I’ve worked at tech companies with “extreme hardcore” cultures at various points in my career. If I were to apply the mindset I observed to what is going on at Twitter:
Regular Company Employees resent having to show their work to “The Boss”
Hardcore Company Employees look forward to the opportunity to show the Legendary Elon Musk some elegant coding solution they came up with.
There’s just a certain mindset that goes into working at these sort of companies. Me personally, no thanks. I’ve been doing this work too long and can no longer drink the Cool Aid (if I ever could) that it’s worthwhile killing myself at work so some tech cult leader’s stock can go up another 1/4 of a point.
If I were a young softwre developer again, I would have jumped at this chance. If you can impress a billionaire that you are special, you might leapfrog years or decades of advancement the traditional way. Surviving the Twitter purge and staying employed while others get fired for incompetence would also look great on a resume’.
Now I’m older and have a family and commitments and don’t need to climb the career ladder, so I wouldn’t do it. But young developers bailing on an opportunity to impress the richest man in the world with their skills are making a huge mistake.
Of course if you don’t believe you actually have great skills, it’s better to take a layoff and severance than to be fired for cause a little later. So there’s probably a significant quality filter involved in who took a layoff and who didn’t.
I don’t trust anybody to identify great code from a printout or screenshot. Those aren’t remotely anything like a proper code review or showing off a nifty solution to the boss.
To even ask for something like this is a major red flag.
I couldn’t identify the next great novelist from a single sentence taken out of context any more than Elon Musk could identify great code from a printout.
No, Musk is the richest man in the world. The opportunity to hitch your wagon to him is extremely valuable. It doesn’t matter if you think he’s smart or dumb.
As for your speculating on my fantasy life…A) it’s inappropriate in this forum, and B) my fantasy life is a hell of a lot more fun than that.
Have you ever been through this? Because you are 100% wrong. The very people who are top performers and have great skills are going to be first out the door, because they are going to get a load of money and a job in a few weeks at most.
In fact, if I were a manager there, knowing I was going to get fired also, I’d give the package to my best people and my worst, and let the mediocre ones stay employed. Sometimes a layoff is unexpected, not here.
I took the package at AT&T, got a job at Intel with a raise and hiring bonus right after a nice vacation, and it helped fund my retirement. And that took a cross-country relocation. Changing jobs in Silicon Valley is pretty much stress free. I’ve done that also.
ETA: Our young here might have a different opinion when Musk blames him when Twitter collapses due to lack of staffing. And how many software people do you think Musk is going to know personally?
But you’re right about the filter. The good people took it.
…just a few weeks ago Sam Bankman-Fried had a net-worth of over 10 billion dollars. The opportunity to hitch your wagon to him was extremely valuable.
Now? Not so much.
Just because someone is “rich” doesn’t mean it’s smart to “hitch your wagon to them.” Twitter is an extremely volatile position, just today it let New Zealand’s resident nazi’s back onto the platform and when NZ Twitter tried to block him, many found that the block button simply didn’t work for them.
That isn’t a wagon I’d want to hitch myself too. Not for a million dollars.
Yep, I’ve not only stayed at an awful job longer than should have because I underestimated my skills, I’ve also voluntarily took a layoff because I knew I would get a job as soon as I started looking. I didn’t like the job, didn’t need the job, and there were other people who would have been laid off that needed the job if I hadn’t volunteered.
Yeah, possibly. Fortunately, I’ve reached the point in my life where if you’re not my wife or one of my dead parents, I really don’t care what you think of me.
This is IMHO. It’s not the pit. It’s not appropriate to attack other posters. Comment on the content, not on the commentator. This is the last mod note. Any further personal attacks will get formal warning, thread closures, or other stronger actions.
(I need to review the recent activity. We may already be at the point of warnings, etc.)
Corrolary: It is precisely the ones who do trust Elon Musk to identify great code (i.e. those who can distinguish neither great code nor competent management from a kiwi fruit) who would think taking the offer is a good idea (as distinguished from thinking that taking the offer is the least bad option because of situations such as H1B status, having insufficient FUMoney saved up, etc).
The problem is that, given a clear-eyed assessment of his criteria for extending such an opportunity, the offer runs into the same problem that occurred to me while I was reading a comic book and thought to wonder why anybody still hires on as a henchman to the Joker. Surely it’s become known that one’s merits as a petty criminal are basically irrelevant to whether he will reward you, ignore you, or kill you.
It’s possible that Musk would just be such a lousy boss that hitching your wagon to him would be a bad idea.
But if my kid worked at Twitter and came home and said, “Elon Musk is firing everyone except a core group pf coders! I can take a payout now, or try to be in that group. What should I do?”
I would tell him that there is a real opportunity here for career advancement, but he’d have to be confident that his work is good enough and that he’s willing to put in long hours and put ip with some frustration for a time. If yes, I’d tell him to stay and take a awing. At the very least, the core coders Elon keeps are more likely to wind up promoted when he has to hire back a lot more developers, which he will. Being in an entrepreneurial situation at the very start can be very lucrative.
But if he thought he was only an average or below average coder, or he wasn’t willing to jump through Elon’s hoops and work the hours, he should get out now and take the severance. For career reasons, it’s better to leave with a group in a layoff than to get fired by yourself.
But being in a group of a hundred or so people restarting the development of Twitter would be a rare opportunity. Better than being one of thousands of faceless developers at another big tech firm. Not just for the career advance,ent, but for the learning opportunity.
…Twitter is billions of dollars in the hole, is struggling to pay payroll (because they fired almost all of their payroll staff), is struggling to bring in revenue (because they fired almost all of their advertising/marketing/customer retention crew) and right now in real time Elon Musk is publicly picking a fight with Apple and Tim Cook.
None of this are tech problems. The tech is fine. There is no demand for “Twitter 2.0.” I have absolutely zero need to use a social media app to “make payments.” We’ve got a banking system that works perfectly well-thank-you-very-much.
There are plenty of problems with Elon Musk’s strategy at the moment. But the fundamental one is that he’s building a product for himself.
I already did that - got layed off when our development office was closed down by the head office. In my case, it worked out fine. i got a severance and early retirement. Getting layed off when a business fails carries no employment stigma at all.
But I would take significant odds that Twitter will still be here in a year, and even momey that it will still be here in five years. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Twitter grow significantly over the next year. but I also wouldn’t be surprised to see it crash and burn.
Musk is showing Powerpoints that say Twitter engagement and new users are way up since he took over. I don’t know how much trust to put in that - it seems likely that a lot of engagement right now is peoole screaming that Twitter is going to hell, and the new users could be bots that were getting filtered before and no longer are. I have no idea.
But it’s also possible that Musk is attracting a whole new audience to Twitter, but people on the left may be leaving and therefore to other peolle on the left it may look like Twitter is shedding users because follower counts are dropping.
If it were my kid, the answer would be to decide what your goal is and decide if staying accomplish that. For example, Warren Buffett’s heir apparent is a guy named Greg Abel, who came up after David Sokol quit about a decade ago. There are a couple of guys named Ted and Todd that advise on buys and sells in the hundreds of millions dollar range, while Buffett, Munger, and Abel handle the billions. It’s sort of “inside baseball” but the players are known.
I don’t see that with Musk. He doesn’t have heirs apparent, lieutenants, trusted advisors. Being on the inside with him doesn’t strike me as likely to lead to anything better down the line. The vibe from him, reinforced recently, is that everyone else is disposable.
Also, a lot of the chatter I see online from older white guys is that 75-hour weeks is part of the business, and the people quitting are “sissies.” In my career I’ve done those sorts of hours, sure - shit happens and it’s all hands on deck for a while, and in some areas (law firms, for example) that sort of grinding is how you move up.
But what seems to be missing now is talk of the rewards. I got bonuses and promotions for doing that crap, and now people talk like you’d be giving up your personal life for a “meets expectations” on your next review. If that had been the deal when I was younger, I’d have left as soon as possible. Heck, I did leave a job when that happened, now that I think of it.