Now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter - now the Pit edition (Part 1)

And it’s just really, really stupid. I’m a programmer. I worked all day yesterday updating a 10,000 line application that I wrote.

I spent all day on it. I added… 4 lines of code. I still have it in ‘test’ mode (don’t go live with anything on a Friday is the unwritten rule where I work) I often don’t write any code at all. I’m updating, republishing services or I’m fixing stuff that breaks. Maybe I’m busy installing a new license manager or whatnot.

Musk probably think that programmers churn out pages of code a day. That’s jus not the case.

I don’t think it is that crazy a request, if you haven’t done any programming in the last 20 years.

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It’s also fantastically stupid and ignorant from a control standpoint. Once your source code is out of git or wherever and printed on paper, you have zero visibility as to how it gets copied and redistributed from there. I work at a fintech startup and if we learned that one of our developers were taking printouts showing the guts of our software, that person would have their system access revoked that same minute. Musk may claim to think of Twitter as a tech company first, but if that’s the case then he seems weirdly unconcerned about protecting and controlling its key proprietary asset.

I remember a podcast, must have been around 2010, where the subject was how non-scalable, non-robust the Twitter platform was. They said something about vulnerability to a single hard disk failure. Of course things were improving and have evolved greatly since then, I’m sure (as of last month) it was as technically sound as any other popular, global, high-intensity web operator, and they had ample documentation and traceability of their technical stuff.

But the key point is that the original Twitter probably had only a few hundred employees. Heck, Wikipedia still has only about 300. From a technical standpoint, as far as just keeping the site operational for a while, maybe it can be pulled off with the remaining staff and a few devoted, brilliant new hires. Finding devoted, brilliant people is one of the few things Musk knows how to do. If he’d just stop micromanaging and making up new rules every day, I think the technical aspect could work.

Revenue will still be a problem; to depend less on advertisers, they may adjust the scalability, close some data centers at the cost of site responsiveness, or add a 2-tier speed system linked to the 8-dollar subscription. Maybe force Tesla and Starlink customers to pay for Twitter somehow.

Moderation would require humans, there won’t be any.

The impossible part will be compliance, from App Store rules to employment laws to filing taxes to the FTC consent decree, but Musk probably figures he can dance around that by blaming the big bad governments and corporate wokeness. Maybe use SpaceX as a lever (weapon) to get the government to bend its rules.

I think I’m turning into a monster.

“From now on, all code for Twitter will be written in Modula-2!”

Now before you can drive your Tesla down to the corner store for a pack of smokes, you have to retweet something Elon posted. “Fuck it, I’ll just walk!”

Stranger

And here we see the difference between twitter and wikipedia. The moderators on wikipedia are volunteers who choose to spend their free time cleaning up articles and settling disputes for free. They have a whole lot more than 300 people “working” for them.

No one is going to do that for twitter for free.

It’s not like it’s all that hard. You just offer a whole bunch of money, and people will come. It’s no more skill there than putting cheese into a mousetrap.

But Musk has to try and do that without the “whole bunch of money” part. And he thinks he can pull it off.

I was going to post something like this. Sure, in the last week or so, I wrote about 1000 lines of code for a new feature. A good part of that is a test harness for my unit testing. It’s not close to ready for integration and system level testing.

But I also have times where I spend a day debugging a weird memory corruption issue, and eventually change one character of code to fix it. Someone has something in write-back cache (foo_WB_bar) instead of write-through mode (foo_WT_bar).

And the only reasons it was only a day to debug that is 1) it was my code originally so I had a good idea of how it was supposed to be working, and 2) I’ve been dealing with cache issues for much of my 25+ years in the industry, so I recognize the signs.

Right, it’s like thinking you’re the king of catching mice, and you’re so good you don’t even need to bait that trap anymore.

So, what you are saying is that you don’t write enough code to justify your paycheck? :wink:

I disagree. Many people in the tech industry are paid a lot of money, but certainly not all are brilliant. There will be a large pool of applicants, especially this year with all the cuts in the tech industry. (Well, to be fair, right now nobody would want to start work at Twitter; but maybe a year from now when the Musk shit-show has died down.) How do you determine who’s only in it for the money to pay their McMansion vs who’s exceptionally dedicated? How do you find the person who can understand situations at a glance and take the correct actions using the least amount of resources?

It could be argued that the turmoil of the past few weeks has been a cold-hearted way to do this with the existing staff. You just semi-randomly fire most people, and dig through the rubble to find out who was irreplaceable. Then see if they’re fanatical enough to come back when invited to. Musk is probably polite and friendly when he’s doing that part.

You don’t think that his employees are in it for the money? Now, I’m sure that there are those at SpaceX who are in it because they want to have their hands in an exciting industry, and show more dedication than their financial compensation alone would account for, but that’s because space is new and exciting. You aren’t going to get the same kind of motivation over twitter.

Generally you hire a bunch of people, promote those who do well, let go those who do poorly, and maintain those who do acceptably.

These are questions that are answered in Business 101. It doesn’t take a genius.

Yeah, that’s the worst way to find and maintain talent. Those people who can understand a situation at a glance are going to understand the situation all too well, those who are irreplaceable are the ones least likely to come back.

Yeah, and most people have caught onto the fact that people who speak out of both sides of their mouth like that make terrible bosses who can’t be trusted.

I agree, but I’m not sure Musk has understood this part.

I’m sure he didn’t. He thought his cult of personality would win everyone over, not understanding that it only works on people who have already fallen for it, it doesn’t do much to get people to do so.

I don’t know if it’s just a reflexive pushback fron Elmo fanboys but cheering for him to suppress the “professional-manager class” of his employee pool is a curious trend.

Why would someone not of the employer class not root for workers to have more leverage? It’s like hoping for higher unemployment so wages will decrease for the working stiffs.

Maybe I should head over to the Post-scarcity thread and knock heads with the people who can’t envision a post-work society, I dunno.

My theory is that Elon can’t deal with having a transgender daughter, so he set 44 billion dollars on fire.

And……apologies if anyone else posted this….but does Elon think he just now invented shadow-banning?

I don’t claim any special insight, but is it perhaps just more know-nothingness on a slightly higher plane.

Dilbert is all about “workers Good(-ish); managers Bad”. Lots of IT folks can buy into that narrative as most of them (and me in my time) have lived exactly that reality.

There are really 3 classes here: owners, managers, and workers. The workers can be thrilled about Elon slaughtering the middle tier above them. Sweet, sweet revenge on all the Pointy-haired bosses.

The ones whose mental makeup is prone to hero or Big Man worship might like the idea of a tyrant genius tycoon for a boss. Just like about half of the USA seems to like the idea of a tyrant genius conman for a President.

Whether they’ll like the reality that follows from ushering in the idea is a different matter. We’ll see in time how well it works out for them.

Many people love vandalizing or watching others vandalize. The bill comes in later.

Dilbert is all about “Dilbert good; other workers Useless; managers Bad”. Managers are bad not just because they’re terrible, but because they allow the flourishing of the Useless. What Dilbert really craves is a good Manager who will fire all the Bad and Useless, validating Dilbert’s sense of superiority and clearing the path for his own success and satisfaction.

This analysis helps us understand Musk’s army of bootlickers, but moreover it demystifies the trajectory of Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) who has become the worst sort of cynical right-wing troll. He was never an ordinary guy aligned with ordinary workers. He was endlessly resentful of the fact that an intellectually superior guy like himself had to be thwarted and oppressed by simpleton co-workers and managers.

There’s nothing more vicious than Betas who think they’ve been cheated out of Alpha-dom. That’s who these people are.

Berke Breathed repurposed an old strip to take a shot at Elon.

Elon is just “refactoring”.

Stranger