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| Dan, in better days, building cloud infrastructure at Twitter |
"9 years at the tweet factory. It was all about my coworkers for me. I'll miss you all and hope to keep in touch on the outside #LoveWhereYouWorked" tweets @dknightly earlier this week. Having an inside view of the impact of Elon Musk on Twitter has added a human dimension to this tech tragedy, but it was quite awful enough even without that. Twitter was infamous for its poor management, but despite that--and isn't it so often despite that?--a lot of good work got done there, not just in cloud engineering (how many Internet services offer global latency measured in milliseconds even when traffic jumps by multiple orders of magnitude instantaneously?) but also, and almost uniquely, in tech ethics. It took Musk to show us what really bad management looks like, management that isn't just obstructive but actively destructive.
People like Musk show up now and again, even at a reasonably well run company like Autodesk. I think of them as cuckoo birds: parasite poseurs, they cause employees who do belong to fall out of the nest and are only with difficulty pushed out themselves, by which time they have shit all over everything, creating a mess that more mature managers are left to clean up. The analogy is particularly apt for Twitter, of course, except that in this case the parasite is the Cuckoo in Chief. All the usual behaviors are in evidence--laughable insecurity highlighted by an ill-advised flaunting of ignorance, total intolerance of feedback, sucking up to your superiors--but the typical recourse is unavailable.
Some may disagree with this characterization, but nothing speaks louder than results: as of this writing internal Twitter services are visibly failing and it's just a matter of time (and events: I'm looking at you, World Cup) before the whole thing topples over. If you haven't already backed up your data I'd get on it, and I suppose you'd better click the links, above, before they die, too.
