Actually, I have noticed that in the last year or two they refuse to show me more than a tweet or two until trying to force me to log in.
Things like that are usually UX driven, developers often don't have any recourse beyond implementing what's demanded in such a setting.
One frame through which you could view Twitter is it was the place where famous / popular / important (athletes, movie stars, government officials) talk to the public. Spaces, enabling audio conversations for those people, makes tons of sense.
So also Twitter Blue letting you read certain news w/o a paywall. If you're a serious consumer of news on Twitter, wsj/nyt/wapo/latimes/ft probably cost $1500/year. If the economics worked for the news orgs, there was huge value there.
Of course, they really sat on the product for 5+ years, so oof...
You underestimate the effort it takes to keep a service as large as Twitter running. Constant software upgrades to maintain high standard of security, inevitable technological break-age, deprecated dependencies, operations, root-causing failures, migrations (you can't avoid hardware migrations; hardware will die out), planning fallacy, etc, etc.
I think the point you are missing that especially tech people might have been using twitter for 10 years like a public IRC client. Open App/Browser, read messages, write messages, complain about lack of linear timeline, close app.
Yes, it has grown, but they added a million features that probably none of the people here asked for. We don't necessarily follow Justin Bieber where the system needs to be able to handle 2m users connected, we follow a kernel developer with 2000 followers.
I guess it's a marvel of engineering that's mostly needed for whatever method they found to make money off, I'm still asking myself this after these years.
He reports that they were worried that if a DC went offline they might not be able to bring it back up again!
Their servers in their DCs were running unpatched operating systems with no disk encryption!
I highly recommend reading his full report. The level of disfunction he reports is insane.
A team of 30 works at zerodha for serving 6.2 million users. They are largest trading broker in India.
There story is worth a read https://zerodha.tech/blog/hello-world/
Edit: Apparently they have 1200 employees for operations and everything else. Thanks to child comment for pointing that out.
They are largest broker so others might be sales, legal, marketting, hr guys
Trading brokers don't need to make spam-filtering tools, CSAM filters, ads tools, handling huge video/image data, or handling a global audience.
I suspect most brokers's tech is way simpler than Twitter's.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2022/t...
"Zatko’s complaint alleges he had warned colleagues that half the company’s servers were running out-of-date and vulnerable software and that executives withheld dire facts about the number of breaches and lack of protection for user data, instead presenting directors with rosy charts measuring unimportant changes."
Firing incompetent people might improve things, not make them worse.
Both companies were very close to failure several times. There was never a room for slack.
Reusable rockets and Starlink for example are extremely expensive investments that paid off, but SpaceX didn’t need them to prosper. Tesla’s stability suffered from continuous expansion of manufacturing requiring continues investment as well as Self Driving and other R&D investments which weren’t actually needed.
Which isn’t to say these where poor investments, but pushing the envelope simply increases risk.
Absolutely yes. The sort of high performing people who join places like SpaceX and Tesla need very very little pressure to get them to work at full speed. Usually it just takes a nudge here and there, and they'll work themselves like crazy. The extra pressure on top is pure stress, and causes people to narrow their thinking and make mistakes.
The most important thing that good leadership brings is clear direction and high standards. Elon has these qualities for sure, and he could do away with the overstressing of his employees and would still be just as successful. Happy employees are productive. This was obvious in the early days of many startups, with Google as the prime example, but now the copycats will think that treating people as disposable is how to be successful like Elon.
You are making it sound like Elon is the type of person who always pesters people and attempts to micromanage them to squeeze every ounce of "productivity" juice he can get out of the forcefully.
But obviously if that was his style, Tesla and SpaceX would never take off.
> The most important thing that good leadership brings is clear direction and high standards.
Isn't that exactly what he brings? And isn't that what's bringing him under fire in this HN thread? People acting all horrofied because he's actually enforcing the high standards that you say he should have.
This is exactly what I hear 2nd hand. His workplaces are miserable to be in because of extreme micromanagement, and expectations of long hours despite the personal and health cost to his employees.
>> The most important thing that good leadership brings is clear direction and high standards.
>
> Isn't that exactly what he brings? And isn't that what's bringing him under fire in this HN thread? People acting all horrofied because he's actually enforcing the high standards that you say he should have.
Yes, but he mixes these good leadership qualities with pointlessly bad leadership qualities. He has high standards for the quality of the work (good), but he combines it with high standards for how unhappy you have to be while doing it (not good).
I'm not debating that Elon is successful and effective--it's obvious that he is. However, on top of being effective he just chooses to treat people like shit.
Well the truth is when you walk into a company that hires people for a quarter million dollars at scale, you are truly a number on a spreadsheet. The only way you can cut budget on 500 engineers at that price is not by firing Bob the underperformer, but instead 1/5 or 2/5 of that entire staff.
It should make you wonder what is that leetcode for? You are not that important or expensive in the backroom of some enterprise or medium sized business to be slashed like that. But when you are part of a 50 million dollar budget, bet your ass you have a 50/50 chance of being part of that 25 million the company suddenly wants to save.
The underperformer stuff has nothing to do with it.
Except it won't take effect immediately. It's not like Twitter will only load 50% of the pages or it will be 2x slower the day the layoffs kick in.
I think the main hypothesis is that Twitter will have an S-curve decline.
Since so much work in a large org is communication, if they're able to do layoffs effectively and actually cut out the least productive people - 50% could take a while to have any visible external impacts.
That's my guess at least.
Sad for the people that lost good jobs, but I'm excited we get an opportunity to witness a massive cut like this and learn from it.
We've seen a lot of these, what do you plan to learn from this specific one?
From one perspective Elon is doing what Zuck doesn't have the balls to pull off. The product is mature, has passed peak enthusiasm already, time to stop growing+exploring, and start battening down the hatches?
Sure, in the very short term you could probably fire 80% of people and make the other 20% work 7-16s. But that's not going to end well.
Seems like if large chunks of the employee base are talking smack on the possible new CEO, not even as a corporation but as an individual, they shouldn't be unduly surprised if the CEO decides to show them the door when he gets in since he can't be sure they won't be actively hostile.
And I know this is happening in such a way that they aren't just letting go of people that talked smack on musk, but still I don't know what supposed adults were thinking when they were s*t talking their new potential CEO.
I think it's worth introspecting on where you got this impression and what "many Twitter employees" means. It seems to me there are many powerful people who want you to have this impression but that doesn't mean it's true. Twitter had thousands of employees and I'd bet a strong majority of them are not ideologues in the way you imagine. Just people who work 9-5 and value job security.
I don't know if Elon Musk was ever "the hero of the left", or any tech executive for that matter? He definitely has his fans (among techies mostly), but you would be hard pressed for any hardcore leftist to see a CEO as their hero. The whole pedo thai diver incident turn even many left-leaning (and unaligned, and right-leaning) techies from pro to neutral or even negative.
This isn’t to say I advocate for people being any of those things, it’s just somehow become generally accepted that these things are somehow inherently breaking the law or some kind of hate crime. Even on the rare instance someone displays some racist material in public, the news is quick to say police are investigating…investigating what, exactly? “Hate speech” is not a crime in the US.
Personally I consider it meaningless metric since almost all American tech companies are left-leaning, for various reasons.
So is, "Don't talk open shit about your future boss" a point? Yeah, but so is Elon treating this process like an inhumane animal. The latter trump's a bunch of plebians with loud opinions.
What a sensitive man-baby. For all his flaws, Mark Zuckerberg is no glass cannon. He is not prone to rage because his employees dared question him.
I'm optimistic for Twitter's future. I thought it had stagnated long ago, but I'm intrigued now.
Yes, this is what people really need to be worried about. Not about Elon's policies ruining Twitter or whatever; that's the good outcome. The bad outcome is: what happens if Elon lays off 50% of Twitter, and a year later it turns from a floundering social media company that's not doing anything with its dominant market share into a profitable adtech powerhouse that rivals Meta and Google? If that happens, then your company's CEO is going to be laying off 50% of staff, too.
Is that really still the case? Most of the time I read something about Elon the comment section is very negative, compared to some years ago and it seems rare to encounter a Musk fanboy anymore.
Can we swap internets? I see plenty of them just in the comments under this story, never mind elsewhere.
Ah yes, the what if I’m really not only ineffective, but a net negative on my company and they find out anxiety.
So dropping 50% even if it harms the company may become a major move.
Isn't one of his stated goals for Twitter to become much less reliant on advertising income? Hence the whole Twitter Blue $8/month thing.
This is the single bizarrest and most literally inaccurate use of the phrase “single-handedly” I have ever seen.
What Tesla and SpaceX have done are enormous human undertakings. He did not single-handedly do it by any rational interpretation. The delusional self-confidence he used to get investors to pay for those undertakings is what's about to destroy Twitter.
Anecdotal, but I spend a lot of time on a lot of tech forums, and the vastly prevailing opinion among the folks there is "I wouldn't work at Twitter right now for any amount of money."
The man is a moron. His engineers probably would've developed it anyway, just elsewhere.
Past performance does indicate future success. Nothing about this twitter story, from waving due dilligence, to trying to pull of a signed deal, to treatnent of employees, indicates competent management
Right but that isn't the problem here, Twitter already solved that. What they haven't been able to do is make a short-form blog posting service that's profitable. Everything Musk has announced so far suggests he doesn't really understand how to change that.
what changes, if not these, would make Twitter profitable?
Particularly on the eve of thousands losing their job and arguably having a hard time to find a new one in this market.
How is this not a mindless non sequitur. What the hell does trying to buy ICBMs have to do with “turning around twitter”.
Twitter is much leaner compared to Meta or Google, and they can't really be compared on many levels.
The experiment is nonetheless interesting.
I bet that the major influence if the layoff is the internal company spirit and morale, if the damage is too deep, the company could sink.
Fortunately for them, I don't think they really need a huge team to simply keep the lights on and the servers running.
Can you turn around people who are used to coming in at 10, getting coffee/snacks for the next 30 minutes who then talk shop for 30 minutes, figure out who's on-call this week, set up some meetings, train new onboard, then discuss lunch plans and when they'll head down to the gym, then return at 2 for a meeting, at 3 do some work, then talk about whether it's uber or something else back home while getting their favorite drink prepared.
Can that be turned around, or are those apples spoiled?
This isn't a knock on you. This is a knock on people who are parasitic to a company. Look, people cargo culted the SGI&Sun ethos and said, aha, they know! Let's follow. But these places are no longer the cult of engineers, it's the cult of MBAs and biz-dev types who if they were not in tech would be doing similar useless things at investment banking firms.
Here is a biz-dev at TWTTR: in her own words: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/skmAZHNuEP0
Same, with MST 3000-style commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk6T1pmHCAE
That commentary video is also worse than useless; they're obviously not aware of how tech companies operate. They're commenting on things like the office being empty and the employee visiting the office for the first time. Are they not aware of WFH? The "gourmet" meals are also standard at many tech companies, and are an extremely small part of the cost. It's not like vegetables are more expensive when you prepare them in a way that looks good. On the net, offering the free food (and smoothie, foosball etc.) leads to much more value created than they cost to provide. This mentality is penny-wise, pound-foolish.
Anyone who focuses purely on hours worked or misery while working is merely perpetuating this country's unhealthy Protestant style relationship with work. If an employee can be fully productive to the demands of their work and still have time to chat or go to the gym, what is the issue? You act like you've just described the worst thing you've ever seen ("spoiled apples") but I just see a happy workforce.
Of course, if they are truly not productive, that's something different. But unless they are your reports, you have no idea what their true level of productivity is.
It's beyond time we start recognizing that happy employees are more productive, and stop shaming people for daring to seem happy at work. Because right now, a lot of us seem like the proverbial crab not letting others crawl out of the bucket.
Here's Andrej Karpathy's (ex-Tesla head of AI) explanation of Elon's leadership style and effectiveness.
I also saw the complete opposite at two companies which were decades old, but were distracted by CSR and processes. Both ceased to exist a few years ago.
I think that’s why Apple created so many iconic products under Jobs. You hear stories of Steve using the product and seeing a minor flaw and just flying off the handle that it’s not good enough, for the type of bug you know would have been a “priority 2 - won’t fix” in most large orgs on a product the CEO will never even use.
A “big hammer” who cares about the product can make a huge difference.
SpaceX has higher headcount and less revenue than Twitter. Despite the long hours and hazardous working environment they are dramatically less productive than the lazy woke Twitter employees.
Nothing I've ever read about him suggests that he operates in a humane manner.
He's like a lot of billionaires, views humans as cogs in the machine.
yawn
“I am really disgusted”
no one cares
True. He could have. In the meanwhile, he has signed Twitter up for massive amounts of loans whose annual interest exceeds the company's annual free cash flow. I am not up to speed with all of Twitter's finances, but this right here might be one of the fastest way to grow the free cash flow without affecting the core revenue stream of the ad business.
I don't think this would be an act of leadership if it comes to pass. This is just a consequence of the straitjacket that Elon has put Twitter in. Sometimes, constraints help. Let's see what these financial conditions do for Twitter.
It's unfortunate that it's happening in a downturn but that's not Musk's fault.
Serious question: how many jobs can really make a difference? How well do they pay and with what risk factors? Compare that to a steady paycheck where your way of making a difference it to try to make political and other internet discourse slightly nicer or at least less troll friendly.
He basically has to rely and trust people inside Twitter to make those decisions for him (can he, though?) or he has to fire people in an arbitrary way.
I don’t really understand how you can make that call unless you believe people are pretty much interchangeable and their emotions play no role.
It just seems inconceivable to me how you can meaningfully decide who to fire.
It‘s not as though this was an acquisition and suddenly the sales department is redundant and you can fire them all.
I would assume that you would need at least a couple months time to get to know the company and understand what and who might be redundant. I don’t think that question is easy to answer at all.
You might say that a perception of fairness is important so that employees trust leadership. Well, what's likely to happen is the fired people will think it's unfair, and the people chosen to remain will think "well, at least the right choice was made in my case". Of course, the opinion of the remaining people is what matters to the company going forward.
Is this for real? In Belgium, most developers would have a good laugh, go home and enjoy the weekend.
Personally, I am sad about these layoffs. Even if there are many many lazy Twitter engineers hanging out on the roof, it's still sad to see people treated so poorly. Elon just treats people with such disgust. I have seen the inside of companies like Twitter, and usually people check out because leadership fails to set any direction. An engineer joins, tries to get some things done, and then finds that they cannot within the company's structure. That engineer will give up and be "unproductive" for the rest of the time their. Elon could have handled the takeover in a serious and humane way. He could have set some product direction, given the employees some time to realign and get some of his features built, and then fired those who could not or chose not to keep up. Instead, he immediately forces everyone to work through the weekend on a random feature, and cuts people ASAP in the most malicious way he could.
I am really disgusted by this brand of "leadership," and it's hard to reconcile this with someone I'd like to respect for bringing electric cars to the masses, and the U.S. back into the space race. I feel deeply sorry for the Twitter engineers who are being squeezed for no purpose but selfishness and meanness, and I hope it doesn't spread through the industry.