Awesome post with a lot of hard-earned wisdom. It reads like a moment where a lot of "taking a step back to examine things" was done.

> Most people were good at their jobs but it was nearly impossible to fire poor performers — instead they got shuffled around to other teams because few managers had the will or resources to figure out how to get them out.

> Often it was a small cross-functional team of intrinsically motivated people who made the biggest impact by challenging some core assumption.

> I learned a ton from watching Elon up close – the good, the bad and the ugly. His boldness, passion and storytelling is inspiring, but his lack of process and empathy is painful.

And many, many more. Really spoken like someone clever, someone with a lot of understanding, someone observant, and someone very, very smart.

Every paragraph just makes me think of Gavin Belson from the Silicon Valley series, surrounding himself with "yes men" and firing people who make him feel like he might be a little wrong.

Elon just personally reinstated a Twitter account that was banned for posting screenshots of an infant being raped and murdered, but it's nice to hear that this lady was the center of attention once.

Says bad things about their moderation; this is literally the worst video in the world and any other large company would have it autobanned instead of leaving it up for days. Though I expect the mandatory legal reporting still works.

Yeah, just sweep it under the rug..

If your plan is anything other what I said, it is either a crime or it will cause people to commit crimes by seeing the material in question. You need a lawyer, not your intuition.

Is there no room for journalism on the topic

There isn't any journalism that requires distributing child porn. Or even possessing it.

Can you share a source

Evil vs Stupid question answered for this person: stupid.

Please don't do this here.

I know we're not supposed to comment on the mechanics of the website or whatever, but did anyone else reach to click the X to make the login banner go away?

There's a lot of good stuff in this post. You should read it for yourself before commenting here. (Word count is 2413 in case you're wondering.) I do want to call out one very questionable aspect:

> I’ve pulled many all-nighters in my career

> Sometimes I get asked about how I felt when I got laid off, and the truth is it was the best gift I’ve ever received.

> Going on a sabbatical afterward has been exactly what I needed to decompress and I’m finally feeling rested and relaxed.

In my long career, I've never pulled an all-nighter, and I don't think that we should ever allow capitalists to deprive us of the essentials, such as sleep. Musk doesn't give a damn about you or your sacrifices, and obviously he fired Crawford anyway, despite the all-nighters. Always put yourself, your physical and mental health, before your employer's profit. Crawford said, "I think of life as a game", but it's not really a game, which you'll eventually learn the hard way as you get older. You have only one life, and you need to pace yourself, protect yourself. What's the point of working so hard that you render yourself incapable of working anymore, burning yourself out and needing a long period where you cannot generate any income? I've seen this time and again, but it's actually counterproductive. Please don't pull those all-nighters, it only encourages the worst exploitation from management. Certainly don't be proud of your needless sacrifices.

> Certainly don't be proud of your needless sacrifices.

Who exactly are you to judge what she should or shouldn't be proud of ?

When she quotes :

> I’ve pulled many all-nighters in my career

She goes as far as adding a full explanation that you - conveniently - redacted:

> I’ve pulled many all-nighters in my career and also when I was a student for something that mattered to me. I don’t regret putting in long hours or being ambitious, and feel proud of how far I’ve come from where I started thanks in part to that type of work ethic.

To me this reads as someone who is perfectly happy with the decisions she took. You do not have to share same work ethics as she does and you don't have to make the same choices. But you have absolutely no right to take it away from her or to dictate what she can be proud of or happy with.

> Who exactly are you to judge what she should or shouldn't be proud of ?

It's not about what "she" specifically should be proud of. It's about all of us, employees and our relationship to management.

> She goes as far as adding a full explanation that you - conveniently - redacted

I literally said, "You should read it for yourself before commenting here. (Word count is 2413 in case you're wondering.)" So the comment about conveniently redacting seems a bit absurd.

> You do not have to share same work ethics as she does and you don't have to make the same choices.

Nobody who knows me has ever questioned my work ethic. But speaking of ethics, I feel that it's unethical for management to ask for, encourage, or condone this kind of needless personal sacrifice by employees. Management deadlines are nearly always totally arbitrary and only benefit management, not the employees.

I also noted that it's counterproductive, individually. You can't win a marathon by running a series of sprints.

> But you have absolutely no right to take it away from her or to dictate what she can be proud of or happy with.

You're making this way too personal. It's intended to be general advice, directed not toward Crawford, who isn't here (I don't think?) but rather to the readers of this comment. The problematic aspect of what Crawford said is the public glorification of needless sacrifice, not whether she specifically is (currently) personally happy or proud of it.

She also specifically says that anything she asked her employees to do, she'd do herself, but if you read that backwards, the implication is that she is setting up a cultural expectation here: to achieve a tight deadline, if necessary, you should sleep in the office.

Which is not only an incredibly unhealthy expectation (for individuals who will burn themselves out for someone else's schedule and benefit; for team leaders who will destroy any sense of team cohesion and motivation in the long run; and for managers who would get more results from a slower but more consistent pace), but it also doesn't seem to have won her anything in this case - she got fired, and it doesn't sound like she was particularly listened to or respected by Musk, despite trying to provide genuine insight and wisdom.

It's not a questionable aspect to be honest. This is her experience and decision.

> I don't think that we should ever allow capitalists to deprive us of the essentials, such as sleep

Your strong claim is actually questionable.

I can already think of one realistic scenario where pulling an all-nighter is a sensible choice like: you are on an H1B visa and, if you are fired, you would be beyond fucked with your life, so you pull an all nighter.

> It's not a questionable aspect to be honest. This is her experience and decision.

I already addressed this point in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36887195

> I can already think of one realistic scenario where pulling an all-nighter is a sensible choice like: you are on an H1B visa and, if you are fired, you would be beyond fucked with your life, so you pull an all nighter.

Perhaps. But this point still stands: "Certainly don't be proud of your needless sacrifices."

I suspect that tech companies like to hire people on visas precisely because they can be abused like this.

Abuse is a strong word for a situation where you earn 30x more than what you would earn back home, and the work culture is actually better even with some all-nighters.

We must either move back to our home country or avoid doing all-nighters. We have no free will to make our own decision. We are to be labeled as an abused person forever.

That is totally a sensible morality

> Abuse is a strong word

You said yourself: "if you are fired, you would be beyond fucked with your life, so you pull an all nighter." If you don't think that's abuse, I don't know what else to say.

> We must either move back to our home country or avoid doing all-nighters. We have no free will to make our own decision. We are to be labeled as an abused person forever.

I really don't understand what you're saying here, especially about "free will". My impression is that you seem to be implying with your response that bosses demanding all-nighters is fine, but a mere critical comment from a stranger on Hacker News has equal authority and power, somehow even worse and immoral. But that would be quite overdramatic, so maybe I'm misunderstanding.

> I think of life as a game, and being at Twitter after the acquisition was like playing life at Level 10 on Hard Mode.

Is it safe to assume theyre a multi millionaire with a large financial buffer throughout this saga? AFAIK they were on a do-not-fire list for that very reason. I understand the compensation and golden handcuffs may be under an NDA which could explain why her wealth and compensation is never referenced as part of the story.

A wealthy person who wins even when theyre laid off yields a different perspective entirely. I think tech product development could use fewer of those types personally. It completely removes failure from the equation.

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36897670, which seems to have the more accessible source.