So someone correct me if I'm wrong but didn't many Twitter employees start talking about how horrible Elon was and how they didn't want to work for him when the discussions were ongoing?
Seems like if large chunks of the employee base are talking smack on the possible new CEO, not even as a corporation but as an individual, they shouldn't be unduly surprised if the CEO decides to show them the door when he gets in since he can't be sure they won't be actively hostile.
And I know this is happening in such a way that they aren't just letting go of people that talked smack on musk, but still I don't know what supposed adults were thinking when they were s*t talking their new potential CEO.
> So someone correct me if I'm wrong but didn't many Twitter employees start talking about how horrible Elon was and how they didn't want to work for him
I think it's worth introspecting on where you got this impression and what "many Twitter employees" means. It seems to me there are many powerful people who want you to have this impression but that doesn't mean it's true. Twitter had thousands of employees and I'd bet a strong majority of them are not ideologues in the way you imagine. Just people who work 9-5 and value job security.
I can't speak for "the left", but he went from someone I respected for his contributions to... not that, not because of his views on free speech, but because he started publicly acting like an asshole on a regular basis.
Is firing people for dunking on their CEO what passes for free speech now? Or do you mean firing people for having different political opinions from the CEO?
> Elon has gone from being the hero of the left to the villain for daring to allow free speech.
I don't know if Elon Musk was ever "the hero of the left", or any tech executive for that matter? He definitely has his fans (among techies mostly), but you would be hard pressed for any hardcore leftist to see a CEO as their hero. The whole pedo thai diver incident turn even many left-leaning (and unaligned, and right-leaning) techies from pro to neutral or even negative.
Nobody in the comment chain was talking about left-wing vs. right-wing ideology. I get that Musk is a partisan figure now, but this thread isn't going to get any better by turning it into yet another ideological battle.
Freedom of speech is tough, huh? And in the USA it doesn't protect against promoting threats of violence. Seeing as the N word is probably considered the most hateful word in the English language, I can see it being understandably considered violent in many cases.
It is absolutely not literally violence to say or call someone the N word, no matter how repugnant or socially unacceptable it is. It is not illegal in the US to call people horrible names, nor is it illegal to be racist, homophobic, transphobic, etc.
This isn’t to say I advocate for people being any of those things, it’s just somehow become generally accepted that these things are somehow inherently breaking the law or some kind of hate crime. Even on the rare instance someone displays some racist material in public, the news is quick to say police are investigating…investigating what, exactly? “Hate speech” is not a crime in the US.
If large chunks of the employee base are talking smack about the possible new CEO, perhaps there are reasons they are doing so? "Elon comes in and throws the company into chaos" seems to be fairly accurate, FWIW.
That is true, at least if you trust leaked discussions, however, this isn't an isolated example of Elon's leadership in action. All the points about the ideological captivity of Twitter employees are secondary to repeated behavior.
So is, "Don't talk open shit about your future boss" a point? Yeah, but so is Elon treating this process like an inhumane animal. The latter trump's a bunch of plebians with loud opinions.
It's been clear for a while that Twitter only has the presence it has because it was the first out of the gate and not because they're actually good at what they do. Their talents seem to largely be the ability to amplify the most toxic aspects of both the left and the right at the same time.
Layoffs are part of business yes (pretty much what I said in my parent post). What I have a problem with is the way this is being done. Forcing people to quit by dropping arbitrary deadlines without any notice? Notice of 84 hour work weeks? Sleeping in the office? Asking devs to print up their code? All this because he doesn't want to pay severance etc. I think that is hella f*cked up.
I've slept at work plenty of times. It's fun! Except one time I went outside for a spliff break at 2am and dropped my wallet w/ key badge right as the door shut. I had to hunt down a taxi and promise him I had money at my house! I also didn't have shoes on for some reason.
Your original comment made it sound like businesses shouldn't layoff people because they were people who had real lives. After reading this follow-up, I realized you have no issues with layoffs, but you actually just had an issue with how they were laid off. Basically, same outcome, but with more grace.
It’s not the same outcome at all - severance pay is often the difference between needing to take out a loan or not when embarking on a job search after a layoff. Lack of that stability will have material impact on many people: they might have to move, change which schools their kids go to, avoid medical treatment not covered by Medicare, etc etc. He’s not committing some sort of victimless crime.
I think we are saying the same thing. Goodwill can only be built with actions and that would be similar to what Stripe did in their layoffs. The lack of goodwill would result in what you are saying.
Forcing people to work over weekends, 84 hour weeks, finding any excuse to make them quit or fire them "for cause" like making them print their code out physically? The end of the year is coming. It's supposed to be the holidays soon. Thanksgiving is in like 3 weeks. C'mon, dude.
Lex Luthor would never make so many stupid comments on social media. Musk is more cartoon villain than comic book villain. But I think the Joker once lampshaded that a CEO was more evil than he would ever be. Its probably somewhere in the Even Evil has Standards trope (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvenEvilHasStand...).
He hasn’t communicated with the employees. He has left them twisting in the wind. They’re finding things out from his tweets instead of through proper company channels. It’s unprofessional and disrespectful.
For the love of God can you please just focus on the browser. Right now Firefox is the one thing standing between all web protocols being decided by Google and an open net.
You'll do a hell of a lot more good by ensuring Alphabet doesn't get to arbitrarily redefine protocols embed tracking in all the web and make the entire internet cater to the whims of the tech giants than any other bullshit social justice, environmental responsibility, or other virtue signaling or political bull hockey you people are currently engaged in.
Although I understand your sentiment, there was a big uproar (rightly so) when Mozilla cut a lot of stuff that wasn't directly related to Firefox, such as MDN web docs or the experimental Servo browser engine. Building a healthy and innovative ecosystem requires not developing tunnel vision. Having a future requires investing in the future as well as the present.
Some would no doubt consider incubating their own programming language, Rust, to be a distraction, but it's a clear benefit to programming / computer safety that they did, and presumably makes Firefox more fun to work on since programmers famously enjoy Rust.
Focus is good, but like most good things it's best in moderation, otherwise you reach diminishing returns while sacrificing everything else that matters.
> there was a big uproar (rightly so) when Mozilla cut a lot of stuff that wasn't directly related to Firefox, such as MDN web docs or the experimental Servo browser engine.
MDN is a documentation site for the technologies supported by Firefox. Servo is a browser engine that's been used as a development target for efforts to rewrite major components of Firefox. These are both directly related to Firefox, as were other things that were cut.
From my vantage I don't recall the outrage whether things being cut were / weren't related to Firefox, but rather that major cuts were being made at the bottom (to features / programmes / staff) while Mozilla management were exorbitantly remunerated and receiving large bonuses/raises at the same time. Despite the severe decline in Firefox seen under their tenure.
I guess "directly related" is more controversial than I thought. I would call these indirectly supporting Firefox, and in line with Mozilla's mission.
Building public documentation for free doesn't directly help Firefox's market share, improve the browser, fix bugs, or financially get them out from under Google's thumb. Nor does building an experimental browser engine that they do not intend to use. They may help with these things, but it requires a few steps to explain how.
The open, standards-compliant documentation wasn't just nice for devs, but it promoted web standards that are meant to foster an open, better-functioning internet that's better for users and Firefox's market share.
The Servo engine could have been a big step forward. It's exploratory, sure, but so is VC funding "ethical" for-profits.
> or financially get them out from under Google's thumb
Ultimately, the seeming disinterest in this as one of their goals is the primary issue I have. My feelings on whether they should be investing more or less money into other initiatives are secondary.
I'm opinionated here so perhaps viewing things through that biased lens but that sentiment seemed echoed in the uproar around the cuts.
> Although I understand your sentiment, there was a big uproar (rightly so) when Mozilla cut a lot of stuff that wasn't directly related to Firefox, such as MDN web docs or the experimental Servo browser engine. Building a healthy and innovative ecosystem requires not developing tunnel vision. Having a future requires investing in the future as well as the present.
Funny how under that goal Firefox has gone from 30% of the market to 3%:
Mozilla today is a net negative for the web. We would be better with them dying in a fire so something new can take their place and actually be something that people want to use.
Executive pay at Mozilla seems inversely proportional to the browser's market share... That's how performance is rewarded at the corporation, the less Firefox is used, the bigger her salary is...
Yes, Mozilla is just good enough to not force the people who can make a web browser start because it has decades worth of inertia behind it. They remove functionality every release but there's always a work around that's ok enough to get you past it. I haven't been excited for an update from them in a decade.
Or just spin off the browser to technically-focused (cf policy focused) group that does not have any connection to management and staff who get paid from deals with "tech" companies.
Mozilla could be releasing multiple "experimental" browsers for people to play with. Trimmed down versions of Firefox with "features" removed that anyone can compile on a low resource computer. Browsers not designed for advertising. Browsers designed for commerce. For banking. Browsers designed for fast information retrieval. "Secure" browsers with tiny attack surfaces. And so on. Specialised browsers.
All that Mozilla code should be useful to more than just "tech" companies. For the avoidance of doubt, the idea of the web browser should not be solely a neverending popularity contest to crown one program that will obviate all others. There should also be (more) unpopular, boring browsers for doing routine, boring web-based things.
The whole "web advocacy" schtick comes across as hollow when the company treats a web browser like some "holy" program that no one else can tinker with. That is exactly why we have the situation with Google. "Web protocols" are decided by whomever writes the browser, and according to Mozilla's view of the web, only a handful of people can write browsers. As it happens they work for advertising companies, companies that are becoming advertising companies or a company paid by advertising companies (Mozilla). The web is more than a f'ing advertising medium. It is a public resource. Mozilla just cannot get over itself and see how dysfunctional this has become. Mozilla thinks the web is dead without advertising. It is the other way around. The web is getting suffocated by the influence of browser-enabled advertising spend.
And then we have the obvious conflict of interest. Mozilla execs get paid from deals with "tech" companies. We are then asked to believe Mozilla is going to make these companies more "responsible". Difficult to see how that is going to work when those companies are the ones paying Mozilla. Maybe if Mozilla threatened to "democratise" the web browser so it was not the exclusive domain of "tech" companies. A web with many clients. Those companies have come to rely on the power over web users they have through controlling "the" browser.
> spin off the browser to technically-focused (cf policy focused) group
Browser development is the main project of the technically-focused Mozilla Corporation, while it looks to me like the project here is under the policy-focused Mozilla Foundation.
> Mozilla could be releasing multiple "experimental" browsers for people to play with. Trimmed down versions of Firefox with "features" removed that anyone can compile on a low resource computer.
The number of people who will actually compile a browser themselves is a rounding error to a footnote on the graph of browser stats. I can't imagine how that can make a dent in anything.
Do you just have faith that by doing this, Mozilla would empower some developer in his basement to come up with a killer feature that will allow them to burst back into the forefront of browsers?
Mozilla Corporation is owned by Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla Foundation also owns the Firefox trademark, and has the Corporation pay the Foundation for the right to use that trademark. $16.3 million in 2020 alone.
Is it possible that making money as a VC firm on the side is the solution to Mozilla's funding problem - being dependent on a deal with their main competitor - so that they can keep working on the browser?
> Firefox is the one thing standing between all web protocols being decided by Google and an open net.
They're not. Mozilla management is ok to take money from Google for acting as a fig leaf and greenwash Google's "standards" and out-of-control complexity. There's no way around the fact that they're fully complicit in having turned the web into a monopolistic PoS that inspires no-one and doesn't provide economic incentives for anyone except Google. They give a shit to users, and now upper management wants to become even more like Wikimedia foundation and engage in mindless fundraising business only benefitting management.
Yeah but what is the debugging experience like? Does that work? I think it adds a layer of complication. Also images can take a while to build. Although most would be cached hopefully with just copying your code changing. Maybe a snappy startup can fix?
> Yeah but what is the debugging experience like? Does that work?
Sort of. In certain stacks, you essentially set up remote debugging like you would for an app running in a remote environment (which is your local container with an exposed port) and your IDE just works.
It's relatively carefree when it works as expected, but a bit of a pain to set up sometimes. Admittedly, something like CPU flame graphs or tools like VisualVM that let you easily select from locally running Java processes to instrument might be harder to work with.
But even then, you can have issues with file system permissions and any bind mounts that you might need (e.g. files in a PHP container, where you want to keep developing and testing your app after page reloads, without rebuilding the entire container).
I'm still a proponent of using containers for making applications more consistently managed (configuration, resource limits, port bindings, storage), self-contained (dependencies, running different/multiple versions in parallel) and easier to launch (e.g. Docker Compose file or a fancier variation of YAML instead of Ansible + systemd services), but they definitely can be a leaky abstraction if you don't have *nix as your development machine OS.
Identity politics was manufactured to distract from the income inequality and divide people so they couldn't focus on the increasing shafting of the American middle class.
You have to remember that you are not the only patient in the hospital. A Caesarean section requires a lot of setup including OR, anesthesiologist, ensuring adequate care for the newborn, etc. Any of these can cause a delay. Of course there is other cases triaged by urgency like crash sections. It would make no sense to show up to the OR 30 minutes before you can begin operating. An elective Caesarean section will always get bumped for emergencies.
Hospitals and the medical profession have a lot of work, and for efficiency they stack the work up. A rule of thumb whenever dealing with a hospital is that everything will be massively later than you expect. It's a good idea to set your expectations ahead of time so that a bit of a wait does not take you by surprise. For a hospital procedure, half an hour late is pretty much right on time.
You have to register with the hospital. You have to change into a hospital gown. You have to get an IV and labs (which take an hour to come back). You have to do a nursing intake interview (which is surprisingly long).
I'm an anesthesiologist. My wife needed surgery. And the surgeon is a friend of mine from childhood and needed to leave that afternoon. We had a free OR. Even then, it took 2.5 hrs to get her registered, up to the surgical floor, and to the OR.
So, maybe that doctor is a jerk, but realistically, it takes a while even if you have the inside track on everything.
The amount of effort to file a grievance against the guy because he was late seems a little extreme. Especially since I haven't slept in 5 days now because of the aforementioned beby.
Although it was incredibly telling when I asked the nurse. "Hey so I know nurses have a list of which Drs. Are a-holes and which ones are good to work with, is our Dr an a-hole?" She responded by saying she couldn't answer that one way or another.
That's fucking hilarious. I filed a grievance when the medical professionals performed care on me against my (fully conscious and alert) consent, without a warrant, and without a court order nor arrest -- at the direction of a federal officer who had me "detained" but not "arrested" because there was no probable cause of a crime.
I wrote an incredibly detailed, 100 page report with several witnesses painstakingly describing the violation and details and associated license #. Included was my full medical report where licensed doctors clearly noted I had denied consent for care. Included on the report was the signed, official report showing care was rendered without consent.
After what I imagine was about 5 seconds of glancing at my report, a low IQ triage official who worked for the state board claimed anything the medical professionals do are excepted because they magically become police officers, except ones exempt to the 4th amendment, if they do anything wrong. So you can file a grievance, and an idiot from the board will probably tell you to fuck off or invent a fake rule, and there is no appeals process.
> . I filed a grievance when the medical professionals performed care on me against my (fully conscious and alert) consent, without a warrant, and without a court order nor arrest -- at the direction of a federal officer who had me "detained" but not "arrested" because there was no probable cause of a crime.
That’s more of a civil battery (and possibly also federal civil rights) lawsuit than a professional complaint situation.
You may be able to sue the government for the violation of your civil and constitutional rights and the damages it and its doctors caused to you. That will be true regardless of whether the doctors themselves violated any ethical rules. I suggest you contact a competent lawyer in your jurisdiction if you are interested in pursuing this.
Presumably the problem there is that even a sea of expendable labour's useless, if what you need is a Von Braun[1]-esque figure and a paddling pool of engineering talent... .
Wow and here I thought most people hadn't read the communist manifesto.
I agree with your vision, obviously once we replace capitalism with socialism run by a dictatorship of the proletariat then the organs of the state will quickly devolve into obselescene and will will all live in a stateless classless atheist communist utopia.
BTW: how is that Lysenknism working out for you now that you are free from the shackles of capitalism.
Seems like if large chunks of the employee base are talking smack on the possible new CEO, not even as a corporation but as an individual, they shouldn't be unduly surprised if the CEO decides to show them the door when he gets in since he can't be sure they won't be actively hostile.
And I know this is happening in such a way that they aren't just letting go of people that talked smack on musk, but still I don't know what supposed adults were thinking when they were s*t talking their new potential CEO.