Because politics and ideologues are so prevalent and everyone's attaching 'the other' (both sides) for the own.
And of course people in 'important' roles who've been laid off are going to say the company is doomed, these are the probably the worst source to go off. They're not going to say "oh yeah I didn't do much at all really, just bossed people around and spent my budget every year."
It's actually scary how many people, even engineers, put their reputation on the line saying Twitter wouldn't survive the weekend. It wasn't just Twitter employees.
It's like a mass psychosis of some kind. It comes off as a kind of desperation, as though they need Elon to fail.
There are a lot of places where the systems would start to fall over if 70-80% of the team departed. Especially since a lot of folks left on bad terms and/or were suddenly terminated. It was the opposite of a smooth handover.
So it wasn't unreasonable to think that Twitter would begin experiencing problems.
I didn't think that Twitter was going to literally have an unrecoverable system crash and permanently shut its doors, but I thought we'd see some outages or partial breakage over time, which is basically what has happened albeit in an admirably mild way.
It comes off as a kind of desperation, as
though they need Elon to fail.
You don't need to pathologize it, like it's some... deep weirdo psychological yearning. Some people think he's a jerk and wouldn't mind seeing him fall on his face!
If a person was staking some significant part of their emotions on their feelings for Musk, yeah, that'd be unhealthy.
But I think you are significantly overestimating the emotional weight behind 99.99% of the half-baked Twitter quick takes. It's okay to not like a guy!
But the parent poster characterizes those disliking Elon Musk as suffering from "psychosis" and "desperation."
It's a an unfortunately common, passive-aggressive ad hominem tactic you see on the internet and elsewhere. "People don't like thing or person XYZ? Oh, they must be mentally ill and losers who spend their whole lives obsessing over that thing/person"
> put their reputation on the line saying Twitter wouldn't survive the weekend.
Was that a real thing those people were saying?
Genuinely asking, as I don't follow any of the former Twitter engineers on, well, Twitter, and if there were any such posts/articles on here I must have missed them.
What is with all the people this year who insist that because something doesn't happen right away, it can never happen?
The only prediction anyone made was that the World Cup was historically a period of very high load, so if something was going to go wrong soon, the weekend would be the first vulnerable time, and the World Cup finals will be the next.
Many of us have worked at companies where there is a lot of duct tape holding things together and when you let go of entire teams (not just a large percentage) then it isn't unreasonable to be pessimistic. Especially when you know that in order to fix problem A you need to take B, D, E, C corrective actions in that order. And you learnt that through years of things going wrong.
More so at companies like Twitter where they never really reach a steady state. You constantly have large fluctuations in system stress e.g. World Cup, Trump rejoining etc.
Just curious, among the critical stuff just holding on, was there also a whole pile of departments and teams doing work that could cease tomorrow and the company would blink and move on?
My experience is both exist at the same time because the leadership teams don't actually know what core business is or are busy building empires and resumes.
Just curious, among the critical stuff just
holding on, was there also a whole pile of
departments and teams doing work that could
cease tomorrow and the company would blink
and move on?
I get what you're saying. For any given team with a public-facing product you generally have perhaps 20% of the staff keeping things running and the other 80% of the staff is working on new features, reports, enhancements, customer support, whatever. You could eliminate them and while it would diminish the company in various ways, the other 20% could certainly keep the lights on.
However it's worth noting that's not what happened at Twitter; there were very specific and explicit reports that the "keep things running" teams were hit just as hard by layoffs/resignations as the other departments.
So there was real justifiable concern there.
There's also a lot of things that can go wrong during sloppy and abrupt handovers. Like... you fired the guy who manages the domain renewals. In the chaos of transition nobody picks this role up. One day 18 months later you realize "twitter.com" has expired. Or whatever. Even if the remaining staff is sufficient to keep things running, there are thousands of these little process interruptions.
I don't even doubt that they did a lot of work, but as this article suggests, that's part of the reason why we _wouldn't_ expect the site to just go down in a couple days. If all the servers needed constant manual massaging that would speak more poorly to their work than the other way around.
I will admit to this. I was so angry at how Musk treated his employees, and I took them at face value when they predicted outages. I still think that we will see outages in the coming weeks and months, but probably not in spectacular fashion.
A lot of Musk’s fans get emotional about this too. I remember people gloating when they rolled out the new Twitter Blue, saying that Elon got more done in a couple weeks than Twitter had gotten done in years beforehand. And then they shut it off, and now they’re delaying the relaunch. People were praising Musk’s “moderation council” concept, and then he promptly abandoned it to make these decisions by fiat (and in one case, a poll).
I love this comment. It's so salient. It's probably hard for a lot of people on this board to digest but, I feel like most know where you're coming from.
And of course people in 'important' roles who've been laid off are going to say the company is doomed, these are the probably the worst source to go off. They're not going to say "oh yeah I didn't do much at all really, just bossed people around and spent my budget every year."