Some engineers like George Hotz seem onboard with the new approach. I have no doubt some there are a couple hundred talented developers in the USA who would not only be fine, but enjoy the challenge.
My company has a "special operations task force" of disagreeable highly technical 10x to 100x engineers who come onto failing projects, fix them, and leave. These guys enjoy (almost unbelievably) extremely hard projects, and working 18-20 hr days to fix messes. They once took over a conference room for 2 weeks, and slept and showered in the company while fixing a major product.
I'm a manager for a high performance team but not that high performance. I have list of at least 100 names of high profile performance developers we keep an eye on.
https://twitter.com/peterclowes/status/1593458225533313025
> Finally, there was no retention plan for those that stayed. No clear upside for sticking it through the storm on the horizon. Just “trust us” style verbal promises. But tweeps overall were untrusting after the 7 months of acquisition drama, recent tweets, and leaks etc.
> So my friends are gone, the vision is murky, there is a storm coming and a no financial upside. What would you do? Would you sacrifice time with your kids over the holidays for vague assurances and the opportunity to make a rich person richer or would you take the out?
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What's Elon Musk's vision here? Does he even have a plan? That's the most outstanding part of this all. It has become blatantly obvious that Elon _HAS NO PLAN_.
Its one thing to work for 20-hour days when you know what to do. But what is the plan for Twitter? The plan was "Come to the office on Friday to give Elon Musk a rundown on the code".
For anyone who has worked in difficult circumstances, this has to be one of the worst "visions" offered to "Hardcore" engineers ever. Or is the "vision" seriously just "keep Twitter running over the weekend" ??
And then what? Next week comes, and you'll need that herculean effort to once again keep Twitter open for just another week.
You're not getting paid any extra. All your friends have left. Institutional knowledge and trusted friends are gone. The boss is a nitwit who doesn't even understand the code, and there's no plan for what Twitter will be next week, let alone next year. (Shadowbans? Or not? Paid $8 blue checkmarks? Or not? There's a distinct lack of mission here).
Its not worth it to put in 20 hour days when the boss can't even decide if $8 blue / grey checkmarks are a good or bad idea.
A job that engages will get the best out of people, whether they are internally or externally motivated. Even internally motivated people will stop living up to their potential if their job role doesn't change to keep them engaged.
The problem might not be the people, the problem might be the roles. Yet Musk, like most others, is firing the people instead of firing the roles.
You mean Meta? The company that froze hiring and just laid off 11,000 employees?
See the Twitter Android engineer / accessibility team guy who got fired publicly on Twitter last week, instantly got a bunch of job offers.
Yeah "Want to go hardcore, click 'Yes'.". Hardcore to where, doofus?
Those 10% quit the moment they were offered an ultimatum. If you're one of the 10% of people who are holding up a company, you quit when an asshole boss comes around. You got plenty of other companies who you'd rather work for.
If you're an engineer of any caliber, even in this economy, you simply don't have to put up with any of this crap at all. And there's no reason to sign on (or stay on) to a company that treats you like this.
> So, when you continually slice away the bad portions of something, all that you're left with is 1 of 2 potential outcomes:
False dichotomy. There's #3.
#3: Everyone who was holding up the company, the "10% who do all the work", switched jobs and is now working for Facebook across the street.