Elon Musk

i dont particularly know what goes on as far as management in musks other companies but purely speculating both cars and rockets seem like industries that people might have a particular interest in working in, like video games or movies, and therefore are willing to work more hardcore, but making a app its cool people are interested in and may even be passionate about the technology aspect but no ones like its just so amazing to be around websites you know

― lag∞n, Thursday, November 17, 2022 5:02 PM (nineteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i think ironically twitter actually is a place where certain kinds of engineers go. it has a rep as being cushy of course but i'm not talking about that. it also has a really strong track record of being a place you can do foundational and extremely influential stuff, without needing to put up with organizational complexity on the scale of google/facebook. they don't care about twitter.com per se, but twitter.com has more interesting engineering problems than like doordash or even uber.

good thread of examples of this

One of the things that I think is sad about the decimation of Twitter eng is that Twitter was doing a lot of interesting (and high ROI) engineering work that, at younger companies, is mostly outsourced to "the cloud" or open source projects

A few examples off the top of my head: https://t.co/zAMF3oW5rL

— Dan Luu (@danluu) November 16, 2022

these people actually like the idea of "hardcore" (not in those words, they're adults) and should be his constituency. but it turns out that spending a month shitting on everything they've ever done (while being factually wrong about literally every detail) is not a winning strategy.

You can be a software engineer essentially anywhere including like banks, grocery stores, universities, companies you haven’t heard of that make ERP systems for hyperspecific sectors…

Personally I think scratching layers off of legacy code and fixing up bad databases and solving business logic problems for your colleagues is interesting

their idea of hardcore (solving difficult problems) is prob different than musks (sleeping at the office) xp

I feel like a lot of the foundational things Uber, etc. had to do are now almost boilerplate. I was at a conference talk where "here's how you'd use this backend system to query the nearest ten cars from a geospatial point" was a low-code example. The backends caught up and have absorbed a lot of the system load that Uber would have had to design around

imo Uber/Lyft still had some things to work on some years ago, but their grasp exceeded their reach and they started building systems to detect cops and feds attempting to illegally use their cars and started building shit to explicitly flaunt regulations, etc. that would have been a waste of time if their basics weren't already there

twitter is just endless "what should we show users and get them to click on ads and also stay on the site" followed by a zillion thought experiments and re-engineering, but caek probably can speak to that

the problem is Uber and Lyft cannot make money because their business model was using VC cash to subsidize cab rides and bribe city councils to exempt them from regulations, so the engineering problems aren't really relevant

anyway it sounds like essentially everyone is quitting

xxxp i know nothing about how they build the product tbh.

xxp unravelling patterns of human interest to keep them scrolling and posting, not just getting someone a ride

xp you were the thought experiment department I thought

if you're a serious infra person and you like things like fixing bugs in the kernel networking stack and improving the throughput of a very large system then you can see how twitter (along with relatively few other places) might be one of your only options. i guess the difference is you have like 5 options and 4 of them aren't run by a maniac and pay better, but if you like space stuff you have 2 options and they're both run by a maniac.

i dont particularly know what goes on as far as management in musks other companies but purely speculating both cars and rockets seem like industries that people might have a particular interest in working in, like video games or movies, and therefore are willing to work more hardcore, but making a app its cool people are interested in and may even be passionate about the technology aspect but no ones like its just so amazing to be around websites you know

― lag∞n, Thursday, November 17, 2022 4:02 PM (twenty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

one of my biggest regrets professionally is that i didn't really see how incredibly fucked up labor issues were in the game industry, we were working our own crunch on the latest issue and website updates constantly and everything was so centered around that being the natural state of things. i was just ignorant as anyone and the culture and discourse has (thankfully) gotten much more critical of the game industry in the past 5 or so years. we definitely failed on every level back then.

all that is to say that i met so many dictatorial nutcases who ran studios and everything about elon musk reminds me of them

on the bright side, I don't think any huge open source projects that are in wide use have twitter as the primary contributor so we won't end up with software forks

reading the twitter kernel guys thread talking about how newer companies are all cloud bois was left wondering once you get big isnt that just so expensive, wouldnt it be worth it to roll yr own at some point

oh yeah, but even then you need someone else's cloud for some stuff even if it's just image caches

You can be a software engineer essentially anywhere including like banks, grocery stores, universities, companies you haven’t heard of that make ERP systems for hyperspecific sectors…

HI DERE. Perfectly happy to live and work in the software suburbs.

I am going to miss this place. We built something special here, and I do not expect to see its like ever again. I have worked here at Twitter for over 11 years. Back in July, I was the 27th most tenured employee at the company. Now I'm the 15th. I am not going to click "yes" pic.twitter.com/IqVrFrUiaB

— THISWILLWORK (@THISWILLWORK) November 17, 2022

wouldnt it be worth it to roll yr own at some point

That's exactly what Basecamp (the inventors of Rails) have decided to do.

Twitter’s Slack currently has hundreds of employees giving the 🫡 emoji, meaning they decided to not stay for Musk’s “Twitter 2.0” cultural reset. The company had just under 3,000 employees remaining before the deadline to say “yes” or not hit 20 min ago.

— Alex Heath (@alexeheath) November 17, 2022

he shouldve bought the company before the salute emoji was introduced

there were 7000 when he took over fwiw.

fn crazy

reading the twitter kernel guys thread talking about how newer companies are all cloud bois was left wondering once you get big isnt that just so expensive, wouldnt it be worth it to roll yr own at some point

― lag∞n, Thursday, November 17, 2022 5:49 PM (thirty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

almost all of twitter is in private datacenters for this reason among others. ml experimentation (not serving) and data science stuff is the big (and expensive exception).

lmao

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FhzPRnEUcAECrNu?format=jpg&name=medium

even tho twitter workers are for the most part still in good shape compared to most people that does just suck to have a job that you like and some billionaire freak comes along and ruins it

it does.

someone shd send that mfr to mars

didn’t half of basecamp quit bc the founder was like no politics allowed

yeah lol that was a good scandal that dude had been acting like his shit didnt stink for literally ever

It sucks to have someone devalue your work and piss all over a place you've invested time and energy in whether you're a line cook or tweep (or an alt-weekly editor, let's say). Even if you have good prospects, leaving a job is always disruptive and when it's accompanied by feeling like your own work and the whole enterprise you were part of is being treated like shit, it's even worse.

the good work continues

NEW: Twitter just alerted employees that effective immediately, all office buildings are temporarily closed and badge access is suspended. No details given as to why.

— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) November 17, 2022

We're hearing this is because Elon Musk and his team are terrified employees are going to sabotage the company. Also, they're still trying to figure out which Twitter workers they need to cut access for.

— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) November 17, 2022

the emperor temporarily realizes he has no clothes

the nice thing is, elon doesn't need to hire anyone to replace the engineers and devs, he can continue to rely on free unsolicited advice from his friends on twitter!

lol they dont even know who works there anymore

does this mean nobody is actually running the site right now?

mods are asleep change yr dn to elon sucks

elon already entering his howard hughes phase

he has truly disrupted the social media industry

Hey how much to acquire ILX by the way

Pack of chewing gum for a start.

next communication from twitter: as a favor, please do not watch or post about world cup

this is all a bit on the nose tbqh

I feel bad saying this but honestly this is the funniest thing to ever happen

richest guy in the world spent tens of billions of dollars to just get mercilessly bullied on his favorite website before destroying it within weeks

its incredible content

This all happening at the same time as FTX and John Fetterman going to the senate is just too much

!!! “I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers," "There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.”https://t.co/5lmWQHX2ft

— Nitasha Tiku (@nitashatiku) November 18, 2022

Legitimately stunned this is happening so fast

xxyyzz mentioned a wildcat strike and i guess this is that, but the strikers get three months pay in advance?

As we’re all very aware, folks on visas are stuck, so thats who makes up most of the roughly 25% (or less than 1,000….) expected to stay. The actual impact is not yet known — there have been no internal comms about what comes next. We’re nearly 2 hours post deadline.

— Kylie Robison (@kyliebytes) November 17, 2022

doesn't seem like enough people tbqh