Musk offers to buy Twitter
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Nycturne
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If I was a recently fired Twitter Android engineer, I believe my response to this little snarky query would be simply: “I no longer have an obligation to the company as an employee. If you want further engineering time from me, it won’t be free, or cheap.”
Andropov
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Apparently that engineer is *still* working at Twitter. Optimizing the Android app for performance, specifically. The snarky reply from Musk makes even less sense now.
Nycturne
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I think I got confused thinking the two threads were related.
This is partly why I don’t talk about current work in public. It doesn’t look great for the company (or me to be honest) getting into public spats with other employees or management. But Elon doesn’t seem to think getting into it on social media like this would undermine trust in the platform? Jebus.
I mean, this sort of stuff isn’t exactly abnormal if problems exist. With a large shipping product, problems will exist. Usually this nonsense is kept to private meetings with the teams in question, for very good reason.
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I have my doubts. Musk started with x.com->PayPal, which gave him the funds/leverage to get into Tesla and stuff. It is not clear how much technical ability he has, though. He seems to be more of an "I have an idea, let's do this" guy, who has smart people do the work for him. He aspires to lofty goals, but barely understands the the technical things. And, worse yet, money makes a person stupid, and he has a lot of money. Had, at least.
Eric
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Exactly, he's probably a really savvy businessman but has little knowledge of how things actually operate. I mean I don't see how anyone looks at the way he's handled Twitter and considers it good management, it's been a cluster fuck of epic porportions.
DT
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Note that I said product designer, the later part about engineering assumed that was someone else doing the heavy lifting. I've worked with product designers who weren't directly involved in the implementation details, they had enough understanding to know what was feasible, usually as a result building prototypes, planning and analysis with SMEs (all of which was usually part of a budget and timeline discussion as well).
That last past is where Musk doesn't have the willingness to admit to what he doesn't know and/or just disregards costs (and assume everyone else will someone magically compress the timeline). Like he knows there's computer vision tech, there's AI systems, but using those for fully autonomous vehicle operation, especially in the original timeframe he suggests years ago, was lunacy.
Andropov
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No worries! Fun recap of what happened. After that interaction, the engineer corrected him on Twitter here:
https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1591968343229366272/
And also here:
https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1592194789801222144/
Elon fired him few minutes ago, apparently.
https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1592186302379982849/
Way to go! Apologising for Twitter on Android being slow while firing the engineers in charge of making Twitter for Android faster. Smart guy.
I used to work on the architectural team of an iOS app for a big fast-fashion brand (~8M daily users for the iOS app, IIRC). Obviously still far from Twitter's size. And yet, everything that Android guy said applies for that iOS app I worked for. Every. Single. Thing. The app was bloated with dumb features no one used. All those features were shipped under tight timelines, with tech debt quickly accumulating. The app was noticeably slow because of this. And the app spent an absurd amount of time waiting for network responses rather than using smart cache policies. Which was really just a consequence of tech debt accumulating.
Elon is just pouring gasoline on the fire. He's been promising a ton of new features for Twitter NEXT WEEK, while firing most of the engineer who could possibly work on them. Tech debt must be accumulating now faster than at any other point in Twitter's history. And not the regular type of tech debt. Nah. Usually tech debt accumulates over time and doesn't break things immediately. But with most engineers out of Twitter, and the few that are left working outside their areas of expertise, someone is going to push a breaking change sometime soon in some obscure part of the codebase they hadn't really worked at before, and there will be no one with context to review that PR and detect the error. Those kind of bugs in not-often-reached branches of the code, which will lurk there for a while like little time bombs until something sets them off.
Andropov
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Apparently he plans to solve the bloating/tech debt problem... *checks notes*... today.
https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1592177471654604800/
https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1592177471654604800/
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The great thing about Elon is he makes a lot of work for my friends who are employment lawyers.
shadow puppet
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In case this goes down and if anyone wants to download their Twitter archive (under settings in your profile). According to the message I received, it can take 24 hours to get your zipped archive.
https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1592188128944705537/
https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1592188128944705537/
Nycturne
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I've worked on projects in the same situation. I've also worked on a couple rather notable projects where this wasn't the problem, and I do miss those teams. I've seen a good engineering system in practice at this scale. It doesn't mean you'll make a product people want, but at least the engineers won't be running for the exits. A lot of the folks I worked with on that specific project went down swinging doing what they could to try to make it work. I'd much rather work for that sort of failure than what Twitter is likely to end up.
Yeup.
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The technology industry is expansive and each area has a lot of nuances in it. I have worked and met many brilliant people in their respective subject area's, and I have witness that a few of them think that their intelligence will just carry over to the every area of tech. Elon should have stayed in his lane. One social media platform is not the same or easier than another social media platform, and definitely not the same as any tech company. As the the saying goes that the one who desires to be a "jack of all trades" ends up being the master of none.
Also Elon's second big mistake, was trying to change Twitter's culture. Culture eats strategy for breakfast, and it is the hardest thing to change about a company.
Also Elon's second big mistake, was trying to change Twitter's culture. Culture eats strategy for breakfast, and it is the hardest thing to change about a company.
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I also read on Twitter today that one of the services he turned off was the 2-factor security, which left people in an endless loop if they had it enabled and then logged out of Twitter. Cause the code was never sent.
There's no angle. The $1B breakup fee clause wasn't something he could choose to use to get out of the deal, it was only there to cover the contingency of Musk's finances (personal and loans) completely falling apart to the point that he was unable to pay.
Because the contract was so simple and airtight, the court case was probably going to end with the judge ordering specific performance. That would've been an even more embarrassing disaster than what's unfolding now, so once things were obviously not going to go his way, he gave up.
He has nobody but himself to blame for signing such a one-sided contract. When Twitter resisted his initial trollish hostile takeover talk, he decided it would be fun to make an offer they couldn't possibly refuse. Twitter accurately assessed him as a guy who would back out if he possibly could (he has a long history of pretending to want to acquire random companies, and messing with them as he does so), so they offered him a purchase contract with no real outs. He was dumb enough to sign it. All the wriggling ever since has been him refusing to accept the consequences of his own actions.
Eric
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As a result a ton of people still can no longer log in, apparently. This guys is an absolute fuck up in every way. How he ever had success with any company is a mystery.
DT
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@mr_roboto
Outstanding, thanks for that clarification, I didn't even realize what a simple, and problematic (for Musk) contract was executed. That makes sense, it was almost meant at a deterrent, hahaha, I'd imagine most people would've reviewed it, had a moment of introspection about their real intent and walked away.
Outstanding, thanks for that clarification, I didn't even realize what a simple, and problematic (for Musk) contract was executed. That makes sense, it was almost meant at a deterrent, hahaha, I'd imagine most people would've reviewed it, had a moment of introspection about their real intent and walked away.
Yoused
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AIUI, SpaceX is the only company he himself actually started. If you want to succeed in that arena, you have to follow fairly narrow lines. If you tell your engineers, "I want SuperThing" and they tell you, "We can make you ReallyGoodThing", you are going to have to settle for ReallyGoodThing.
To succeed in space, there is 0.00000000000001 margin for error, and you find out really fast that you goddamwellbetter listen to your boffins and not fuck around or you will be history. Also, the corner-cost-cutting dynamic is different from consumer-type industries, and bullshitting with stuff like the FSD fiasco is going to end you big time.
IOW, SpaceX appears to have the right people to make it work, and they seem to know how to keep Musk from going off the res. Just about everything else he has been involved in could probably be done better by someone who has good thinky-parts, because his seem to be not so good to begin with, and extreme wealth has corroded them as badly as quart-of-whiskey-every-day alcoholism.
DT
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I realize in the grand scheme this is trivial, but I do think it speaks to the far and wide impact this nonsense has resulted in ...
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