There is a massive pool of engineers that if payed FAANG*1.1 salary would work on anything. As long as they set salaries correctly they will not have any issues recruiting talent.

You also seriously underestimate number of people pissed off about having spout the latest woke tropes to continue being employed at FAANG, those will go for much lower rate.

It feels like they outsourced this, or hired the people willing to do the work most cheaply. More likely they hired the people in their network who had any experience in this space and hoped for the best (Bill was director of engineering for a regional bank? He knows people, right?).

I don't doubt there would be engineers willing to work on this if 1) the pay was right 2) the culture was right. Do they have the executives in place who know how to set those two things to attract the best engineers? All signs point to no.

What? Half of the country voted for this guy. That's a pretty large pool of people to pull from for future employees.

> Half of the country voted for this guy.

Significantly less than half of the significantly less than half of the the country that voted at all voted for this guy.

Or, an alternate phrasing, significantly less than half the slightly more than half of eligible voters that actually voted at all voted for this guy.

But, in any case, nowhere near half of the country voted for him.

I'm not sure half of them would want to _work_ for him, though. He doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation as an employer.

Seems like the type of person to do something just for the resume pad or the chance of working with rather than working for. Any sane person knows that what ever agreement you start with will 100% be renegotiated later, and paid in full never.

Only ~60% of eligible US voters voted in 2016 and 2020, Trump lost the popular vote both times, "half of the country" did not vote for him.

74+ million did which worked out to 46.9%. That's pretty close to 50% for discussion purposes. That's a large pool of potential employees.

That's about 22.5% of the country, not half.

Might I interest you in a course on statistics and how smaller samplings can be used to extrapolate larger sets?

Then the correct statement would be "half the country would've voted for this guy, based on the number of people who did vote".

> 74+ million did which worked out to 46.9%.

Not of the country it didn't.

I guarantee you there are plenty of smart, capable, clever engineers willing (and likely motivated by sincerer personal belief) to work on Trump's Mastodon media clone.

I'm not one of them, but I also put active effort into not letting my social spheres from taint my view of "the other"'s ability too much.

I'm certain you're right that there are a lot of talented engineers with political philosophies all over the spectrum, many of whom I would whole-heartedly disagree with.

However, Trump and the folks in his immediate circle seem to drive away competence through a special combination of malice, selfishness, pettiness, projection, and short-sightedness that boggles the mind. Set aside ideology for a minute; it seems like not paying the bills is standard procedure for their organization, and I don't know who would stand for it regardless of their ideology.

Absolutely, the Truth platform will likely fail due to inept management, legal troubles, learning that moderation is actually a hard problem, etc.

I just want GGP to know that there are plenty of smart people willing to work on such a project (assuming they get paid) - and I want to combat this idea that the "other side" is just a bunch of bumbling bozos who don't know the difference between a bit and a byte.

There's likely also a small number of people who would work on this just because they believe in Trump's ideology, and would like to see Truth exist more than they'd like to get paid on a regular basis.

There are very few of Trump's allies that would ever work for him, either as an employee or a contractor. They can see his modus operandi clear as day.

And yet somehow there are always suckers that he can convince to do his shit for free. Of course there is a promise of payment, but the check never arrives.