Elon Musk has made a serious mistake

[Synthaholic]

 

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womp womp

 

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What a POS.

 

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This guy is a natural born liar. No wonder he's MAGA.

 

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Lol! His ego can't take it.

 

[Patriot01]

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​

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.

Well this backfired lol

 

[Synthaholic]

Yes, Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first​

After his Super Bowl tweet did worse numbers than President Biden’s, Twitter’s CEO ordered major changes to the algorithm​

At 2:36 on Monday morning, James Musk sent an urgent message to Twitter engineers.

“We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” wrote Musk, a cousin of the Twitter CEO, tagging “@here” in Slack to ensure that anyone online would see it. “Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs up this post.”

When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.

Biden’s tweet, in which he said he would be supporting his wife in rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles, generated nearly 29 million impressions. Musk, who also tweeted his support for the Eagles, generated a little more than 9.1 million impressions before deleting the tweet in apparent frustration.

In the wake of those losses — the Eagles to the Kansas City Chiefs, and Musk to the president of the United States — Twitter’s CEO flew his private jet back to the Bay Area on Sunday night to demand answers from his team.

Within a day, the consequences of that meeting would reverberate around the world, as Twitter users opened the app to find that Musk’s posts overwhelmed their ranked timeline. This was no accident, Platformer can confirm: after Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers, they built a system designed to ensure that Musk — and Musk alone — benefits from previously unheard-of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base.

 

[Synthaholic]

Well this backfired lol

In what way? He is seriously underwater with twitter. He can't make the debt payments on Twitter revenue.

 

[Patriot01]

In what way? He is seriously underwater with twitter. He can't make the debt payments on Twitter revenue.

What are you talking about? He bought a huge business, he probably has no idea where he owes money lol he fired the bums.

 

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[Synthaholic]

I always know when I've hit a nerve because you all always let me know, labeling news stories as Fake News.

 

[Synthaholic]

Richest man in the world, they say.

 

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The whole thing is an incompetent clusterfuck.

 

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[Synthaholic]

This is not only going to cost Elon Musk the $100 million payout to this guy due to Elon's massive ignorance of whom his own top level employees are and what their contracts state, if he takes Elon to court, it's going to be MUCH MORE! What a colossal fuckup. Mocking and firing a guy with muscular dystrophy ON TWITTER for everyone to see violates California labor laws big time.

No wonder Elon freaked out and had an emergency Facetime with the guy, but reading his tweets afterward it doesn't look like Elon is getting off the hook.

 

[Synthaholic]

I'd REALLY like to know why OhPleaseJustQuit thinks these last few tweets about Elon Musk are "fake news".

The guy Halli who Elon ignorantly fired was the owner of a company that Twitter purchased. Any owner of such a company is, by contract, on a 'do not fire' list. Halli's contract with Twitter specifies a buyout of $100 million if he's fired.

These terms not disputed by Elon, Twitter, or anyone else.

So what makes this imbecile OhPleaseJustQuit think he/she is in any position to label this as fake news? Is it just a moron reflex?

 

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