Elon Musk has made a serious mistake

[ralfy]

The former owners were running the company to the ground such that when Musk took over it was $3 billion in the hole and valuation cut in half. The platform was also filled with 'bots and child porn tweets, which is why advertisers were leaving.

 

[Synthaholic]

The former owners were running the company to the ground such that when Musk took over it was $3 billion in the hole and valuation cut in half. The platform was also filled with 'bots and child porn tweets, which is why advertisers were leaving.

This is completely false. There was no child porn. There were plenty of bots, which Elmo has done nothing about.

 

[Synthaholic]

 

[Desperado]

dems cant tolerate freedom of speech on twitter ...

Neither can twitter employees

 

[Synthaholic]

 

[the other mike]

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
Bookmark Save as PDF My Authors
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.

Elon Musk could lose everything and still be a billionaire on his SpaceX contracts with the Pentagon alone.

 

[ralfy]

This is completely false. There was no child porn. There were plenty of bots, which Elmo has done nothing about.

Here's what Twitter lost in advertising revenue in final months of 2022

Top advertisers on Twitter slashed their spending after Elon Musk's takeover, according to estimates compiled for Reuters by research firm Pathmatics, in the latest shock to the company's dominant revenue source.

www.reuters.com

 

[Synthaholic]

Sue the fuck out of them.

Special Report: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars


LONDON/SAN FRANCISCO, April 6 (Reuters) - Tesla Inc assures its millions of electric car owners that their privacy “is and will always be enormously important to us.” The cameras it builds into vehicles to assist driving, it notes on its website, are “designed from the ground up to protect your privacy.”

But between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras, according to interviews by Reuters with nine former employees.

Some of the recordings caught Tesla customers in embarrassing situations. One ex-employee described a video of a man approaching a vehicle completely naked.

Also shared: crashes and road-rage incidents. One crash video in 2021 showed a Tesla driving at high speed in a residential area hitting a child riding a bike, according to another ex-employee. The child flew in one direction, the bike in another. The video spread around a Tesla office in San Mateo, California, via private one-on-one chats, “like wildfire,” the ex-employee said.

 

[Synthaholic]

 

[Synthaholic]

 

[Synthaholic]

 

[Synthaholic]

Twitter Files were a hoax, and fake news. Just like I said at the time.

 

[Synthaholic]

Oh, there's definitely a story there!

 

[ralfy]

Elon Musk throttles Substack, clashing with Twitter Files' Matt Taibbi

The professional relationship between billionaire Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, and independent journalist Matt Taibbi hit a serious and possibly irreparable snag late last week following Musk's quixotic decision to suppress links to Substack.

reason.com

Hasan did identify some errors in Taibbi's reporting, which first appeared on Twitter itself and was ultimately published by Substack. But one notable complaint of Hasan's—that Taibbi had confused the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) with the Center for Internet Security (CIS)—is not nearly the gotcha that Hasan seems to think it is:

...

In response, Musk claimed that Twitter was not throttling Substack per se; rather, "Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so their IP address is obviously untrusted." The "clone" in question is Substack Notes, a new feature that is said to mimic Twitter in several ways. Musk also called Taibbi an "employee" of Substack—which is false—and unfollowed his former ally.

 

[Grumblenuts]

Mehdi Hasan has an impressive history and he's not a bad guy. But he's f-ed up bigtime before and had to apologize. He'll likely end up apologizing again.

 

[Synthaholic]

 

[Synthaholic]

 

[Synthaholic]

 

[ralfy]

 

[Synthaholic]

Elon Musk Made The Twitter Checkmark A Digital Dunce Cap

Elon Musk is handing out Twitter checkmarks for nothing, but that doesn’t mean the celebrities actually want them. Perhaps surprisingly, the checkmark has become a mark of shame for many on the social media platform.

www.forbes.com