Elon Musk has made a serious mistake

[Synthaholic]

 

[Synthaholic]

KoGuan Leo is the biggest individual investor in $ and the 3rd largest shareholder of Tesla. Ross Gerber is also a large Tesla investor and vocal Elon Musk critic.

 

[Synthaholic]

 

[Synthaholic]

e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.io)

Big takeaway from the Tesla earnings call is that Elon doesn't want to do anything to shore up sales, because he'd rather try to use the idle GPUs in parked Teslas as a distributed AI supercomputer... which doesn't make sense, but even if it did, it would still be stealing from your customers.

bsky.app

 

[Dont Taz Me Bro]

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.

Huge mistake

 

[Synthaholic]

Tesla profit plunges on price cuts, but company unveils plans for affordable models​

Tesla says profits fell 55 percent in the first quarter to $1.13 billion while revenue declined 9 percent​

 

[Synthaholic]

 

[Synthaholic]

 

[Synthaholic]

Lol!

 

[JimH52]

Musk's greatest error is thinking he can be MAGA and sell cars to progressives. As a result. GM and Ford will pass Testla in EV sales in the coming years...unless he sells Tesla to someone with a brain?

 

[frigidweirdo]

Jeez, you couldn't own a Tesla in the UK, all the roads are "uneven surfaces", like the teeth

 

[Synthaholic]

Musk's greatest error is thinking he can be MAGA and sell cars to progressives. As a result. GM and Ford will pass Testla in EV sales in the coming years...unless he sells Tesla to someone with a brain?

Exactly. It takes some doing to get Liberals to rather buy from GM, Ford, or Toyota rather than the original EV startup that everyone loved until Elon started alienating everyone.

 

[JimH52]

Exactly. It takes some doing to get Liberals to rather buy from GM, Ford, or Toyota rather than the original EV startup that everyone loved until Elon started alienating everyone.

Maybe RFK is not the only one with a worm is his brain?

 

[Captain Caveman]

Jeez, you couldn't own a Tesla in the UK, all the roads are "uneven surfaces", like the teeth

I'm surprised Americans can get their fat arses into a Tesla, probably why their range in the US is half.

Don't need headlights in the US, just smile.

 

[Synthaholic]

I'm surprised Americans can get their fat arses into a Tesla, probably why their range in the US is half.

Don't need headlights in the US, just smile.

The fatasses are all MAGA.

 

[ColonelAngus]

Just like with Hunter's laptop, everything here with Musk/Taibbi/Weiss is cherry-picked and distorted and corrupted data. No transparency. Because that would give people the full context.




Oh, and he's not a doctor. MD are his initials. But he wants any random Twitter browser who sees his tweets to think he's a doctor.

Yet it is evidence in a Federal firearms case.

The Fed is using a Putin laptop as evidence against Hunter?

 

[Synthaholic]

 

[The Duke]

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.

Synthaholic spends EBT dollars while Musk is a billionaire and launches rockets for fun.

 

[JimH52]

If trump is elected, he will shut down infrastructure efforts to support EVs and the Chinese will leave the US in the dust in their development. This will give China the chance to catch and even surpass the US in GDP.

 

[The Duke]

If trump is elected, he will shut down infrastructure efforts to support EVs and the Chinese will leave the US in the dust in their development. This will give China the chance to catch and even surpass the US in GDP.

I feel this is appropriate at this point in time..again.