So "X" - nothing to see here. Elon's in control - Part XXX

magicbastarder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119888983#Comment_119888983

he can most likely do the engineering better than most of the engineers

how? genuine question. his academic qualifications are a B.A. and a B.Sc in economics.

TheIrishGrover

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119888889#Comment_119888889

Twitter absolutely categorically is not a "Software and Services" company. It's an advertising platform.

And he's spent the entire duration of his ownership pissing off the advertisers and firing all the staff that get the adverts.

Exactly. Social Media companies live or die based upon advertisers revenue. They are not a "Services" company.... Well, they are in that they serve valuable data to their advertisers. But as a platform becomes more and more toxic and partisan, the value of that data diminishes. Advertisers want as broad a pool of data as possible. They want data on people of as many nationalities as possible. As wide an age-gap as possible. As wide a income level as possible. Left, right, centre. Male, female, other. As many religions as possible. They don't want to preach to the choir. They need a diverse pool of data. How diverse do you think Twitter will be in 6 months? In a year? How diverse do you think "truth social" is? How many affluent, educated young transgender people with money to burn do you think there are on truth social? This was all brought up last year on the trump Thread: about Musk's initial spoutings of it being a total "free speech" platform without moderation (This was very early days before he "backed out"). Every single person then said on the thread that it would just turn into 4chan and become so toxic that advertisers would abandon it in droves and move on to the next thing.

It's not that we had some great insight into the world of high-finance or were some advertisment gurus. It was just simple obvious commonsense. Business is business and a company will not want to be associated with a toxic brand/platform. Now, while there are currently no twitter-killers out there (Mastadon too niche, others extremely partisan one way or another), if there is a gap, SOMEONE will fill it. Unfortunately it will mean that the likes of Zuckerberg or Besos will be the likely candidates.

It REALLY is strange and I can't help but feel that it is entirely intentional and we are not seeing the big picture

Agent Coulson

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119888994#Comment_119888994

But but he has a Blue Tick and doesn't have parody in his name :)

magicbastarder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119888999#Comment_119888999

my hunch is that he's a bully and being a bully works in some companies but not others.

jobs, for example, was known to be a 'toys out of the pram' style of manager at times too. but people would still buy his product.

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119888983#Comment_119888983

I'm sorry , but that's just nonsense.

What "Software & Services" does it sell??

The only people that pay Twitter to use their platform are Advertisers - Yet you say if they improve their tech they don't need Ad revenue????

80%+ of Twitters revenue is from advertising , just like every other Social media company.

VMWare is a Software and Services Company , SalesForce is a Software and Services company.

Twitter absolutely categorically is NOT a Software and Services Company.

Also - Musk is NOT an engineer and never has been , he absolutely cannot "do the engineering better than most of the engineers"

Penn

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889002#Comment_119889002

Yeah but you can tell because Musk responded to him playing along with the joke rather than firing him. Besides, Musk is definitely laughing along with everyone right now, and definitely isn't concerned about the amount of money he's about to lose and the damage to his reputation and possibly even the knock-on effect it will have regarding his other companies. Nope, he's definitely having a good time with the memez and lulz.

Christy42

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119888983#Comment_119888983

It produces users. That is twitters main production. All the widgets and servers are just to produce users which is the product they sell to advertisers.

And yes the advertising matters because that is their client base.

Someone asked why twitter was worth 44 billion. Because something is worth whatever someone will pay for it and Musk agreed to buy twitter for 44 billion. Course it isn't worth that now.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119888983#Comment_119888983

he can most likely do the engineering better than most of the engineers, 

Based on what? He turned off MicroServices on a whim, and broke 2FA for starters; he hasn't worked in IT or the web since the early days of PayPal (and it's debatable how much input he had there, open to correction). There's no evidence he codes, or understand coding practises from 2022.

Gregor Samsa

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889002#Comment_119889002

In all fairness to him, he did try...

https://twitter.com/anothercohen/status/1593407201913278464

Cordell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889037#Comment_119889037

How much it costs and how much is worth are different notions. It's like a branded tshirt made in a sweat shop Bangladesh which is worth 3 cents yet it's being sold for 100 euros.

erlichbachman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889015#Comment_119889015

Where did I say they don't need ad revenue? I said they don't need an oversized marketing department driving the company.

Improve the tech and user interface/experience and more people will use it, the more people use it then more advertisers will pay for the exposure.

This isn't rocket science, its bottom up which ruffles a lot of feathers and makes a lot of unnecessary roles obsolete.

AndrewJRenko

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119888234#Comment_119888234

OK, let's drill into this example then.

As explained in the texts highlighted above, consent is not a good legal basis for processing employee data, as it is not freely given and can be withdrawn. So they need another legal basis for the ID card data, including a photograph, which is biometric data. The legal basis is going to be something like "to manage access to the building for safety and security reasons" which is fine. They need to inform staff of the legal basis, provide a channel for staff to make Subject Access Requests to see what data is held, have a clear policy around retention and deletion of data, and hold the data securely.

RFID reach is normally something like 30cm, so unless you're working in a shoebox, they're not using RFID to track your location.

If they employer turns around and tries to use this data for a different purpose, they are so screwed. If, for example, they use the access card data to reprimand or fire you because you went to the bathroom three times an hour, they would be big trouble with the DPC and WRC. 

I haven't seen access systems that display a photo which is then verified by a human security officer. It would seem to be over the top for the vast majority of office environments. What companies use such systems in Ireland?

CCTV systems are well covered in DPC guidance already. CCTV covering a till where cash is handled or a storeroom where goods are being shipped in and out is fine. CCTV over a changing room or break room or toilet is absolutely not fine. CCTV monitoring into a staff member's home via webcam would be an absolute can of worms from a data protection point of view. What happens when other family members are recorded on camera? What happens when someone's naked spouse passes in the background of the camera? What happens when a private conversation is recorded? I can't see how this could get past any sensible GDPR review. I've never heard of any company doing this for staff in Ireland.

Cordell

Just a small point: biometric data i.e. face and fingerprint recognition doesn't store actual pictures and fingerprints - it doesn't need to.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889047#Comment_119889047

But if they want to make money, then yes, they're going to need marketing driving the bus a little bit here; and you say "improve the tech", but you don't improve the tech stack by arbitrarily firing swathes of departments and turning off critical services for the lols. With rumours of the core IT staff now disappearing there's a severe risk of "brain drain". No it's not rocket science, it's web development - and you don't achieve success by collapsing your knowledge and skill base in the space of a month.

Timberrrrrrrr

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119888845#Comment_119888845

Oops, my bad

Hadn't had my 2nd coffee at that stage 🙈🤷‍♂️🤣

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889047#Comment_119889047

The "User Interface" has never been Twitters problem , certainly not in recent times.

It's problem has been spam and fake posts and general trolling/sh!t-posting.

The platform could be the coolest tech ever , but if the content is hateful muck , users won't use it and advertisers absolutely won't want their products to be associated with it.

You don't "fix" a company by randomly firing 50% of them and then in effect constructively dismissing most of those that are left by making utterly ridiculous demands of them.

I work in a very large MNC and we got a new VP about 6 month ago , he came to us from another part of the organisation where he had been a "customer" of ours for many years.

After 3 months of intensively consuming all the information he could, he reckoned he only understood about 50/60% of the detail of what we do and how we do it.

Only now after 6 months did he feel confident enough to make changes to the organisation to try to streamline activities - And that's for an organisation of about 250 people inside a company he's worked for for 20 years.

The idea that Musk could walk in and know exactly who did what and what areas were needed/not needed inside about 10 days is fan-boi nonsense of the highest order.

He has f*cked this up , royally.

Musk has made most of his fortune off the backs of others by demanding more than is reasonable from his employees, he also gets a lot of government subsidies. He has gotten away with it as most don't want to face the uncertainty that unemployment brings, its good to see employees standing up to him. It really highlights the need for unions again, even though it appears unorganized now that enough employees have declined Musks new employment terms he will have to negotiate if he doesn't want his 44Bn investment to go down the drain. Musk thought the employees had the most to loose by not agreeing but as we all know the collapse of Twitter would make quite the dent in Musks fortune and severely damage his credibility with future investors.

rogber

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119885935#Comment_119885935

Almost all Americans seem extremely hyped up, fake enthusiastic about almost everything, and extremely superficial. In reality I'm sure they aren't, but it's a striking cultural difference, this obsession with being positive

one armed dwarf

As bad as this all is, in a way it's good to have it flame out so publicly. It provides a useful lesson to anyone who thinks that your top performers are replaceable cogs in a totally modular system. The brain drain that is happening at twitter is a terminal blow to the site or service or whatever you want to call it. There's no opportunity for a handover of knowledge between the domain experts, who are the first out the door because they are the ones who will more easily get more suitable positions.

Even in the best cases, handovers are difficult. Maybe you have one domain expert who's 90 percent certain of how a certain area works, maybe the next senior engineer is slightly less certain. But knowledge can be accrued over time, but not when a huge swath of these experts are all departing en masse. The framework of twitter might have just turned into an arcane puzzle box for its remaining staff. It's just gotten more volatile overnight, and implementing these sweeping new features that will 'save' twitter more risky

There's no option either for twitter to just thread water for a year or so while they rehire and establish a new foundation of 'domain experts', to carry the tech stack forward. Cause Musk has burnt through so much social capital with its advertisers that the boat is springing leaks from all sides and sinking more quickly. It's the cost of this kind of bluffery, respect your top performers

Penn

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889151#Comment_119889151

I've seen someone else say (not sure if here or maybe on Twitter itself) that Musk's attitude in bullying employees into accepting awful working conditions and pressures etc usually worked because a) he was part of the companies from earlier and so it was always the workplace culture, and b) the engineers and staff at the likes of Tesla & SpaceX have more limited options in terms of jobs elsewhere. A huge amount of the staff at Twitter could quite easily get jobs elsewhere with comparable working conditions/salary to Twitter pre-Musk and have skills which are far more easily transferrable to another company.

erlichbachman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889085#Comment_119889085

He has made some changes, some incorrectly no doubt, but to say he has fcuked this up royally is a bit ignorant.

He has done marketing’s job for them, companies advertise based on popularity, not on moral stances, whatever reaches the target audience and the masses is where the dollars are spent.

I get that this looks more like coronation street than a top tech company at the moment but the idea that a random on boards is giving one of the most successful CEO’s in the world advice is pretty funny.

Gregor Samsa

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889047#Comment_119889047

First off, "built it and they will come" rarely works. You have to have a wide variety of people plugging away making any company successful. The next big thing is snapping at your heels, users are fickle, and the "best" doesn't always win out.

Secondly, it's quite easy to look in from the outside (or even from the inside) and say "well, that whole section is useless, get rid of them all. Marketing, who needs it?". Inevitability, when that does happen, you get a about 2 months before you realise all the valuable things those people actually did, and then you have to start hiring those positions back, or delegating that work to people who are already doing other jobs. I worked for a company that decided to get rid of all the receptionists of all the offices, because we weren't a public-facing company, so we didn't need someone sitting at each door for 8 hours a day answering the door or the phone. They installed a bell in the main office floor, and redirected the main number to random desk phones as cover. I can tell you, it got old pretty fast as a developer or project manager having to jump up and go to the door for someone handing in flyers, or answer the phone to some random cold-caller that you had business talking to. So eventually we all gave up and then the small amount of legitimate visitors and callers weren't being answered, which caused chaos. So while it seemed on paper that the receptionists were a waste of time, because they spend most of their time dealing with useless callers, they were actually very valuable to the company as they let the rest of us get on with "proper" work without all these distractions. And that's before you even got to all the other useful things things the receptionist did that weren't taken into account when they were let go.

Thirdly, maybe the problem is that it isn't rocket science. Musk seems to have built a fairly successful company in SpaceX by hiring experts and giving them the space (pun intended) and budget to build genuinely innovative machines. But with Twitter, he seems to have approached it as a user with gripes, fired or pissed off all the experts and assumed that he has the expertise himself to just take away the things that personally annoyed him about his favourite pastime, and that it would magically be a business success. It clearly isn't working.

magicbastarder

if reports are true that after having fired half the workforce, 75% of those remaining want to leave, saying 'he has fucked this up royally' is an understatement, rather than being ignorant.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889207#Comment_119889207

True. I had been wondering how the workplaces in SpaceX and Tesla worked out, but as you remark those are much more niche industries, wherein its employees would have had fewer options to move onwards to. Twitter's developers have an entire globe's worth of companies. Exponentially larger when you take into account how much more common Remote working has become (Musk again showing his archaic views when he pushed against Remote working a mere weeks ago).

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889222#Comment_119889222

"Ignorance" is steaming into an industry about which you know nothing, making no attempts to understand the company as it is exists now. Advertisers have paused their spend in Twitter. Musk had vital services turned off because he didn't understand the changes in Web Development in the 20 years since PayPal, then tried to threatened an ultimatum on the remaining 50% of staff - those currently trying to keep the lights on after arbitrary firings no doubt caused a huge brain-drain. An ultimatum that backfired if rumours are to be believed - with core development now showing gaps. The launch of the Blue Tick subscription was an instant disaster; admire Musk the Engineer all you want, but he has fúcked up Twitter.

Still plenty of time to recover and rebuild but he has brought a hammer to a situation that needed a scalpel, then tried to gaslight employees into thinking this is brave, innovative thinking. "Oh but he's rich?" isn't an excuse.

Penn

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889222#Comment_119889222

Do you think being a successful CEO makes him infallible? Do you think his success with companies in one industry means he can't possible fail in a company in another completely different industry?

He's burdened Twitter with huge amounts of debt. Advertising revenue is down since Musk took over (by his own admission). They had to nix the Twitter Blue programme after a few days because it was so poorly thought out and implemented which means further loss of planned revenue until they get it back up. They've lost huge amounts of experienced staff and the wealth of knowledge of Twitter's internal systems with it.

Making a success of Tesla and SpaceX does not mean he can make a success of Twitter. He's a man, and he's just as fallible as everyone else. The only difference is scale of the success/failure.

erlichbachman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889233#Comment_119889233

That’s the thing though isn’t it, all the outrage and drama is taking place on social media and discussion platforms.

In the real world 75% won’t leave, it’s one thing being outraged and dramatic but the bottom line is always what’s important

AndrewJRenko

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889068#Comment_119889068

The scenario outlined was a photo being displayed for human verification, so that’s an actual photo.

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889321#Comment_119889321

anybody who didn't agree to his new work conditions would be fired. So either musk sticks to that or shows himself to be weak. a really dumb move by him.

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889288#Comment_119889288

Micromanagers hate remote working.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889352#Comment_119889352

So do bullies. It’s very hard to bully on Zoom.

Bass Reeves

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889222#Comment_119889222

I always laugh at this ''random on boards'' put down. This has been the excuse for the last couple of weeks but the sh!ts is still continuing. There is an old saying business is business. Musk has forgotten that axiom. He went in to Twitter with a personal vendetta and has proceeded to burm it down.

Wait until you see the end of year figures. He will have saving on staff costs but they will swallowed up by loss in advertising revenue.

Twitter wage bill was 650-700 million. Advertising revenue was 5 billion. You do not have to be an economic genius to see where he will loose and save money.

TheIrishGrover

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889310#Comment_119889310

I don't see one person stating they knew everything about the internal operations of a multi billion dollar company. As a matter of fact, many here have expressly stated that they are NOT experts in such fields.

However, the abandonment of advertisers (By Musk's own admission) was predicted by pretty much everyone here and on tangentially-related threads. Again, all while stating variations of "Well I'm no expert but..." Not because ANY of these posters had expert knowledge but simply that, in their own opinion, the outcome was obvious (and verified). Yes, I'm sure a certain pillow manufacturer may advertise on Twitter 6 months from now but many (Certainly Me) believe that a less diverse userbase means a less valuable pool of data for advertisers which means that it would be of more benefit for them to spend their money on more valuable data pools. Look at Facebook: Its core demographic is older, probably more fiscally conservative than other platforms (Honestly, when was the last time Facebook was "down with the kids"? Has anyone EVER clicked on an ad on Facebook?).

The next big thing is six months away, whatever it is. It will explode and, after 3 years or so the most valuable demographic (16-25 year-olds) will move on and leave it to their parents and it will implode and the next hot thing will pop up

Having an opinion does not mean that someone believes they are an expert. Just as watching discredited Covid "experts" on Social Media does not make one a virologist.

By the looks of it, a bunch of random Boardsies would have done a better job on assessing what the company was about than the current owner did!

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889461#Comment_119889461

No one is an expert , but lots of people on here work or have worked in large global tech companies that have undergone big changes in their time - Takeovers , Acquisitions , Downsizing etc. and as such have a view on what has worked/not worked in other companies.

Pretty universally , the types of decisions being made in recent weeks by Twitter are very similar to ones taken by other companies in the past and in almost all cases those choices were bad ones - People are simply sharing their experiences and viewpoints.

Maybe Musk is indeed a genius and something amazing will emerge but based on the history of the tech industry and all of the successes and failures that have been seen and reported on over the years, all current indications are that he is making a lot of major decisions in a very short period of time that have never worked any of the times they have been tried before by lots of other CEOs.

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889488#Comment_119889488

He could have done a better job by just doing nothing and figuring out the business before acting.

TheIrishGrover

I still think we're missing something. I don't know. I mean these actions, to me, don't look like the actions of someone who doesn't know what he's doing. These look intentional.

I mean we've all been there: Some new manager comes in and says "Right, I'm gonna shake things up. Whip everyone into shape. Ye're great but we could ALL be better" only to find that internal politics and procedures hit home and they realise they can only do so much without causing more hassle than it's worth. So they come in, outsource X amount (Some successfully, some not) and then hit a wall as business (rightly or wrongly) resists change "Meh, if it ain't broke, don't fix it" "It IS broke" "Yeah, but it's not THAT broke. It's OUR broke and we are used to it".

Penn

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889488#Comment_119889488

Most of us wouldn't have tried to buy and run a company in an industry we knew nothing about in the first place!

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889548#Comment_119889548

I know what you mean - It has the feel of the old-school corporate raider type that buys the struggling old manufacturing company and then just burns the place down but holds onto the key assets and re-tools the company with a leaner and meaner outsourced manufacturing model and makes lots of money 12-18 months later.

But Twitter doesn't build stuff and its assets are the user base and the information it captures about those users for its advertisers.

In the online Social Media world , if you burn the place down those users aren't going to come back - They will just move on to the next thing and the advertisers will follow them.

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889548#Comment_119889548

He THINKS he knows what he is doing because of his ego.

Cordell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889579#Comment_119889579

100% correct.

Like, no one here have any experience running car and aerospace companies where he also failed. Oh, wait. He didn't. That's the difference between him and us. Not only his inherited wealth, but his willingness to go head on where us won't even dream trying.

McFly85

We seem to be at the stage where even his supporters have nothing positive to say about his tenure at twitter.

Now it’s either the fault of “the left” or just vague mockery about not knowing what happens inside a company like it’s some massive secret, or just putting down people for discussing it at all.

one armed dwarf

When in doubt, blame the 'wokes'! It's the pronoun police wot done it

None of us may have been in a decision making position for a large corp like twitter, but more than some of us have been on the receiving end of these kinds of upheavals in a company and recognise some of these patterns from the employee PoV.

Maybe one should also consider Elon's blind spots here in this particular area, the limits of his own perspective(s), rather than focusing on how uninformed the boards members are

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889629#Comment_119889629

On the one hand, we got attempts to divine meaning in Musk's actions surfaced either through his own, quantifiable words (re. advertising revenue), or the words of those close to employees within the company - and charting the chaos within.

On the other hand, we have intermittent jibes that he's rich, ergo, he's probably doing great and who are we to question it?

No actual quantity to comments, just insults. Says volumes.

pjohnson

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889622#Comment_119889622

Sure give any of us 44bn and a chance.

Common sense would have avoided most of Musks errors.

His "willingness" is due to his wealth.

erlichbachman

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889461#Comment_119889461

The random comment was in response to the Elon fanboi comment, and the poster knows it. I have thick skin and have never hit a report post in my life, but I will get down into the weeds if necessary, no problem at all.

however there are facts that random boardsies may be ignorant to, and one of those is that all companies revenue and spend will be down this year in the current climate so year end reports may not be an accurate gauge, and it is actually possible to increase revenue whilst reducing headcount

LastFridayNight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889519#Comment_119889519

I disagree- I doubt he could have done a better job. He's been playing a blinder actually. That is, if you believe his number one job was to make a splash and get people talking about him. The phase 'Follow the money' doesn't apply when you're already stupidly rich. At some point, the phase 'Follow the ego' is way more appropriate. Sure, at some level he want's to make twitter successful. But first, the most important business of the day is 'look at me, look at me!'

Larbre34

That argument that there is 'no such thing as bad publicity' falls down with many examples. Two recent being Kanye and Trump.

Its very easy now for the World to punish toxic behaviour. The connected globe has meant commercial punishment can be swift and it can be devastating.

Twitter's outgoing staff have a direct line to an audience of billions to give their side of the story.

I somehow doubt that even Musk will be keen to have people talking about him, when that talk is about the time he personally and speedily detonated €44,000,000,000. Most of it borrowed.

Quin_Dub

So Twitter have locked the doors on all it's buildings worldwide because they are concerned that disgruntled staff might carry out physical sabotage of Company assets.

Twitter has temporarily closed its office in Dublin, and in locations around the world, as more staff chose to leave, sparking new concerns about the site's ability to stay online.

According to reports in the US, the social media giant has closed its offices until Monday over fears disgruntled staff could sabotage the company.

How utterly terrible a job do you need to do as a leader that your staff go from being relatively normal and functional to "at risk of physically wreaking the place" in less than three weeks??

$44 billion for a domain name…. Was it really worth it?

pjohnson

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889762#Comment_119889762

*Something* *something* Leftist *something* *something* Antifa *something* *something* MUSK HARDCORE!!!