Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?

[Fudge Nuggets 19209]

4 hours ago, Homercles said:

At least it didn't catch fire and explode.

[atomheartbevo 89750]

1 hour ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Good luck with that.

 

[Firemans4Horn 18117]

7 hours ago, Humble Beast said:

It seems like the narrative is shifting a bit here from Twitter is going to die to Elon’s Twitter business is going to hurt Tesla. That seems more likely imo. Just depends on people putting themselves in lesser electric vehicles to spite Elon.  

 

 

 

[HenryJames 66134]

2 hours ago, Prepuce of Doom said:

 

 

Jesus.

[Bateshorn 9928]

21 minutes ago, Firemans4Horn said:

 

 

 

[Walte464 450]

7 hours ago, Left Coast said:

Whynotboth.gif

And quite frankly many of the electric cars coming out are better than Teslas. It’s Tesla’s charging network that is unsurpassed.

When another company can get the same charging network as Tesla, I’m out. Not going to support Elon’s lunatic moves anymore

[HOOKEM4 5039]

40 minutes ago, HenryJames said:

Jesus.

Let me tell you about how hard it was to give birth to my children. 

[Neonmoon 38129]

Let me see here. 83% of your revenue comes from Advertisers (1 billion of 1.2 billion in revenue). 50% of top advertisers left the platform. You added 1 billion in debt obligations each year. Carry the 1, and…

Yeah, that’s not adding up

[Humble Beast 258]

13 hours ago, Firemans4Horn said:

 

 

 

 

56 minutes ago, Neonmoon said:

Let me see here. 83% of your revenue comes from Advertisers (1 billion of 1.2 billion in revenue). 50% of top advertisers left the platform. You added 1 billion in debt obligations each year. Carry the 1, and…

Yeah, that’s not adding up

Nice math.
 

All the hand wringing here about Twitter’s profitability and I don’t think I’ve seen it once mentioned how much reducing headcount will help their bottom line. Only that without all those vital personnel, Twitter won’t make it through whichever weekend. 

[956 Worldwide 34736]

21 hours ago, G650 said:

It's a pretty well known flaw

Teslas are a luxury/lifestyle object and the pretty serious build quality flaws (phantom braking is a huge safety issue) don’t seem to make a dent in brand desirability. 
 

It’s not super uncommon for cars— Land Rover/Range Rover is a great example of catastrophic reliability for DECADES that still didn’t put a dent in demand. And it’s a similar story, they capitalized on the cachet of being the only “luxury SUV with real off-road capability” in the game for a long time. 
 

Tesla’s genius isn’t really tech. It was selling EVs as a status/luxury item instead of an environmentally friendly penalty box that changed the game.

[Homercles 10206]

26 minutes ago, Humble Beast said:

 

Nice math.
 

All the hand wringing here about Twitter’s profitability and I don’t think I’ve seen it once mentioned how much reducing headcount will help their bottom line. Only that without all those vital personnel, Twitter won’t make it through whichever weekend. 

Because in the grand scheme it’s not going to cover the debt servicing.  According to NYT they went from approximately 7,500 to 3,700 FTE…say comp and ben averaged $150k/FTE…3,700 x $150k = $555M annually.    
 

Now that doesn’t account for any severance or other related costs like lawsuits, and the debt service is about $1B annually.  Considering the ad revenue evaporating, new features being put on hold, brain drain, limited inside sales reps, and a complex core mesh that seems to be crumbling…I’d suggest you are vastly overestimating the impact of indiscriminately firing half the workforce. 

[NoName 16364]

On 11/25/2022 at 7:18 AM, G650 said:

So apparently quite a few of us have gotten in Post at this point. I can pretty much say it's way easier than mastodon.

Not me

[NoName 16364]

2 hours ago, Neonmoon said:

Let me see here. 83% of your revenue comes from Advertisers (1 billion of 1.2 billion in revenue). 50% of top advertisers left the platform. You added 1 billion in debt obligations each year. Carry the 1, and…

Yeah, that’s not adding up

89% last year.

[Goredho 17413]

On 11/25/2022 at 9:44 AM, Chopper said:

My first tech job in Austin was for a startup led by a man who has become very visible in the Austin start up/VC community.  On my 2nd day of work, he called me into his office.  At the time, the company was small enough that he the CEO was part of the panel that interviewed me.  He said he was greatly impressed with my creativity in a technical medium, and as such he had a very important first mission for me at the company.

He then proceeded to pull a crystal ball out of his desk.  Like a wizard’s scrying ball.  He flipped a switch on the base and it began to glow.  He then fiddled at his keyboard a little and started to explain.

“This is a wizards orb.  It’s got network connectivity, and an api that lets you control it.  It’s connected to my laptop now, and I can control it with this software.”

He clicked a bit on the computer and the orb started glowing a pleasant green.  He clicked some more and it started glowing an agitated red.

”Wow, cool.”  I said, feigning interest.

”It is, isn’t it?!  I want you to program something to interface this with our systems. So that when all is well, it glows green and when things are degraded, it glows red.  That way I’ll always know the state of our system.”

I digested a moment before asking some questions.

”We already have a big monitor in the dev area that shows colored graphs of the health of various systems in real time.  What does this give us that that doesn’t?”

”Nothing.  But it’s fucking COOL!  Plus that’s out there, I want this in here.  On my desk.  How long do you think it’s going to take to whip something up?”

”Uh, I dunno.  It’s my 2nd day, I haven’t looked at any documentation, I don’t know what systems to tie it into.  Give me the rest of the day and I can get you an estimate.”

He frowned.  “This shouldn’t be hard for someone of your caliber.  Get me a working prototype by the end of the week.”

“Ok.”

In the end, I tied it to our public website response time metrics so that anything over a half second glowed red and anything else glowed green.  He was ecstatic.  I mentioned it’s limitations and how it could be expanded on to give better indicators of health across various systems, but he cut me off, “This is so fucking COOL!”

He showed it off at the next all hands proudly, using it as a prop to discuss the innovation we were driving at this company.  Of course, this had nothing to do with our core business and did nothing to get us closer to profitability, a successful exit, or assist in subsequent fundraising.

I never heard about the wizards orb again, though it stayed on his desk and if website perf went down, he’d come out of his office to see what was up.  There was no follow up effort to make it more useful or indicative of what was going on with our systems.

CEOs and tech founders are an odd bunch.

Edited November 26, 2022 by Goredho

[Aqua Buddha 14599]

1 hour ago, Humble Beast said:

 

Nice math.
 

All the hand wringing here about Twitter’s profitability and I don’t think I’ve seen it once mentioned how much reducing headcount will help their bottom line. Only that without all those vital personnel, Twitter won’t make it through whichever weekend. 

Remember the day Facebook disappeared or something?  Remember how it was back on line within a few hours?  Now think about when (not if) that happens to Twitter.  

[Aqua Buddha 14599]

1 hour ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Teslas are a luxury/lifestyle object and the pretty serious build quality flaws (phantom braking is a huge safety issue) don’t seem to make a dent in brand desirability. 
 

It’s not super uncommon for cars— Land Rover/Range Rover is a great example of catastrophic reliability for DECADES that still didn’t put a dent in demand. And it’s a similar story, they capitalized on the cachet of being the only “luxury SUV with real off-road capability” in the game for a long time. 
 

Tesla’s genius isn’t really tech. It was selling EVs as a status/luxury item instead of an environmentally friendly penalty box that changed the game.

I've always used the Land Rover example in regards to Tesla.  They're notoriously trash, have been for decades, have horrible CR numbers of whatever but you see them in every upscale suburb in America for people just driving to Whole Foods or some shit.

That's basically Tesla except Tesla has a higher market cap than Ford or GM.

[CooterBrown 18015]

My first tech job in Austin was for a startup led by a man who has become very visible in the Austin start up/VC community.  On my 2nd day of work, he called me into his office.  At the time, the company was small enough that he the CEO was part of the panel that interviewed me.  He said he was greatly impressed with my creativity in a technical medium, and as such he had a very important first mission for me at the company.
He then proceeded to pull a crystal ball out of his desk.  Like a wizard’s scrying ball.  He flipped a switch on the base and it began to glow.  He then fiddled at his keyboard a little and started to explain.
“This is a wizards orb.  It’s got network connectivity, and an api that lets you control it.  It’s connected to my laptop now, and I can control it with this software.”
He clicked a bit on the computer and the orb started glowing a pleasant green.  He clicked some more and it started glowing an agitated red.
”Wow, cool.”  I said, feigning interest.
”It is, isn’t it?!  I want you to program something to interface this with our systems. So that when all is well, it glows green and when things are degraded, it glows red.  That way I’ll always know the state of our system.”
I digested a moment before asking some questions.
”We already have a big monitor in the dev area that shows colored graphs of the health of various systems in real time.  What does this give us that that doesn’t?”
”Nothing.  But it’s fucking COOL!  Plus that’s out there, I want this in here.  On my desk.  How long do you think it’s going to take to whip something up?”
”Uh, I dunno.  It’s my 2nd day, I haven’t looked at any documentation, I don’t know what systems to tie it into.  Give me the rest of the day and I can get you an estimate.”
He frowned.  “This shouldn’t be hard for someone of your caliber.  Get me a working prototype by the end of the week.”
“Ok.”
In the end, I tied it to our public website response time metrics so that anything under a half second glowed red and anything else glowed green.  He was ecstatic.  I mentioned it’s limitations and how it could be expanded on to give better indicators of health across various systems, but he cut me off, “This is so fucking COOL!”
He showed it off at the next all hands proudly, using it as a prop to discuss the innovation we were driving at this company.  Of course, this had nothing to do with our core business and did nothing to get us closer to profitability, a successful exit, or assist in subsequent fundraising.
I never heard about the wizards orb again, though it stayed on his desk and if website perf went down, he’d come out of his office to see what was up.  There was no follow up effort to make it more useful or indicative of what was going on with our systems.
CEOs and tech founders are an odd bunch.

That’s a lot of words to say you’re a wizard.

[Homercles 10206]

6 minutes ago, CooterBrown said:

That’s a lot of words to say you’re a wizard.

Wondering if it was this guy

[G650 14270]

 

 

 

[Humble Beast 258]

20 minutes ago, Aqua Buddha said:

Remember the day Facebook disappeared or something?  Remember how it was back on line within a few hours?  Now think about when (not if) that happens to Twitter.  

You mean Twitter isn’t going to make it through the weekend?

 

5 minutes ago, G650 said:

 

 

 

Shit like this has been the case for years. Nobody cared here until Elon bought Twitter. It’s just funny. 

[Neonmoon 38129]

Here are Twitters actual financials 

https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2021/ar/FiscalYR2021_Twitter_Annual_-Report.pdf

2021 

(in thousands)

Revenue - 5,077,482

Cost of Revenue - 1,797,510
Research and development  - 1,246,704
Sales and marketing  - 1,175,970
General and administrative  - 584,336
Litigation settlement, net  - 765,701
 Total costs and expenses -  5,570,221
 Income (loss) from operations  - (492,739)

so getting rid of half the workforce only takes the annual savings down to 291,168

Revenue from Advertisers- 4,505,692

 

[Captainant 27685]

1 minute ago, Humble Beast said:

You mean Twitter isn’t going to make it through the weekend?

Yall keep arguing as if that's some flag in the sand that your opposition is defending. It's not, but y'all really can make that straw man dance lol

[GenXer 2894]

1 hour ago, Goredho said:

In the end, I tied it to our public website response time metrics so that anything under a half second glowed red and anything else glowed green.  He was ecstatic.

 

Ummm… it glowed green when response time was >= 0.5 second, and red when it was < 0.5 sec?  A slower response time glowed green?

If you pulled that off and convinced him things were good at green, he’s dumb as well as odd.

[G650 14270]

7 minutes ago, Humble Beast said:

You mean Twitter isn’t going to make it through the weekend?

 

Shit like this has been the case for years. Nobody cared here until Elon bought Twitter. It’s just funny. 

I mean feel free to take a poll of my friends and acquaintances but I've consider Elmo a worthless piece of shit for about 20 years

[Grade of D as in David 13253]

2 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Teslas are a luxury/lifestyle object and the pretty serious build quality flaws (phantom braking is a huge safety issue) don’t seem to make a dent in brand desirability. 
 

It’s not super uncommon for cars— Land Rover/Range Rover is a great example of catastrophic reliability for DECADES that still didn’t put a dent in demand. And it’s a similar story, they capitalized on the cachet of being the only “luxury SUV with real off-road capability” in the game for a long time. 
 

Tesla’s genius isn’t really tech. It was selling EVs as a status/luxury item instead of an environmentally friendly penalty box that changed the game.

Range rovers are amphibious exploring vehicles

[Brian Fantana 6689]

1 minute ago, Humble Beast said:

You mean Twitter isn’t going to make it through the weekend?

At least try to engage honestly. It's going to be interesting to see what happens, whatever feelings you or anyone else has about Elon personally. The math is out there for anyone to see:

Twitter gets the vast majority of its revenue through advertisers, a significant chunk of top advertisers have fled the platform. Elon has also personally saddled an already unprofitable company with a billion and a half a year in interest alone via the loans he took to finance the deal. He has eliminated key engineering and support personnel for a platform that relies on a lot of on-premises bare metal (in addition to outsourced cloud servicing) to drive the service. The decision making, thus far, doesn't seem to be very conducive to bringing large advertisers BACK to the platform. Twitter Blue was a harebrained idea to begin with, as trying to sell something to your company's product makes no sense whatsoever. He would need something along the lines of 200 million (give or take) concurrent paying subscribers in perpetuity in order to pay off the interest alone. The Wall Street banks that financed the deal have rumored to have received many offers to buy the debt at 60 cents on the dollar. He's effectively being margin called, and for someone with his personal wealth, that's basically unheard of.

It all seems like a time bomb if you sit there and think about it for more than a minute and a half. Elon Musk aside entirely, it's very interesting and there doesn't seem to be a clear path forward for Twitter to survive in the long term. That doesn't mean it can't happen, but the decisions that have been made so far have not been good for the most part.

[Francisco 2.0 32395]

 

Surprisingly, no reply:

 

 

 

[Brian Fantana 6689]

That's a pretty bad attempt at obfuscating names

[Captainant 27685]

3 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

 

Surprisingly, no reply:

 

 

 

Also, it directly violates his own rules lol. Trump got banned for encouraging the Jan6 attacks and continuing to use the platform to attack the election result. There's been a shitload of convictions directly stemming from that event, and I would think it meets Elmo's violence or illegal activity standard for getting banned ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

[Goredho 17413]

26 minutes ago, GenXer said:

Ummm… it glowed green when response time was >= 0.5 second, and red when it was < 0.5 sec?  A slower response time glowed green?

If you pulled that off and convinced him things were good at green, he’s dumb as well as odd.

My mistake in retelling, under .5 second was green, otherwise red.

[Humble Beast 258]

1 hour ago, Brian Fantana said:

At least try to engage honestly. It's going to be interesting to see what happens, whatever feelings you or anyone else has about Elon personally. The math is out there for anyone to see:

Twitter gets the vast majority of its revenue through advertisers, a significant chunk of top advertisers have fled the platform. Elon has also personally saddled an already unprofitable company with a billion and a half a year in interest alone via the loans he took to finance the deal. He has eliminated key engineering and support personnel for a platform that relies on a lot of on-premises bare metal (in addition to outsourced cloud servicing) to drive the service. The decision making, thus far, doesn't seem to be very conducive to bringing large advertisers BACK to the platform. Twitter Blue was a harebrained idea to begin with, as trying to sell something to your company's product makes no sense whatsoever. He would need something along the lines of 200 million (give or take) concurrent paying subscribers in perpetuity in order to pay off the interest alone. The Wall Street banks that financed the deal have rumored to have received many offers to buy the debt at 60 cents on the dollar. He's effectively being margin called, and for someone with his personal wealth, that's basically unheard of.

It all seems like a time bomb if you sit there and think about it for more than a minute and a half. Elon Musk aside entirely, it's very interesting and there doesn't seem to be a clear path forward for Twitter to survive in the long term. That doesn't mean it can't happen, but the decisions that have been made so far have not been good for the most part.

I agree that it will be very interesting to see how it plays out.
 

I pointed out the expense reduction because literally no one here has despite waxing on and on about profitability. In the end I think there’s a good chance these advertisers come back. If the traffic and eyeballs are on the app, then you’re hurting your business by not being involved if you thought it was a worthwhile spend in the past. If that happens, you have costs down where you’re profitable. As a bonus, the remaining workforce is committed and harder working by default than all the divas that have left. The path is there. Whether it happens remains to be seen. 

 

[atomheartbevo 89750]

Was it delivered to him today?

 

[tx 3 putt 77212]

 

[atomheartbevo 89750]

2 hours ago, Brian Fantana said:

Twitter gets the vast majority of its revenue through advertisers, a significant chunk of top advertisers have fled the platform. Elon has also personally saddled an already unprofitable company with a billion and a half a year in interest alone via the loans he took to finance the deal.

Don’t forget - he’s now farming out moderation to internet polls, and took a vote last week for an amnesty that is going to allow many/most of the shitty accounts to come back, as long as they didn’t spam too much, didn’t incite violence, and didn’t break the law.

Which means, as far as the advertisers who drop the big bucks are concerned, a bunch of extremely undesirable accounts are coming back.

it’s a big “FUCK YOU” to the advertisers that Musk needs to pay the bills and his debt.

There is a reason why Alex Jones could only get gold coins, prepper supplies, and male supplements as his advertisers,

[Homercles 10206]

I don’t even know why I bother engaging with Beast, probably as an outlet to how shitastic OSU’s football season has become.  
 

However, the fact that you refer to people who declined to sign a contract committing them to long, intense, ‘hardcore’ hours as ‘divas’ tells me more than enough about you.  Anyone with options and self respect should absolutely have bailed out of there the moment they were presented with that form.  
 

Beyond hero worship of the rich, this secondary fascination with people who refuse to give their sanity to support large companies as being diva/lazy/worthless/selfish/etc is hopefully, slowly coming to an end via the youth of this country.  This isn’t the 60’s where you have a pension waiting for you if you stay loyal.  It’s been proven over and over again that they have eschewed any commitment to individuals in the name of quarterly profit.  
 

And yes that sounds all South Park ‘the corporations, man’ hippy-ness but any remaining doubt has been killed by PPI loan handling and taking advantage of the complex drivers of inflation to continue raising prices.  Massive stock repurchasing.  All of it.  
 

Fucking Jimmy John’s wants me to add a tip on a pickup order because they won’t pay their people enough. 
 

Airlines stupidly furlough’d tons of pilots as a short term cost saver during Covid, are now short handed on captains, and are making us pay higher fares as demand outstrips supply.
 

Disney was an absolute shitshow last year with record crowds and broken rides/light bulbs/full trash cans but are still raising prices to cover for their greedy failures in the streaming world.  
 

Fuck em all.  I’d be out of Twitter the moment that contract shit hit my mailbox.  You’re laying off half the company under the guise of cost savings / leaning, and now I have to work endlessly to pick up the slack.  Fuck.  That.  

[atomheartbevo 89750]

The fanboys will ignore how many of those 54 launches were made with US/NASA/DOD funding, using US/NASA facilities.

 

[956 Worldwide 34736]

Both of Musk’s flagship companies are part of the military-industrial complex and/or profit thanks to U.S. government subsidies and programs. That’s why it’s so odd that his biggest fanboys right wing/libertarian/anarcho-capitalist weirdos. 
 

(MIC and subsides aren’t a criticism for me, it is awesome and cool that the United States is the world’s leading military power and I think the government should help drive and steer innovation).

[Aqua Buddha 14599]

38 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

The fanboys will ignore how many of those 54 launches were made with US/NASA/DOD funding, using US/NASA facilities.

 

So, he's putting stuff into orbit, which something NASA has been doing since the 60's?

[G650 14270]

18 minutes ago, Aqua Buddha said:

So, he's putting stuff into orbit, which something NASA has been doing since the 60's?

Yeah I brought up to an Elmo fluffer NASA managed to get all the way to the moon 50 years ago with slide rules, SpaceX with billions of government subsidies have only gotten to the reusable space craft stage. Feelings were hurt.

 

They dude literally hasn't advanced anything.

[Humble Beast 258]

1 hour ago, Homercles said:

I don’t even know why I bother engaging with Beast, probably as an outlet to how shitastic OSU’s football season has become.  
 

However, the fact that you refer to people who declined to sign a contract committing them to long, intense, ‘hardcore’ hours as ‘divas’ tells me more than enough about you.  Anyone with options and self respect should absolutely have bailed out of there the moment they were presented with that form.  
 

Beyond hero worship of the rich, this secondary fascination with people who refuse to give their sanity to support large companies as being diva/lazy/worthless/selfish/etc is hopefully, slowly coming to an end via the youth of this country.  This isn’t the 60’s where you have a pension waiting for you if you stay loyal.  It’s been proven over and over again that they have eschewed any commitment to individuals in the name of quarterly profit.  
 

And yes that sounds all South Park ‘the corporations, man’ hippy-ness but any remaining doubt has been killed by PPI loan handling and taking advantage of the complex drivers of inflation to continue raising prices.  Massive stock repurchasing.  All of it.  
 

Fucking Jimmy John’s wants me to add a tip on a pickup order because they won’t pay their people enough. 
 

Airlines stupidly furlough’d tons of pilots as a short term cost saver during Covid, are now short handed on captains, and are making us pay higher fares as demand outstrips supply.
 

Disney was an absolute shitshow last year with record crowds and broken rides/light bulbs/full trash cans but are still raising prices to cover for their greedy failures in the streaming world.  
 

Fuck em all.  I’d be out of Twitter the moment that contract shit hit my mailbox.  You’re laying off half the company under the guise of cost savings / leaning, and now I have to work endlessly to pick up the slack.  Fuck.  That.  

Have we seen the actual hours he was demanding from employees anywhere?

 

Re diva comment:  what was the median Big Tech job like the last decade? Especially the last two years. Work remotely. How many hours a week? We’ve all seen the tik toks. When confronted with having to do more, “working extremely hardcore”, they were given 3 months severance and proceed to leak about what a raw deal they got. Oh and that Twitter would fail any minute. I suspect that a lot of the people online are worried that if Twitter survives with half the headcount or less, that their jobs are not safe. Easy money has kept a lot of people afloat for a long time. That appears to be coming to an end.
 

43 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Both of Musk’s flagship companies are part of the military-industrial complex and/or profit thanks to U.S. government subsidies and programs. That’s why it’s so odd that his biggest fanboys right wing/libertarian/anarcho-capitalist weirdos. 
 

(MIC and subsides aren’t a criticism for me, it is awesome and cool that the United States is the world’s leading military power and I think the government should help drive and steer innovation).

Elon has totally lived off the government teat. He’s done it well enough that I’d imagine he and his companies are viewed as important assets by the DoD and the government. 

[Goredho 17413]

2 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Was it delivered to him today?

 

My name is Elon, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

[RDCanecutter 26455]

5 hours ago, Goredho said:

My first tech job in Austin was for a startup led by a man who has become very visible in the Austin start up/VC community.  On my 2nd day of work, he called me into his office.  At the time, the company was small enough that he the CEO was part of the panel that interviewed me.  He said he was greatly impressed with my creativity in a technical medium, and as such he had a very important first mission for me at the company.

He then proceeded to pull a crystal ball out of his desk.  Like a wizard’s scrying ball.  He flipped a switch on the base and it began to glow.  He then fiddled at his keyboard a little and started to explain.

“This is a wizards orb.  It’s got network connectivity, and an api that lets you control it.  It’s connected to my laptop now, and I can control it with this software.”

He clicked a bit on the computer and the orb started glowing a pleasant green.  He clicked some more and it started glowing an agitated red.

”Wow, cool.”  I said, feigning interest.

”It is, isn’t it?!  I want you to program something to interface this with our systems. So that when all is well, it glows green and when things are degraded, it glows red.  That way I’ll always know the state of our system.”

I digested a moment before asking some questions.

”We already have a big monitor in the dev area that shows colored graphs of the health of various systems in real time.  What does this give us that that doesn’t?”

”Nothing.  But it’s fucking COOL!  Plus that’s out there, I want this in here.  On my desk.  How long do you think it’s going to take to whip something up?”

”Uh, I dunno.  It’s my 2nd day, I haven’t looked at any documentation, I don’t know what systems to tie it into.  Give me the rest of the day and I can get you an estimate.”

He frowned.  “This shouldn’t be hard for someone of your caliber.  Get me a working prototype by the end of the week.”

“Ok.”

In the end, I tied it to our public website response time metrics so that anything over a half second glowed red and anything else glowed green.  He was ecstatic.  I mentioned it’s limitations and how it could be expanded on to give better indicators of health across various systems, but he cut me off, “This is so fucking COOL!”

He showed it off at the next all hands proudly, using it as a prop to discuss the innovation we were driving at this company.  Of course, this had nothing to do with our core business and did nothing to get us closer to profitability, a successful exit, or assist in subsequent fundraising.

I never heard about the wizards orb again, though it stayed on his desk and if website perf went down, he’d come out of his office to see what was up.  There was no follow up effort to make it more useful or indicative of what was going on with our systems.

CEOs and tech founders are an odd bunch.

Got to admit, it was cool.

[Genco 3041]

5 hours ago, Goredho said:

My mistake in retelling, under .5 second was green, otherwise red.

[Aqua Buddha 14599]

On 11/25/2022 at 5:24 PM, Francisco 2.0 said:

Good luck with that.

 

 

Maybe we can have blue bubbles for iPhones, green for Androids, and black for Tesla phones to let us know who the incels are.

Edited November 26, 2022 by Aqua Buddha

[Mrs Whiggins 13050]

7 hours ago, Goredho said:

My first tech job in Austin was for a startup led by a man who has become very visible in the Austin start up/VC community.  On my 2nd day of work, he called me into his office.  At the time, the company was small enough that he the CEO was part of the panel that interviewed me.  He said he was greatly impressed with my creativity in a technical medium, and as such he had a very important first mission for me at the company.

He then proceeded to pull a crystal ball out of his desk.  Like a wizard’s scrying ball.  He flipped a switch on the base and it began to glow.  He then fiddled at his keyboard a little and started to explain.

“This is a wizards orb.  It’s got network connectivity, and an api that lets you control it.  It’s connected to my laptop now, and I can control it with this software.”

He clicked a bit on the computer and the orb started glowing a pleasant green.  He clicked some more and it started glowing an agitated red.

”Wow, cool.”  I said, feigning interest.

”It is, isn’t it?!  I want you to program something to interface this with our systems. So that when all is well, it glows green and when things are degraded, it glows red.  That way I’ll always know the state of our system.”

I digested a moment before asking some questions.

”We already have a big monitor in the dev area that shows colored graphs of the health of various systems in real time.  What does this give us that that doesn’t?”

”Nothing.  But it’s fucking COOL!  Plus that’s out there, I want this in here.  On my desk.  How long do you think it’s going to take to whip something up?”

”Uh, I dunno.  It’s my 2nd day, I haven’t looked at any documentation, I don’t know what systems to tie it into.  Give me the rest of the day and I can get you an estimate.”

He frowned.  “This shouldn’t be hard for someone of your caliber.  Get me a working prototype by the end of the week.”

“Ok.”

In the end, I tied it to our public website response time metrics so that anything over a half second glowed red and anything else glowed green.  He was ecstatic.  I mentioned it’s limitations and how it could be expanded on to give better indicators of health across various systems, but he cut me off, “This is so fucking COOL!”

He showed it off at the next all hands proudly, using it as a prop to discuss the innovation we were driving at this company.  Of course, this had nothing to do with our core business and did nothing to get us closer to profitability, a successful exit, or assist in subsequent fundraising.

I never heard about the wizards orb again, though it stayed on his desk and if website perf went down, he’d come out of his office to see what was up.  There was no follow up effort to make it more useful or indicative of what was going on with our systems.

CEOs and tech founders are an odd bunch.

What I think was cool was that you got to spend part of your workweek making an adult pacifier that changed colors.

[F250 28794]

1 hour ago, Humble Beast said:

Re diva comment:  what was the median Big Tech job like the last decade? Especially the last two years. Work remotely. How many hours a week? We’ve all seen the tik toks. When confronted with having to do more, “working extremely hardcore”, they were given 3 months severance and proceed to leak about what a raw deal they got. Oh and that Twitter would fail any minute. I suspect that a lot of the people online are worried that if Twitter survives with half the headcount or less, that their jobs are not safe. Easy money has kept a lot of people afloat for a long time. That appears to be coming to an end.

You're a fucking government worker. Fuck off, you don’t know fuck about fuck.

[Humble Beast 258]

18 minutes ago, F250 said:

You're a fucking government worker. Fuck off, you don’t know fuck about fuck.

Lulz. Like everyone in healthcare I benefit from the government to some extent, but no I’m not a government worker. 

[Bama Chick 28596]

My name is Elon, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

[atomheartbevo 89750]

3 hours ago, G650 said:

The dude literally hasn't advanced anything.

Last week on Twitter, he publicly lied about the death of his firstborn child to score points with anonymous tech bros.

It’s got to put him in the running for the annual Liar of the Year award from the Burlington Liar’s Club.

[GenXer 2894]

2 hours ago, RDCanecutter said:

Got to admit, it was cool.

Ok. Fess up.