24 Replies to “Let That Sink In”

  1. The same thought occurred to me early on. With all the puerile narcissistic threats of the SJWs at Twatter leaving, my immediate thought was “good riddance!” He’s cleaning house.

  2. Here’s what has sunk in … consider the sources of every negative Elon Musk/Twitter story … few of whom have done an honest day’s work in their sniveling lives

  3. I find the media take on Twitter and Elon to be a source of constant amusement. He’s p0wning them every day. But no matter how much he pranks and trolls them, they just keep right on going.

    Unfortunately that type of propaganda WORKS. Plenty of uncritical media viewers have the opinion that Elon is a Bad Person.

    1. I’ve worked in several companies during my life where the ethos was “up or out.”

      It was stressful at the time, but upon later reflection, those companies couldn’t afford a lazy, inattentive workforce; too many other people (customers) depended upon them in one way or another.

    2. I’ve often said that the constriction industry NEEDS a recession every so often to weed out the scamsters and incompetents. Every Recession is amazingly … cleansing.

  5. I honestly can’t understand what a company like Twitter needs thousands of employees for.
    They’re all running on giant hamster wheels to keep the servers going?

    1. JDN …

      Agreed. My guess is the majority of Twitter workers have nothing to do with running the servers (with US Gov/Intel help?) or writing and maintaining code , but are involved in censorship , woke , politically correct meetings , more meetings , more meetings etc. etc. which have little to do with running the actual business.

      Having work in and with large businesses , as the article points out , the 90% “drones” actually impede progress. Some companies have what they call a red-team or crisis-team .. same thing under different names , which when it all hits the fan the CEO assembles a small team of competent people who know how to get things done and who he can trust to honestly tell him what happened and how to fix it.

      That is essentially what Elon Musk did by injecting some of his trusted Tesla people who quickly identified those in Twitter who could be put on the red-team.

      Whether Twitter actually becomes any different remains to be seen.

  6. “This is what he was talking about with ‘Twitter 2.0.’ It’s likely not a ‘new twitter.’ ”

    I’d disagree with this. Elon has already said that what he would like to do is a very serious and extensive change to Twitter.
    Serious and extensive enough that he’s going to need an unfettered pod of whales to have any hope of getting it done.

  7. Question: how can you “whale and cull” essential government services when the corruption is entrenched at the top levels of the department? The blowback can harm innocent and ignorant citicens who vote. The benefits realized from this attempted correction usually take longer than an election cycle.

    1. “Question: how can you “whale and cull” essential government services when the corruption is entrenched at the top levels of the department?”

      War.

      See Ukraine or Syria for further elucidation.

      1. “War.

        See Ukraine or Syria for further elucidation.”

        Exactly so. It’s happening in Russia as well. The Russian army has lost more generals in the past ten months than it lost during the entire time after Operation Barbarossa in 1941. It’s very rare for there to be large scale purges at the top in peacetime. There are only two that occur to me. The first was the purge by Joseph Stalin of senior military in 1937-38 and the second was an equally large purge (albeit without lethal personal consequences) to large numbers of US military officers at the same time. The failure to purge obsolete senior management was a large part of why WW2 began to go so very badly wrong in 1939.

        In the case of the Russian army, it’s largely been doing nothing meaningful since 1945, learning nothing and the rot just kept building up.

    2. what are “essential government services”?

      That’s the first thing that needs to be identified. and then shut down the ones that are not essential.

      as an example, Health care under our constitution is a provincial concern, therefore Health Canada doesn’t seem to be essential. Similarly, Environmental protection is a provincial concern, so “Enviornment and Climate Change Canada” doesn’t seem to be essential. There is also something called “Impact Assessment Agency of Canada” which reads impact assessments and tells ECCC what to do.

      Also do we really need a Federal Dairy Commission, or a Federal Freshwater Fish Marketing Agency, Or a federal agency dedicated to “Economic development of Southern Ontario” or a “Canada School of Public Service”

      lots of graft and corruption can be found here: https://www.canada.ca/en/government/dept.html if you are willing to look

  9. The health care system needs this big time. During the pandemic, the only people coming into the hospital were people who looked after sick people with the bare minimum of admin/”support” staff. The parking lots were virtually empty and I could pull in and park in no time flat. The pandemic has largely resolved and the dead wood is back. Finding parking if I’m coming in for a late start is a much longer process. And the biggest difference is a new computerized charting system so unwieldy it has front line workers in tears, uncertain of wether or not medications have been ordered, and unable to administer them unless the computer has been looked after first. Needless to say no one who actually looks after sick people asked for this monstrosity; it was imposed by the administration of which there is absolutely no lack. The acid test of how necessary an admin position is, should be the following of a random sample of patients presenting to the hospital. If the elimination of the admin position has no detectable effect on the flow and care of a patient through the system, the position should be eliminated permanently. One would probably find half to two thirds of “support” functions could disappear, and patient care not only would not suffer but likely would be improved.

  10. While he’s not wrong, this is a really, really stupid way to manage a software company. The software engineering methods that work for producing quality software on a competitive cadence are actually well-known, they’re just not sexy or novel and they won’t get you tons of press coverage or juice your stock price.

    People who perform well in a crunch are valuable but they aren’t the be-all and end-all of software. “Whaling and culling” is going to end up ostracizing the architects, the system engineers and the planners who are critical to long-term success of the company. Tech companies are so used to chasing the next round of startup funding or the next sexy technology that they try to operate in constant crisis mode. It’s why so many of them fail.

  13. This can sometimes go badly. The company I worked for, Saskpower (a government crown corp), used to do a binge and purge cycle of management every decade or so…often with a change of government and economic downturns.

    In the 1990s they tried something radical and fired every manager and made them reapply for new jobs in the corporation. It saved money but over the next year we lost our best engineers and supervisors because of the anger over how terribly the process was managed, mostly to Alberta. Those employees that left then advised their new companies which Saskpower employees were the most productive in management and trades. We lost many top linemen, charge engineers and tradesmen in the second wave.

    1. Exactly what I’ve seen happen in every tech company that’s tried this. It inevitably ends up destroying the organization.

      Conservatives seem to think Musk is some kind of great executive while ignoring the terrible engineering quality and complete dependence on government subsidies of most of his companies.

      1. Yep, I remember one young electrical engineer who had started at the company at around the same time as I did coming in to the lab and explaining why he was leaving. He took over our whiteboard and did the math of higher pay, low Alberta flat income tax etc. But after talking to him and asking a few questions it was clear that he felt betrayed by the company. A while later we were taking pictures with him and saying goodbye when he took the job in Alberta. He was a good worker and probably wouldn’t have left under normal circumstances.

  14. The practice of whale and cull is common in country music management, but they usually call it “whale and jennings”.

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