Elon Musk has made a serious mistake

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Users on the forums of the Cybertruck Owners Club are finding out that their shiny new trucks are losing their shine and starting to show signs of rust and corrosion.

A forum user under the username of Raxar started a thread on the forum on Feb. 1, where he complained to his fellow Cybertruck brethren that the metal on their new truck started forming small flecks of rust after two days of rain shortly after delivery . . . Additionally, another user under the username vertigi3pc reported similar spots on their Cybertruck both on the forum and on the Cybertruck subreddit. According to them, Tesla is aware of the issue, but the service center he went to was not able to fix it then and there . . .

. . . Owners are getting creative with their methods to remove spots. One user on the forum reported that Barkeepers Friend and Windex restored its luster after it showed similar rust spots before, while others are willing to adapt to the eventual "rat-rod" look said corrosion will give their Cybertrucks.

" know I’m a weirdo but I actually kinda like the corrosion and hopefully the associated patina that will come with it," a user named DumpsterFire replied.


 
I don't understand a lot of the technical stuff, but it's becoming clear that firing all these engineers was a monumental mistake, which may sink Twitter, Tesla, and his wealth.

Gergely Orosz Profile picture

Gergely Orosz


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4h • 13 tweets • 3 min read
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What I'm hearing from inside Twitter:

Several people who were let go on Friday, then asked to come back were given less than an hour as a deadline.

Software engineers who got this call I know of all said "no" and the only ones who could eventually say "yes" are on visas.


Also:
Many people got a phone call with this "offer", and a short deadline. Lots of people stopped answering unknown numbers to avoid this.

Inside Twitter, managers I hear are getting desperate, trying to call back more people. People are saying "no" + more sr engineers are quitting.

None of this is surprising. As a rule of thumb, after you lay off X% of people, you get an additional half attrition. Lay off 10%: expect another 5% to quit. Lay off 50%... not unreasonable to expect another 25% to quit.


Calling back people you just fired rarely works.
Why it's a problem that senior people are quitting and people don't want to come back:

Twitter has a complex architecture for a reason. And it needs some level of institutional knowledge to maintain.

This institutional knowledge both got fired + is walking out the door.


In practical terms: software engineers who are with the company are now put on oncall rotations for systems they have no idea about. I mean, they can figure it out... easiest to talk with someone who knows these.

The problem is when there's no such person left.

Talking with engineers, some things people don't realize about Twitter:

  • On prem data centers
  • Lots of infra-level advanced stuff. Eg multi-level infra feature flags
  • Advanced infra-level incremental rollouts to avoid outages that were caused by infra changes in the past
Unless the institutional knowledge is somehow retained, in days/weeks/months, we should, sadly, expect to see a lot more outages.

The straightforward option to reduce damage is:
1. Retain experienced folks, at least mid-term
2. Hire and onboard new people with these seniors

I know that on Twitter it's fashionable to mock how "slow" Twitter was to ship.

But the more I learn about the internal systems, and why it was built in a way, the more impressed I am. Eg Twitter onboarding to k8s was extremely challenging (+brilliant) thanks to legacy infra.

Twitter has no nuance to discuss Twitter tradeoffs. But as I understand, there were many: some workaround of legacy decisions, some deliberate.

This doesn't change that Twitter is a complex system, and it's complex for good reasons. I really hope enough people stay who know why.

Also, thank you to both people who built these systems Twitter runs on, and especially those staying and maintaining them.

Keeping Twitter running became far more challenging overnight for no fault of ppl doing all this difficult work.

Thanks for keeping the lights on and more!

One thing that continues to bug me:

Elon Musk is an experienced operator and no stranger to layoffs (and their impact). He has a team of advisors from the VC world.

Surely they expected all this to happen. So, why did they do it? Or is this the plan?


Unroll available on Thread Reader

A timely comic from a former Twitter software engineer - several people told me he was one of the most productive web engineers -, who was also Twitter's unofficial Chief Cartoonist.

So a bit more of an insider view:



Worth linking how the author of the above comic got fired at Twitter.

He was working on a high-priority project at 9pm on Tuesday (after Elon bought Twitter). Disconnected and fired mid-work-meeting. No justification as to why.

Now he's suing Twitter.


Its been a pretty spectacular destruction of wealthy. Down from 44 Billion to what? 17 Billion? In like a year and change?

I don't know what's going to happen to Twitter. But I do know that if the outcome is poor, it won't be Elon Musk's fault.....according to Elon Musk.
 

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