Wow... The responses under the https://twitter.com/ashleevance/status/1591938798807814145 are just sad 😞 Most of them are accusing the developer of being unprofessional... I mean wtf?

I think that this is an effort to move attention from what they're changing in their Terms. Take this video as an example: https://youtu.be/OOG65rSM5fA?t=623 The trick is to "put the balls under the cup when they don't look".

> I think that this is an effort to move attention from what they're changing in their Terms. What's "this"? Also what are they changing in their ToS?

This sacking and other crap is just fluff to take away the attention from whatever they're actually doing. Don't lose your focus. I don't know what they're changing, but this is what they want you to look at while they are actually pulling the rug from under you. So I think you should have a read in the ToS section as this is the first thing investors change when they buy a company.

https://psychological-warfare.com/misdirection/

there are services that monitor this that you can check

and you don't need to ignore the clearly egregious things in order to also watch for clandestine changes. there are so many people watching what happens at twitter, both inside and outside

governments, big journalists, indie journalists, employees, ex-employees, etc

Exactly, besides I was just making an observation. You can still empathize with other people individually even if you believe there's a bigger game at play and we are all pawns in it.

psychological warfare? maybe, but occam's razor tells me this this stinks so much like overconfident billionaire tech bro fucking everything up desperately trying to recoup losses from the sale that I'm willing to believe that (while keeping an eye on other things)

and he did have huuuuuge losses, he crushed tesla stock in order to make this purchase and likely got very bad terms on the debt he took on in order to finance this. the losses I've seen calculated by people I trust are on order of ~$100B

We'll see what's going to happen. Let's hope it happens sooner than later :thinking_face:

Or it already happened and we missed it

I can imagine what he's betting on, that he can turn this around and tesla stock will recover, but with bad debt terms he neeeeeeeds this to be profitable like right now and that's the simplest explanation for his behavior

I mean it's been a few weeks and he's showing us what's happening and what will continue happening

banks selling his debt for $0.60 / $1, I think I heard? the banks are gonna be real, real mad

THe funny thing is Twitter was profitable, and has been a while

He immediately torpedoed their main source of revenue

convinced that somehow 8 bucks a month was going to make up for immediately alienating his biggest advertisers

I understand that it was profitable but not recoup-debt-from-bad-sale profitable

Yeah, classic leveraged buyout

in all he probably would have been better off paying the penalty instead of purchasing the company, betting on twitter not winning specific performance in a lawsuit

omg, it was the Yes Men. https://twitter.com/theyesmen/status/1592228241120845824

OMG

I had no idea they were still around

also leave it to an overconfident billionaire tech bro to not think about how "features" will be used as avenues for abuse

I forgot they even existed

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2022/11/14/musk-fires-twitter-engineer-on-twitter-cowards/?sh=4c909bfc6063

he was publicly deriding the work of him and his colleagues, public response is warranted and it says a lot about musk that the man-baby can't handle that

this is how you end up with a ton of yes-men around you

and then no one wants to tell you anything lest they lose their jobs

it's self-defeating behavior

and certainly not in the interests of the company or the people of twitter

It's also possible that this is how you transform a start-up into an enterprise. You take the people that can detect logical fallacies out of the company.

The actual chairmenfounders and builders are not needed anymore and they create problems as they say that things can't work. But instead you want somebody that will absorb instead of somebody that will act.

it's how you end up with an organization of ineffectual sycophants, so you might have a point

management that can't blame itself for failures but instead blames frontline workers is a failure of management, imo. they direct work and, as the android dev said in tweets, prioritize work often to the detriment of paying down technical debt to make things fast (why isn't fast a feature?)

if they don't want the frontline workers to correct them when they're wrong then how can they expect frontline workers to defy management in prioritizing work? it's absurd

and firing people who challenge him just ensures he is surrounded by more and more sycophantic people and the more sure he is that he's brilliant and any challengers are fools. round and round it goes until he thinks he's a business god and starts making drastic changes to a business he doesn't understand to try to dramatically increase profits to service bad debt. it's a catastrophe

And that's how you get the Boring Company

@U028ART884X I think you give Musk far too much credit as some sort of "cunning evil genius villain" when in fact he's just a "lucky idiot with money" 🙂

I think I'm too used to be in a rational environment. I have to accept that people can be irrational too.

Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by mere incompetence.

I think even rational environments are far less rational than we would like to believe. rational depends on value judgements and assumptions and knowledge that can be different from person to person. I'm sure that from his standpoint he's being rational but it doesn't make the choices any less bad

(calling them bad is a value judgement, wheeeeee)

No human is truly perfectly rational, and those who claim it are the most suspect IME, as what they almost invariably mean is simply that they lack the self-reflection to recognize their own biases.

> rational environments are far less rational than we would like to believe I currently read a book on this... at least the book touches it. I came to conclusion that this is because humans have finite constraints in their existence.

sure, that's one way to put it, but humans also are greatly influenced by emotion in all their decisions. even the lack of emotion about something influences your decisions

I would argue that lack of emotion, or at least empathy, is a liability to understanding the human condition and how our actions affect it.

vulcans are more parody than aspirational

absolutely @U13N2SPMZ

also re: "don't backtalk the boss", it appears that encouraging dissent had been existing culture: https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1592548431347994625

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_T1wBFWbf-g

Also thanks, the twitterisdoinggreat webpage linked to this: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ What a great read 😄 That's a feed I can read at least a little 😄

Molly White is awesome! I followed her for a while on Twitter and now I follow her on Mastodon. And if you don't like either of those, you can just read her newsletter: https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/

https://reddit.com/yyqgcx

Possible at least partial cause of a bubble, if it is -- all of the on-line activity/shopping/ordering/Zoom-use/etc. during 2 years of lockdowns.

Another possible partial cause, sure to be controversial, is various kinds of US government hand-outs during lockdown that skewed the kinds of spending occurring during that time, contributing to overall price inflation in many areas, leading to reduced spending later.

I'm no economist, and I'm sure an economist would give you an earful backed up by more facts and data. N economists would give you N different earfuls 🙂

Another possible perspective: the overall stock market lost 20+% of its value this year and that's hitting everything, and tech is just one particular case of 'everything' (although I imagine VC gets hit especially hard by overall belt-tightening).

this may be subjective, but overhiring over the last two years is prolly a huge factor

The people that were laid off were obviously hired because the companies needed extra hands in the first place, so how do you measure "overhiring"? :thinking_face: I kinda get it as a symptom of COVID (demand skyrocketed since 2020 but now it's getting back to normal, so tech companies adapt by downsizing) but the numbers I'm seeing for 2022Q4 are really high (haven't verified them all yet to be honest, so take with a grain of salt):

Meta - 11k (13%)
Twitter - 3.7k (50%) - this is because of the change in management, but 50%? wow
Intel - 20%
Snap - 20%
Netflix - 450
Robinhood - 30%
Stripe, Lyft - 13%
Salesforce - 2k
Amazon - 10k

Generally, I think big corporations would love to have layoffs every 6 months, but don't because of how it looks. Every once in a while, there's an opportunity to have layoffs and blame it on some external circumstances. There's also a herding effect since having more companies participate make it easier to lay external blame. Having said that, there are fundamentals that are not great: • high inflation • the Fed continues to raise interest rates to combat high inflation which is a drag on the economy • high energy prices (which also contributes to high inflation) • global supply chain issues

Big Tech/VC-backed startups have been so flush with cash in the past that they've been hiring at a ridiculous rate to expand their product offerings/capture more market share/whatever and that's been the bubble, IMO. Many of them have been doing so even when they haven't been making profits to justify that expansion. And now there's just enough of a shift in the economy to bring reality crashing into their C-suites and so they're "correcting" -- and doing it too late so it's too hard. color me cynical about Big Tech/SV

> Generally, I think big corporations would love to have layoffs every 6 months, but don't because of how it looks. Doesn't Amazon actually do something like this? With their ranked performance stuff -- and they let go the "lowest N%" of their staff on a regular basis?

I think Amazon has a reputation for more aggressively targeting a "lowest N%" attrition rate. It's a little hard to tell what their actual policy is because companies have moved away from explicitly saying they "stack rank". Also, Amazon has lots of non-tech employees and it's hard to tell from reporting which policies apply to which subset of employees.

price gouging by corporations is contributing significantly to the appearance of inflation (according to some economists, but if you ask 20 economists for their opinion you'll have 50 opinions)

having just done job some serious job hunting it appears to me like a lot of tech jobs are shifting away from the unicorn companies towards smaller and mid-sized companies

my anecdata is irrefutable

> a lot of tech jobs are shifting away from the unicorn companies towards smaller and mid-sized companies This makes me happy... 😸

saaaaame

also glad I found a job before the flood of layoffs hit 😅

Isn't this what some people have been screaming about for 10 years now? QE was basically giving interest free loans and all that loan fueled - buy my stock back - tech bubble couldn't last forever. Now that the interest rates are going up again, religious investments in tech are drying up. I don't know crap about any of this, but this sounds right to me. 😄

I think that basically everyone here is right. Mass economic changes don't often have one cause but many things. While "tech companies" have many similarities (many took VC funding, pulling from the same labor pool of software engineers) their actual business can be quite different. For instance, Meta's business is being hit hard by the "cookiepocalypse." Plus their lack of growth in their user base, plus retail brands wanting to be more careful with their ad spend, means they had less revenue from ads than last year. They've also made some really big bets on some far-flung ventures; with the risk of ad spend continuing to go down as the retail market slows from lack of oil and rising prices, they need to look like they're taking this seriously. Amazon, on the other hand, is one of those retailers who is dealing directly with both supply chain & energy issues due to the war in Ukraine, and consumer behavior changing from a year ago with more people returning to in person shopping. They still have a money printing machine in AWS, but investors still pay a lot of attention to their core online retail business. And on and on for each company doing layoffs. Each one is special in the way they operate and their position in the market, but there are common trends within those. The best thing to do rn is to go skim the earnings reports of these companies. They pretty much spell it out for their investors, who they're beholden to, what their goals are and how they're going to achieve them. Layoffs are fitting into those plans pretty easily rn.

the nice thing is that it's mainly in big tech & VC funded tech that things are looking worse rn. a lot of the rest of the market is doing just fine. who knows what the future holds, but that's the here and now

This is driven by investors and finance in general, around 20% layoffs all across the board

“The people that were hired were obviously needed” -> the most charitable description of (large) organisations in a while. 😁

I've never understood why companies would create such big tech teams in the first place. If simplicity is at the core of your product or service, then the first rule should be to build something truly simple. Simple enough to build with as few people as possible. Adding more people tends to add more complexity (both in features and in processes) in my experience. That allows a team and a product to grow more organically, which is slower but more profitable in the end imo. Not a popular opinion with investors (I've been working with them for over 20 years now).

The Mythical Man-Month was published in 1975… just saying. 😛

@U01M742UT8F One of my earliest jobs was at an actuarial company (in England) where the IT department head had gradually built up a team of about 100 developers. I was only there for five months before I quit but it was obvious that there were a lot of inefficiencies in how the department was run. At my exit interview, the department head asked me if I had any observations or suggestions about working there -- I told him he could probably fire half his staff and have a much more productive department (there were quite a few very lazy contractors and a lot of low-performing junior developers -- and they had promoted most of the senior developers into "management" roles where they no longer did any development). He was outraged and pretty much admitted that having "only" 50 people in his department would reduce his power and standing in the company... Empire-building and deep management hierarchies naturally produce larger teams and larger departments.

@U04V70XH6 that is exactly what I mean. Great story! I can't believe IT is still often run this way. I can imagine it makes a difference if the core of your product or service is build in an inefficient language or not. But in my mind everything starts with simplicity. It is incredibly hard to make things really simple, but if you can do that it will pay off in the end. Adding more people to that process should be done carefully and sparsely I think. The culture of my company is entirely based around the notion of simplicity.

I think the desire of some managers to create large teams that they control is independent of whether they work in IT or not.

Practically speaking, nothing has changed for me in my goals. Focus on what I understand, and avoid over-investing in things that i don't. I feel that "market shifts" often happen because people believe they have more resources than they do energy to understand them. We might be better just relaxing a bit rather than over exerting ourselves. As someone who recently literally "over stretched" a muscle, trying harder in a short period of time might not lead to the desired effect. But it's hard to sell "relaxing" to overstimulated venture capitalists, especially when we're saturated with media constantly over hyping ever aspect of life.

delete facebook, enjoy the simple pleasure of doing a good job, then hit the local cafe and have an almond scone.