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Most software at the end of the day is the same as hammering nails.

Anyone who builds anything needs a process and accountability.


Agreed. But the old system of “well this is really big so 9 months to two years maybe? We’ll be over there trying to finish it” isn’t nearly as appealing. How far along are we? “I don’t know 27%?”

But “here’s 20 steps averaging X points so it will take Y long and we can easily track progress” that agile promises is much more appealing. It may not speed up good teams. Or bad teams. It may slow things down some.

But managers like it.


Unfortunately, most teams wrongly estimate their time requirements and the last 10% is really more like 90% of the development time.



secure a good job now before the job openings freeze up.


This has nothing to do with homeless.

Elon is saying the staff could be replaced by the homeless and it would be a better use of the office and money.

This is about putting the staff on notice a house cleaning is coming.


Finally an interesting comment, thank you. Seeing how blatantly detectable a lot of shitcoin spam on the platform is, one does wonder where the staff are spending their time. Even if it’s hard to algorithmically detect a spam, it should not be so clunky to report it when the spammer repeats the same thing 20 times. It’s like they learned their work ethic at Google or something.


> Seeing how blatantly detectable a lot of shitcoin spam on the platform is

I'm a nocoin/nevercoin blockchain skeptic who hates shitcoin spam too, but I wonder: does people posting tweets about "shitcoins" violate Twitter's usage policy, or just offend your sensibilities? I could see how posting the same thing twenty times might violate a policy, though not sure if it violates Twitter's. I only post about infosec and politics on Twitter and some users might not like that either!


You seem to be mixing different things.

They do have an anti spam policy.

I was talking specifically about spam. Non-spam is another matter.

And who decides what is and is not spam, you might ask? Well Twitter of course; they just aren’t very good at detecting even blatant examples of it proactively enough to prevent it from detracting from the user experience.


I saw it as a sign that he's not a fan of WFH/remote arrangements for tech companies, though at its root it's a shitpost.


I think you're reading into this, you're making inferences that simply have no context or support. As others have pointed out, it's likely a satirical comment about under-utilization of the office space (that's also quite expensive).

That said, it could be good for Twitter to go on a diet. It's spending a lot on employing some 5.5k people [1] and it doesn't seem to be in a massive growth phase [2].

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272140/employees-of-twit...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/303681/twitter-users-wor...


That's still a pretty shitty comment, or joke, or whatever, to publicly make. Imagine if you were a Twitter employee and this is how you're finding out that he plans to come for a large swath of you? By cracking wise and half-jokingly putting the decision over whether or not you get to keep your job in the hands of that poll?

I don't care if we all could've assumed he was going to want to clean house, he could at least have some tact in how he goes about it.


Twitter is permanent work from home. He's making a joke about the office being empty and the streets outside the office being filled with homeless people.


This tweet where he calls out needing to fire 12 floors of staff might suggest otherwise;

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1512974273606045702


Silicon Valley / SF have had a stranglehold on the digital economy for the last 20-30 years -- nearly anything that touches electrics or software had a "tax" where some portion of that innovation flowed back as cash.

With covid / the great reset, I've seen so many leave the bay area now that they can work remote. It's occured to me that SV / SF will need to reinvent itself and be in a rough patch for a couple years. The benefit to the rest of the americans is that all those high paying jobs and new ways of doing business are being dispersed throughout the rest of the USA which is better for all of us in the end.


There’s a fine line with this though — the advantage of hiring Americans in the Midwest versus hiring in Europe and Asia needs to be solidified somehow.


Timezones and the whole mess of laws and regulations around paying international employees tend to keep American companies hiring primarily American workers.


There are 2 advantages I see...

1. Many great workers either won't or don't want to live in SV. I've known a bunch of them, over the years. Moving more development to where these folks are brings them in to the fold.

2. The people in SV don't represent and aren't regularly interacting with most of America or the world. They are in a different bubble. The majority is part of the out group to them. Hiring people in distributed places means you hire people who are more likely to interact and relate to the majority. Relating to people that will use technology is useful when building solutions.


If you are hiring from a pool of candidates who, by nature of their skills and relative wealth, lie at the 90th percentile or higher in their communities, does it really make that much of a difference? Yes SV is a bubble, but hiring people living in a similar bubble in Omaha isn't going to move the needle that much IMO.


NYT exec editor Dean Bacquet famously said(ruefully) “we don’t understand the role of religion in people’s lives”, after the ‘16 election.

There is not a single soul in Omaha who would make that statement.


The people in Omaha would probably be more likely to understand the role of religion in people's lives than the NYT exec editor, after all.


> The people in Omaha would probably be more likely to understand the role of religion in people's lives

If by “people’s lives” you mean specifics “the lives of people in Omaha”, plausibly.

Otherwise, no, not really.


Several factors still favour Americans - stable, business-friendly laws, crazy high human development index, American work culture, predictable interpersonal experiences.

It’s going to be a rich continent for many generations to come.


I think the Californians are going to be first on the chopping block. They're expensive and what can they do that a bunch of midwesterners can't? I think international teams are a given in both cases.


I think the companies there will also need to reinvent themselves. I'm currently interviewing and both Apple and Facebook required in-person or based around a satellite office. I'm in Los Angeles so it shouldn't be a crazy ask. They lost out on a candidate and my labor will go to a business who lets me continue living my life.

Given thoughts like Individuals Matter [1], my speculation is that these companies are currently losing a lot of valuable individuals who can command more flexibility. There are plenty of remote first companies paying competitive salaries.

1. https://danluu.com/people-matter/


There is a downside to some places as well. You have people moving into areas with high paying jobs and expectations of high cost in housing. The locals who have lived there for years are priced out of their own community with the influx. This has happened around Austin TX, and from what I understand in Colorado.


They actually aren’t dispersed at all. You have more remote workers than you had before, that’s pretty much it. It really remains to be seen what happens when those remotes go to switch jobs.


The internet exploded post financial crash.

The iphone invented a whole new platform for ideas.

The economy moved substantially online during this time.

It was a transformative moment in technology being driven out of silicon valley / sf.


I think that's true although I also think that the past decade has been a pretty good time to be in tech broadly. I'm not sure it's really specific to the Bay Area/SF although it may be more obvious there because of how concentrated it is. (And, as you say, an outsized amount of the most visible tech came out of (I'd say) the West Coast.


i work in sf. i'm in florida right now for the nhl finals and covid is fake news here, and it's utterly refreshing.


Since before anyone on this board was born companies, have adjusted pay based on location using charts like this;

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/05/25/us-dollar-ho...

To think this time is different is to be ignorant.


it's so weird. i know it'll be cold in feb in minnesota. i know this because i have experience. and that experience translates into my ability to give guidance. if you want to be taken serious, you need experience to be able to estimate.


4F or 12F? Come on, which is it? If it's above 8F I can get away with a cheaper antifreeze next year, but I need to put the order in next week.

"Cold" is not an adequate analogy for the sorts of estimates that non-delivery parts of businesses seem to think they are entitled to, and it's not reasonable to say people can't be taken seriously for rejecting that trap.


This is the "it never rains" strategy of weather reporting. On most days, it's not raining, so you'll be right most of the time.

Some may claim they have personally experienced rain, so your model must have some faults, but just ignore those plebeians.


i agree with you.

folks over 65 and 40% BMI got their go in life. prioritizing around the make makes more sense to me.

thankfully the lockdowns are no stomach anymore in most of the states. a visit to an airport and any city not in california or ny and you can see and feel the difference in an instant.


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