Elon Musk

SBF seems both smarter and more borked, by his own delusions and by the world catching up with them (slowly then quickly)

i want elon to crash and burn since his japes already have a bodycount but i can also see him wobbling thru to the other end in effect unscathed and never really confronted with a reckoning he understands as being a reckoning

Musk's folly here feels a little like say someone obscenely rich who doesn't know anything about coffee bought Starbucks and poured all of their coffee in the street and then told all of the Starbucks employees to double time it on inventing something sorta like coffee (optionally beverage-centric even) but better (maybe a product where, whenever the new owner of Starbucks isn't around, all the consumers of nu-Starbucks should be asking 'where's Poochie?') or they're out on their asses, is what it feels a little like. Just why. What is money when the person with the most of it decides to use his to put himself in the center of a third-rate Marx Brothers rip-off that ends with a static shot of the Groucho stand-in pissing into his own face for twelve solid minutes.

i have to say this post lost me

Agreed.

that Matt Wallace tweet is so deranged, not just in the implication that women are falling over themselves to get a piece of this freak but also in the idea that people like this are driven by hedonism and not spite. dude is just like Trump, he needs people to tell him what a good little boy he is 24/7

but also that he's cool like poochie

which is not actually a trump failing (in new low bar news)

where is Poochie tho

Also Musk should be louder, angrier and have access to a time machine

Then again, there must be someone willing to take $300k for being the least experienced. Probably easier to find if they can wfh and live outside the Bay Area, though.

Genuinely interested to know how you get massaged by 100 women

shifts

first you need 100 of these

https://i.imgur.com/izJW0Vt.png

You might have regrets, but at least you’ll never have this guy’s regrets pic.twitter.com/wh1b3uJohm

— Read Jackson Rising by @CooperationJXN (@JoshuaPHilll) November 16, 2022

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/17/23464351/whatsapp-business-directory-brazil-mexico-indonesia-uk

lol whatsapp is launching a feature that's similar to offering from the one company Elon actually started in the 90s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DRju2sOusI

Can't believe I'm saying this, but if your account got locked in the last hour for retweeting my post about Elon Musk, DM me. (Others have DM'd me directly.) pic.twitter.com/pK4wGyRCpV

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) November 17, 2022

Scoop: I am hearing far fewer than expected devs hit "yes".

Elon sent out an email relaxing remote working from the former draconian policy.

I'm hearing he is having meetings w top engineers to convince them to stay.

Sounds like playing hardball does not work. Ofc it doesn't. https://t.co/VrPEn4IwBG

— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) November 17, 2022

Maybe the collective outrage over Ticketmaster cancelling the public ticket sales for the Taylor Swift tour will give enough of a pre-World Cup stress test.

how can he be so bad at this is so much worse than should be possible

"From my larger group of 50 people, 10 are staying, 40 are taking the severance. Elon set up meetings with a few who plan to quit."

I don't blame people quitting. They've been offered intimidation, ever-changing policies the last minute, long hours, and an ultimatum.

— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) November 17, 2022

Who could have predicted this?

The richest man in the world now has to beg blue-haired nerds to keep submitting pull requests. And they’re just going to be like “you know I’ve been meaning to take a pottery class, it’s time.” Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

crazy that people didnt jump at the chance to take a much worse job than they can get anywhere else

It's nice to see pampered, overpaid programmers getting to play the victim in a media narrative for once.

Maybe it's just me but it feels like implicitly whittling your workforce down to employees motivated by punishments from daddy isn't the most efficient way to run a company.

And I've got to assume those staying, every last one of them, is readying a resume and looking for other opportunities, because they would be more reckless than Musk not to.

xpost You probably have to create a whole new division to delegate some of those spanking duties to, for a start.

I assume the majority of people who don’t quit will be those with visas

Also may be gambling that a lot of people will get promotions to fill positions left by people who quit. If you're kind of low-level, it could work out well. (Not that I have any idea how the hierarchy of Twitter departments is set up.)

No use getting promoted to be the boss of nobody

idk that sounds pretty good

Well, fair

My whole career game plan has been, and hopefully always will be, to get promoted and compensated as much as is possible without being to boss of anybody.

"I fear that in this world one is reduced to being either hammer or anvil; lucky the man who escapes these alternatives!"

Also may be gambling that a lot of people will get promotions to fill positions left by people who quit. If you're kind of low-level, it could work out well. (Not that I have any idea how the hierarchy of Twitter departments is set up.)

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Thursday, November 17, 2022 4:23 PM (thirty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

IC engineers don't get promoted just because someone more senior than them gets fired. managers sometimes do, and i know a couple of managers who stuck around hoping for exactly that. they both got fired in the first wave though haha.

I assume the majority of people who don’t quit will be those with visas

― G. D’Arcy Cheesewright (silby), Thursday, November 17, 2022 4:12 PM (forty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i know four people still on the payroll. three are on visas and one is on paternity leave.

It's nice to see pampered, overpaid programmers getting to play the victim in a media narrative for once.

― o. nate, Thursday, November 17, 2022 4:07 PM (forty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

its pretty funny that musk thought he could do some drill sergeant routine, pure delusion, pampered people are very resistant to not being pampered anymore

i dont particularly know what goes on as far as management in musks other companies but purely speculating both cars and rockets seem like industries that people might have a particular interest in working in, like video games or movies, and therefore are willing to work more hardcore, but making a app its cool people are interested in and may even be passionate about the technology aspect but no ones like its just so amazing to be around websites you know

up until recently, if you wanted to work on rockets or greenfield EV car design, there were relatively few places to go

but if you're a software engineer in silicon valley, there are and have been literally a million places to go?

(i think i saw this point being made itt but can't find it, apologies for plagiarizing)

i think its amazing to be around websites. but im not an engineer

posters love to be around websites

xp to myself - meant to say 'clean sheet' not 'greenfield'

i know four people still on the payroll. three are on visas and one is on paternity leave.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Thursday, November 17, 2022 4:58 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

lmao one of them quit today.

for a while people were genuinely interested in apps, telling you their app ideas, asking if you know how to build that

never know, the next one could be a million dollar idea

i dont particularly know what goes on as far as management in musks other companies but purely speculating both cars and rockets seem like industries that people might have a particular interest in working in, like video games or movies, and therefore are willing to work more hardcore, but making a app its cool people are interested in and may even be passionate about the technology aspect but no ones like its just so amazing to be around websites you know

― lag∞n, Thursday, November 17, 2022 5:02 PM (nineteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i think ironically twitter actually is a place where certain kinds of engineers go. it has a rep as being cushy of course but i'm not talking about that. it also has a really strong track record of being a place you can do foundational and extremely influential stuff, without needing to put up with organizational complexity on the scale of google/facebook. they don't care about twitter.com per se, but twitter.com has more interesting engineering problems than like doordash or even uber.

good thread of examples of this

One of the things that I think is sad about the decimation of Twitter eng is that Twitter was doing a lot of interesting (and high ROI) engineering work that, at younger companies, is mostly outsourced to "the cloud" or open source projects

A few examples off the top of my head: https://t.co/zAMF3oW5rL

— Dan Luu (@danluu) November 16, 2022

these people actually like the idea of "hardcore" (not in those words, they're adults) and should be his constituency. but it turns out that spending a month shitting on everything they've ever done (while being factually wrong about literally every detail) is not a winning strategy.

You can be a software engineer essentially anywhere including like banks, grocery stores, universities, companies you haven’t heard of that make ERP systems for hyperspecific sectors…

Personally I think scratching layers off of legacy code and fixing up bad databases and solving business logic problems for your colleagues is interesting

their idea of hardcore (solving difficult problems) is prob different than musks (sleeping at the office) xp

I feel like a lot of the foundational things Uber, etc. had to do are now almost boilerplate. I was at a conference talk where "here's how you'd use this backend system to query the nearest ten cars from a geospatial point" was a low-code example. The backends caught up and have absorbed a lot of the system load that Uber would have had to design around

imo Uber/Lyft still had some things to work on some years ago, but their grasp exceeded their reach and they started building systems to detect cops and feds attempting to illegally use their cars and started building shit to explicitly flaunt regulations, etc. that would have been a waste of time if their basics weren't already there