My money’s on implosion. They’ve built amazing automations, but with so many layers of authority excised something dumb will expire and recovery will be too costly.
The other factor trig is that those thousands of coworkers who are gone through one method or another will be recruiting the employees still there to new opportunities.
Probably better opportunities if Elon isn’t paying to keep employees as has been reported.
Saw it happen when I was at Broderbund (I was one of the few kept on, and left to go work with a former coworker a couple of months later) and O’Leary gutted the company (along with the Leaning company). He was more clever than this tho.
But I saw this with multiple entire teams they wanted to keep. Their old managers just recruited them to follow.
nKoan
3118
The one thing Twitter has going for it is that dev velocity is going to be near 0 for a while. So we won’t see a lot of newly introduced issues.
Oh wait, Twitter blue is coming back in a week. Oh no. I take it all back.
Infrastructure and InfoSec can’t sleep tho… 2 of the harder hit areas per reports.
It could happen. But where are those opportunities and how many of them are there? Right at this moment it seems like there’s an unfortunate ratio between software engineers who have suddenly hit the job market and companies that are looking to hire them thanks to downsizing around the tech sector at present.
Twitter can be the worst website ever.
But Twitter–even with Elon Musk owning it–can also be an incredibly useful and even life-saving resource for marginalized and endangered communities across the globe to find and support themselves and one another. I personally think that the demise of twitter – whether it happens fast or takes weeks/months/years will be the opposite of a “good thing”.
rho21
3122
Don’t forget overworked and dog-tired.
ShivaX
3123
Agreed.
It bugs me on a fundamental level that a single person can take something away from hundreds of millions of people and destroy in a couple of weeks.
Aceris
3124
The simplest explanation is that some kind of drugs are involved, probably Parkinsons or ADHD medication used as a “cognitive enhancer” because crazy techbro utopians are gonna crazy techno utopian; and Musk if having side effects. We know in the past Musk was less crazy, and even if we accept the theory that he lucked into his previous success I think it’s at least evidence that he wasnt actively incompetent. I dont think just being surrounded by yes men can explain the sheer lack of any kind of judgement we are seeing from him.
On the other hand, absolute power and impunity can be one hell of a drug.
One thing Elon is certainly never good at is hitting schedule, so I doubt that will happen.
I heard that Reddit with basically the same number of MAUs, and probably more total content has 700 employees. It does have volunteer moderates, but still that is a big difference in employees.
I haven’t seen any noticeable change in Twitter since Elon took over other than an extraordinary number of tweets about what the future will look like, and lot of people thinking it will be dead in a week. I’m with Trigger, it may die fairly quickly but I don’t see an FTX-like implosion, or even a New World, or Ticketmaster-level failure.
Function-wise, the bit that counts notifications has been broken for more than a week. Instead of displaying the number of notifications you have, it just has a dot next to the notifications icon.
And we’ve seen reports of other things that were broken, fixed, broken in another way, etc. Like the initial Twitter Blue implementation, then the next one, then the next one. The two-factor auth outage. Etc.
Content-wise, it’s just shit full of Elon cultists and fanboys crowing about the wonderful way Elon is running everything, and how delicious are the salty tears of the whining takers. That, plus ads for cheap mail-order gadgets, which are suddenly everywhere.
Strollen
3128
Really mine works, it tells me I have 3 or 5 notifications, I have 3 different accounts and switch between them at least daily. I think the Elon haters, Twitters is going to die farewell to all of you who I blocked, out number the fanboys by at least 10-1.
Jazar
3129
I can’t imagine losing 70-90% of your staff in two weeks and things turning out fine. Oh and the world cup is starting. Also we’re coming into the holidays. This is far far far from your everyday corporate layoff situation.
Elon is asking for his employees to treat their jobs like a startup only with massive legacy systems, zero cohesive vision, and zero company equity. Good luck with that.
It probably works on some platforms and not on others — I’m using the iOS app on my iPad and iPhone. But ‘works some places not others’ is definitely a failure.
I see lots of people lamenting the demise of Twitter, but they’re people who mostly do other things. E.g. Popehat is cracking wise about the impending end of the platform, but that isn’t why he’s there in the first place. The legion of Elon fanboys basking in the light of the great genius is nearly unbearable, and the fact that they’ve all popped for $8 accounts means you really can’t avoid them.
Yeah, I can’t really grasp thinking there isn’t going to be any downside to that. I guess we will see.
jsnell
3132
People intimately familiar with Twitter’s infrastructure who left a year+ ago. People who have no ties to Twitter, but have operated the huge distributed systems at the couple of dozen companies that have something as large or larger than Twitter with bespoke infrastructure.
It’s really a perfect storm.
- I don’t know that we’ve ever seen this scale of institutional knowledge loss at a large organization that’s still supposed to be a going concern. This is totally uncharted territory.
- The parts most at risk are not something that can be treated as generic software engineering jobs; there’s probaly on the order of 100k engineers with the right experience in distributed systems to get up to speed quickly. Musk will find it very hard to hire them; he has worked very hard to alienate them and make sure that very few of them would consider working at Twitter 2.0. And the thing is, he probably doesn’t realize this at all.
- Then there’s what @nKoan alluded to: the most dangerous thing you can do to a system is change it. Usually you’d expect engineering to be extremely conservative in this kind of situation while the knowledge and processes are rebuilt. But that is antithetical to Musk’s “hardcore” approach. He will gut the processes and safeguards, select for a team of cowboys, and then push them to be even more reckless.
- Twitter is a wounded animal in an adversarial space. They’ve e.g. never been more vulnerable to a DDOS attack than right now, with nothing but static rules and predictable automation to prevent the attacks. That’s not going to cut it if somebody looks to attack Twitter with the goal of taking them down in the long term, you need actual humans in the loop.
Just to be clear: I don’t want Twitter the platform to fail. I get a lot of value from it, and would hate to try to rebuild a network on another platform. I’d put money down on a total outage lasting more than a day before end of February, but luckily that won’t be enough to kill it. But there’s a non-trivial possibility of something worse than that! Something like the three week PSN outage from a decade ago would be company killer in this situation. Is it plausible? Yes, if a cascading failure takes down every single system Twitter has running, it might take three weeks to bootstrap them by even if you had the perfect team rather than whatever C-tier team will still work for him.
(And while I don’t want Twitter to fail, OMG what a perfect blaze of glory this would be.)
This. As much as I enjoy the thought of Space Karen publicly imploding in public, the reality of things is hard to judge from the bleachers.
Ex-SWoo
3134
I know someone who’s hasn’t resigned (yet) and he informed me as of right now his entire org is down to zero engineers. He’s on the infra team managing blob storage and data caching.
strategy
3135
This. So much this.
I can’t think of any company, ever, that has done something like what Elon has done here. We’re all waiting with bated breath for the continuation.
