I don’t blame him from trying. He has to attract enough genuinely talented missionary idealists among the scaramuccis, bannons, millers, and visa-serfs to give this a real shot. And protect any islands of clean-sheet startupish energy from the siege of 15 years of history.
Conversation
The interesting thing with software is that manufacturing capital base is not heavy hydraulic presses and factories but people. Detroit in 1940 had to spin up lots of new factories and raw material flows. Labor was less of a bottleneck. People could be trained up fast.
1
3
31
In sw, it’s always a core of irreplaceable artisan geniuses building mysterious/puzzling bits, small armies of good, hard-to-backfill people around them, building less mysterious/puzzling bits, and vast crowds of fungible drones doing what sw still can’t: moderation, tagging…
2
3
65
In dictators handbook terms, these are the essential, influential, and interchangeable parts of the “ software factory” (the labor IS the capital, not the hardware)
Twitter’s lost thousands fairly randomly, including presumably enough essentials and influentials to be in crisis.
1
5
40
Forget visa status. Can you guess from this photo which of these people is which group? I can’t.
It’s not actually a bad time to be fighting a talent war. The industry’s laif off 10x as many people as twitter, in all 3 categories. It’s a buyer’s market.
1
23
I’d guess Twitter needs to replace at least a dozen “essentials” and maybe 100-200 “influentials.” The interchangeables (70-90%?) can be ignored. Can be replaced or automated (a lot of biz-process bureaucracy and moderation is going to get automated everywhere in this downturn).
1
1
27
The influentials backfilling I think will be fine. Even with the terrible optics that this photo is attempting to counterprogram, enough people will be desperate or just morbidly curious enough. This photo is designed to recruit them. It’s like a college brochure stock photo.
1
2
49
It’s the essentials that are the problem. They will bring opinionated design ideas that will disruptively alter the DNA of twitter’s core. They will generally be industry veterans (don’t forget this is a big, scaled, live-ops company), often with fuck-you money already banked.
1
3
41
They will have no good reason to put up with bs. They will be in roles with exposure to Wrath of Elon or any pitbull CEO he installs to deliver “hardcore intense long hours” leadership. Any equity participation for a future exit is a higher-risk bet than unencumbered new startup.
2
31
This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more
