I think the author of this piece fundamentally misunderstands what business Twitter is in. It’s not a tech company, it is a publisher. The technology is necessary and profitable only in so far as it enables Twitter to grow a valuable audience. And to be more specific, an audience that is valuable to certain advertisers.<p>Chris Sacco nailed this in the comments he tweeted recently. There are businesses where engineering can “get it right,” like cars and rockets, but Twitter is not one of those businesses.<p>It’s not clear to me why cutting back to only engineers would be a good strategy at Twitter. Twitter doesn’t make widgets for people to buy, it makes culture. Rejecting cultural topics in favor of lines of code seems like an internally-driven decision, not one that reflects a deep understanding of the customer.
"Once he got access to the company’s finances, the Tesla boss realized it was losing millions of dollars every day, and that many of its employees weren’t doing much work at all."<p>Once he took possession of the company, he had to demonstrate that it was somebody else's fault that the finances make no sense.
The oil states have a huge problem with this - an oversupply of educated but useless people. The government ends up as the employer of last resort. Egypt used to guarantee a Government job to anyone who completed college. Then the oil ran out. There's been much unrest ever since.<p>In the US, only about half of college graduates have jobs that require a college education.<p>Craigslist has about 50 employees. If you really had to, you could probably run Twitter with a very small staff, and the computing outsourced to AWS.
This is a terrible article. The author contributes nothing to the discussion other than to fawn over Musk and attack straw men through pseudo-intellectual prose. It also appears to have factual information wrong. The article is not worth being on HN if this is the discourse it provides.
What the author is describing isn't even an email caste. It's a phony email caste. There was and still is in many places a genuine email caste of product managers, account managers, customer service directors, and so-on, that, for all of their meetings and draining of engineering hours, managed to add some value to the company.
This article's closing insinuation that diversity only matters (or is pushed by) 'the email caste' perpetuates a sterotype.<p>There are lots of us "diverse" engineers who wouldn't have been given a first shot without such sensitivities.
This is a fun polemic to read but rather short on evidence. Personally, I doubt tech companies bloat because of a social-minded desire to give "scions of the professional-managerial class" employment, but for the same reason any company does: managers wanted bigger teams because it enhances their status, and when times are good nobody complains.
Not talking about the Musk point, i don't like the guys and never liked most cargo-cult in general, be it Jobs, Musk, Gates, but also Linus or even Stallman, so i might have negative priors, i won't judge it on this.<p>The author take on French revolution is bullshit. And i don't even understand where it came from? I assume a lot here, because i cannot be in the author head.<p>The author read about Louvois for whatever reason, let's say an army fetish? (i'm projecting maybe). Then he misunderstood the impact of this army size on coordination and cooperation, especially at the time. Read about Autrichian war of succession and the fact that the biggest european army did not handle itself as it should have. Then he extrapolated a lot without reading any academic discussions and made himself an opinion.<p>I understand, i do that a lot in my HN comments, but if i wrote in a journal, i would be very careful about being correct about historical parallels. To me it's disqualifying the whole article, and this put "compactmag.com" in the "might be untrustworthy" category.
Two notes:<p>skilled workers for a proprietary platform should learn that they work against their interests since anything they create is bound to the owner so instead of creating technical value they'll keep reinventing the wheel a company after another with small differences between them since all of those are interested only in trapping users inside their service model. As a result preferred workers are those with less skill who knowing that accept limited compensation and being treated like human-robots;<p>the lesson users should learn about proprietary platform is that they are at the mercy of the platform so NOTHING done with it should have a value since it might change or vanish overnight.<p>The juice of this note is simple: IT MUST BE FLOSS, services must be open protocols anyone can implement and keep up not tied to any company or developer in particular. That's is.<p>Beside that the sole comparison I see with the French Revolution is the fact revolutionaries / innovators in both cases are betrayed by those who led/hire them and in both cases such cohort of people allow betrayers to betray them.
I read through some of this author's other articles, and he has a really inaccurate view of technology workers. We're not VC-backed digital nomads spending our days eating artisanal hot dogs. Most of us are just nine-to-five workers with families and hobbies, and most of use work on relatively boring parts of code that keep the wheels turning. (Only a specialized few get excited about automating mass data migrations. I love it, but it doesn't make for interesting TikToks.)
This is a real-time history rewrite.<p>"Once he got access to the company’s finances, the Tesla boss realized it was losing millions of dollars every day [...]"<p>He knew it would be losing $millions/day because he forced the situation that created the debt.<p>I stopped reading at that point, not interested in dissecting how a beat-sweetener slides into obsequious myth building.
Lord what a fawning article. They laid off plenty of engineers, including folks that apparently were necessary. I'm sure they laid off some folks who were doing very little work, but seems pretty clear they also laid off plenty of contributors. Seems like the author started from two perspectives - Elon Musk is a genius and anyone who isn't an engineer doesn't add value to tech companies and just went from there. Neither point is supported.
First of all Twitter is SF based, and is NOT a Silicon Valley company. It's frustrating how many people get this wrong, and most of the times when it suites a particular narrative.<p>Secondly: Not to say that Twitter, or other tech firms, don't have a bunch of people who are not very productive/contributing - but is this a problem unique to tech companies and not every other company that grows beyond a point?<p>Are pharma companies, car manufacturers, utilities, CPG, etc etc all running a perfectly well oiled machinery. Or, is it just that the people who have been on the outside looking in with jealousy suddenly get to vent their rage during times of such correction since it gets them eyeballs.