A more apt analogy would be that the plane was leaking fuel when it took off.
Elon Musk | Owner of X
- Thread starter Pogue Mahone
- Start date
I disagree. Look at the numbers
Define better.
Narrator voice: it wasn't.
It had a bad business model where it was struggling to capitalise on its user base and generate adequate revenue going forward. It's a struggle of a lot of fast growing internet companies, same was the case for Facebook and YouTube. The business model sure needed change. Hence the analogy of a plane leaking fuel is apt.
I don't see how releasing features with 0 forethought and getting an advertiser backlash or firing ~90% of your experienced worker base, changes the business model for the better. If anything it hugely jeopardises your operations. It sounds more like he lit the fuel on fire.
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What I find most astonishing is the amount of time he seemingly spends with nonsense. Assuming it really is him tweeting all day long. Or call the just-fired-badge-master to come back because they locked themselves out in the process. I never followed him so no idea if he was always that much "hands on". I mean even the best can make a big bad business decision once in a while for whatever reason but I'd be interested in seeing a chart about the amount of time he spend on twitter/social media per day.
Nowhere near 2000. It seems like basically 50% of the company was let go in the first round and around 75% accepted his "work yourself to death or take 3 months severence offering". If that's true you're looking at less than a thousand left.
Its hard to overstate how toxic he makes work environments. I work in the space industry and it was common knowledge that SpaceX was the worst place to work. The problem was there aren't that many options in that industry for some of those jobs, and the mission was also cool, which kept people there. For software engineers at Twitter there are millions of other jobs and Twitter really has no mission other than to grow. There's literally almost nothing attractive about working there now, I can see it being 90% those on sponsored visas that hang around.
Well, he gave himself the title of "chief engineer" at a rocket company. The implication is clear.
non existent.
Are there people still defending this total buffoon?
The work force was bloated clearly (not just Twitter the entire industry). They will make mistakes and iterate quickly rather than suffer from paralysis and ship nothing (what has Twitter shipped in the last few years)
I wouldn’t judge this based soley on the first month, especially when a lot is based on dislike for Musk anyway.
Fail fast and iterate with a smaller more engaged team. I think what comes out at the end of that will be interesting.
Do not be suprised to see long form video coming to Twitter within that 2 years along with improvements in spaces.
I think the industry is going to get a shake up top once PE sees what happens at Twitter.
There are literally threads this week of the people who've left Twitter recently explaining the features they've launched recently that they're most proud of. Alt text for images was a recent one that made Twitter more accessible to a huge proportion of internet users. They have made constant improvements.
On the "smaller more motivated team" point... Why on earth would they be more motivated? They've just been told to work harder for zero benefit and seen all of the most talented and experienced people leave. Morale will be in the basement there.
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Small iterative improvements yes. Thats not what Twitter needs (I’m talking from a business perspective here)
A lot of companies suffer bloat, across different sectors. I'd love to see any precedent where 90% of the work force is deemed bloat though.
As for what Twitter has shipped:
https://twitter.com/i/release_notes
Fail fast and iterate is a good agile process especially around the product discovery and prototyping of something new. It's the mantra for start-ups with a reason. But an established $44bn business is not a start-up. Twitter is a company with 50,000+ in-house servers. Firing 90% of their infra puts them at risk of catastrophic failure. There's a good reason large companies are not that agile.
We'll see I guess. It will either be a wake up call to the industry, or to Musk.
You asked what they've shipped in the last few years. "Nothing" is clearly totally wrong.
I don't think that's clear at all. Its incredibly easy to look and say "what can 7000 people possibly do" without realizing the complexity of some operations. They are likely releasing features a lot of stuff people don't know about including scale, performance and required security updates. I would suspect for a company like twitter a huge portion of engineering time is on the scale side, their feature set is small but their scale is enourmous.
Then you have line management, product managment, project management, finance, HR, legal, moderators, facilities, regional legal expertize and operations, sales and marketting and so on.
From an investor perspective its not wrong at all.
Its clear from all the job cuts in the last few weeks
Anyway its just my 2 cents. Im not a fan of Musk.
But I think Twitter needed drastic change and Im not convinced the narrative around whats happening at the moment is objective at all (especially given its Musk and how publicly he is doing things)
Saying that though we shall see. I would be more worried about Meta if Im honest
But I think Twitter needed drastic change and Im not convinced the narrative around whats happening at the moment is objective at all (especially given its Musk and how publicly he is doing things)
Saying that though we shall see. I would be more worried about Meta if Im honest
Its not at all clear, you can't tell the impact of job cuts after week. Its also worth noting 2FA stopped working in that time. So a critical feature that has always worked broke during the cuts. Let's see over the next few months if we get more outages, less moderation, more operational issues etc.
I personally use Twitter very sporadically, only log in once in a while to scroll through and see what people I follow have said, and there's no direction or plan to it. So that part I can easily do without, and have for years at a time.
The thing that might actually be a problem is that a lot of the CE discussion and information is directly centered around tweets. Like, almost all of it. Reddit is a good replacement for football news (except that embedded reddit posts have a habit of violating the no-autoplay setting) but not political stuff. Reddit isn't good with breaking news either, since it's designed around few posts with many comments - and if we ever resort to relying on Reddit comments we might as well shut down the CE.
The thing that might actually be a problem is that a lot of the CE discussion and information is directly centered around tweets. Like, almost all of it. Reddit is a good replacement for football news (except that embedded reddit posts have a habit of violating the no-autoplay setting) but not political stuff. Reddit isn't good with breaking news either, since it's designed around few posts with many comments - and if we ever resort to relying on Reddit comments we might as well shut down the CE.
I was not talking about Twitter there read up.
The tech sector became overvalued and bloated.
Great post. I really don't understand why some people are trying to take away Musk's accomplishments from him, or present him as some stupid person. Guy was a pivotal person in making three extremely successful businnesses. He obviously isn't stupid and is most likely more intelligent than average.
However, I don't understand, either this obsession with successful and/or smart people, as if everything they do is right. Einstein, regarded as one of the brightest men ever, was denying existence of black holes. Carlsen, probably the best chess player ever is not immune to making blunders.
We humans make mistakes and it doesn't matter how smart you are, you will make them. We can be wrong and one of the worst thing is, when we happen to think we are smarter then we actually are, which is looking like happening with Musk. But that doesn't mean we should take away his other accomplishments from him.
Also, all three of Paypal, Tesla and Space X, where Musk had his successes where in fields that were new to private commerce but he saw opportunities and exploited them brilliantly. On the other hand Twitter is completely opposite, an already established global business in a market that is very competitive. Had he bought some unknown social media platform with a different take, perhaps he could transform it or he could see some market opportunity to exploit. But with twitter this all looks like ego-driven money waste. Perhaps, he believes he can turn it around, but at this point I just think he is trying to save the situation on stop it from bleeding further financially, but he is not thinking it through and so far it looks like it might backfire spectacularly.
Probably qualifies
Here you are clearly saying Twitter was bloated along with the whole industry.
It's clear he doesn't know how to handle twitter.
So far he's undermined the authenticity of his platform.
Started firing critical staff (and then trying to rehire them)? It's obvious he doesn't know what he is talking about at times, like those tweets with thousands RPC requests. Any single developer would know that's nonsensical statement.
Now, I won't exclude the possibility of twitter becoming profitable, but so far, from my educated guess it doesn't look likely. My reckoning if he had a proper vision of Twitter and really thought this through he wouldn't have tried to back out.
He blundered, he knows it and know is scrambling to save himself, but is just making it worse, because his ego can't handle it.
I don't know what that means? But if you are referring to business being overvalued, then it certainly doesn't make sense to buy a tech company at an overvalued price.
Yes the entire industry. Your response was specific to Twitter with the example of 2FA. I didn’t say Twitter was 90% bloated but it was bloated.
Seriously?
You asked what have Twitter shipped in recent years. That was the question. You have the answer from two people here. Are you that inflexible?
I think you need to give it a week or two to see how wrong that pov is when Twitter has its inevitable massive outage. There's no way it's not going to happen.
We’re talking about whether or not the business will be successful. My first statement was. I think they will have a better product and be profitable in 2 years.Seriously?
You asked what have Twitter shipped in recent years. That was the question. You have the answer from two people here. Are you that inflexible?
Shipped nothing to me, probably worded incorrectly I can hold my hands up there. If we are talking from a business perspective, nothing that moved the needle in terms of revenue / profitability.
Again that statement wasn’t focused on Twitter alone. And no I was not saying 90% over staffed. Read first.
I don't worry about outages. It's most likely they have a lot of that stuff automated and have the code designed and written to not be affected that much. Although devs have been mentioning technical debt, so who knows.
But from my experience, most likely what will happen is bugs. Old bugs reappearing because nobody will check them as nobody will know who's responsibility it is. New bugs will slip in as QA won't have time to check everything and then those bugs will not be fixed for long time as nobody will know who's responsibility is to handle it.
With this kind of massive scaling down it's possible for catastrophic bugs. Such as microservices not booting up (circular dependence somewhere, query not compiling in production), faulty logic causing corruptions in databases, then attempted fixes causing even more issues.
I suspect there will be a lot of issues and outages will be the least of it.
If multiple people haven't gotten that from what you wrote, isn't it possible that what you wrote wasn't clear?
The example of old bugs reappearing has already happened days after they fired half the people. I think larger-scale issues are inevitable and on the way soon.
I'll have you know that investors always agree with salary and workforce reduction. I work for a tech / consultancy company and one of the investment groups (Elliott) acquired a sizable portion of our shares and began demanding reducing and optimizing operations. We went through a lot of pain for a period of two years when we started giving in to their demands. In my personal view, there is always room for improvement in any company, but investor led workforce reduction rarely is based on bloat or merit. They basically bandy around industry standard figures and how some company is doing better than that and why we should match them blah de blah.
Sorry if it ended up as a rant.
How much time do you reckon before shit starts breaking?
Also cant Twitter remain stable by hiring aggressively? No knowledge transfer but I'm sure Twitter has decent documentation.
When I heard that comm to the crew of demo 2 from the "chief engineer" I laughed like a rude Korean person.
Yes of course most likely true
This is true, I work in tech after all.
But in this example its true. Look at the growth rate of the industry in terms of hiring vs revenue and profit over the past few years
Actually not too worried about outages as they are probably on high availability with automated failover. Thinking more in line of them open to cyber attacks. With that much personal data on their server, there is no way any hackers wont be interested to try.
I don’t buy for a single minute this Twitter is gonna be better in two years. And if that really happens, and Elon will be able to make a better product with 80% or so less employees, then it means that the entire industry does not know what is doing and has over hired. Which means that all of us in the industry are in trouble. feck that so hopefully Twitter burns!