The federal government certainly is not adopting remote work as much as they could, but this OpEd is a bit off base.
For starters, there are a lot more federal agencies embracing remote work since the pandemic. From the people in my network working as government employees or contractors, I'd say more than half have more remote work options that they had before, with some going fully remote. There are still stubborn leaders and organizations but remote work has made major inroads in the last few years.
The fact remains that some jobs can't go full remote as a function of security clearance requirements. It's laughable to say, "...so long as the employee has access to a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) in their location," as if SCIF's are readily available around the country, and that somehow it's easy to get a seat in one. If you work for one three letter agency, you can't just sign up for a hotdesk at another three letter agency's SCIF.
The market is shifting in the DC Metro where even cleared jobs are allowing some remote work, but it'll still take some time for organizations to change.
One problem is government buildings employ many other people like security, maintenance, repair, etc. People commuting into cities spend money at businesses within the city. It's easy for us to say remote work is better but it will come at the cost of many businesses failing (see: SF)
> People commuting into cities spend money at businesses within the city.
People working from home are spending money where they live. I do not think it is somehow superior when all business is concentrated in one place rather then scattered around.
The fact that Twitter had to ask some of the people it laid off to come back shortly after having fired them says it all about how incompetent and self-defeating those layoffs were.
If they asked most of the fired people to come back you would have a point, but they just asked a small fraction of the fired people to come back. That doesn't seem unreasonable, you will make errors and it is good to admit when you made an error.
Would you think the whole ordeal was done better if they just refused to admit that any of the firings were in error? Nobody makes no mistakes when firing. There are many issues with the Twitter firings, but asking some of them to come back isn't a negative sign at all.
No that is in my opinion, still insane. Laying someone off and then being like, "oops, you were actually important", is indicative they have no clue. Maybe they could have waited a bit to figure shit out instead of scorch-earthing everything.
Maybe. Maybe once those plans were noticed, they would have been resisted and thwarted by people who wanted to retain their power within the organization. Political struggles happen even in "healthy" companies.
> Maybe once those plans were noticed, they would have been resisted and thwarted by people who wanted to retain their power within the organization.
I'm perplexed by the mental gymnastics you had to resort to to try to deflect any responsibility from Musk, let alone the despair to omit any reference to the extremely poor judgement and outright incompetence it takes to pull this sort of stunt, and instead fabricate this theory where this impulsive shot in the foot was actually a brilliant plan to thwart entrenched interests.
Occam's razor and Musk's track record reject this hypothesis. Musk f-ed up, just like he keeps on f-ing up, like the recent shit fest of Musk posting a stream of brain dead and profoundly I'll advised tweets trying to publicly smear a employee with disabilities.
You're really worked up about the simply proposed possibility of how someone might (MIGHT) go about firing a lot of people, especially in an organization already hostile to new ownership. It seems like you need a devil figure to channel anger against, rather than someone who does some stupid stuff and maybe some not so stupid stuff.
> but they just asked a small fraction of the fired people to come back.
That we know of (meaning they posted publicly about it). The real number could be way higher.
> but asking some of them to come back isn't a negative sign at all.
It's a very negative sign, especially at the scale it happened (as I said, we know about the cases where the person accepted to go back or publicly stated they were offered to come back).
If you fire people hastily but then are forced to ask them to come back because you discovered they were actually key personnel, that speaks to incompetence. The speed of Twitter's layoffs were completely under the control of Musk. There was no crisis or external factor that made them cut people so quickly.
Mistakes certainly can happen, but they're much more likely to happy when things are done chaotically without proper planning.
The truth about the Twitter layoffs is that the company is not even remotely profitable and likely never will be, so it doesn't really matter that much as long as the company barely continues to operate. You can certainly barely operate a web services company with a barebones crew: we all do it every year during the holidays! But long term growth? Yeah, good luck with that.
Twitter is now just nice yacht for a billionaire. The acquisition was no different than Ron Watkins buying 8chan.
Twitter lost 200mil on 5b in revenue in 2021 and has had a handful of profitable quarters in recent history. Not sure why you think it's "not even remotely profitable and likely never will be".
Of course, that's a pre-Elon analysis. Elon's loans alone add 1 bil/year in interest costs, and reports say there's been a large drop in revenue since his purchase.
> The truth about the Twitter layoffs is that the company is not even remotely profitable and likely never will be, so it doesn't really matter that much as long as the company barely continues to operate.
But it was profitable at certain times. Despite all the reported "bloat". Ironically now, it has little hopes of being profitable thanks to advertisers pulling out due to lax moderation (some of the automated stuff no longer working because the maintainers are gone!). So even if they managed to run the site with a skeleton crew, assuming they keep breaking non-essential features, it's unclear they could ever become profitable again.
There seems to be this echo chamber around the Twitter acquisition that thinks most software companies are bloated and that software engineers basically do nothing. They seem to believe Twitter will make that demonstration. It's particularly pervasive in semi or non-technical circles. I guess it's the same crowd that bought into no-code and low-code tools to "get rid of expensive developers" for the last decade.
While Twitter hasn't suffered any complete outage as of yet, several products and features seem to be broken, as well as a good chunk of their API (I don't buy the claim it's intentional because the latencies and error rates have been jumping up). To be completely honest, this level of service degradation would have killed more serious products. It's fine for Twitter because there's no SLA, no enterprise customers and no critical infra running on it.
Twitter actually had some profitable years lately and in the last 5 years before Musk bought it they recorded a net profit. Revenue had been grown 60% over that time.
But now with Twitter reportedly losing 40% of its advertisers and taking on $1 billion of annual debt servicing costs, it seems unlikely they'll be able to get back to profitable if things keep going this way.
Sure we won't run out of water, the challenge is gonna come when weather patterns shift in a way that cause droughts on crop-bearing land or abnormal temperatures in key parts of the growing season. Some parts of the world may be in for some considerable pain in those scenarios.
Bingo. This has made me spend a lot less time on Youtube because recommended content and search are worse for me. If I'm searching for a marine biology video I don't want to see recommendations for clickbait influencers 3 results in. I used to go down random rabbit holes when I found related interesting content, but now that just doesn't happen very much anymore.
The problem is that Google makes enough money from ad business that they don't care that they may be losing out on more revenue/profits by having better support. This fundamental belief is one reason Google has a hard time making inroads in the enterprise market. In that market, support absolutely matters and the perception that Google doesn't care about it makes it easier to exclude Google altogether when considering a cloud platform or office productivity suite.
What prevents good support is scale. For example, Microsoft is very entrenched in the enterprise space, yet support is quite lacking (unless you are a very large customer, maybe).
> Stack ranking seems to misunderstand how statistics work.
This is the fundamental flaw with stack ranking that really irks me. Stack ranking force fits people to a normal distribution but that's backwards. With normal distributions you're supposed to measure the phenomena then use statistical formulas to see if the data fits a normal distribution. Maybe it does. Maybe it's bi-modal, or tri-modal. Maybe the data is evenly distributed.
But no, companies butcher the concept of a bell curve and end up doing serious damage to the culture of the company as everyone starts optimizing their behavior to succeed in an utterly irrational system.
> My guess is that Musk wins the battle of the wills here; he no longer needs to maximize advertiser income, just get enough to make the wheels turn
Twitter now has to pay $1 billion a year in debt servicing costs. Twitter was not wildly profitable before, so it seems very unlikely Musk can make enough money to break even, much less profit, while losing a large portion of advertising revenue.
That's why he's trying cut costs so aggressively, and rushing to gain new subscription revenue.
You didn't see Twitter Spaces, Fleets, Birdwatch, Tweet Editing, and Twitter Blue? Some of those features have been successful for them, some not, but they've been releasing features.
The thing I always wonder is, in habitats where birds would normally have to deal with feline predators, how is the domestic cat worse than that? Any birds in environments that have feline predators would already be adapted to avoidng cats, unlike say, small Australian fauna.
I can understand the damage inflicted by cats in environments that never had a very efficient bird predator like cats (e.g. New Zealand and other islands). But in North America there's the Bobcat, Lynx, Ocelot, Margay, and Jaguarundi. Even without the domestic cat, birds would still get eaten in sizable numbers by cats. Sure there are a lot more domestic cats out there, but without civilization there would be a lot more wildcats out there eating birds.
Maybe the impact is simply that outside house cats exist in numbers that are not supportable for a normal wild predator due to the fact that house cats have meals provided by humans to sustain them. So house cat numbers don't reach an equilibrium with their prey the way a wild cat could. Either way I suspect that the impact on bird populations by domestic cats is often overstated.
>Maybe the impact is simply that outside house cats exist in numbers that are not supportable for a normal wild predator due to the fact that house cats have meals provided by humans to sustain them. So house cat numbers don't reach an equilibrium with their prey the way a wild cat could.
That's exactly it. The density of house cats is orders of magnitude larger than the density of wildcats would be.
> Either way I suspect that the impact on bird populations by domestic cats is often overstated.
Last time I looked, which was a while ago, there were over 9 million cats in the UK. I suspect a similar number for the US, proportionally, so I can't see any way that the wildcat population could ever rise that high. Domestication brings safety and an ever increasing population, not just for humans.
For starters, there are a lot more federal agencies embracing remote work since the pandemic. From the people in my network working as government employees or contractors, I'd say more than half have more remote work options that they had before, with some going fully remote. There are still stubborn leaders and organizations but remote work has made major inroads in the last few years.
The fact remains that some jobs can't go full remote as a function of security clearance requirements. It's laughable to say, "...so long as the employee has access to a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) in their location," as if SCIF's are readily available around the country, and that somehow it's easy to get a seat in one. If you work for one three letter agency, you can't just sign up for a hotdesk at another three letter agency's SCIF.
The market is shifting in the DC Metro where even cleared jobs are allowing some remote work, but it'll still take some time for organizations to change.