They definitely loved working there. When working means gaming, attending yoga class, having long lunches and taking care of your kids at home while being paid on average $227k per year.
LOL.
Besides, what's wrong with taking a long lunch if you then work longer afterwards? What's wrong with taking care of your kids or gaming or attending yoga classes if you still get the same amount of work done as other employees who don't? Do you honestly think you would get more work out of the employees without that?
The reality is that software engineering is quite mentally taxing. Most people get about five useful hours of work in per day before their brains turn to mush. The difference between successful companies and unsuccessful companies is that successful companies let workers de-stress so that they can get in just a bit more work before their brains turn to mush.
Also, all of those fun things contribute to retaining the best and brightest employees who can do more in less time. When you cut them out, companies tend to deteriorate, because the best people leave.
It’s ridiculous that it took 7,500 people to keep one site online, with the occasional tweak. A few dozen in programming would suffice, plus a hundred for the network, a few hundred for acquisition and a maybe a thousand for moderating. Including overhead no more than 1,500 to 2,000 people.
How many of those employees were selling ads to keep the company in business? You need to lose exactly none of those, or the company is dead.
And your best sellers are going to see the writing on the wall and start looking for other opportunities, and.. the company is dead.
And you need to retain most of the site reliability team or else when those few remaining employees break something, the company is dead.
You have to do very, very careful cuts when you're talking about a company like this. Behaving in a way that causes a mass exodus is corporate suicide.
Well I just checked in and Twitter seems to be working.
On what date do you predict that it will stop working?
That's the thing, it could be days or it could be weeks. But as long as the bulk of the people responsible for making sure the AWS side doesn't break are gone, along with all of the institutional knowledge about how to fix things when they get into a bad state, you can probably expect the very first failure to be apocalyptic.
If we go into a recession next year and Twitter has job openings they will have record job applicants.
Doubtful. Almost anybody who has been around the industry long enough to have a nest egg is going to take one look at Twitter and say, "It's just not worth it," and continue living off savings rather than apply there.
If I get the chance, I'll take a survey among upcoming CS grads and see what they say. I fully expect them to laugh at me. But even if they don't, you can't realistically run an established company with only junior employees. The complete loss of institutional knowledge about how things work would be enough to break a company even if the lack of work experience didn't.
There is also always overseas contract agencies that can support that have great software engineers.
Yes, and if you had ever worked with those contracting companies, you would know that their best and brightest employees generally come to the U.S. as soon as they are able to get an H-1B, because they know they'll get paid a lot better here. The ones who are still overseas working as contractors for low wages generally produce substandard code, so you're going to need a
lot more hand-holding. A
lot more. You're going to need a small number of very, very senior people watching everything they do. And those people won't even consider taking a job at a company like Twitter right now, and the ones who were there before have likely already left.
If you're doing something non-business-critical, like writing tests, overseas contractors are a great way to save money, provided that you give them enough oversight. For business-critical operations, it is suicide.
I wouldn't touch ex twitter employees with a 10ft pole. One question employers ask is "name a time when the situation is difficult and how you have managed to work through the difficulty?". Quitting is not the right answer. Tho I guess a worst answer is quitting and telling the boss to go F himself.
The thing is, most people working at tech companies would have the opposite reaction. When they ask that question, the employees would say that they ended up under a toxic boss, and that they quickly concluded that there was no way to salvage the situation, and left the job, because nobody should have to put up with working for a toxic boss. The interviewers would recognize that the employees aren't willing to put up with toxic behavior by bosses and will take steps to distance themselves from them, which is the best way to ensure that toxic bosses aren't in charge of people.
The people that I won't hire are the ones who apply for jobs at Twitter now. My first question to them would be, "Do you think that Elon Musk's management style at Twitter is appropriate behavior?" If their answer is "Yes," they would be an immediate strong no-hire. If their answer is "No," then the next question would be why they chose to go to work for someone who they knew was abusive towards employees, and almost anything short of "I got laid off, I had to put food on the table, and nobody else was hiring" would make them at least a "no-hire" if not a "strong no-hire".
Let's call a spade a spade here - Elon is a KNOWN quantity. Everyone at Twitter should have expected his "hardcore" announcement. He also is BRUTAL when it comes to anyone, employees or not, that don't agree with him. My friend who was a former VP at Telsa said Elon threatened to fire him multiple times, his words were "you develop a thick skin, or you leave".
Which is a terrible approach to management. If he happens to be right, then yes, it results in things getting done the right way, but if he is wrong, it results in things being done the wrong way in spite of objections, which makes the final product worse.
This is not anything we didn't expect Elon to do once he showed up, he gave STRONG hints of his intentions before the deal was closed. There were the comments about the 50-75% downsizing, etc.
Oh, yes. Employees absolutely expected it. Immediately after he started talking about buying Twitter, employees began jumping ship. It is safe to say that a decent percentage of the best and brightest left
long before he actually took over.
Media loves to play up drama around Musk. People here lap it up like it’s nectar.
Considering I have worked in the tech industry since before the 2001 dot-com crash and am basing my opinions on what I've seen while working at similar companies, you would be wise to not assume that my cynicism is based on media drama, rather than from having watched companies implode.
Twitter is
already having serious outage problems. The other day, their two-factor authentication went down completely, so anybody with 2FA enabled became unable to sign in at all. I don't know if they have fixed that. Service in countries outside the U.S. is apparently quite broken, and data consistency problems are becoming more and more severe. The number of outages reported is alarmingly high.
And that's the first couple of weeks. Remember that all the people who know some of those systems and know how to fix them are working for other companies now.
www.businessinsider.com
