News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by helsinkiandrew on Friday September 30, 2022 @06:26AM (#33033114)
Shame he couldn't do anything about that when he was either CEO, chairman or on the board of Twitter (for most of its existence).

As Bloomberg said yesterday: "Twitter Is in This Mess Because Jack Dorsey Was Too Busy Being a Bitcoin Influencer"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-29/twitter-t...

https://archive.ph/7ugqn

Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by ekianjo on Friday September 30, 2022 @06:52AM (#33033297)
Bloomberg are idiots talking out of their asses. They have never worked in tech companies
Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by currenciessfe on Friday September 30, 2022 @07:07AM (#33033386)
You are both right and wrong.

Bloomberg IS a tech company. But the journalists obviously don't mingle with that part.

Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by morelisp on Friday September 30, 2022 @07:42AM (#33033594)
More like, "tech company" has nothing to do with whether a company's product or competitive advantage lies in technology and just means "popular company" or today more like "SHR-funded company".

I'm reminded of how often I had to read about "tech companies vs. telcos", "tech companies vs. ISPs" during the net neutrality discussion, or "tech company vs. car company" for AVs, or "tech company vs. broadcaster" for streaming/advertising...

Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by dis-sys on Friday September 30, 2022 @08:10AM (#33033802)
> Bloomberg IS a tech company.

This is like saying Microsoft is a charity - worst joke I heard in Sept 2022.

Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by cochne on Friday September 30, 2022 @08:25AM (#33033938)
I think it’s a tech company. They employ lots of software engineers who develop a software product which is their central business. Why do you think it is not a tech company?
Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by monkpit on Friday September 30, 2022 @09:08AM (#33034353)
It’s sort of like saying Amazon is a delivery company. It’s part of a division of their company, and a main component at that. But it’s not like SREs working at AWS know or care about logistics.
Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by cochne on Friday September 30, 2022 @11:11AM (#33035949)
I don't really understand the parallel. It's not like software engineers at Bloomberg really know or care all that much about finance. The vast majority just work on the software product that moves financial information.
Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by monkpit on Friday September 30, 2022 @01:34PM (#33037963)
The parallel is to say Bloomberg journalists are tech experts because “it’s a tech company”. The journalists are just journalists
Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by colinmhayes on Friday September 30, 2022 @11:36AM (#33036306)
Amazon is a logistics company though. Solving logistics is pretty much the entire value add of the retail arm.
Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by achenet on Friday September 30, 2022 @10:40AM (#33035528)
uh, Bloomberg's original business was selling computer systems.

" Bloomberg developed and built his own computerized system to provide real-time market data, financial calculations and other financial analytics to Wall Street firms. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_L.P.

Microsoft's original thing was NOT philanthropy.

Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by MrMan on Friday September 30, 2022 @09:12AM (#33034401)
there is no such thing as a tech company except maybe biotech or other R&d based businesses.
Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by planb on Friday September 30, 2022 @07:00AM (#33033347)
This is funny, because that's exactly the thing "The Old Industries" said before being disrupted by tech companies.
Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by kspacewalk2 on Friday September 30, 2022 @07:41AM (#33033591)
Bloomberg itself is "the old industries", in several domains including supposed-journalism. In the parlance of starry-eyed overglorified bloggers, they're the "legacy media".
Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by whatgoodisaroad on Friday September 30, 2022 @11:05AM (#33035871)
Bloomberg also still hasn't printed a redaction of "The Big Hack" which is extremely damning to their journalistic credibility.
Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by rchaud on Friday September 30, 2022 @10:27AM (#33035311)
Hard to call Twitter a "tech company" considering how difficult it was for them to switch to 280 chars. What tech milestones did they hit in the past 7-8 years? Muted words?
Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by tazjin on Friday September 30, 2022 @07:04AM (#33033373)
It seems to me that once your middle management is infested with the wrong kind of non-tech people (because you couldn't resist "growing" forever), you don't stand a chance anymore.

To me it seems this is what happened to Larry & Sergey, too.

Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by travisgriggs on Friday September 30, 2022 @07:36AM (#33033550)
> It seems to me that once your middle management is infested with non-tech people (because you couldn't resist "growing" forever), you don't stand a chance anymore.

I fixed a redundancy for you.

Otherwise, spot on, and if I had one of those vinyl printers my wife uses to put things like “Home is where your heart is” on the wall, I’d print this, and hang it secretly on the bathroom walls at work.

I’m experiencing this right now sadly. Came to work at a company a decade ago with a lot of equality and flat/low management. Engineers of various disciplines were predominantly middle/older, so there was a sense of “we’re all adults here” and it’s worked pretty well for a long time. But as staff is retiring and the business is growing because it forking worked well, the cry for more middle management to “scale” has been heard. Need point people. Points of responsibility. Because we can’t spare real engineers, these are often people with “some engineering in their background” or just know how to play the good buddy network really well and evoke a sense of “trust.” The relationship that’s emerging now with middle management layers is more the family structure. Instead of being a group of collaborative light management adults, the middle manager assumes the parent role, and the workers become the kids. They get to take less risk, be less responsible and avoid the “adulting” stuff that is (endless) meetings and the like. The management/parents obsess about the way their group/family is seen elsewhere in the company. Protecting them name and reputation takes an increased precedence. The “adult kids”, the experiences engineers who want to be treated like adults and not over managed, start looking for a new home to move to.

It’s sad really.

Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by swalsh on Friday September 30, 2022 @08:06AM (#33033771)
Flat management hasn't really worked well for Valve. With no formal power structures they seem to have just formed informal power structures which aren't necessairly pushing the company forward...
Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by marcinzm on Friday September 30, 2022 @08:35AM (#33034021)
As I see it, most every structure works when you've got a fountain of never ending cash. The true test of a corporate structure is when that fountain starts to run dry or there was never a fountain to begin with. Facebook is hitting that wall now.
Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by prepend on Friday September 30, 2022 @08:50AM (#33034169)
I think it depends on what “worked well” means.

They have stagnated product wise but it seems that their employees are happy and they make enough money to be profitable.

I think this is also a function of their competitors being jerks (Epic) or not really caring (Apple App Store). So a true competitor could likely eat their lunch if they really wanted to.

Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by thatguy0900 on Friday September 30, 2022 @12:53PM (#33037295)
If valve didn't have access to free effortless money then it's informal structures might look very different by necessity. As of now there must not be much drive to change anything.
Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by saalweachter on Friday September 30, 2022 @08:22AM (#33033905)
People misunderstand the Peter Principle.

Why do you think our startup heroes were failed from below, rather than simply "having been promoted to the level of their incompetence"?

Dilbert, et al, rewrote the principle as, you promote the incompetent so they don't interfere with the real work. Or maybe that brown-nosers get promoted until they get fired. Or that the more incompetent you are the more you get promoted. But it's always been about how smart people who do good work end up in over their heads.

The reward for a job well done is another job, a harder or different job. Eventually you run up against a harder, bigger, different job you just can't hack. It doesn't matter if you're being promoted by your manager, yourself, or the invisible hand of the market.

Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by abruzzi on Friday September 30, 2022 @10:35AM (#33035448)
yup. I live the Peter principle every day. Its really that your promoted because you were good at your old job, but that doesn't guarantee that you are good at your new job, and eventually you get promoted to a job you're not good at. Where I work, a lot of excellent tech people have been promoted into management positions, and we all suck at it. We're better at tech.
Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by helsinkiandrew on Friday September 30, 2022 @07:07AM (#33033388)
> that once your middle management is infested with the wrong kind of non-tech people

Surely that's the responsibility of the CEO/chairman/board who recruit and direct the staff?

Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by sokoloff on Friday September 30, 2022 @07:40AM (#33033577)
Over a long enough time, everything is. The question is whether they had a better alternative along the path. If many/most companies are infested, the wrong kind of middle management must be quite common. If it’s quite common, avoiding hiring from it (or avoiding the effects when you do) could be very difficult. It’s still a problem that lands on their desks, but might be less “how could they be so stupid?!” than portrayed above.
Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by tazjin on Friday September 30, 2022 @07:41AM (#33033586)
Yes, but it's easy to get overwhelmed during that explosive growth phase and, well, see the Steve Jobs anecdote about "A players". Once the damage is done it's hard/impossible to undo.
Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by doctor_eval on Friday September 30, 2022 @07:26AM (#33033484)
Yeah I reckon at Google, that came from above. That was Schmidt.

> "There is what I call the creepy line," he said, according to The Hill. "The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."

Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by bushbaba on Friday September 30, 2022 @10:11AM (#33035071)
Schmidt ran the company relatively well. Googles issue is the lack of focus and rewarding technically complex 10x ideas. Meaning long term recurring compound gains is not rewarded.
Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by TT-392 on Friday September 30, 2022 @07:17AM (#33033439)
Pretty sure twitter was a mess before bitcoin became relevant
Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by SmokeyHamster on Friday September 30, 2022 @11:53AM (#33036547)
In Dorsey's own words, he was only one vote on the board, and only had 3% share in the company.

Whether he put 100% of his time into Twitter or 1%, that doesn't change the fact that he had very limited influence over his own company. Twitter's board is what has caused all their problems, often by explicitly rejecting Dorsey's advice.

Re:Jack Dorsey texts Elon Musk, March 26, 2022 by LAMike on Friday September 30, 2022 @07:22AM (#33033458)
> Bloomberg said

Irrelevant East Coast media company comments on Bitcoin lol