
| This is preposterous, a tech worker is never going to be
| as wealthy as Elon in 2010, unless they starter thinking
| of themselves as a founder instead of a worker.
|
| I will admit to having a few feelings of jealousy of the
| founders I know who have done far far better than o have
| on the game of building big companies, but that is also
| mixed with happiness for them.
|
| With Musk, it's different. It's sadness and
| disappointment, to see someone throw away so much
| goodwill and be such a horrible person. Some of this is
| the media becoming adversarial with tech, while at the
| same time profiting off the hype bubble that the media
| itself created for Musk. But I view him as a lost man
| that needs a better support network and a slightly better
| filter so that he stops looking so foolish all the time.
| ilkkal wrote:
| > the end of that bell-curve
|
| A "bell end", if you will.
| random314 wrote:
| At Tesla, Elon is a manager like any other CEO. At Space
| X, he clearly is not and Gwynne Shotwell with decades of
| experience in Aerospace engineering runs the show.
|
| As much as people would like to believe that Elon musk, a
| materials science graduate with his only career
| experience being online payments with PayPal, is actually
| responsible for the core founding engineering of SpaceX
| and Tesla is crazy.
|
| Musk made bank with PayPal and has been an investor in
| many companies including failures like Neuralink, boring
| company etc. He has both invested and managed Tesla.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Major world powers invaded Germany, tore the country in
| two, and Hitler killed himself. Musk is a complete dick
| in public and people are right to criticize him, but you
| are being plainly ridiculous when you say "he's hated as
| if he is the new Hitler."
| randomsearch wrote:
| That's a fair criticism of me using a lazy shorthand, but
| it really is quite difficult to capture the level of
| vitriol against Musk. It's at a level I've never seen
| against anyone in my lifetime. People certain express
| strong hatred towards him than, say, Putin or Xi.
| Strom wrote:
| Obviously in reality Musk has done nothing to be compared
| to Hitler, however as far as how much hate he gets in
| 2022, I would say he easily surpasses Hitler by at least
| a factor of a thousand. Very few people even talk about
| Hitler anymore, so it doesn't really capture the sense of
| hate either.
|
| I think a good comparison in the US would be Trump and I
| think more people hate Trump than Musk.
| canucklady wrote:
| He sexually harassed employees and then paid them off to
| stay quiet: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-
| sexual-misconduct-...
|
| His factories have a history of complaints about racial
| abuse: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-
| transportation/tesla-...
|
| Elon Musk hates the color yellow so hazards in the
| factory aren't properly identified:
| https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/tesla-workers-
| gettin...
|
| Elon Musk made up the hyperloop just to kill high speed
| rail and sell more cars: https://www.fresnobee.com/opinio
| n/editorials/article26445107...
| randomsearch wrote:
| Thanks for posting links, that's the kind of answer I'm
| interested in.
|
| (Thanks also to whoever un-downed me, as it is from
| genuinely wanting to understand).
|
| The last link is paywalled, but I doubt that is really
| his motive. It sounds silly. There was plenty of
| outspoken criticism against that highspeed rail link
| without a Musk conspiracy theory. He gave an interview on
| the BBC where he was similarly bemused by how poor our
| high speed efforts were, and his criticism was fair.
|
| I'm not sure we can see incidents in very large
| organisations as indicative of the character of the CEO.
| For sure he is ultimately to answer for them, and has a
| responsibility to sort them out, but Tesla employees
| about 100 000 people and in any sample of people that
| large you'll have some horrible ones.
|
| Someone else told me about the harassment suit today, now
| _that_ is directly attributable to Musk and awful. Are
| there other such incidents?
|
| Still, doesn't seem to explain the sheer hatred for the
| man. I do have a different theory about that having
| spoken to others, which I'll post elsewhere...
| canucklady wrote:
| The hyperloop article is sourced directly from his own
| statements in text messages turned over during discovery.
|
| I'm always amazed at the double standard where musk is
| solely responsible for the success of multiple companies,
| but any fault is attributable to someone else. He claims
| to have slept in the factory! He's this hands on car-
| building ubermensch. How can he be completely oblivious
| to safety and discrimination issues?
| smcl wrote:
| Eh, guess I just don't know enough about SpaceX then. If
| you read my comment and interpreted it as "hatred" then
| that is odd. I don't think it's possible to hate someone
| you don't know. I mean, every time he has popped up in
| the last 5 years or so he's been saying or doing
| something dumb or annoying so quite a lot of people have
| gradually gotten tired of that. But it's not hatred at
| all.
|
| He's not treated like the next Hitler by any stretch of
| the imagination. He's more like a village drunk who just
| keeps showing up doing stupid things like peeing on your
| doorstep or passing out in your garden. You don't _hate_
| that person, you 're just like "[sigh] ok I guess we have
| to deal with him again..."
| llamaLord wrote:
| He's also built rockets that land themselves, scaled
| electric car manufacturing, launched a world-wide low-
| latency satellite internet service, and made more
| progress on self-driving vehicles than literally any
| other company in that same time.
|
| If your town drunk is doing that much good for the world,
| I think you'd forgive them for pissing on your doorstep
| once or twice a year.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Elongated Muskrat never built a rocket in his life.
| Engineers at a company he owns built rockets that land
| themselves.
| smcl wrote:
| Well this is the other side of the public opinion on Elon
| Musk. His companies have done a bunch of things, ranging
| from impressive to bad. As outsiders all we know is that
| his involvement with, say, a rocket that can land itself
| is somewhere between "Elon single-handedly designed,
| constructed and assembled every part of it" and "Elon
| told someone the rockets re-usable". There's no way to
| know, but you and a legion of people seem to be
| portraying his involvement as closer to the former (
| _literally_ "He's also built rockets that land
| themselves..." - come on)
|
| Honestly this discourse has played out a thousand times
| over. Some people love him, attribute all his companies'
| wins to him and memory-hole any of the fuck-ups or
| gaffes. Some people acknowledge his business acumen,
| don't quite believe the hype on the company-level
| achievements that get attributed to him personally and
| find his personality as portrayed on traditional and
| social media to be grating.
|
| I'm clearly in the latter group and I think that's a
| pretty uncontroversial position to take.
|
| Edit: would the drive-by downvoters care to explain?
| mancerayder wrote:
| >"Elon single-handedly designed, constructed and
| assembled every part of it" and "Elon told someone the
| rockets re-usable". There's no way to know, but you and a
| legion of people
|
| I think that's missing the point, which is the question
| of whether these innovations (the re usable rockets,
| scaling e cars) would have happened without his
| involvement. If the answer is no, then the question of
| whether 'someone else did it and he took credit' seems
| irrelevant. That's what leadership is, driving results,
| not pulling up your sleeves and doing it yourself.
| smcl wrote:
| If someone says those words - that he helmed a company
| and pushed them to deliver re-usable rockets then ok.
| Saying he _built_ that is an absurd fantasy.
| trashtester wrote:
| He does _seem_ to be a lot more hands-on with the
| technical stuff than most C level execs, and for SpaceX
| there are reports that he is actually doing the work that
| comes with his role as Chief Engineer:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/evi
| den...
| kaba0 wrote:
| He did none of that? Companies listed under his name that
| employ smart people for a shitton of money did.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| "makes huge and sometimes unreasonable demands on his
| workforce"
|
| Weird way to spell serial labor law violator
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/02/tesla-
| factory-is...
| willmadden wrote:
| >He has said and posted things he shouldn't.
|
| According to whom? His internet comments are sci-fi
| libertarian mainstream with a dash of NWO.
|
| His business accomplishments are impressive, but he's
| rather boring, no pun intended.
|
| I think the only argument against Musk's success is that
| he enjoyed unfair regulatory advantages.
|
| PayPal's KYC was non-existent for years, you could send
| money with little more than an email. Amazon had similar
| miraculous regulatory exceptions. No State sales tax
| until it had a near-monopoly network effect.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| >>He has said and posted things he shouldn't.
|
| >According to whom?
|
| I found that time he called a diver who was trying to
| save those kids a pedophile to be pretty revealing. Also,
| calling himself "Lorde Edge" was pretty awful. I suppose
| if you're asking "who has the right to tell him not to
| say that?" the answer is "no one", but I find it hard to
| respect the guy when he acts so childishly.
| heartbreak wrote:
| You missed his recent pro-Russian plan for Ukraine and
| subsequent blackmailing over Starlink.
| Aunche wrote:
| I don't like Musk, but he's done more for Ukraine than
| you can dream of. But he also sent a few stupid tweets
| that he took back, so that's a good enough excuse for
| virtue signalers to feel superior.
| slaw wrote:
| Poland bought for Ukraine more than half of the starlink
| terminals.
|
| https://www.thefirstnews.com/article/ukraine-uses-
| over-11000...
| Aunche wrote:
| From your source:
|
| > SpaceX has said it pays for about 70 percent of the
| services used by Ukraine, offering all the terminals in
| that country the best possible option, valued at USD
| 4,500 per month even though most have contracts signed
| only for the USD 500-per-month service option.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Ukrainians literally pay for the internet access.. what
| did he do?
| Aunche wrote:
| According to Musk, Starlink has spent $80-120 million to
| subsidize Ukraine. He could be making this up, but this
| is supported by a letter SpaceX sent to the Pentagon even
| before Musk's infamous Ukraine tweets.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/politics/elon-musk-spacex-
| sta...
| random314 wrote:
| I hate almost everything Musk does, but I am aligned on
| his Russia plan. Biden must negotiate with Putin to end
| the war. Europe is buying more than enough oil from
| Russia to sustain the war for a decade.
| sneak wrote:
| I don't think his proposal was pro-Russia as much as it
| was anti-more-dead-people.
|
| There's no way Russia loses this war if it doesn't
| escalate beyond local conflict. The objective now is (or
| should be) minimizing casualties and human suffering, not
| lines on maps from 2015.
|
| Stopping recurring monthly donations of something very
| expensive is also not "blackmail".
| Herbstluft wrote:
| > I don't think his proposal was pro-Russia as much as it
| was anti-more-dead-people.
|
| I believe this topic has been discussed more than enough
| since February, by people with way more expertise than
| Musk. Ukraine has made it very clear that they _do not_
| intent to let their country be oppressed by the foreign
| aggressor. It is their decision to make.
|
| Asking Ukraine to bow to Russia now that they are
| successful in their defense _is_ a pro Russia stance.
| Claiming otherwise is just dishonest.
|
| Especially since he was attempting to imply that anything
| close to a proper voting process would even be _possible_
| in that region now.
|
| His statement means he is either incredibly stupid, or
| malicious. Both possibilities are dangerous. And Musk
| fans will vehemently disagree with the former.
| smcl wrote:
| If you're a spectacularly famous, influential and anti-
| more-dead-people the message you should be blasting out
| to your hundred-million followers is: Russia out. That's
| it.
| watwut wrote:
| > I don't think his proposal was pro-Russia as much as it
| was anti-more-dead-people.
|
| It was anti Ukrainian lives on occupied territories and
| pro Russian soldiers lives. It was also pro next invasion
| once Russia recovers at which point Russia will argue
| that Ukraine is failed stated due to having destroyed
| infrastructure.
|
| >The objective now is (or should be) minimizing
| casualties and human suffering,
|
| The causalities are not minimized by rewarding Russia for
| invasion and letting it continue with genocide.
|
| > not lines on maps from 2015
|
| The issue is not so much lines on the map as actual
| consequences of those maps. The torture, genocide,
| suppression of Ukrainian identity and so on. And
| obviously favorable position for next invasion again and
| again, until whole of Ukraine is taken.
| tommiegannert wrote:
| > I am genuinely fascinated by this hatred.
|
| At a meta level, I consider Musk and Trump both to have
| the same approach to media: say whatever you want to
| create publicity. Words mean nothing, in the sense that
| there are no repercussions large enough to outweigh the
| created buzz/fame. Outrage works extremely well to that
| end (look at this thread.)
|
| Because he says things helping both extreme sides (lovers
| and haters,) all they have to do is latch on to whatever
| fuels their fire, and ignore the other words. And it is
| well-know that confirmation bias is a thing among humans.
| This causes polarization that fuels the debates, creating
| a spiral of even more debates, buzz and fame. Even sparks
| meta-debates.
|
| Edit: Another side of this is that it seems that
| everything must be classified as good or bad. Both on HN
| and elsewhere, commentors go to extraordinary lengths to
| argue why something has one abstract label or the
| opposite. Does everything have to have emotions assigned
| to it? Does everything have to be categorized in the very
| coarse good and bad buckets? It would be nice to read
| comments where the author tries to explain both sides,
| instead of just arguing for one.
| randomsearch wrote:
| > , I consider Musk and Trump both to have the same
| approach to media:
|
| I think you've hit on more here. I think Musk has become
| associated with Trump. I think that might be because
| Trump is the champion of the losers of globalisation, and
| Musk is also a hero to those people because (a) he has
| created a lot of manufacturing jobs and (b) is creating a
| sense of patriotic pride in some of his achievements...
| just see SpaceX staff chanting "USA USA". I'm not
| criticising anyone, just drawing a connection.
|
| So I think after reading these posts and talking to
| others, that Musk is hated because he is part of the war
| between left and right. To praise Musk is to praise
| Trumpism, and to hate Musk is to show you are against
| Trump.
| smcl wrote:
| I don't think I made any statement here about whether he
| is good or bad. I've said that I find his public persona
| to be annoying, justified why I think that, and have said
| he's probably not as responsible for everything he's
| credited for than many of his supporters believe. I think
| that's a _really_ reasonable comment to make - there are
| people frothing mad about him and there are people who
| are rabid supporters of him. But I haven 't seen either
| in this thread.
|
| Edit: ok I just saw someone call him "Elongated Muskrat"
| so _now_ there is someone who is mad at him in the thread
| :-)
| tommiegannert wrote:
| Yepp, it wasn't a reflection on your comment. I just
| think the good/bad dichotomy ties in to my argument about
| polarization. It doesn't happen with every comment, but
| when it does, it adds fuel to the fire.
|
| Sorry if that wasn't clear.
|
| ... I wonder if polarization can be seen as a market
| spread, and that more polarization causes higher
| volatility, which leads to more "trading" to close the
| spread. I.e. discussions follow some version of the
| efficient market hypothesis? Need to do a PhD on this. :)
| Pigalowda wrote:
| Don't forget his initial support for Ukraine and then his
| attempted about face with star link terminals. I'm very
| curious why all of that intrigue seems to have dried up.
| How did Musk know the Crimean peninsula was dry and
| needed water guarantees from Ukraine? It's weird and i
| believe the critics, he actually talked to Putin and felt
| like a big man so he started shilling for russian
| "peace".
|
| I thought he was just a lucky cult like futurist before
| but now I think of him as what he truly is - a
| billionaire narcissist that craves adulation from the
| mob.
| chaosbolt wrote:
| >You have to admit that he invested in some companies
|
| Yeah sure, he just invested in Paypal, then invested in
| Tesla, then invested in SpaceX.
|
| I'm not even sure if I'm answering real people or bots
| anymore, everyone sounds the same now: "Elon good,
| because environment and space and he made reusable
| rockets and tesla cars are so good etc.", (Elon starts
| saying wrongtalk about the media and other sensitive
| subjects), "Elon bad, because he called some diver years
| ago a pedophile, and he just invested in tesla and spacex
| no biggie easy for anyone".
|
| But hey who cares right? I've been getting insulted by
| everyone here for saying Youtube censors videos and
| google censors results etc. yet just a couple days ago
| some leaked documents showed the DHS with the help of
| tech giants are planning to push the censorship even
| harder.
| duhast wrote:
| His company X.com was acquired by PayPal.
| smcl wrote:
| Sort of - X.com merged with Confinity (who supposedly had
| some good payments processing system) and became PayPal.
| hnusersarelame wrote:
| smcl wrote:
| Flagged this. There is a reasonable discussion to be had
| here, and it was being had. But you're calling me a bot,
| you're misrepresenting what I've said and launching into
| an unrelated rant about censorship.
|
| This is flamebait, plain and simple.
| [deleted]
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| You have to admit that Tesla didn't sell a single EV, nor
| did SpaceX launch a production vehicle or secure high
| value contracts until Musk took over.
| kaba0 wrote:
| It's almost like both companies need metric tons of money
| to do anything remarkable - isn't that the point of
| YCombinator as well? That's just venture capitalism.
|
| He just has the ego of a manchild and bought the title of
| "founder" as wellz
| random314 wrote:
| Musk took over Tesla by firing the founder CEO, and took
| another 4 years to ship a car to production. The car had
| already been built when Musk took over. He only needed to
| build a production pipeline.
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| Building a production pipeline and scaling it is no small
| feat in itself though. Hats off to anyone who can do that
| and make it profitable.
| random314 wrote:
| Sure, there are several other companies that are able to
| do that as well.
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| They must all be run by man-children, too, according to
| the people who have never done it before.
| random314 wrote:
| You can put as many words into people's mouth as you
| wish. This can help to make a non-argument appear to be
| an argument.
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| Has stripe lost billions of dollars for 8 out of the last 10
| years?
| dragontamer wrote:
| Rookie numbers.
|
| The new owner of Twitter took on $13 Billion in debt, which
| probably costs $1.3 Billion+ in interest payments alone.
|
| Twitter has gone from a hundred-million loss / year into a
| Billion+ per year loss in the past week, because of the
| decisions related to this buyout.
|
| That is the problem. $200 million loss per year is
| manageable. $1500 million loss/year is not.
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| Twitter's loss in 2020 was over $1,100,000,000. In the last
| 10 years, twitter has lost almost $4,000,000,000, posting
| profits in only two years (2018,2019).
|
| Twitters losses in 2021 were over 221MM, and 250MM to 700MM
| between 2013 and 2017.
|
| So the myth that Twitter was a healthy company is only
| promulgated by agenda driven opinions, not factual ones.
| dragontamer wrote:
| And this year (and all years here on out), Elon Musk in
| his brilliance added $1,300,000,000 to that loss, because
| he took on a $13,000,000,000 loan to buyout the company.
|
| That's all I'm saying. The $1.3 billion/year in interest
| payments alone is a magnitude more loss than Twitter ever
| had before.
| anthropodie wrote:
| People might choose based on their preferences:
|
| You want stability? Join stripe
|
| You want to be sharp? Join Twitter
| watwut wrote:
| I dont think it would make you sharp. It would train you for
| ugly politics, back stabbing and general chaos. But it would
| not train you for good performance. You can actually hide
| incompetence very well in chaotic companies if you can talk
| well and take others credit. And competence without political
| clout gets punished (because it is easy).
|
| Being sharp as in the positive performance terms requires
| sharp leadership and decision making. It means leadership
| that actually knows what is going on and that requires trust.
| That is not the same as rage layoff after you impulse bought
| company you dont want while trolling on social medias.
| capableweb wrote:
| > You want stability? Join stripe
|
| Didn't Stripe just announce their own set of layoffs because
| they over-hired? That doesn't seem that stable.
|
| You want actual stability, join a fortune 500 company.
| [deleted]
| wildrhythms wrote:
| What does it mean to be sharp in this context?
| anthropodie wrote:
| For me, if I were at beginning of my career I would have
| definitely joined Twitter. Because I have to work harder,
| compete harder, learn faster just to save my job. I think
| that sort of culture would make you sharp than others in
| your field very early in your career.
|
| Then when you go and work at company like stripe, its easy.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > Because I have to work harder, compete harder, learn
| faster just to save my job. I think that sort of culture
| would make you sharp than others in your field very early
| in your career.
|
| That's a great way to get a bunch of cowboys in their 20s
| who think they are hot shit after five years in the
| industry while kicking out the people with deep
| experience because they actually like spending time with
| their families. Now you've got hyper-trendy software
| design everywhere with nothing supporting it.
| Blokje5 wrote:
| That type of culture might also cause a burnout ending
| your career early.
| pyb wrote:
| Or you might just discover that cut-throat companies
| often build low quality products.
| onpensionsterm wrote:
| Perhaps you should delete prod so you have to work
| harder, compete harder, learn faster just to save your
| job
| dasil003 wrote:
| Do you mean working at Twitter now under Elon or
| historically? Because I'm not sure that Twitter has
| historically been more demanding.
| threeseed wrote:
| And good luck to Twitter if they are looking to implement
| a Hunger Games style culture. However this type of
| attitude to work is extremely immature, counter-
| productive and proven to be harmful to both individuals
| and the company.
|
| People are most productive over the long term when they
| feel encouraged, supported, self-motivated etc.
|
| Positive emotions not negative ones like fear, coercion,
| hostility etc.
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| I would go to work for Twitter, if only to work for Elon.
| It would be better than any comparable education. Maybe I
| last a month, maybe I last my career, but I will probably
| learn a lot.
| kaba0 wrote:
| You want to learn from an egoistic manchild who managed
| to make a terrible deal _and forced himself to actually
| go through with it_ to buy a company that has yet to turn
| a profit, and I'm almost sure it will never, because he
| is the owner?
| tomp wrote:
| _> However this type of attitude to work is extremely
| immature, counter-productive and proven to be harmful to
| both individuals and the company._
|
| Because SpaceX and Tesla totally crashed and burned and
| are doing so much worse than Boeing and Volkswagen?
| jquery wrote:
| Elon shows all the signs of thinking he can do absolutely
| no wrong because his fan base keeps telling him so.
|
| Nothing about this acquisition as been impressive or
| promising. I see no sign of that changing. A mass
| disrespectful layoff like this is going to backfire,
| hugely.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| SpaceX and Tesla would have crashed and burned had it not
| been for government, of all levels, subsidizing them.
| Something that, now that he has benefited from it, Musk
| is against others having.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| >government, of all levels, subsidizing them
|
| and the established automakers with billion dollar war
| chests didn't have access to the same subsidies if they
| had innovated and made electric cars that didn't suck?
| The established military industrial complex companies
| like Boeing and Lockheed that have failed in their space
| endeavors aren't subsidized?
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| Musk doesn't want others to have the same subsidies that
| he received. It's a bit telling if you think about it.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Tesla stock is a huge bubble, so I'm not sure they are
| doing as good actually as their ratings would indicate..
| threeseed wrote:
| Not sure. I think we should increase the sample size to
| include Boring Company and Hyperloop.
| tiahura wrote:
| You think those failed because of corporate culture and
| not market fit?
| kaba0 wrote:
| While I do rather think that tesla and spacex has an
| unhealthy work cultural based on the limited things I
| read about it, these two ideas are just ridiculously dump
| to the point where a 3 years old wouldn't have come up
| with "cars in a tunnel".. they are ridiculous.
| threeseed wrote:
| You think SpaceX and Tesla succeeded because of corporate
| culture and not market fit?
| tomp wrote:
| Clearly.
|
| Legacy car brands had electric cars (Toyota, BMW
| definitely). Boeing could have created landing rockets.
| Market wanted those products from _anyone_.
|
| Why didn't they? Because they're dinosaurs, asleep at the
| wheel. Bad corporate culture.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I don't see more empathy from Stripe. And since no one has come
| out of the process of mass layoffs yet, we don't know if
| Twitter isn't going to provide severance and bonus payouts and
| etc.
|
| On the other hand, Stripe was much more productive and is
| workforce wasn't so inflated.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I was thinking it over, and one way Stripe nailed Twitter is
| communication. Stripe's severance was clearly communicated up
| front. Twitter's leadership is like the proverbial headless
| chicken.
|
| It's quite the contrast. I think there's a lesson here. A
| well-drafted email could've saved twitter a lot of heartache.
|
| Then again, maybe the email drafter got laid off too.
| joeblubaugh wrote:
| Stripe had 3x the staff of Adyen doing the same revenue
| mitemte wrote:
| Are there no laws about minimum notice or severance pay?
|
| I'm glad Australia has decent laws to protect workers. It'll be
| interesting to see if Australian Twitter staff who are locked
| out of their accounts have been laid off and what happens next.
|
| https://www.fairwork.gov.au/tools-and-resources/fact-sheets/...
| jleyank wrote:
| Yeah there are laws :
| https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/termination/plantclosings.
| Probably state laws as well. These require notice of
| severance or post payment and protect against discrimination.
| Twitter can try to claim that they're all being fired for
| cause, but that'll just end up paying a whole lot of lawyers.
| Tenoke wrote:
| In cases like this typically they'd just fire you and pay the
| salary through the minimum notice period without requiring
| nor allowing you to show up. I see no reason to think that's
| not the case here.
| mozman wrote:
| What if twitter were so bloated they were effectively providing
| corporate welfare?
|
| Truth is we don't know. I see it as someone is finally taking
| action to turn Twitter around. They've been floundering for
| years.
| matwood wrote:
| We don't know details yet, so it's hard to contrast anything.
| The pre stock vesting rumor was before 11/1. That date has
| passed.
|
| It's also interesting that nearly every tech person I read
| thought Twitter was over-staffed prior to Musk taking over. Now
| he's doing something about it, and people are pearl clutching.
| steve76 wrote:
| bArray wrote:
| > Yep, the team is gone. The team that was researching and
| pushing for algorithmic transparency and algorithmic choice. The
| team that was studying algorithmic amplification. The team that
| was inventing and building ethical AI tooling and methodologies.
| All that is gone.
|
| If you want to justify your position, I would suggest
| highlighting the positive changes you _did_ make, rather than the
| positive changes you _intended_ to make. If you didn't make any
| notable positive changes over the time you worked there, that
| might explain why you no longer do work there.
|
| 'Ethical AI' in my opinion is essentially the AI version of
| 'positive discrimination', i.e. they will keep biasing the inputs
| and outputs until the algorithm yields the desired result. In
| this case the desired result in not equality, but "corrected
| equality". Don't get me wrong, biased and misleading training
| sets are a problem, but the AI itself is not unethical.
|
| Also I would like to know whether algorithm transparency included
| blue check-marks (that were obviously biased), or government
| take-down requests, or the promotion of completely random people
| for no apparent reason? There was never any intention for
| algorithm transparency, this is Twitter's 'secret sauce' after
| all.
| lagolinguini wrote:
| > If you want to justify your position, I would suggest
| highlighting the positive changes you _did_ make, rather than
| the positive changes you _intended_ to make.
|
| Imagine where the world would be if bell labs didn't invest all
| that money into positive changes that people _intended_ to
| make.
| ptero wrote:
| The comment you replied to did sound callous given the fact
| that the author probably just got laid off.
|
| Specifically on your response: while _planning_ specific
| changes is good and so is attempting to solve hard problems,
| during mass layoffs the teams with few accomplishments are
| usually hit first. Ambitious plans seldom help. Mass layoffs
| are rare, but this is something one should keep in mind. My
| 2c.
|
| Specifically on Bell Labs, new employees until the 1990s were
| told "you have a job for life" (paid by the AT&T's monopoly
| generating huge cash flows). But when the AT&T became less
| profitable and mass layoffs did start, as far as I know they
| followed the same pattern.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Twitter does not have the luxury of being the Ma Bell
| monopoly.
|
| If Twitter had a vice-grip on the social media market, we'd
| live in a different world... for better or for worse.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I've worked at companies that had entire teams that did a lot
| of fancy-sounding nothing.
|
| Based on these details, I wouldn't be surprised if this is a
| team like that.
| pjc50 wrote:
| An AI that promotes a single holocaust denial tweet has
| committed an unethical act, regardless of how it gets there.
| neel8986 wrote:
| The way employees were treated was beyond disgraceful. Really
| feel sorry for my younger self who believed that Musk truly cares
| about Humanity. Never ever hero worship a billionaire while
| thinking he will change the world. They are all ego manic pos
| hungry for more and more control. Small things you can do a) If
| you care about environment don't buy an over expensive electric
| car. Think about efforts to improve Public transport b) SpaceX is
| not about putting man on Mars. It is about elon wanting to
| control world's internet through Starlink. Whenever a small
| nation falls for the trap raise your voice.
| sequoia wrote:
| "The way employees were treated was beyond disgraceful."
|
| Sorry I may have missed this in the article-was it something
| beyond being laid off? Being laid off sucks (it's happened to
| me) but it's a normal part of business operations.
| ninth_ant wrote:
| They are treated like disposable trash, tossed into the wind
| by a capricious ultra-rich jerk who bought the company on a
| whim. The consequences of that poorly thought out "decision"
| meant the purchase had to be a leveraged buyout which
| necessitated heavy cost cutting.
|
| How is this not disgraceful? This not "normal business
| operations", this is peoples lives being torn apart while the
| ultra rich play games with their livelihoods.
| ghastmaster wrote:
| It goes both ways. Employees get to quit at a moments
| notice, leaving the company scrambling to find a
| replacement at potentially great costs. The internet is
| replete with stories of employees quitting, leaving their
| companies in shambles trying to figure out how to fill the
| void. I choose to care about my employer and my employer
| chooses to care about me. I could make a lot more money at
| a company that does not care, but I value that relationship
| more than money. Everyone should have the choice.
| Jalad wrote:
| With respect, it doesn't really go both ways.
|
| > Employees get to quit at a moments notice
|
| Most employees have to work in order to make an income.
| To assume that it's at all common for employees to just
| jump ship and leave a mess behind is inaccurate
|
| > leaving the company scrambling to find a replacement at
| potentially great costs
|
| And to this point, most employees are redundant. Other
| employees can pick up the slack. A well managed
| organization usually doesn't let the bus factor get too
| high. And if an org isn't well managed, it's not fair to
| blame employees for wanting to leave
|
| > I choose to care about my employer and my employer
| chooses to care about me. I could make a lot more money
| at a company that does not care, but I value that
| relationship more than money. Everyone should have the
| choice.
|
| I think this is closer to the mark. Employment is first a
| legal agreement, but also a social agreement. And this is
| the social agreement that Musk is destroying through his
| game of chicken with Twitter. He doesn't get a pass
| because "it goes both ways"
| ghastmaster wrote:
| > And this is the social agreement that Musk is
| destroying through his game of chicken with Twitter. He
| doesn't get a pass because "it goes both ways"
|
| It is a choice that is going to cost his company money.
| Talented potential employees are going to be well aware
| of the potential to be fired without a second thought(or
| severance) on the whim of Elon from now on. Twitter will
| have to increase compensation or settle for less talented
| individuals to balance that potential. That is where he
| does not "get a pass".
|
| I agree of course from a human social standpoint that it
| would be moral and appropriate to give as much notice and
| severance as possible. However, there are many factors
| that come into play when making decisions of this nature.
| I do not know the full compensation package of the
| employees(were they already overcompensated?) or the
| total financial status of the company. The company could
| in theory be on the brink of failure. If Elon gave the
| fired employees a sweet parting deal and the company
| subsequently goes broke, leading to even more layoffs
| that would be terrible for the remaining employees.
| Furthermore, what of the employees that have to be fired
| or never hired in order to compensate the employees that
| are already leaving? I wonder how the vote would go from
| the employees if a company proposed the following:
|
| "Would you rather we fire without severance pay 100
| employees tomorrow or fire 150 with severance pay next
| month?" That's essentially the question that happens in
| management when a layoff is happening. Sadly many people
| fail to see that 50 jobs were saved in the first scenario
| when they read headlines about layoffs.
|
| Either way we think, the complexities of human
| interactions in the markets and business is fascinating!
| DesiLurker wrote:
| > "Would you rather we fire without severance pay 100
| employees tomorrow or fire 150 with severance pay next
| month?"
|
| that assumes management is acting in good faith towards
| the employees, more often than not that decision is
| tilted towards shareholders ie.. if they think they can
| cut 150 employees and make it work then it just becomes a
| choice between cutting 150 employees with or without
| severance as soon as possible. the amount of severence is
| essentially decided by local laws and prevailing
| standards but mind you the game is mostly give as little
| as needed.
| hackerlight wrote:
| How is it disgraceful to lay off a rich tech worker who
| isn't needed in the company anymore and can add more value
| elsewhere in the economy? This is a big part of economic
| prosperity that we all enjoy. Sometimes people need to get
| fired. It sucks, but if everyone was in a jobs protection
| racket, that would suck much much more.
| partiallypro wrote:
| You just described layoffs in general. Are you as upset
| over the other tech companies doing layoffs, that go from
| Square to Microsoft?
| roddds wrote:
| Yes.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/04/twitter-faces-a-class-
| acti...
| CrazyStat wrote:
| Starlink's total bandwidth is about the same as a small
| regional ISP. There is no way it will ever "control the world's
| internet".
|
| Starlink will serve many places where terrestrial wired or
| wireless access doesn't make sense, including oceans, very
| rural areas, uninhabited areas, airplanes, rockets, etc. It
| will never be able to serve 1% of a high density city. It will
| never control anything on the scale of the world's internet.
| This is an absurd conspiracy theory.
| neel8986 wrote:
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/11/04/poli.
| ..
|
| Example of how musk can blackmail governments at critical
| juncture. Never ever should any govt depend on this egomaniac
| POS for such critical infra
| CrazyStat wrote:
| "Blackmail" is a strange word for "we decided to stop
| paying the monthly service fee and service ended as
| expected."
|
| > Before the terminals went completely dark, Ukraine's
| Ministry of Defense made a request in early October to
| their British counterparts to pick up the $3.25 million
| monthly bill. The batch of terminals were also rotated out
| as concerns grew that service could be turned off, in order
| to minimize the impact, the source said.
|
| > A British official said after discussions between the
| ministries "it was agreed there were higher priority
| military capabilities." Among many other channels of
| support, the UK has been flying thousands of Ukrainian
| troops to Britain for training before they head back to the
| frontlines.
|
| It's possible for a perfectly reasonable person to
| justifiably strongly dislike Elon Musk, but what you're
| doing here is not that.
| loceng wrote:
| There's no source or confirmation that 1,300 units were
| actually down, and, if they were down - it looks like
| because the service wasn't being paid for?
|
| Do you expect companies to provide services for free? The
| hypocrisy that Elon pointed out is that the military
| industrial complex is getting paid billions, but the
| ideological mob via captured MSM is smearing him for no
| longer wanting to provide free/subsidized services?
|
| P.S. Their "withdrepw" typo in the article, doesn't bode
| well for overall quality.
| brtkdotse wrote:
| Can't find the article now but it made an interesting point
| that Starlink is just busywork for SpaceX to keep launching
| rockets.
| max51 wrote:
| I think it's similar to small construction companies using
| their staff during the winter to work on the owner's new
| rental properties.
|
| They can easily scale it up or down depending on how other
| projects/priorities are going and how many people don't
| have tasks to do. All of the deadlines and KPIs are
| internal and they don't expose themselves to lawsuits or
| financial penalties when they have to delay something.
|
| In the case of spacex, it's even more beneficial because
| they need to launch rockets anyway for testing. Sending
| them to space empty is a wasted opportunity.
| partiallypro wrote:
| Starlink has massive DoD potential, like it or not. Also
| could be big for banking. Their client facing aspect of it
| will eventually just be piggybacking off of those two
| industries.
| throwawaydec20 wrote:
| Suckers are born every sec. I had many arguments with Musk rats
| with no success.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| I was one of those suckers though I kept it mostly to myself
| (& dont own tesla stock or a tesla). I still do feel Musk's
| contribution in accelerating EV adoption is invaluable and
| help markets get over a 'internal combustion local minima'.
| Also he didn't have to use his pile of money to land rockets
| and make space launch cheap so I give him credit for that.
| BUT thats where it ends for me, IMO we need a barely winning,
| underdog Elon much more than this flamboyant, impulsive,
| A*h0le billioniare.
|
| what I worry about now is that musk fanbois are willing to
| bend the rules (in peacetime not covid panic or early days of
| EVs) for him will set a horrible pressident for workers in
| general.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| There are other billionaires out there doing good things,
| without needing to have a weekly news scandal:
|
| Bill gates foundation has made tremendous progress with
| healthcare in developing countries. He's probably made as much
| progress that can made in these countries as the walls he's
| hitting seem to be corrupt/incompetent governments rather and
| money or technical.
|
| Mark Cuban's cost plus drugs company is making a life changing
| difference for Americans paying a lot per month in medicine,
| often saving their customers hundreds of dollars per month, and
| committed to expanding their selection of generic medicines.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Let's all open our personal professional networks to help these
| folks laid off find work. Nothing we can do about Elon owning
| Twitter now but what we can do is help those affected by the
| layoffs.
| rejor121 wrote:
| I honestly hope this forces twitter to crash and burn. I feel
| sorry for those who would lose their jobs. That said, twitter is
| utter garbage and is nothing but a place for people to complain
| Ptchd wrote:
| Complaning is also important...
| jwilk wrote:
| Archived copy without GDPR nag screen:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20221104125809/https://techcrunc...
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| All the hysteria around the purchase proves that Twitter, as it
| has existed, was very, very important to a lot of people.
| anonAndOn wrote:
| Does this mass layoff comply with the WARN Act and California's
| mini-WARN?[0] What about all of California's protected
| classes?[1] The pregnant ladies let go before their FMLA seem
| especially aggrieved.
|
| Maybe some lawyers here can chime in: How soon will we see some
| class action lawsuits?
|
| [0]https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/layoff-
| protections-c...
|
| [1]https://www.employmentattorneyla.com/blog/2017/june/what-
| are...
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Class protection doesn't mean you cant fire minorities and
| pregnant women.
|
| It means you can't fire people for being minorities and
| pregnant.
| anonAndOn wrote:
| Firing a pregnant lady in CA simply as a cost cutting measure
| usually results in a nice settlement for the pregnant lady.
| FAFO, Elon.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Not legally. They would have to prove that they were being
| targeted and fired for being pregnant.
|
| Laying off half the company is pretty strong evidence you
| aren't targeting based on protected class.
| anonAndOn wrote:
| Do they? Or does Elon have to explain in front of a judge
| that employees about to go on protected leave/ older
| workers/ less fanboy were not unfairly targeted?
|
| My money is on settlement to prevent any judge from
| seeing how the firing decisions were made.
| billfor wrote:
| I want to know if the product manager that was raving about the
| yoga rooms and free wine on tap was fired.
| pelasaco wrote:
| I'm never happy with mass layoffs, but reading some tweets and
| going through some profiles linked to the article, it is clear to
| see that some people who were fired, weren't happy with the
| company. So regardless of their performance, maybe was everything
| that they needed to find their happiness in another company?
| kraig911 wrote:
| Truly hope that we can use this as an opportunity to make
| something people want. Obviously we all use Facebook and Twitter
| because I guess that's all there is. I hope this create an
| experience vacuum for people on the web because virtual reality
| snooze offices and/or racially and class deriding ad driven posts
| that are 140 words are less is not what I thought the future
| would be.
| mikkergp wrote:
| Interesting to see if VC's/Angels will be chatting up some
| tweeps as they exit.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Musk and friends compare Twitter to other tech companies and see
| that it's ratio of employees to revenue is lowest. He therefore
| thinks he must halve the number employees and/or increase revenue
| to get this ratio up.
|
| From the chat log exhibits from the Twitter vs Musk case:
| https://danluu.com/elon-twitter-texts/#47
|
| A VC (Jason Calacanis) does back of the envelope calculations:
|
| Twitter revenue per employee: $5B rev / 8k employees = $625K rev
| per employee in 2021
|
| Google revenue per employee: $257B rev2/ 135K employee2= $1.9M
| per employee in 2021
|
| Apple revenue per employee: $365B rev / 154k employees= $2.37M
| per employee in fiscal 2021
|
| Twitter revenue per employee if 3k instead of 8k: $5B rev/ 3k
| employees= $1.66m rev per employee in 2021 (more industry
| standard)
|
| Elon: "Insane potential for improvement"
| tshaddox wrote:
| It would be nice if revenue and employee count were completely
| independent. Heck, you could fire everyone except one person
| and have an incredibly high ratio! (Don't fire that last person
| or else you'll get a divide by zero error.)
|
| Interestingly, he's already tweeting out complaints about a
| massive drop in revenue. His theory is that this is caused not
| by his erratic behavior, but instead by activists who hate free
| speech:
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588538640401018880?s=46...
| bamboozled wrote:
| That tweet really makes me think he has gone paranoid /
| crazy.
|
| "Activists groups pressuring advertisers trying to destroy
| free speech in America ?"
|
| The dude is a conspiracy theorist now ?
| moufestaphio wrote:
| Yes? He tweeted the Paul Pelosi's gay lover conspiracy last
| week.
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| Activists: _take credit_
|
| Some dude: "it's totally not them!"
|
| Why would he not think that?
| tshaddox wrote:
| I'll ignore for the moment questions about what "activists"
| is supposed to mean and whether it refers to a real group
| capable of making unified decisions. Regardless, it's just
| not great for leadership to blame a revenue drop on
| unrelated third parties even if those third parties are
| working against the company and taking credit for the
| revenue drop. This isn't like complaining that trolls came
| in and review bombed your movie on IMDb. Revenue is an
| actual metric. If the claim is that the revenue numbers are
| only _very briefly_ down because advertisers are only
| pulling spend in response to some temporary PR issue, then
| sure, make that argument.
| epakai wrote:
| Musk's prime motivator for purchasing twitter seems to have
| been ideological. Of course people are going to oppose him on
| ideological grounds.
|
| More succinctly, Musk performed an activist takeover.
| gscott wrote:
| Twitter could have let him out of the deal but forced it.
| This is all on the (now former) board of directors who
| probably received a nice payout for a new mansion.
| mrits wrote:
| I don't understand how anyone could not blame activists for
| this? They themselves are taking credit for it.
| Kye wrote:
| Who is "they"? Activist is an expansive noun that covers
| every possible viewpoint, so this is meaningless without
| further qualification. Is it randos on Twitter, or someone
| with actual clout?
| nwienert wrote:
| IPG and ADL both pushing hard to pull advertisements.
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/158860354056
| 966...
|
| Not to mention there's countless cases of this happening
| over the last decade, across payment processors to CDNs.
| [deleted]
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Were the activists controlling ad spend?
| arrrg wrote:
| How do you fire the right people? Where is the information
| about who to fire and who to keep coming from?
| washywashy wrote:
| At previous places I've been at it seems like it's easier for
| higher ups to just blanket fire people and then rehire the
| important ones once people in the know complain. Not super
| efficient but definitely faster and comical in a depressing
| way.
| vidarh wrote:
| If they do that outside the US they risk facing a fun
| series of expensive lawsuits.
| [deleted]
| morelish wrote:
| You don't. You just fire the number based largely on cost and
| let the remaining people pick up the pieces.
| estomagordo wrote:
| I think you mean the remaining people leetcode?
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| This is an ignorant question: to what extent is it relevant
| that a hardware company like Apple effectively
| employs/contracts services of e.g. Foxconn to the tune of
| probably a million employees?
|
| It _feel_ a little bit misleading to take a look at company in
| isolation, as different companies have different dependencies
| and depths of integration.
| nequo wrote:
| Great point. Revenue reflects the value added of the entire
| supply chain, not just Apple's. EBITDA/employee instead of
| revenue/employee would be a more appropriate measure. GP's
| numbers revised: Twitter EBITDA per employee:
| $211mn / 8k employees = $26k per employee Google
| (Alphabet) EBITDA per employee: $93.7bn / 135k employees =
| $694k per employee Apple EBITDA per employee:
| $130.5bn / 154k employees = $847k per employee
| Twitter EBITDA per employee if 3k instead of 8k: $211mn / 3k
| employees = $70k per employee
| gopuck16 wrote:
| How were you able to include/exclude the contractors, apple
| also has large number of CW that you are excluding so these
| numbers are bogus imo.
| q1w2 wrote:
| Purely looking at the math and the product portfolio, I would
| argue that since Twitter is such a single-product company, with
| a near-monopoly in this specific niche, it should have a much
| higher ratio.
|
| Given these factors, I wouldn't be surprised if Mush cuts the
| employee base in half again.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Interesting that the conversation then turns into using Return-
| To-Office as a strategy for voluntary departures ("20%").
| dmix wrote:
| Only 3 years ago Twitter had 5000 employees. They now have 8000
| in 2022. That's a massive headcount growth for a company whose
| stock price declined significantly since then.
| estomagordo wrote:
| That is also the time period when they started showing a
| profit.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| No new features, and from my seat I can see no new
| monitization model.
|
| Where is all this new money coming from, and why do suggest
| it requires these new employees to keep that stream
| flowing?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > No new features
|
| Are the new features for advertisers rather than
| consumers?
| ketzo wrote:
| Operating a massive, distributed, real-time ad platform
| requires lots of engineers.
| partiallypro wrote:
| But how many of the new hires are engineers? I've read it
| has mostly been middle management hires.
| pyrrhotech wrote:
| And no notable features have been released
| scarab92 wrote:
| It seems like most of the layoffs are in trust, comms,
| creative, policy, wellness and those supporting these
| functions.
|
| If the rumours of 50% downsizing are correct these
| functions were way bigger than I expected.
| GVIrish wrote:
| You didn't see Twitter Spaces, Fleets, Birdwatch, Tweet
| Editing, and Twitter Blue? Some of those features have been
| successful for them, some not, but they've been releasing
| features.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I think the employees are pretty expensive to keep, even
| compared to other tech companies. Twitter now has a lot of debt
| to service from the acquisition and I think the employees now
| get cash instead of RSUs (paid based on the acquisition price)
| whereas employees at other tech companies have effectively seen
| comp decrease as the stock prices went down.
|
| So there might be some philosophical attempt to reduce
| headcount. There might also be some attempt to hire more later
| and at a lower price (or at least one that isn't artificially
| high).
| tdeck wrote:
| This is a great point. Employees at Twitter may be vesting
| RSUs that need to be converted at Elon's inflated purchase
| price. Even laying off those people today and rehiring all of
| them tomorrow would save the company a boatload of money.
| plgonzalezrx8 wrote:
| [redacted]: Hey Elon -my name is Jake Sherman.
|
| I loled at this. Why redact the name if its in the content. SMH
| joenathanone wrote:
| Because his name is really Sake Jherman.
| jdub wrote:
| Musk is capricious, cruel, and clueless. Whether or not you liked
| Twitter, it's a culturally significant platform, and Musk has
| almost certainly destroyed any hope it had of surviving. In
| barely a week. Hopefully it destroys him, too.
| alluro2 wrote:
| If you're basing part of your comment on this event, it might
| be worth noting that the article states the layoffs were being
| mentioned before Musk.
| pas wrote:
| > layoffs were being mentioned before Musk
|
| does that mean anything? (especially "mention" seems to carry
| no predictive value here.) were layoffs mentioned for years
| and nothing happened? were they put on hold because the ex-
| CEO wanted Musk to take the blame?
| goodpoint wrote:
| Musk is capricious, cruel, and clueless in general.
| nameless912 wrote:
| Sure, but I imagine the pre-Musk layoffs would have been
| similar to what we're seeing in Twitter's peer companies
| (~10-15%, generous severance payouts, etc.) as opposed to
| what's happening now. To throw your hands in the air and
| claim that layoffs were an inevitability is a weird way to
| shield a dude that is just being cruel because he thinks he's
| God.
| wreath wrote:
| Twitter's cultural significance is almost net negative. It has
| been a vehicle for divisiveness and culture wars and not only a
| vehicle but a self driving one if you catch my drift.
| _djo_ wrote:
| That depends on which aspects of Twitter you focus on. It has
| added a ton of value for niche interest areas, open source
| intelligence and reporting, news from underserved areas or
| issues, and so many others.
|
| The value isn't in the loudest and most active accounts, but
| the long tail of expertise that was previously either not
| widely visible or connected in the way Twitter enabled.
|
| All that will be lost.
| NathanWilliams wrote:
| Agreed, losing InfoSec Twitter will really sting
| tsujamin wrote:
| not sure if incident responders will be cheering or
| crying for less Friday dumpster fire causing tweets :')
|
| but yeah it's going to sting r badly...
| phphphphp wrote:
| I disagree. The internet has increased the reach of
| individuals by many orders of magnitude: we (humanity) are
| experiencing the consequences of something we're not equipped
| for, but that isn't the fault of Twitter or Facebook, it's a
| consequence of the internet connecting us all.
|
| What, specifically, has Twitter done, that has been a
| negative influence on the culture? If you look at, say,
| Donald Trump, he was across the internet being divisive in
| every venue he could get his hands on, from Facebook to
| Reddit... and outside of the internet too, on Fox News and
| the like.
|
| If we went back 2 decades and put all of humanity on a bbs or
| newsgroup instead, you'd have the same outcome.
| dandellion wrote:
| Twitter is a cesspool. The three times I've created an
| account I have deleted it in less than 24 hours because I
| couldn't figure a way to filter good content from all the
| noise, toxicity and low quality content. Reddit is not much
| different but at least you can reduce the scope by staying
| in small niche subreddits. I'm following this with
| curiosity to see if all these changes improve the situation
| or drive Twitter to the ground, but both seem to me like
| they would be an improvement.
| jdub wrote:
| So you're saying you followed some real jerks.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| And extremely biased, like the rest of big tech:
| https://files.catbox.moe/3mvjhv.jpg
| trashtester wrote:
| > Hopefully it destroys him, too.
|
| Hoping that other people will be destroyed, is pretty dark...
| boringg wrote:
| I think you are out of touch with how poor Twitter is as a
| medium currently. Either Musk brings it back to some validity
| or he puts the final nail in the coffin and creates a space for
| some new better technology to fill the void (that last bit is a
| bit sarcastic about the new tech).
| s1k3 wrote:
| Alright folks you heard it here first. jdub has assured us
| Twitter is going down!
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| Twitter is a trash heap of the worst kind of snarky/sassy
| culture.
|
| It's great to see it getting shaken up
| Ptchd wrote:
| lol, what are you basing this comment on?
| Kye wrote:
| Link to search LinkedIn for Twitter employees posting in the last
| 24 hours. It's more or less 100% people looking for work (at
| least from the view of my network), so it's a great place to
| start for people looking to hire.
| https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?authorCompa...
| skc wrote:
| Serious question about this Twitter sale and how people expect it
| to go.
|
| What does it really matter to Musk or the other investors if this
| thing fails spectacularly.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I don't think there's anyone on earth who can afford to lose
| $44 billion dollars.
| memish wrote:
| There's an asymmetry here where Twitter and other companies get
| blamed for layoffs, but didn't get praised for providing highly
| paid jobs that put their employees in the top 1%.
|
| Even Stripe just had layoffs and they are a much more productive,
| tighter run ship.
|
| Twitter cutting deeper than Stripe shouldn't be surprising. It's
| not a secret that they were overstaffed and are known for rest &
| vest.
|
| This goes way back. In 2014 there was a show called Silicon
| Valley that had an entire character and subplots based on this
| phenomenon in tech companies. Big Head hanging out on the roof
| resonated for a reason. Compassion is warranted regardless and
| productive employees got caught in this too, but that doesn't
| mean we have to engage in selective amnesia and kneejerk outrage.
| cochne wrote:
| Well, it's mostly not Twitter betting blamed for layoffs, it's
| Musk. Twitter provided those jobs, not Musk. Musk is doing the
| layoffs, not Twitter. So someone not responsible in the least
| for the creation of those jobs is ending them.
|
| That is not to say the layoffs were not needed or justified (I
| don't know) but the asymmetry exists because it's an asymmetric
| situation.
| hackerlight wrote:
| Layoffs that improve economic productivity should be
| celebrated. The executives who do them should be
| congratulated. They are creating economic surplus by freeing
| up labor to add value elsewhere in the economy where it's
| needed more. So few people understand how much human
| prosperity would be stunted if people weren't allowed to be
| terminated when they were no longer productively adding value
| in a position.
| uejfiweun wrote:
| Agh, I WISH tech companies provided jobs that put employees in
| the top 1%. The truth is that in an era of gigantic wealth
| inequality, being in the top 1% of income doesn't mean shit. I
| may make good money, but when I can't even afford the shittiest
| studio apartment in town and I have no choice but to be a
| renter bitch, it doesn't make me feel rich at all.
| ta238911 wrote:
| I never understood why people like Musk are admired that much.
| He's a bully, period. If you cheer a bully, you're probably also
| one.
| brainwipe wrote:
| Feel for the workers being laid off and those that remain. I've
| been in teams that got decimated and the aftermath is rough.
| Although it's just a job, you can't help forming a bond with
| those that you work together with.
|
| Hope that those looking for new challenge find it and those that
| remain can grow into new things without doing the work of 3
| people.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| Elon is pushing a giant reset button on Twitter. This is long
| overdue and the pain is a result of accumulated managerial debt.
|
| Twitter will be fine operationally. It might have some short term
| hiccups as people pick up the pieces but the network effects and
| the value proposition are unchanged.
|
| Letting go of these people also makes room for more wild thinkers
| and hacker types to join the party.
|
| Sometimes the team that got you there isn't the team that can
| take you to the next level. I feel bad personally for everyone
| who liked their job, but many of these jobs existed for years
| longer than they should have.
|
| These are all smart individuals who have a big important company
| on their CV. No one is going to fault them for being laid off
| from Twitter when the cuts are this deep; they're already neck
| deep in recruiter spam if they have any degree of competence.
| ctvo wrote:
| > This is long overdue and the pain is a result of accumulated
| managerial debt.
|
| The pain is the result of Elon Musk overpaying 3x for a company
| he didn't want to buy and aggressively cost cutting to lower
| expenses.
|
| 1 billion a year in debt interest payments due to the 12
| billion in loans he took on to purchase Twitter matches reality
| more closely than "accumulated managerial debt".
|
| > Twitter will be fine operationally.
|
| I'm unsure how anyone can say this with any confidence.
|
| > Letting go of these people also makes room for more wild
| thinkers and hacker types to join the party.
|
| I think I met you at a gathering in SF once and had to walk
| away from the conversation.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| > The pain is the result of Elon Musk overpaying 3x for a
| company he didn't want to buy
|
| If he were put in charge of twitter and paid no money, I
| don't think his actions would be any different. He's that
| kind of crazy.
| [deleted]
| jimcavel888 wrote:
| martin1975 wrote:
| Personally, I'd keep the software devs + QA. Most of them
| probably don't care so much about politics/culture and are
| hopefully motivated by doing a good job. Without dev+QA, there's
| no Twitter. So I would understand a total mgmt purge....
| paganel wrote:
| In all the brouhaha about the Twitter acquisition this piece of
| info had personally escaped me:
|
| > Musk's deal to buy Twitter included making the company take on
| $13 billion in debt from banks, which means Twitter will owe
| about $1 billion a year in interest payments
|
| puts things in a slightly different perspective. I had somehow
| assumed that all the acquisition money had come in from Musk
| himself together with a bunch of other business "friends" or
| investment vehicles, didn't know there were direct bank loans
| involved.
| trashtester wrote:
| There is not much difference. This is just one way to structure
| that. Basically, this is like a mortgage, where if Twitter goes
| bust, the bank takes a loss. But if Twitter just falls in value
| compared to the purchase price, the bank gets their money back.
| For Musk (and potential other owners), this means he doesn't
| have to offer any other collateral than Twitter for that loan.
| paganel wrote:
| I was mostly thinking on the recurring price of paying that
| debt, which, if I'm not mistaken, in cases like this one
| falls entirely on the acquired company (Twitter, in this
| case). This is irrespective of Twitter's financial status,
| that money has to be paid on a recurrent manner.
|
| That's an extra cost on future Twitter of which I was not
| aware of, a cost entirely brought by this acquisition.
| Bhilai wrote:
| Sorry to say this but comments on this thread are very
| disappointing and show a basic lack of empathy in HN crowd. I am
| obviously generalizing and I know most of you are not heartless
| souls.
|
| FFS people, a huge number of people have lost their livelihoods,
| sense of belonging and might fall into financial hardships in
| current market conditions. Whatever you think of Elon or Twitter
| employees, its good to be grounded in suffering of fellow
| techies.
| [deleted]
| wobbly_bush wrote:
| > A huge number of people have lost their livelihoods, sense of
| belonging and might fall into financial hardships in current
| market conditions
|
| At the end of the day, CA is an at-will employment state.
| Anyone can get fired anytime, and it is up to everyone to be
| prepared for that. Any person working in any company X can meet
| the same fate - it's like being prepared for an earthquake,
| which can happen anytime. I'm not condoning what's happening at
| Twitter, but the idea that those employees had no way to be
| prepared for this is false. Though I agree with you that we
| should show empathy to those affected.
| arrrg wrote:
| Being prepared for getting fired (in the sense of having a
| financial cushion) is one thing.
|
| What I'm seeing here, however is a discrepancy between saying
| that working hard and burning brightly for your employer is
| meaningful and fulfilling and something to strive towards (as
| seen in the threads around expectations at Twitter of working
| 12h days and meeting tight deadlines) and on the other hand
| the expectation to dispassionately deal with being fired.
|
| That just doesn't go together. It's just a weird perspective.
| Those views don't seem to be consistent with each other.
|
| If your work is meaningful to you then psychologically being
| fired can have a devastating impact. You can't be at the same
| time emotionally invested in your workplace and also not
| affected by being fired.
|
| I know that HN is not one person, but that's the perspective
| I'm perceiving.
| cr4nberry wrote:
| > working hard and burning brightly for your employer is
| meaningful and fulfilling and something to strive towards
| (as seen in the threads around expectations at Twitter of
| working 12h days and meeting tight deadlines)
|
| but how many people actually do this? Even then, if someone
| does it and learns from it then they've set themselves up
| to make even more down the road
| [deleted]
| idlewords wrote:
| Those techies had years in which to organize their workplace
| under US labor law to forestall exactly this kind of outcome.
| For the past 20 years, there was no group of employees on earth
| with more latent power than US tech workers, but this very fact
| blinded them to the possibility that they might ever lose this
| power. What feeble efforts there were at collective action were
| organized around divisive "social justice" topics rather than
| securing a permanent voice for labor in tech company governance
| and decision making.
|
| Twitter workers are highly intelligent and the current pity
| party for them is unseemly. Everyone in the industry saw a day
| coming when the music would stop, whether because of economic
| changes or automation, but no one chose to act.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Don't blame labor for failing to unionize when media has been
| filling the room with anti union sentiment for a century.
| dangerwill wrote:
| Any time a whiff of union talk for tech workers comes up, the
| industry recoils in abject horror driven by many years of
| anti-union propaganda ("unions = evil" or "how DARE you well
| paid, lazy programmers ask for even more"). Especially here
| in HN given its hyper-capitalist slant. I think it's a bit
| disingenuous to put all of the blame on tech workers
| idlewords wrote:
| Is the argument here that capital should have been more
| supportive and nurturing? Imagine if the OG labor movement
| had been such hothouse flowers.
| dangerwill wrote:
| No, the argument is that we are on a forum run by and for
| venture capital, so criticizing labor for not being
| activist enough is out of step with where we are.
| cr4nberry wrote:
| > Any time a whiff of union talk for tech workers comes up,
| the industry recoils in abject horror driven by many years
| of anti-union propaganda ("unions = evil" or "how DARE you
| well paid, lazy programmers ask for even more").
|
| I mean, we definitely could. They'd be seriously fucked if
| we did. It's a wonder it hasn't happened yet
| DesiLurker wrote:
| So its our fault for not making a union? Also nothing to do
| with 40 year decline in consumer rights & stagnated wages &
| heavy influence of money in politics. Also, to quote Stephen
| Colbert, its the ribcage's fault that victim got knifed.
| luckylion wrote:
| The "stagnated wages" of SV engineers? What?
| sklivvz1971 wrote:
| > its our fault for not making a union
|
| Surely a union would help avoid this exactly kind of
| things, I can assure you. Once I kept my job thanks to a
| union when there were mass layoffs at a company I worked
| for. Also, a union would probably have negotiated something
| better than an "at will" contract, which I assume Twitter
| employees are bound to.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Sorry to say this but comments on this thread are very
| disappointing and show a basic lack of empathy in HN crowd.
|
| The vast majority of comments near the top don't seem to be of
| this type, so not sure what you're referring to.
|
| I have a lot of sympathy for Twitter employees who just had to
| deal with the total shitshow of the past ~10 months, with the
| media spotlight on them.
|
| But that said, the thing I fundamentally disagree with (and I'm
| speaking from experience) is that getting laid off if this
| colossal, tragic thing that many HNers seem to think it is:
|
| 1. There will definitely be ups and downs, but getting laid off
| in a _growing_ industry is very different from getting laid off
| in a _shrinking_ industry. Many companies are tightening their
| belts but there are still tons of companies hiring right now,
| and it 's not like most tech workers have the concerns of, say,
| medical transcriptionists, where the vast majority of those
| jobs just won't exist in 10-20 years.
|
| 2. Tech pays well, and the likelihood of huge layoffs at
| Twitter have been known for months. While I can empathize with
| people who were laid off, it's difficult to have sympathy if
| folks haven't prepared, i.e. saving up a cushion and starting
| their job search early. It is rare to get this much foresight
| into a layoff.
|
| 3. Tech also tends to give much better severance packages than
| in many other industries. To be clear, lots of other industries
| give 2 weeks max, if anything at all.
|
| Again, I have tons of sympathy along the lines of the "man,
| that really f'in sucks that you had to deal with that" level. I
| disagree with some of the melodrama I'm seeing that this is
| something like the worst thing that can happen to someone - one
| of the linked tweets in the article had a Hunger Games
| screenshot.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| I get it. I'm almost 40 and have been working at tech startups
| since I was in my 20s. I've been through what they're going
| through.
|
| The difference is that people are being laid off, terminated,
| or otherwise losing their jobs _every day_. It 's not a new or
| interesting phenomenon. What's interesting are the conditions
| that led to it happening to these people, both inside and
| outside Twitter. It's novel and may have broad impacts well
| outside the ~3.5k people who are now looking for work.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| > What's interesting are the conditions that led to it
| happening to these people, both inside and outside Twitter.
|
| Which, in your estimation, are?...
| Ancapistani wrote:
| Inside Twitter, I don't have enough context to say much in
| detail. I will say that 7.5k employees seems very high
| given their product offerings, and that the existence of
| things like an "ML Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability
| Team" at least lend credence to the idea that many of those
| people weren't contributing directly to the company's
| revenue.
|
| Outside of Twitter: the purchase was high profile and
| novel, made by a popular figure whose star seems to still
| be on the rise. There was drama around it for months, and
| we still don't really know if Musk _really meant_ to buy
| it. Musk 's personality alone is interesting. Then there
| are the responses of people approximately split down party
| lines in the US, the various communities that use Twitter
| heavily today, advertisers, and high-profile people who
| have run afoul of Twitter in the past.
|
| Finally - and perhaps most impactful of all, though it's
| not been extensively discussed here - there is the possible
| impact this will have on US politics. Exactly how much of
| Trump's popularity ~2015-2020 was due to his tweets? Will
| his account be reinstated? If so, will he use it? Will he
| resume using it the way he did before, or will he feel less
| encumbered by Twitter's policies and be even more
| bombastic/inflammatory? How will that impact the 2024
| presidential election?
|
| From where I sit, I have no idea where things will end up.
| Any outcome from "Musk loses tens of billions of dollars as
| Twitter ceases operation" to "Elon Musk sends his
| congratulations to President Trump from his home at the
| SpaceX lunar outpost after his election to a second term".
|
| If you don't find such a range of possibilities
| interesting, I don't know what to tell you :)
| Cyberdog wrote:
| I don't really relate or sympathize with the Silicon Valley
| types, no. I don't do the yoga and $8 latte-shakes and the
| Kegerators and Ping-Ping tables; I come into an office I rent
| myself in a flyover state, do a full day of work, and then go
| home, usually after sundown, seven days a week, and I make a
| lot less than those kids in California do. So it doesn't really
| burn me up to see the less productive ones trimmed off.
|
| I read elsewhere that they all get 60 days of salary as
| severance, so I'm not interested in hearing sob stories about
| being fired right before the holidays either.
|
| If you got laid off in these cuts, you'll do fine. Just find
| another SV company that's hiring, go in there with "Twitter"
| prominently on the CV and play up a sob story about how that
| mean ol' racist fascist homophobe fired you because you
| wouldn't give him a Roman salute or whatever, and you'll be
| back to working in an office with bean-bag chairs and free
| vegan flatbread brunches in a jiffy.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| This is a discussion board. Therefore, commenting at all
| requires something to discuss, and there is nothing really to
| discuss specifically around the topic of empathy towards the
| laid off employees.
|
| It sucks, we all know it sucks, and it shouldn't be minimized
| but there's no "other side" to that viewpoint, so what is there
| to talk about? People aren't "heartless" because they choose to
| talk about the bigger picture rather than wallowing in
| sympathy.
| uwuemu wrote:
| The vast majority of the people let go were management-class
| silicon valley people. Not a single tear should be shed.
| [deleted]
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| And just like that we found a counterpoint to "Empathy is
| obvious, nothing to discuss there"; I assume the explicit
| point here is "Management aren't people and shouldn't be
| treated as such"? :)
| fullshark wrote:
| We aren't employees on HN, just temporarily embarrassed
| founders.
| [deleted]
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Everywhere I worked access to systems was revoked before people
| received their termination communication from HR. This is
| standard practice in industry to prevent last minute IP theft, or
| destructive revenge actions at an emotional time.
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| For the employee(s) being laid off, yes. I've never heard of a
| company closing their offices entirely during a layoff round.
|
| (That doesn't mean it hasn't happened!)
| tumetab1 wrote:
| I think it means that they feel that they can do it safely
| without it. It also saves them from having journalists taking
| photos.
|
| Your security team and HR team must be really good lay-off
| some many people without causing violence, law suits, data
| leaks.
|
| I can easily imagine that if 50% of people present in a
| office were laid off some would start a protest within the
| office which could degrade into some violence, damages and
| law suits. Also, having the HR systems automation must be
| really on par to revoke access correctly to so many people.
| stokesr wrote:
| Notified of your being let go via a personal email? So no
| opportunity to back up your data, save contacts (which might come
| in handy for finding other employment), any notes or drafts...
| Brilliant idea, honestly ...
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| Literally no place I've ever worked in my decades in the tech
| industry were laid off workers allowed any physical or virtual
| access to company property post layoff. I'm sure it happens
| sometimes, in rare circumstances, but to pretend that this is
| especially egregious is disingenuous.
| wussboy wrote:
| You'd think a little bit of forethought would cause you to have
| done that at any point in the last few weeks since this shit-
| show started, just in case.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| "Back up your data?" Why would you back up company data to your
| personal storage? That sounds like huge legal trouble
| crnkofe wrote:
| Looking at how Musk handles business and public comms makes me
| loose more and more respect for this guy with every passing
| second. It's all fun and games when you have a few hundred mills
| in the bank. Hopefully the people that left were prepared. Given
| his public behavior it was kind of expected. I'm not sure if
| people that stayed are now worse or better off.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| iamdbtoo wrote:
| > They made a ton of cash, will likely get a lot of
| severance, and work in an industry and area where it is easy
| to do that with their experience.
|
| Is that all one's life boils down to?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| When you take a job at a consistently unprofitable company,
| you kinda have to accept that's what you signed up for.
| Every job at Twitter is a speculative bet that might or
| might not pan out. I'm not saying they're not allowed to
| feel bad or complain about it, but a sale followed by rapid
| staff cuts is what always happens to startups who don't do
| well enough on their own.
| luckylion wrote:
| No, they also got the opportunity to build a system to make
| people miserable at scale. And, it's important to remember
| that, their life isn't over. They're not being marched into
| the ocean this afternoon, they just need to get a new job
| in the area, which is unlikely to be too hard.
| westpfelia wrote:
| This is America. A persons value is 100% derived from the
| increase in capital they provide billionaires.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| We're not talking about life, we're talking about their
| job.
|
| The answer is yes: Jobs generally boil down to exchanging
| labor for cash. When people are willing to do a job without
| pay, we call it "volunteering" instead.
| iamdbtoo wrote:
| We spend 40 hours a day for nearly our entire adult lives
| at work but we're not talking about life? Are you
| serious?
| raisedbyninjas wrote:
| These are people that have many job opportunities and chose to
| work at the poison factory.
| [deleted]
| giarc wrote:
| The people that stayed at least have a job, but they likely
| have to pick up the slack for all those that left.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| Sweet let me know when they're hiring.
| brandonagr2 wrote:
| How much blame should go to Jack + Parag for _doubling_ the
| twitter work force in just the past couple of years?
| spyremeown wrote:
| I have a question: why companies like Twitter need so many
| people? I'm sorry but it doesn't seem that hard to replicated
| Twitter functionality and scalability (with the right people on
| team). What are the engineers actually doing the whole day? Why
| do they need so many lines of code? All mysterious to me.
| clusterhacks wrote:
| My experience is that software businesses and teams have an
| internal pressure to grow the number of software engineers on
| staff. I have seen three things swirl together to cause that.
|
| 1 - During periods of company growth (increased revenue and
| profits), there is a tendency of leadership to not have their
| hands on the wheel. You tend to see growth in company "cost-
| centers" instead of "profit centers." So you'll get new efforts
| that don't directly contribute much in increasing revenue.
| Early in my career I wasn't tuned into the need to really build
| your work and projects directly into profit center activities.
|
| 2 - Internally, I have seen people grow the number of staff
| underneath them as an almost weird way of justifying a
| promotion (eg, "executive VP mucky-mucks have N employees and
| I'm now managing N employees, promote me to executive VP mucky-
| muck").
|
| 3 - I have seen smaller companies really focus in on the
| revenue and/or profit per employee number to guide hiring
| plans. So during a good period of revenue/profit growth, a
| CEO/owner-type will say something like "It looks like every
| engineer I add at $1X0,000 is resulting in $[2|3|4]X0,000
| additional revenue or profit - let's just keep adding
| engineers." These napkin calculations are devoid of deeper
| market analysis.
|
| If you went one-on-one with every single software engineer at a
| big tech company or in a smaller org, you probably wouldn't
| find many who aren't busy with work. You just probably would
| find a bunch on "nice to have" work instead of real revenue
| generators.
| philjohn wrote:
| It's a fair question, and shows that a lot of these sites are
| like icebergs - they look simple until you delve beneath the
| surface.
|
| How are you detecting human trafficing and reporting it (FOSTA-
| SESTA)?
|
| How are you detecting CSAM and reporting offenders to NCMEC?
|
| How are you detecting and removing spam? How are you preventing
| fraudulent ad clicks? How do you deal with "whale" accounts
| (very large follower counts) and returning an algorithmic feed
| for their followers?
|
| I interviewed for their deveng team and they were doing things
| like build-caches because it sped up compiles and increased
| productivity. Also optimising the Scala compiler (more
| productivity gains).
| fredgrott wrote:
| Some context, these are the platforms that are at 1 billion or
| getting close to 1 billion users:
|
| FB Instagram Youtube Linkedin
|
| Notice that twitter, despite it's age is nowhere close to closing
| on LinkedIN's current 700 million users.
|
| Those worried about Journalists have not followed the upswing in
| Instagram users by journalists...some well known Liberal leaning
| journalist networks are now current Instagram users and creators.
|
| The Twitter employees let go, got a gift of being freed from
| working for someone that factually is perceived as white superior
| race advocate including racism.
|
| Advertisers, current Twitter employees and users all have the
| most important vote and objection to this...our feet and
| attention.
| iwiser wrote:
| Folks from Twitter and other companies! I know that layoffs are
| brutal. We are primarily at tech-winter. At the same time, we,
| Wise (formerly TransferWise) - actively looking for engineers,
| product managers, and engineering managers, designers. Many roles
| are open, and we are growing quite a lot! We have a product our
| customers love, and we care about our employees a lot! We are
| pretty good financially and have a clear vision of which one we
| are executing. If you are interested - you can browse the list of
| open roles here: https://grnh.se/1f3d39a91us and apply for them.
| You can write me directly, and I will try to answer anything as
| much as possible.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| The ML Ethics, Transparency, & Accountability team. i find it
| interesting Twitter need a ethics, transparency and
| accountability team for ML. is Twitter worry about creating a
| Skynet or something?
| mr90210 wrote:
| You need ethics as soon as you start dealing with privileged
| access to public's data.
| warlord1 wrote:
| Animats wrote:
| Craigslist has about 50 employees. If it really had to, Twitter
| could probably run with 50 employees and AWS.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| cleaning house. nice. we should do the same. during production
| incidents there are 4:1 managers to engineers.
| the42thdoctor wrote:
| Let's wait for the severance package, I hope they do something
| similar to Stripe.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| I don't get all this antipathy towards what Musk is doing. It's
| an established maxim of the venerated Warren Buffet that the very
| first thing you need to do after buying a company is clean house,
| and get rid of the people who put it in the shape that made it
| buyable to begin with, starting, and especially, at the top.
| hankerito wrote:
| I would say, a lot of it has to do with style? Even if
| something is necessary - and I have now idea if it is - but
| even if, there are better, more friendly and respectful ways of
| dealing with all of this right?
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| You suggest you don't even know if it's necessary to cut
| staff, but if _you_ had bought Twitter, currently losing
| money for 3 years in a row, what would you do to turn the
| ship around more "respectfully?"
|
| I think most people who are whinging about this -- especially
| here, on this forum -- are people who wouldn't think twice,
| if this were happening at any other big "Web 2.0" company.
| And, in fact, they'd probably cheer on the "decisive" and
| "courageous" leadership. I think they just don't like Musk,
| and don't like that he's bought Twitter, because they believe
| the narrative -- as I've seen many people suggest -- that
| it's going to somehow veer hard right, and become 4chan 2.0.
| partiallypro wrote:
| I'm not a huge Musk fan, mostly because of his political
| ramblings and especially revolving around Ukraine; but I find the
| sudden hatred of him pretty odd. Mass layoffs happen all the
| time, Square just announced a 14% cut yesterday. In terms of
| Twitter's current moderation nothing has really changed on the
| platform, I'm an avid user and have seen no difference.
|
| It's not really just Musk, it feels like there is a turn on any
| social media platform that doesn't do wide arrays of censorship
| that lean whatever way you're inclined to agree with (this
| includes conservatives hating TikTok.) Musk has said he wants a
| free-speech platform but has never claimed it would have no
| moderation. There was a piece somewhere about a rise in the use
| of the N word, but there was no follow up showing if those
| accounts were banned. Seems like an important part of the story.
|
| Honestly some of this feels like a hit job. I've not found anyone
| that can point to something inherently wrong with the new vision
| of Twitter that isn't based in some crazy hyperbole not in tune
| with reality. Twitter has been horribly run for ages, someone
| trying to revive it isn't bad.
|
| When I use a platform, unless the person is a literal Nazi or
| Communist, I don't care what their political beliefs are. I care
| about the product. I think that is being lost on people where now
| everything revolves around politics. It's kind of sad, especially
| when we all basically agree on 90% of things and policy.
|
| We used to complain about data silos and filter bubbles...and now
| people just leave platforms because leadership may not share
| their political views? How is that good? I think the media itself
| has fed into this because they have always hated social media
| (for better or worse) for making them no longer the first source
| of news when print was already dying.
| mikkergp wrote:
| What is the new vision for twitter? Musk has ridiculed his
| customers, acted unpredictably, and fired people
| unceremoniously while joking about on Twitter.
|
| To me, all of the reaction seems to be completely appropriate
| given his actions. This is why actions matter! This is why
| CEO's get communications training, because in the absence of
| reading his mind, the world has to react to his behavior. Being
| a leader of a 45 billion dollar corporation is hard, this is
| why most CEO's that do it don't have two other part time jobs.
| Maybe it will turn out ok, but I don't see how you can not see
| that his behavior warrants scrutiny and pause, and seemingly
| attribute it all to vague notions of political beliefs.
| partiallypro wrote:
| Do you honestly think your first sentence has anything to do
| with public/media reaction? I mean honestly? Because the same
| reaction happened in April when none of this had occurred.
| There had been a turn against Musk before the Twitter
| acquisition was even a thought. I just find it interesting.
| sbf501 wrote:
| It is illegal to do layoffs like this at scale without
| following the California WARN act:
|
| https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/03/tech/twitter-layoffs/inde...
|
| It's a dick move and demonstrates someone who doesn't
| understand how to build worker loyalty. Forcing people to tap
| dance 80+ hours a week or be fired (without mega compensation)
| doesn't earn you loyalty. Yeah, he claims he works 120 hour
| weeks, but he also reaps nearly all of the compensation.
|
| But I think the benefit of all this is having someone trying to
| break the laws. He's pentesting federal & state worker
| protections. That's a good thing in the long term, not so much
| in the short term.
| partiallypro wrote:
| I'm well aware of the law, it has been posted everywhere.
| However, the article questions itself, because it doesn't say
| how many have actually been laid off, when that date is
| effective or if they will just get their pay for 60 days; so
| he might not even be in violation. I don't think Elon is just
| doing this all solo, he probably has a legal department and
| also has advice from one of his co-investors which is still
| Jack Dorsey.
|
| All of which kind of supports my point of the media doing a
| bit of a hitjob. They did the same during the Cambridge
| Analytica scandal and a huge portion of the reporting came
| out to later be mostly not true. The irony is that the media
| may be doing exactly what they want Twitter to crack down on.
| sbf501 wrote:
| "They" did the same thing? What was "mostly not true" about
| the CA scandal?
| jimbob45 wrote:
| They might still technically be employed and receiving
| paychecks for 60 days to keep this legal.
| sbf501 wrote:
| Yeah, just learned that they are paid until Feb 2023 and
| RSUs vest.
|
| Vacation time!
| Niksko wrote:
| Time and time again, Musk has shown that he does not understand
| the nuances of free speech and moderation, and has presented
| nothing to indicate that he has any new solutions to the
| problems he is claiming to want to solve.
|
| You're applying good faith reasoning to someone with a proven
| track record of acting in bad faith. That's noble of you, but
| you shouldn't be surprised if others don't follow suit.
| maxpowersage wrote:
| pertymcpert wrote:
| Why does it warm your heart?
| maxpowersage wrote:
| For the exact reason I'm being down voted.
| pertymcpert wrote:
| Which is?
| maxpowersage wrote:
| The exact reason Elon Musk is laying these people off.
| maxpowersage wrote:
| I mean you literally could not give me a more perfect
| example of why I am happy today. Flagged and downvoted.
| pertymcpert wrote:
| > For the exact reason I'm being down voted.
|
| > The exact reason Elon Musk is laying these people off.
|
| Still not sure what you're talking about. Are you saying
| that you're being downvoted because Twitter is reducing
| costs?
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| Layoffs are really tough on anyone, but Silicon Valley lay-offs
| are met with more indignation. Most people get laid off, they
| take the severance, and they start looking for a new job. With
| Twitter, etc The decision to lay someone office met with such
| indignation like how dare you lay ME off.
|
| The whole response to the layoffs just doesn't sit well with me.
| It's the righteous elite complaining that they have to eat cake
| irae wrote:
| The specific team the article mentions, the "inventing and
| building ethical AI [stuff]" seems like a very reasonable choice
| for layoff. This is a company in debit, and as such I see no good
| reason for them to have a long term, unknown timeline, unknown
| outcomes and (likely) expensive team. Especially considering how
| much AI critics accuse AI of being racist, sexist and all sorts
| of impossible to judge human behavior without bias.
| trashtester wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Elon has more confidence in the Tesla AI team.
| I suppose he will move someone he trusts into a team lead for
| whatever AI activities (if any) Twitter will have in the
| future.
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