I've always wanted to work for Musk, but never felt like I was skilled enough to work on spaceships or cars... But Twitter? I am thinking about applying, so go ahead and quit.
Also maybe don't say your employer is a "petulant man child" in Slack or otherwise undermine them and you'll be fine. The idea that an employer should keep people that actively dislike like him or her is insane.
If you are a leading developer on Twitter's Android app and the company's new CEO is making verifiably untrue, denigrating public statements about the architecture of the Android app that make you look incompetent, what do you do? Accept the damage to your professional reputation and roll over? Or "undermine" the CEO by explaining your app does not in fact make >1000 poorly batched RPC calls to render the timeline in front of the community of your peers?
That's the example I'm thinking of, and I would guess that even if that dev fully expected to be terminated for making that correction they viewed it as a price worth paying to spare their professional reputation.
I don't think it's that Musk denigrated your work. It's that Musk claims Twitter has a horribly designed product on the specific thing you specialize in. People then spread this around that Twitter has a horribly designed thing that you specialized in building. Now there's not an off-chance that without anyone actually knowing the source, people in tech just "know" that Twitter has a horribly designed X. You, in charge of X, are now collectively understood on your resume as a horrible designer.
Think of it like this: I cannot name probably more than a handful of Google abandoned projects. But whenever Google announces a new project I'm happy to meme about how it will be inevitably abandoned. It's just something I "know" despite not hunting down some weird statistic of exactly what percentage of Google products to market survive after X years.
Reputation isn't a science. It isn't even that well correlated with truth.
Of course, but it's not binary. It's not a choice of people who hate you or love you unquestionably. There's a middle ground between those.
I don't buy into the notion that the chief engineer of SpaceX, which puts rockets in space, and CEO of Tesla, which efficiently produces electric cars, doesn't know how to stay in touch with reality. The evidence is in direct conflict.
i mean, he owns SpaceX, he can put whatever title under his name as he wants to. Elon Musk has an excessive desire to make it look like he is a technical genius and a genius engineer/scientist, but he most likely is technically very competent but his true strengths lie in his long term vision, manic energy, great PR skills and work ethic. He is more akin to Edison than he is to Tesla.
Doesn't mean there is no stock. The stock isn't publicly traded, which makes it harder to sell, but Twitter has a bunch of shareholders (Saudi Prince and Jack Dorsey are known ones) and could give out shares to employees.
Having illiquid shares in a company that has already gone through most of its growth is completely unappealing.
What is the value prop for a talented, high productivity employee to work at Twitter? The management hates its employees, seemingly hated the product, and doesn't even understand the business that he bought.
What's the upside for employees? There's a reason people were hanging up exactly at 5pm as Musk was giving his pitch to try to keep employees from bailing. He's offering a shit sandwich and he's not even good at selling it.
However if you believe in Musk's vision (is there one!?) and he's desperate he might throw stocks around and then a pivot unexpectedly might work out and a IPO might be lucrative ... but I wouldn't bet on it. All I said: stock exists and can be distributed.
Twitter is a private company now. Not sure if you missed the news that this guy named Elon Musk bought the whole company.
> Also maybe don't say your employer is a "petulant man child" in Slack or otherwise undermine them and you'll be fine. The idea that an employer should keep people that actively dislike like him or her is insane.
I think the issue most people are taking with this is that the same standards aren't being applied. Elon is publicly deriding his employees, and then firing them when they respond in kind.
If you already have no respect for the new boss, calling him a petulant man child to his face and getting 3 months severance isnt the worst thing that could happen.
Twitter already changed the world a decade ago, all someone would be doing at this point is maybe helping them not file for bankruptcy. But if someone really wants a job with zero security in this economy they should go for it!
What part would be changing the world? Seems like at the most hes going to eventually do a lap and twitter will end up where it started, just saddled with 900 million dollar a year debt fees. At worst just a place where saying the N word is more acceptable.
I could see working for an unstable egomaniac if it meant working on something big and meaningful like space travel or green energy or ending ICE cars. But to work on a glorified comment section? Hard pass.
I could not agree more. If I were single I could see giving most of my time to SpaceX because I believe in what they're doing and what they want to accomplish. Twitter? omfg no.
if you look at it as a highly influential media platform with infinitely hard right-brain challenges around every corner ... many would be drawn to that.
That is true and supports my statement. If you're chasing technology over people, from whose weaknesses and mistakes could you learn from, apart from your own?
I suspect the challenges in running a scalable distributed realtime system like Twitter are fairly significant. And while I don't know how much of Twitter's operating expenses are attributable to the efficiency of that platform, if the new CEO wants to keep expenses lower than revenue, they would potentially be very concerned about how to make that platform efficient, which probably has some really interesting systems engineering challenges.
Maintaining services that no one knows anything about, management afraid to let anyone touch anything because no one understands what may break. Everyone griping about the systems they don't know, wanting to re-implement from scratch but not having the time to do so.
Go for it. It's rare to see such a high alpha opportunity. It's like getting in an early stage startup but in this case they already have network effects.
Looks like you're probably going to be working with a lot of entry level people. If you're desperate and ok with eating shit for a year or two, maybe it's a good place to start.
I think Musk played people who quit this week, he used some trigger words in his email to sus out people who are not committed to the company. And the heard mentality kicked in and more people quit.
What does "committed" look like to you? The promise of working more for the same or less? What upside is there for folks who "commit"? Besides personal gratification, is it even remotely likely that Twitter will do something at this point to pull untold riches from thin air that would somehow benefit these people? From the sound of it, no.
The engineers (don't care about non-engineers) who quit need to face the fact that were part of "company" which gave negative returns to both public and private investors for almost a decade.
I think "committed" will still be 8 hours/day, like I said he sussed out people who are "triggered" by words or don't love what they do.
Do you work at Twitter? Do you have any reason to really believe this?
If significantly more than half of your coworkers left (fired, laid off, quit), it's very reasonable to assume that you now have twice the work to do. Moreover, we've seen in just the last two weeks people sleeping on the floor of the Twitter office(s), working more than 8hr/day, to urgently ship features that Elon personally nixed hours after launching. The language that Elon used repeatedly over the last week is "hardcore", implying that Old Twitter's way of working is "not hardcore"; if you were working 8hr/day before, what does "hardcore" mean beyond that?
> people who are "triggered" by words or don't love what they do
I love what I do, but I'm not about to start working harder without being compensated for that work. If you sign an agreement to work somewhere for a certain amount and the other party demands you work more without more compensation, no amount of "loving what you do" makes that equitable or fair. Loving what you do doesn't mean sacrificing the worth of your craft because someone said to.
Sussing out people who are "triggered" isn't a business move, it's a loyalty test. Loyalty is uncorrelated with skill or motivation. "Loving what you do" is uncorrelated with loyalty. There's a lot of companies out there doing amazing work that are hiring. Twitter isn't somehow special. If you love what you do and have been given an ultimatum by your new boss who has gotten rid of half of your coworkers and wants you to do more work, how is the logical move to _stay_ at the company?
Rather he kept people who don't feel like they have other options. Either due to immigration or feel they can't easily find another job or have financial obligation that don't allow the risk.
Most people don't like these sorts of ultimatums, especially those with the most options and flexibility.
Why would an engineer care about that? I see this kind of sentiment expressed here frequently and it's so bizarre. Engineers make products, they don't design them, they don't make the determination that they are marketable or profitable, that is all on the business end of things. Why would an engineer care? Why do people impart an absurd obligation onto twitter engineers?
If you step back from the trainwreck and look around, the job market is not good anywhere. Some definitely will find fast employment, but > or = quality & remuneration is not a given. For the rest, 3 months may cover on-boarding time, if they strike an offer quickly. This just sucks all the way around. I wonder if EM has a master plan or a brain tumor.
Yea, I have friends who work at SpaceX and seems to be doing just fine. The zeitgeist on HN is basically if you ever do anything challenging, don't even think about it, it is bad for your mental health. You probably should just concede in life, don't work hard, regress into resentment for "rich people" and make sure no one else succeeds.
What kind of a shitty place has this become? Supposed to be "Hacker News". Not a whole lot of hackers here.
It's says something when the greatest living hacker, George Hotz, now wants to work at Twitter. But so many of the readers of "hacker news" can't even imagine why.
There's literally an Ask HN on the front page right now about the most impactful thing readers have built with like 300 comments. Hard to believe that such a thread isn't celebrating hard work and perseverance.
Perhaps people are tired of being told "hard work is its own reward" from people who are extremely rewarded with money and a suspicious lack of hard work.
