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Gergely Orosz Profile picture
@GergelyOrosz
Nov 17, 2022 • 18 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X
Scoop: I am hearing far fewer than expected devs hit "yes".

Elon sent out an email relaxing remote working from the former draconian policy.

I'm hearing he is having meetings w top engineers to convince them to stay.

Sounds like playing hardball does not work. Ofc it doesn't.
The new remote policy is how remote work is approved as long as the manager of the engineer takes responsibility that the dev makes excellent contributions.

In-person meetings w teammates are expected ideally weekly; the very least monthly.

A week ago:

"From my larger group of 50 people, 10 are staying, 40 are taking the severance. Elon set up meetings with a few who plan to quit."

I don't blame people quitting. They've been offered intimidation, ever-changing policies the last minute, long hours, and an ultimatum.
I am not sure Elon realizes that, unlike rocket scientists, who have relatively few options to work at, devs with the experience of building Twitter only have better options than the conditions he outlines.

Plus they remember how this was two days ago:

Plus, we're talking about a leader who lost respect with their engineers when an engineer *corrected* him about why the Twitter app was slow.

That engineer was right.

Elon fired him.

Give people fear and intimidation, then a way out: guess what they choose. Well, now we see.
From a dev: "so this new policy makes remote working infeasible. It makes the manager responsible for "excellent contributions" of the direct. If it does not happen: manager is fired.

Managers have 20+ reports and don't have time to check in. So they'll demand in-office work...
I meant it when I called Elon's latest ultimatum the first truly positive thing about this Twitter saga.

Because finally, everyone who had enough of the BS and is not on a visa could finally quit. Lots of the people staying are on visas btw.

The unnecessary brutality Musk has treated all 7,500 Twitter employees has been mind-nubing. I keep saying that tech is pretty small, so be kind to people. He's done the opposite for 3 weeks.

Week 1: turmoil blog.pragmaticengineer.com/turmoil-at-twi…

Week 2: cruel changes blog.pragmaticengineer.com/cruel-changes-…
Unless something changes, Twitter's engineering workforce could be down by 90%, in just 3 weeks (!!!).

Elon fired 50%.

Then fired a few more for correcting him.

Now 80% of the remaining 50% could take severance.

Here's what I think will happen:
Twitter *cannot* afford to lose that many devs and keep operating. Heck, they have barely started hiring new ones, and those hires will not come through the door for several weeks!

I'm assuming Elon will have to throw money at this:
- Retention bonuses
- Short-term contracts
I heard some ppl suggest that Musk has made Tesla a success, SpaceX a success, and we should not judge too early, as he has a track record.

I agree.

But my question is: why treat people with zero respect? And once he does this, what does he expect, when those ppl have options?
Clear to me that Twitter needs to hire new people ASAP plus retain some existing ppl for handovers.

Too many bridges burnt with most devs.

All of this is just completely nonsensical. I get he wants to move fast, but why wreck the company while at it?

The irony is a lot of the software engineers liked some of the changes. E.g. the speed up in the pace. Elon spending time at Twitter.

But, as an eng is saying "we got what we wanted the worst possible way." Faster pace by working on weekends. Elon cancelling remote overnight.
Another sw engineer was telling me he was *really* excited when Elon took over, and could not wait to work with him.

Then was confused why Elon treated Twitter so poorly. Eg didn't even talk with staff.

Then this person was fired as part of the 50%.

Why let go even supporters?
Talking with a software engineer who was fired by Musk. This person is saying they are conflicted. They feel mistreated, but want Twitter to survive - *in spite* of him, because of its outsized importance to the world.

I agree.

Hope Musk sorts this fully self-inflicted crisis.
The odds of a service outage have, sadly gone up with so many leaving. Though good news deploys are locked down (no changes: fewer outages!)

Follow me on LI: linkedin.com/in/gergelyorosz and subscribe to newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/about in the hopefully unlikely case that Twitter has a blip
Deadline passed and lots of people did not blink when given the ultimatum.

Let that sink in.
Pretty much what earlier employee internal polls showed.

Brutal and entirely self-inflicted.

Twitter will be run on a skeleton crew that’s ~10-15% of what it was 3 weeks ago.

So much institutional knowledge walked out the door.

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More from @GergelyOrosz

Gergely Orosz Profile picture
Oct 1
My personal anecdote on the impact of AI (aka Claude Code + Cursor)

There was this tool I wanted to build that would have helped my business a little bit at @Pragmatic_Eng, but not enough to

1. Do it myself (would have taken ~days)
2. Hire someone (too much onboarding)

But...
... but then I gave it a go with Claude Code + Cursor open.

In 30 minutes, I had something promising. In an hour, I got it done, exactly how I wanted (this was an addition to my existing codebase.) In another hour, I moved it over to a new stack I've been wanting to play with!
... and now it's done, and I've onboarded the first company on to this feature.

Here's the thing without this AI tool, I don't think I would have EVER done it! Not worth it.

So I think AI tools will do this. People + companies doing stuff they wouldn't have, before!
Read 9 tweets
Gergely Orosz Profile picture
Sep 24
Linear has a 30-minute weekly meeting called "Quality Wednesdays." I sat through one and WOW

Devs show a quality or perf-related fix they did last week. It can be big, or small. We went through 17 issues, from massive backend performance wins, to this tiny one. Can you see it? Image
On one end, it was super casual. On the other, it was really dense.

A dev spent 2 minutes showing how because styled-components *feels* slow, they tried out 3 other frameworks & measured how they compare for build time, JS bundle size, CSS size, and LCP rendering performance.

Based on this, they'll probably move off styled components... mainly for LCP rendering for massive pages to be faster. But it's all tradeoffs.
And it could really be *anything.* Some devs showed work they picked up as reported by users that resulted in higher quality.

Most devs though found a small thing or two to fix last week. That first bug (off by 1px) was found and fixed by a frontend engineer.

Lots of small but irritating things fixed like moving the mouse over an element takes a small delay to show the tooltip, or the tooltip first shows as empty etc
Read 9 tweets
Gergely Orosz Profile picture
Jul 27
Amusing use of LLMs at a more traditional company:

“A project with ~50 people got stuck. There are too many JIRA tickets, no clear specification, and anytime one team tries to make progress, the others shoot it down.

So a dev built an LLM to try and break the deadlock: (cont’d)
- Fed all JIRA tickets to the LLM. Built a basic RAG with vector DB

- Had it generate questions about the project, about topics not covered by the tickets

- Had the LLM attempt to answer the same questions

- Generated a report of what areas are not specified

- Tried to use this to stop teams rejecting suggestions “because this is not well specified”
A PM at this company told me this story. Asked him if this LLM helped break the deadlock? His response:

“No. We’re still stuck. But it was good fun to build it and an excuse to play around with vector databases!”

Ha.
Read 5 tweets
Gergely Orosz Profile picture
Jul 13
Regarding the Windsurf sale (part of the team acquihired by Google, prob a great exit, but not all the team):

I feel we’re forgetting well-funded startups today are NOT scrappy startups in the past where employees work for pennies, paid well under market.

Its a different game
What is true, and always has been true: founders and decision makers always have the biggest potential upside - for anything! Including negotiating and acquisition.

This is why so many accomplished employees eventually become founders - because its hoe you have more control of your destiny
It still stings to have some people get much better outcomes during an acquisition.

It’s a reminder that as an employee, you really don’t have leverage beyond hoping founders look out for you… sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t
Read 7 tweets
Gergely Orosz Profile picture
Jul 9
There was this engineer on my team a while back who was: a good dev, but not the best dev. Got everything done. But had zero ego, a very nice personality, and got along with *everyone* on the team very well.

When he joined, the team became... better. Nicer. More balanced.
I just got a reference check about this dev, asking the usual questions ("what is an example where they delivered over and beyond," "how did they execute", "what are growth areas" etc)

He did fine on all of them, but I still think how much better he made my team. With stuff that's hard/impossible to measure!
Makes me realize how hiring is not focused on this stuff: "how would this person make the team better."

I guess, it is hard to be focused on this.

But this was one of the *very* rare devs who made every team much better. Nicer. More motivated. More a "team."

Still think of it
Read 7 tweets
Gergely Orosz Profile picture
Jun 30
So predictable that we’ll see an explosion of digital products selling “ideas for million dollar businesses” that you can “just vibe code quickly”.

Basically: “buy my digital product for $500, spend $1,500 on Lovable / Claude Code and become a millionaire.”

Another hype train
Ofc these products promoted by influencers will work just as well as crypto sh*tcoins launched by influencers in 2023.

We’ll see doctored evidence (“someone who built one of ideas idea is at $5K MRR after 2 weeks”) and nontechnical people will spend thousands for $0 in return
The predictable winners: AI infra companies! Lovable, Vercel (with v0), Claude Code, Cursor, Replit, Gemini and any and all products that (at least partially) position themselves as “AI tools to build your idea that work even if you’re not a developer”

And it’s stated. A gold rush where - and the surest winners are those selling the shovels!
Read 6 tweets

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