Basically what we are seeing here folks is the proof of Isaac Newton’s third law of motion. As well as a very strong statement against the idea of working harder for the same pay being normal.
From evaluating engineers and programmers based on a meaningless metric, to “motivating” the surviving employees with a very thinly veiled ultimatum/threat, I believe the only thing here that Elon Musk did right was show the dangers of assuming that the people who have money, know what they’re doing. 44 billion dollars. $44,000,000,000.00. That’s an awful lot of zeros. And now the question is… will Twitter survive? Probably not. Twitter was on the verge of dying out like MySpace and Google+, and then the hands of fate came out and carried it out of the blast zone in 2016. The website was never really super profitable. It only gained serious traffic when people were notified about things on it, elsewhere. We literally have a Reddit sub named r/whitepeopletwitter, on REDDIT. Featuring screenshots of TWITTER posts. (Rest easy, there’s one for the other spectrums of skin color. Well, one of them at least.) It’s literally both a profit failure compared to Meta, which it didn’t stand a chance against, and a backbone of social media infrastructure. When a company wants to make an official statement, they don’t use Reddit unless they ARE Reddit, or Facebook unless they ARE facebook, or YouTube unless they ARE YouTube. They use TWITTER. Do governments use Reddit? Not to my knowledge, nor do they rely on Facebook. They use Twitter. The POTUS has a dedicated Twitter account, that is only for official business. Once you are no longer the POTUS, you cannot use that account. A paramount part of our internet communication systems, it is a low traffic system that doesn’t filter out anything unless the user explicitly asks to not see that tweeter’s content. Whistleblowers can sound an alarm that will reach MILLIONS of listening ears before they can be silenced, not that people will hesitate to hurt them anyways, but once a whistleblower, you are considered a valuable citizen wherever you are or are from, and you announce if something happens to you, then there’s a very good lead who might be involved, so….
And in less than a month, Twitter has basically been put on life support. There’s no other way to say it. And yet, its owner insists on taking out more and more organs instead of putting them back in. There is a complete lesson here that was wasted on the man who blew forty four billion clams on a website that jumped ship when he boarded it. If it is not broken, don’t force break it to justify trying to fix it unless you know everything about what you’re doing. All it takes is ONE. OVERSIGHT. And everything comes crumbling down and you are left wondering “what… just happened?” What do we take away from this? When it’s obvious that your superiors have no clue how to do your job, don’t take crap from them.
I took a management course in college, and if there was anything that they grilled/drilled into my brain that semester, it was “don’t immediately look for someone else to fill the shift— you ARE the someone else.” Now I’m out of the education black hole, and… it looks like I was not the person who needed to hear that the most. No one seems to know these days anything that the employees have to know. Especially the higher up the ladder you get. Like the simple concept that the metric of total typed lines of code is not an indicator of how good a programmer you are. It’s how fast you can catch what went wrong and fix it. It’s how efficient your code runs. It’s how much time it takes to run your code. It’s how accurate the results are. It’s understanding what the client wants. It’s seeing potential problems and patching it before it is noticed by others. It’s implementing atypical methods to improve performance and improve versatility of incomplete code bases. It’s knowing more than just Java and Python. It’s being able to make a computer solely out of thousands of just one type of logic gate. It’s knowing the difference between two seemingly identical statements and recognizing the reason why it doesn’t actually turn out to be the same statement. It’s knowing how the f$#%ing INTERNET is maintained and what is required to keep the digital realm running smoothly. Now he might have known some of these concepts, but just looking for who types the most? I could put a chimpanzee at a terminal and outtype these programmers. But it wouldn’t necessarily be smart, now would it?