Nov 15, 2022
Why I Care About Elon Musk’s Acquisition Of Twitter
A conversation about “lines of code” is a good window into the state of the entire tech industry
I posted my last article, “Did Elon Musk Really Fire People Using Lines Of Code As His Metric?”, just a few days ago. It is already my third most viewed, and at this rate it will probably be the top. Now I know the key to getting attention on the Internet: Just write the words “Elon Musk” over and over again until you draw a crowd.
In case you don’t want to read the article I just linked, here’s the 5-second version: Elon Musk probably didn’t fire people solely based on how many lines of code they committed, which is a claim circulating on HackerNews, Reddit, and now Medium. What I can point to is evidence that Elon Musk had suggested firing people using lines of code committed as one criteria.
My motivation for entering the conversation at all is this article by Bennett Garner. It is very popular on Medium — possibly viral — and very explicitly claims that Elon Musk force-ranked Twitter engineers and fired the ones who had committed the fewest lines of code in the past year.
Responding To A Negative Comment
When I receive negative comments, I generally prefer to write article responses than to engage with a person directly. If they are very involved in the conversation, they have a way of popping up again — it’s not like they’re blocked. But here’s the thing: My response to this comment is basically an argument for why you should care about Elon Musk’s practices. “You” refers to the reader. I don’t think dvs0416 is going to be swayed.
Why you should care about Elon Musk’s practices:
- By no exaggeration, the entire tech industry is going through something of a crisis right now. There are widespread hiring freezes and layoffs.
- If people who write code are going to be fired or laid off, I would hope that at least the criteria for doing so makes logical sense. This is why there is such a buzz around Garner’s article, and this is why I wanted to correct a statement with a bit more nuance
Like last time, I want to refrain from stating a strong personal opinion about Elon Musk. To say a positive thing about him, I do think he was facing the same tough situation many other companies were facing, and that some news media outlets make it sound like he simply fired a lot of people out of spite. To say a negative thing about him, I do not think this was very well-executed.
From an article by the New York Times:
The fallout has often been excruciating, according to 36 current and former Twitter employees and people close to the company, as well as internal documents and workplace chat logs. Some top executives were summarily fired by email. One engineering manager, upon being told to cut hundreds of workers, vomited into a trash can. Others slept in the office as they worked grueling schedules to meet Mr. Musk’s orders.
Twitter, which is under financial pressure from debt and a slumping economy, is now unrecognizable compared with what it was a month ago. Last week, Mr. Musk slashed 50 percent of the company’s 7,500 employees…
By last Saturday, Mr. Musk’s advisers realized that the cuts may have been too deep, four people said. Some asked laid-off engineers, designers and product managers to return to their old jobs, three people familiar with the conversations said
— Two Weeks of Chaos: Inside Elon Musk’s Takeover of Twitter
dvs01416 writes that “10 people in the world know how the decisions were made.” I imagine the real number is more like 100, but this is a legitimate point.
What I take issue with is the notion that “Musk owns Twitter and can do whatever he wants.” He could fire people using an arbitrary metric, yes, but these people he fired are in the tech industry and the kinds of things he does set a precedent.
I do not know if this user is in tech. A large percentage of Medium users are programmers who write about coding, but not everyone. Some people are tired of hearing about Elon Musk and just generally don’t care. Some people, after years of experiencing the effects of things like gentrification and annoying LinkedIn posts, are not exactly shedding tears for tech workers. And some people — probably the majority — simply don’t think Twitter is the most constructive, benevolent, intellectually stimulating app in the world.
So let me just bring everything back to one point.
“So WHAT IF Elon Musk had fired people using lines of code as his metric?”
Well, the first thing that would happen is dvs0416 wouldn’t care.
Let THAT sink in. That was an Elon Musk sink reference…
It would have been a bad metric, and there would have been backlash. That was the entire point of this. Imagine firing technical writers who wrote the fewest sentences. Imagine firing journalists who used the fewest exclamation points. If Elon Musk had really fired people because of line count, it would have demonstrated that Elon Musk was completely and utterly insane.
In this state, any headline with the words “software,” “engineer,” and “fired” in the title is probably going to get attention.
The tech industry is in a bad situation right now, but it’s also huge. As I write this, I notice that the exact tech companies that were doing quite well a week ago have lagged behind the rest of the S&P500, which has rallied (if anyone is curious, they were a few defense stocks).
Tonight is Sunday. I plan to post this on Tuesday, so maybe by Tuesday everything will be different again.
Yes, as I wrote last time, it looks like he also asked everyone to print their source code for review. Combine that with the NYTimes piece, and it makes for a pretty tense situation.
Closing Thoughts
It would be nice if the stock market continued to rally, and all these companies promptly hired everyone back.
