Tag: Management

Elon and Twitter

The recent Elon Musk $44 billion takeover with Twitter is causing quite a drama isn’t it? One of those classic takeovers where somehow you are allowed to essentially purchase with money you don’t have and slap the debt on the company you just bought. It really sounds like Twitter was managing their finances in a fairly reasonable fashion, and now their situation seems perilous.

One of the first things was to cut the staff dramatically (~50%). That struck me as an odd thing to do. I understand companies can slowly expand over time, and if they actually thought about it – they could probably trim a few staff positions here and there. But mass-scale redundancies? it’s not gonna work is it? At any company, surely 90% of the people there are required for the business to function.

The problem that many managers don’t think about when making redundancies is that:

  • You are taking away the culture that got the company where it is today.
  • You are removing people’s friends.
  • You are taking away job security as current staff feel that they may be next to go.

The thing is, he also said that remote staff now need to come into the office, so the remaining staff are going to be very disgruntled. This means more people will leave voluntarily. Now he will have paid loads of people to leave, and now need to pay money to start hiring again. It doesn’t really save money, and if it does; it is small figures really; Elon needs to recover billions – not a million.

According to games journalist Jason Schreier, redundancies were made in mistake, and others were made before managers realised their roles were necessary for the business to function.

After cost-cutting, the next thing on Elon’s list was to try to increase monetisation. He decided that the blue verified checkmark was worth $8 a month.

One of my colleagues did mention it, and said he didn’t realise why people were so obsessed with a tiny image, but I explained it helps prevent impersonation. It’s easy to spread misinformation, make slanderous claims, or run scams when you can just change your picture and name and pretend to be another person or another company.

It was no surprise when it happened, you had plenty of people demonstrating this as soon as possible. You had Nintendo of America showing Mario “flipping the bird”, people impersonating Elon Musk, former presidents reminiscing about killing innocents… you name it.

Loads of examples if you view the thread on Twitter

and therefore, it was no surprise to see the feature currently suspended…

Twitter has suspended the launch of Twitter Blue and is actively trying to stop people from subscribing “to help address impersonation issues,” per an internal note.

Zoë Schiffer

Corey House recently tweeted about “Chesterton’s Fence”, and I was keeping my eye out for an excuse to put it in a blog. So here goes.

“Chesterton’s Fence: Reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. How applies to software: Before deleting code, figure out why it was added.

Other examples:

– Don’t delete a test before you know why it was added.

– Don’t delete a file until you’ve proven it’s unnecessary.

– Don’t make fun of a developer’s old code unless you understand the context in which it was written.”

Corey House
My own Twitter examples:
  • don’t takeover a company without having a solid plan of what to do with it.
  • don’t sack staff without knowing what role they do
  • don’t change the verification feature when you haven’t understood why it was added

“Human Resources”

Managers often talk about “allocating resources” when discussing project teams. I don’t understand why we are dehumanizing people. Why can’t we just say people/staff/developers? If we are talking about money or hardware, then it’s fine to use the term “resources”. However, the term seems to be embedded in the business culture since the department that deals with people is often known as “Human Resources (HR)”.

I was watching all the Bourne films recently, and in the scenes where you see staff in the agency office who are monitoring security monitors – they say lines like “Asset is on the move”. It probably makes sense here to dehumanise people; because your end goal is to kill them, so calling them “assets” and using terms like “dispose”/”eliminate” probably removes you from the fact that this is a person who has feelings and a family, and you’re about to end them. Maybe managers talk about people in this way so it’s easier when it comes to redundancies. “Cut 10% of the resources, and move on”.

I think it isn’t even that effective to talk about people using their job roles. When managers only look at the Job Titles and not the individual skills, then they end up creating imbalanced teams. This could be that you need to spread a certain skill across teams such as SQL Databases, so a manager who only looks at Job Titles could end up putting the people with SQL skills together.

Additionally, some Seniors aren’t that great, and therefore lower-ranking Developers are better than them. I’ve definitely seen it happen where managers create a team consisting of 3 underperforming seniors, then wonder why it isn’t working. This was a source of my frustration a few years back and was some major motivation to start this blog. 

Creating a team based on 3 underperforming developers is a rarity, but a recent trend for us is to have only 1 Senior leading a few Developers and a Junior. If the Senior isn’t very good, then the team has no guidance at all.

In conclusion, I think managers should show respect to staff and refer to them as people (not “resources”). They should also try to understand where individual people’s skills are, rather than simply making assumptions based on a Job Title. This should lead to better balanced teams. Balanced teams should lead to high performance and morale.