Friday, Nov 4, 2022 • 39min
Life Under Musk: Two Twitter Employees Speak Out
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“We cross our fingers and hope to make it through another day.” Twitter hasn’t spoken publicly since Elon Musk bought the company a week ago. But inside, employees describe a mood of fear, chaos, stress and bizarre requests to print out code.
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Talking about
Speakers
(4)
Casey Newton
Kevin Roose
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
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Transcript
Verified
Break
Casey Newton
00:18
So Kevin, I've noticed something about a lot of the people running
Twitter
right now.Share
Kevin Roose
00:23
What would that be?
Share
Casey Newton
00:24
Okay? So you know, David sacks
Jason Calacanis
, Sriram Krishnan
have all been sort of volunteered into this war room to help Elon
run the company.Share
Kevin Roose
00:34
Right? They are members of the
Elon Musk
Twitter
brain trustShare
Casey Newton
00:37
And if you've heard their names before, maybe it's because they're venture capitalists, they're sort of known in that field, but there's also something else: they're podcasters.
Share
Kevin Roose
00:46
Podcasters, baby!
Share
Casey Newton
00:47
And that means that for the first time in history we have a social network that's effectively being run by podcasters.
Share
Kevin Roose
00:54
This is our moment, this is our opening! I think if the deal is if we spend three weeks at the top of the tech podcast charts, we officially run
Twitter
, is that how this works?Share
Casey Newton
01:05
Every reporter's dream to run
Twitter
!Share
Kevin Roose
01:18
I'm
Kevin Roose
, tech columnist for The New York Times
.Share
Casey Newton
01:20
And I'm Casey Newton from platformer and you're listening to Hard Fork.
Share
Kevin Roose
01:42
So usually on this podcast, we're going to try to bring people news from around the tech industry, give a more comprehensive sense of what's happening in Silicon Valley. But right now, the only story that anyone in tech cares about is what's happening just down the street from us in
San Francisco
at Twitter
.Share
Casey Newton
01:60
We're going to talk to to
Twitter
employees or at least two people who were Twitter
employees as of Wednesday morning - not sure what their status is going to be by the time you hear this - about what's happening inside of Twitter
and we're going to let you hear them or here to be precise an AI
generated version of them.Share
02:21
So what we're gonna do is talk to them like have a normal interview but instead of playing you their voice - which would de anonymized them and risk getting them in trouble or getting them fired - we're going to transcribe what they say and then we're going to feed those words back into a text to speech
AI
generator and play you an AI
generated version of their voice.Share
02:45
And we should say up front like these voices, they're not going to sound 100% exactly human, it's going to be a little weird and frankly robotic. But just remember as you listen that these words were spoken by actual human
Twitter
employees, and that this is really the only way to get them on the record and get a real picture of what's happening inside Twitter
right now.Share
Kevin Roose
03:14
I like that when we started the show we said we would never put on
AI
voices unless we had like a really good reason and a really limited capacity and now twice in five episodes, we've been like it now here are the AI
voices.Share
Casey Newton
03:26
Well you were wrong about Elon buying
Twitter
and you were wrong about this not being a podcast filled with robot podcasters. So two strikes for Casey.Share
Kevin Roose
03:35
But before we get to those interviews, let's just go over what's been happening at
Twitter
this week, because it has been one crazy thing after another. Casey, on Friday after our emergency podcast, you reported that Twitter
engineers inside the company had been instructed to print out the last 30 to 60 days worth of code that they had written for review.Share
Casey Newton
04:01
Yeah. And this is one of the, you know, sometimes as a reporter you get a tip that sounds so silly that you think, "well this couldn't possibly be true!" So when I got this tip that
Elon
and his people were telling people print out your last 30 to 60 days of code. I thought well that can't be true. And in fact two of my sources are like Casey, that doesn't sound right to me.Share
04:18
Okay, but then I start texting around, start getting on the phone with some folks. And then the two people that told me that I was wrong came back to me, they said, "Oh my God, he's actually asking people to print out their code!" So you know, why is this funny? Why is this interesting.
Share
04:32
This is a weird way to evaluate how good someone is as a software engineer, people are generally not evaluated by how much code they've written. If you show up with a printout of 100 pages of code that's not necessarily a good thing, you might have done better for the company by eliminating some code, right? And it's sort of streamlining it. So...
Share
Kevin Roose
04:49
Also who prints code? Like it's not like I was surprised that the coding programs actually have a print button in them because that's like not what you're bringing to your like daily review of your code!
Share
Casey Newton
05:01
Right. Also like they just had this situation where they're like former chief security officer was complaining that they had really lax security practices and like file this whistleblower complaint. And now the fact that like all the
Twitter
engineers are just printing out the code base and leaving it around, Twitter
headquarters.Share
Kevin Roose
05:15
Incredible.
Share
Casey Newton
05:15
It's like two hours later they get all the
Twitter
folks get this new notification, it's like, "Change of plans. Elon
and his folks, they still want to see a code, but why don't you just bring it in on your laptop and if you have printed out any code, we're going to need you to shred it".Share
05:30
So all the
Twitter
engineers have to like run to the paper shredder on the 10th floor I believe and just start shredding the code base.Share
Kevin Roose
05:37
I mean this sounds honestly, it's a little... it's giving
Dunder Mifflin
. It's like, like there's just this boss in charge who like doesn't really seem to know what he's doing and everyone's just kind of humoring him. But it's not the kind of thing that usually happens at a big tech company.Share
Casey Newton
05:57
It's not. Now one thing that we should say is that the
Elon
folks are obsessed with figuring out who is a good engineer at the company, right? So Elon
very much like worships at the altar of the engineer. He considers himself an engineer.Share
06:11
And so I've talked to folks who like are getting calls late at night from random
Tesla
engineers, saying things like, you know, "who's really good on your team?" You know, "Who are the top performers, who are the low performers?"Share
06:22
And so this code print out exercise as ridiculous as it seems was all part of this sort of evaluation system, where they've been trying to figure out who this company do we need to keep in order to keep the service running.
Share
Kevin Roose
06:33
And who can we lay off. That's sort of the unspoken piece of this.
Share
06:36
Okay, so we have this code printing fiasco. Then on Sunday you reported that
Twitter
was considering tying verifications to Twitter
Blue subscriptions, and explain what that means.Share
Casey Newton
06:48
So
Twitter
Blue is a subscription service that gives you access to a handful of other features. You can see the top articles of the day. You have this new test feature that lets you edit tweets.Share
06:60
We don't know how many people subscribe to
Twitter
Blue, the company has never released a metric, what we know is that 89% of this company's revenues comes from digital advertising, and the bulk of the rest comes from sort of selling access to their A. P. I.Share
07:15
So
Twitter
Blue, however many people subscribe to it, has never been a major source of revenue.Share
07:20
But the Elon folks who were under this huge pressure to start making money in a hurry had been looking for new revenue ideas and one revenue idea that came up basically right away was to make people pay for
Twitter
Blue in order to keep their verification badges.Share
07:33
Twitter
Blue costs five bucks a month. A few hours after I wrote that story, Alex heath at the verge reported that they were considering charging up to $20 a month to keep the verification badge and I think it's fair to say that that made the entire Twitter
timeline just melt down.Share
Kevin Roose
07:46
Yeah, people including
Stephen King
, the horror author, he tweeted, "$20 a month to keep my blue check? F**k that they should pay me if that gets instituted I'm gone like Enron".Share
Casey Newton
07:58
Wait, let me just say,
Stephen King
has written about some of the most terrifying horrors imaginable and nothing scared him more than the idea of paying $20 a month for a verification badge. Move over it!Share
Kevin Roose
08:09
So let's take a moment and talk about this idea of paying for very on
Twitter
because I think it's an interesting idea, it seems to be kind of their big first idea for how to change Twitter's
business. So right now the way that people get verified on Twitter
is sort of mysterious.Share
08:27
I got verified like a decade ago because someone at the news company that I worked at put my name on a list and all of a sudden I had a check mark by my name. And I think that's how a lot of journalists get verified. But there's also a process you can ask to be verified if you're a celebrity or something. And the reason the verification exists, we should say like it's not about a status marker, it's not about like this person is important.
Share
08:50
It was literally created because people like
Oprah
were joining Twitter
many, many years ago and there were already a ton of impostors on Twitter
saying that they were people like Oprah
, and so Twitter
needed away to basically allow users to tell whether the person they were talking to was actually the person they purported to be.Share
Casey Newton
09:09
Yeah and I think it's fair to say like this is a necessary feature of the platform. Every platform that is you know social in some way has a feature like this
Facebook,
Instagram,
Snap
Tiktok,
right?Share
09:19
You need a way to say like this is the real
Oprah
and that is not the real Oprah.
You know Twitter
verification started because Tony Larussa
, the baseball manager, sued the company because he was being impersonated and he was basically like, you know this is harmful to my reputation that you have these fake Tony Larussa
is running around.Share
09:33
So it's only natural that such a thing would exist. And now the question is really gonna charge people for that, that privilege of just you know, not being impersonated?
Share
Kevin Roose
09:44
Right. And I think it's fair to say that over the years, like people have come to see these check marks next to your
Twitter
name as sort of a status symbol, right? Like it means that you're someone, it means that you know, it's-Share
Casey Newton
09:54
It means that you're worth impersonating.
Share
Kevin Roose
09:56
Right? Exactly.
Share
09:56
And so I think the idea initially coming out of the
Elon
war room was that people who were verified cared so much about being verified and staying verified that they would pay for the privilege. And so that that's where we get this idea of $20 a month for verification.Share
10:11
Now that almost immediately results in, as you said, an entire
Twitter
timeline meltdown where users are saying, "No way will we pay $20 a month, That's more than I pay for Netflix
, That's more than I pay for YouTube
. Like just to keep my little check Mark. Like that seems insane!"Share
10:27
Subsequently,
Elon
responds to Stephen King
on Twitter
and says, "We need to pay the bills somehow Twitter
cannot rely entirely on advertisers, how about $8?" So Stephen King
has become the pricing consultant for Twitter
verification.Share
Casey Newton
10:44
I just love the idea that like
Elon
is haggling with Stephen King
over the price, like it's like tomatoes at a farmer's market, you know?Share
Kevin Roose
10:49
Well here's my theory about it, real quick. It's that I think that inside
Elon
world and inside frankly a lot of right wing sort of circles, there's this idea of the blue checks, right people on, you know Fox News
and other conservative media outlets are always talking about this sort of like blue check mob of people on Twitter
, mostly journalists and other media figures who are sort of like you know self-important and care very deeply about their check marks.Share
11:16
And so for them this seems like a way to make money while at the same time kind of punishing the blue check marks, which is just very, very different from how other social media platforms treat their creators.
Share
Casey Newton
11:29
Yeah. I mean look, I have to say I have long been in favor of letting anyone who wants to verify themselves right part of this plan, it's not just making people pay to keep their badge, it's also that if you pay, you could get a badge, and I think it would be good for
Twitter
and most social network, if anybody wanted to optionally verify their identity, like that would be good for the credibility of the ecosystem overall. But it does come with a lot of questions that so far have mostly gone unanswered.Share
Kevin Roose
11:57
And it also just seems to me like, you know, I'm trying to keep an open mind, this could work, I have often thought that people who are power users of
Twitter
should be paying something for some of the features that are being talked about here. You know, it does create a lot of economic value for people like you and me, it does matter to us, you know, news organizations pay for all kinds of software solutions that help them do various things.Share
12:23
Maybe
Twitter
Blue should be part of that. But it also seems strange because it's just not that big money making idea. So I was doing some back-of-the-envelope math on this. So right now there are about 400,000 people who are verified on Twitter
, that's sort of the latest number that we have, If all of those people pay $8 a month to keep their check marks, that's $38 million a year roughly.Share
12:44
Twitter's second-quarter revenue was $1.18 billion. So this is a drop in the bucket, even if everyone who is currently verified on
Twitter
pays $8 a month, which I don't think they will, and then say you get even, you know that many more new people who are paying to get verified for the first time - so you have 800,000 people paying for verification - that's still only about $80 million a year, which is frankly not that much for to company like Twitter
.Share
Casey Newton
13:18
Right. Apparently,
Elon
did say something, like they're gonna have maybe some sort of separate like legacy verification program for, you know, I don't know... government entities that aren't going to pay the $8 a month.Share
13:31
So you know, there's still a lot of details to be worked out here, but you know, if it's, we're taking a long time talking about this again, worth saying that because
Twitter
is where so many folks go to get their news and information, it matters that we know who is who on that service.Share
13:44
And so it's like if they're starting to charge for it, if they're introducing this new confusion into it, then the risk is that, you know, within a month or so there's just gonna be way more misinformation, confusion, hoaxes and scams on
Twitter
because nobody knows who's who.Share
Kevin Roose
13:59
Right. So that's not all that happened at
Twitter
this week. We've also had a number of other executives departing chief customer officer Sarah Personette resigned. A number of other senior Twitter
executives have also announced that they are leaving.Share
14:13
One other idea that's been floated from the
Elon
brain trust is bringing back Vine
. Casey, how do you feel about that?Share
Casey Newton
14:20
Well look, I love
Vine
like people are very nostalgic about Vine
for a reason, it kind of ushered in the era of short form video that we're living in now and you know, I think many folks listening to the show can probably recite several vines from memory.Share
14:36
For me it's back at it again at the Krispy Kreme, one of the great moments of culture for the past 10 years. You know, at the same time, the culture has also moved on. The code base for
Vine
is 10 years old and the idea that it is now, you know, going to be revived and turned into a Tiktok
competitor: that's a really steep hill.Share
14:54
I would also say like not an immediate revenue driver, right? That's something they're just gonna have to put a ton of effort into your essentially launching a new social network within
Twitter
. So that's a huge heavy lift, I think it could be fun to have a very like popular American short form video network that wasn't owned by Facebook
or YouTube
, but we'll just have to see if they can do it.Share
Kevin Roose
15:14
Yeah. So that's the other big idea coming out of
Elon's
brain trust. And underneath all of these changes and announcements and changes to the announcements, there's just been this atmosphere of total chaos and confusion inside Twitter,
as engineers and other Twitter
employees are getting extraordinary demands to make changes much more quickly than they otherwise would have.Share
Casey Newton
15:35
That's right. They're being told, "you have days to ship this, if this does not ship by this date, you know, in some cases a date next week, you will be fired, if it is one hour past deadline, you will be fired". So people are sleeping very little. They're sleeping in their offices and frankly some of them are terrified. Some of them are here on work visas. If they lose this job, they have 60 days to find another job or they're out of the country. So it's, it could not be more serious for the folks who have these jobs.
Share
Kevin Roose
16:03
A very, very stressful time and frankly an unprecedented time. I've never heard about anything like this happening at a major tech company. And so we have coming up interviews with two current
Twitter
employees who are there witnessing this all from the inside and we'll talk to them right after the break.Share
Break
Casey Newton
17:39
Great, and then just the plan is to transcribe your voice and then feed it back into some kind of - we have an
AI
text to speechShare
Twitter Employee - Mockingjay
17:48
Awesome. Thank you. I'm probably getting fired today, but don't need to expedite that or get sued.
Share
Casey Newton
17:54
Right.
Share
Kevin Roose
17:55
And I just want to remind folks real quick, you are hearing a computer generated voice but behind that voice is a real person.
Share
Casey Newton
18:04
Okay, so what should we call you?
Share
Twitter Employee - Mockingjay
18:07
I had suggested Mockingjay, like from the Hunger Games.
Share
Casey Newton
18:10
Welcome to Hard Fork Mockingjay. So it is about 10 a. m. pacific on Wednesday. Right now, how's your day going so far? Anything notable happened today?
Share
Twitter Employee - Mockingjay
18:22
Every day seems to be the same cycle for the last week, which is everybody wakes up to more panicked messages via various different channels.
Share
18:29
I think most people have been smart enough to move off of slack and into other channels. And it is this up and down of trying to chase rumors because we have had zero communications from anybody internally.
Share
18:39
In fact, there has been more external communication to
twitter.com
than there has been to Twitter
the employees.Share
18:45
So everything is just based on rumor. So we wake up, we look at all of our various channels, we look at what our friends are messaging us, and we cross our fingers and hope to make it through another day.
Share
Casey Newton
18:55
So what's that been like for you? What's your emotional state?
Share
Twitter Employee - Mockingjay
18:60
Stressful. I feel like between trying to maintain this job that I have currently while clearly looking for a way out while having zero support and acknowledgement from the people above me is very stressful. Already there have been multiple rumor mill based scares.
Share
19:14
First of course was that layoffs are supposed to happen Monday. They didn't happen. Now the rumor has it it's going to be Friday. It's exhausting. I know we are all paid really well.
Share
19:25
Most of us have some savings to sit on. Some people don't, but it is also just nerve-racking not to know, especially as we're entering a really tough hiring market in tech and also we're entering the holidays.
Share
Casey Newton
19:36
So just to really underline that you have a new CEO of your company, most of the C-suite has either been fired or resigned and you have not received one email that says, "Here's who's in charge and here's the game plan for the next few days".
Share
Twitter Employee - Mockingjay
19:49
That is 100% accurate. We have received zero information other than what gets trickled down to us. Comms is incredibly sparse. There is really nobody answering even messages in the company wide channels.
Share
Casey Newton
20:00
And so what is that like when day to day you wake up and it's almost like a scavenger hunt across seven different apps, just to figure out what you're supposed to be doing?
Share
Twitter Employee - Mockingjay
20:13
It's complete chaos. Some people are panicking, some people are helping each other, some people are throwing other people around them under the bus. You have probably heard. And you have been reporting on some of the infamous code reviews. I have seen examples of people saying that code was written entirely by them and not crediting people who collaborated with them, all in hope that they will be on some preferred status list.
Share
Casey Newton
20:34
So people are sort of overstating their contributions in hopes of keeping their jobs.
Share
Twitter Employee - Mockingjay
20:38
Absolutely: what they are asking for is volume not quality. So everybody is sharing every little bit of code they have ever written no matter how insignificant or garbage it is.
Share
Casey Newton
20:48
Yeah, I reported on a message from a manager who said basically, "if you don't know what you're working on right now. Work on something, work on anything. Just code a project. What have you always wanted to code. Show it to
Elon
, See what he thinks at worst. You'll get some feedback".Share
Twitter Employee - Mockingjay
21:04
There was also a discussion about identifying "Cool code".
Share
21:07
What I genuinely do not know what that means and I don't know who is the arbiter of Cool in the situation.
Share
Casey Newton
21:12
What?
Share
Kevin Roose
21:12
Tell us more.
Share
Casey Newton
21:13
What is "Cool code"?
Share
Twitter Employee - Mockingjay
21:15
That's all I know, I don't know anything else. I think people are just grasping at straws to retain some semblance of order.
Share
Casey Newton
21:22
I want to read you a post that someone had sent me from
Blind
. Blind
is this app where you sort of log in with your work email and then you can have these pseudonymous chats about what's happening at your company. And multiple people have sent me this post and I wonder if you've seen it.Share
21:39
I'm not going to read the whole thing but the headline is "I can't cope". And it reads:
Share
21:43
"I'm on the 24-7 team working to make all of
Elon's
ridiculous dreams come true. Management have repeatedly threatened to fire us if we missed delivery. Even if it's totally outside our control. If we don't work at weekends we're gone. If we take PT or leave were gone. People are working ridiculous hours. I'm working around 20 hours per day at absolutely full velocity. I'm waking up in the night to attend status calls, even when I'm not working, I can't stop worrying about it. I can't cope. I'm an absolute mess. I'm at a breaking point. This is after just a few days of Elon
" "how closely does that track with what you are hearing and seeing from your colleagues?Share
Twitter Employee - Mockingjay
22:17
So there are two camps at
Twitter
right now, the people who are being completely ignored until they get fired and the people who are being pulled into these task forces, I think the better places to be in, the people who are being ignored and will be fired.Share
22:29
My heart goes out to this person. I hope they are able to find gainful employment and in that four hours while they are trying to sleep and take care of themselves applying to jobs.
Share
22:39
And I sincerely hope that there is care taken for people who are on visas, all of the people I know who are here on visas have no idea what will happen to them and they have not been told anything. So this is more than just privileged tech people crying, because we're moving from 6 figure salary to another six-figure salary. These are people who are trying to immigrate to this country and have gainful employment and do a good job, who are highly skilled.
Share
Casey Newton
23:00
And what do you make of the characterization that has come from
Elon
and people around him that Twitter
is this kind of bloated, overstaffed, slow-moving company where everything takes way too long to ship, where there's kind of a culture of, you know, sitting on your hands and not really doing much, and where you know with some quick decisive action, you could really trim some fat and reestablish the company and make it profitable?Share
Twitter Employee - Mockingjay
23:32
So there is a lot that I do not necessarily disagree with. I think
Twitter
at the end of the day is structured very poorly. This goes back to a lack of operational leadership which has been existent in the company for many years. This company does not have good operations and it shows.Share
23:48
So I do not think though it is because engineers and people are sitting on their hands. I think it is because the way this company is structured. It is nearly impossible to get anything done, whether it is trying to get the appropriate approvals by and going through Byzantine process is literally not being told how things are changing from day to day. So there is some truth to that statement, this is the absolute wrong way to deal with it.
Share
Casey Newton
24:10
You know, on, on one level, working at
Twitter
is just a job but I know from so many of the employees who I've spoken to who work there, there is a real sense of inspiration around the mission of a company that does want to democratized communication, give more people a voice, and I wonder as you've been going through all this, if you have been thinking about the degree to which that could be at risk, and what fears you might have around the future of Twitter
, the service?Share
Twitter Employee - Mockingjay
24:43
Any company,
Twitter
included, is a function of its people, and the people who have always been drawn to Twitter
are kind of strange in the best way possible. It's not something you really know until you work at the company and those people are all the ones who are going to leave, those are not the people who are going to stay, so all of that is goneShare
Kevin Roose
25:02
And what do you think will happen to
Twitter
the product in the next few months? Like where do you see this heading?Share
Twitter Employee - Mockingjay
25:10
I would love to think that everybody on
Twitter
is going to leave in protest, but the reality of the situation is a lot of people may stay, but it's going to be interesting to see who stays. Twitter
had already leaned more towards different communities from what made Twitter
, some very small percentage of people on Twitter
generate all the tweets, right? So even pre-Elon, we're already starting from a place where it's actually a very fragile community, a very, very few people creating all of the content that everybody else sits and consume now that community is being shifted and changed.Share
25:41
Heavy tweeters have been leaving the platform and it's not just people leaving the platform. The content that is popular on the platform is changing towards more niche communities, so there is part of this, that was an unfortunate direction that
Twitter
, pre-Elon was already headed in anyway. So we'll see, it'll be interesting to see who stays and who goes, but I think the heart of Twitter
will be gone.Share
Casey Newton
26:02
So just to put a fine point out you're planning to be fired in the next couple of days, correct?
Share
Twitter Employee - Mockingjay
26:07
That is my expectation. Yes and that is most of
Twitter's
expectation.Share
Kevin Roose
26:12
And have you thought about how you'll feel if and when that happens?
Share
Twitter Employee - Mockingjay
26:16
Scared and relieved. It will be scary to not have income but at the same time I hope that all of us who get fired will just get to chill out for a day or so and then wake up on you know a couple of days later and say, "All right, got to get that resume out there, got to be energized about these other jobs", because right now it's sucking the life out of us.
Share
Casey Newton
26:35
Yeah, well I'm really grateful for your time and willingness to chat with us about this. And I'm sorry you're going through this,
Share
Twitter Employee - Mockingjay
26:44
Thank you.
Share
Casey Newton
26:50
When we come back a
Twitter
engineer on how long it would normally take to make the changes Elon Musk
wants to see.Share
Break
Casey Newton
27:33
All right, what should we call you?
Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
27:36
Let's use Fulcrum.
Share
Casey Newton
27:38
Fulcrum, alright. Fulcrum: welcome to Hard Fork. Can you say how long you've worked at Twitter?
Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
27:44
Quite a few years.
Share
Casey Newton
27:46
And can you share anything about what kind of work you do Twitter?
Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
27:49
I'm an engineer, software developer.
Share
Casey Newton
27:52
What has the past week been like for you?
Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
27:56
Intense and uninformed?
Share
Casey Newton
27:58
Let's maybe start with intensity. What has felt intense about these past few days?
Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
28:04
Uncertainty. There are people who aren't even certain if they should continue doing the work they're doing and that pile of unknowns along with the things that have been reported on, which is all the information we really have, It leads to this cognitive dissonance and just general constant stress.
Share
Casey Newton
28:18
What was the culture of this company like before
Elon Musk
showed up? Like what has it generally been like to work at Twitter
?Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
28:24
Twitter
has gone through phases in its lifetime. But at least leading up to this whole fiasco, I can't think of a better place to work. People were respectful people were honest and people had legitimate goals.Share
28:36
I mean even in the lowest parts of engineering people would raise privacy concerns or potential misuse of new features, and like their only job is to write random code that no one's ever going to see, just like the piping behind the scenes and the company just always kind of had a culture of letting people speak to these things. And more often than not, it caught us on issues before it ever made it to the public eye.
Share
Casey Newton
28:55
And how did news that
Elon Musk
was going to buy the companies start to change the way it felt inside?Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
29:01
That's complicated because no one really knew. I mean, I guess there was sort of groupthink that existed that was this guy was not a nice person. You know, there were a lot of people that were of the thought that they should probably have been banned a long time ago for his behavior, and everything just sort of came from there.
Share
Kevin Roose
29:16
And this idea that
Elon Musk
and his inner circle seem to have that Twitter
is full of coddled, unproductive people who are, you know, left-wing political activists who just want to censor people on the right. What do you make of that impression that he and his friends seem to have of who works at Twitter
and why?Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
29:41
I mean, he's certainly been more aggressively attaching himself to various political viewpoints and their talking points and if it serves him, he'll lean into it. I will say having been there for a number of years, the company has grown in a lot of ways and some not so good. Like I don't disagree with people when they say there's probably too many managers, too many engineers. Maybe delivery is a little too slow.
Share
30:01
Management has never been the company's strong point. So that aside, you don't go through any change like this without some massive structural change. If he just came in and did the same thing, like... what's the point?
Share
Kevin Roose
30:12
Yeah.
Share
Casey Newton
30:12
Okay. So there's an idea there that
Twitter
should be moving faster than it has been. We've been hearing that Elon is saying ship this thing by next Monday, or else you're going to be fired. As an engineer when you hear that you have a three or four-day deadline. What does that, what does that do to you?Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
30:38
I lose my mind. I mean having a 3-4 day deadline on something because priorities shifted, we need to have this done by Friday. That's normal. That's a little stressful. Might put in a couple extra hours. Need to get it done. Makes sense. But I think the major differentiator here is just the sheer scale.
Share
30:54
I wouldn't get asked at work to completely revamp
Twitter
Blue by Friday. That's just completely absurd. And the sheer number of systems that need to be touched on. The number of engineers that have to be dragged in. That's like raising the titanic from the bottom of the oceanShare
Casey Newton
31:06
Because it's not as if there's like just like a certain set of code that needs to be written, you also have to coordinate across presumably dozens of engineers, product managers and lots of other folks, right?
Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
31:17
Yeah. Well, I mean if you look at some of the feature sets that have been reported on that he wants to add in like ranking blue check users higher than others where that ranking occurs in the stack. Like they have to completely reshift how that entire process works. There are whole services in the company that we have to go figure out.
Share
Kevin Roose
31:33
Right, and for people who aren't and don't know like how long would these changes normally take at
Twitter
to implement?Share
Casey Newton
31:42
Yeah. Like if if somebody come to you and said we want to redo
Twitter
Blue, what would be like the time frame that you would be given that would make you say like Yeah, that seems like a reasonable amount of time to do that?Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
31:51
It depends if the change requires a ton of infrastructure changes. It could take quite a while because the
Twitter
platform is generally pretty slow. We were more concerned with reliability than we are moving fast.Share
32:02
But feature wise, I guess if I had to give a roundabout time frame there would probably be something that could possibly be deployed within a quarter, 2 quarters.
Share
Casey Newton
32:10
So 3-6 months, and what the deadline this team has been given is Monday.
Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
32:15
Yeah, because you also have to keep in mind like these changes are pretty structural to the service and not only is this an engineering problem, it's a social problem. Like we need to do testing, we need to figure out how this can be abused. What are people going to do with it? You know, what are the Bitcoin bros is going to do to try to steal more of people's money abusing this feature?
Share
Casey Newton
32:33
Right, and that's what goes on with all major releases at a big social network, is trying to figure out we change this feature, what are the 10 other things that happen? And you are essentially saying it sounds like that these deadlines are so short that this stuff may be released without any of that testing or scrutiny that sort of trying to figure out what could go wrong, they're just gonna be set loose.
Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
32:56
Yeah, I mean I've read the design docs that exists as of right now in the spaces for that information and that work are empty,
Share
Casey Newton
33:03
Wow, they're just like blank spots and the like how could this be abused section?
Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
33:07
Yeah, there's one section about like user privacy and like privacy data and it's basically, "We're not doing anything with user data so we don't worry about that". And then now it's just a blue check on a profile.
Share
Kevin Roose
33:18
Wow! So you said that there's been very little communication from managers and executives at
Twitter
in the past week, what has been communicated, what's happening?Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
33:31
So there's a couple of things and it depends on sort of where you were in the leadership stack as far as like
Musk
and his people. Generally the one like overarching message that did get communicated was find something cool that you like and hopefully Musk
likes it functionally.Share
Casey Newton
33:43
So it's like, it's become this kind of hackathon show-and-tell project?
Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
33:47
Yeah. One of my coworkers put it as hack-week, but with a gun to your head.
Share
Casey Newton
33:53
That's dark.
Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
33:54
Think about it. If you present him an idea and he thinks it's cool, he wants it done like within a week, and you basically just sacrificed every team around.
Share
Kevin Roose
34:02
Wow. I'm curious what you make of the various product changes that have been floated or proposed by
Elon Musk
and his inner circle, such as the Charging $8 a month for Twitter
verification, bringing back Vine
. What do you make of those proposals and do you think they're good ideas?Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
34:27
That's kind of the hard part. It kind of hurts my soul every time I agree with
Musk.
Like there are certain things he's done that kind of made sense. I mean one of the first decisions he made was to redirect the logged-out view to the explore page and I don't know this for certain, but my basic understanding of the goal here was that we might even be able to serve ads to people that aren't logged in.Share
Casey Newton
34:45
And so we'll just real quick. So what that means is before
Musk
, when you were not logged into Twitter
, you just basically seeing box asking you to log in.Share
34:52
Now if you go to
Twitter
and you're not logged in, they'll show you a bunch of tweets which might entice you to sign in to create an account and if you linger and browse through some tweets, maybe you see some ads, right? So that was a relatively quick change that he made that. I think a lot of people would agree make some sense.Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
35:09
Yeah, at the very least it was worth trying.
Share
Casey Newton
35:12
And what about some of his other ideas?
Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
35:14
The
Vine
one, it's not the worst idea. I mean the cynical part of me says too little too late. You know, Tiktok
is Tiktok
and that's a mighty hill to climb. But sure, I mean we do have all the original content from Vine
. So marketing wise the nostalgia factor is huge, which gives us kind of a foothold to at least launch something.Share
35:33
I really find it completely patently absurd to try to bring back
Vine
proper, like that code base is so ancient. Good luck! But we at least have the media and you know, trying to build a product like that, we've been working on that for a while. I think every tech company has at least tried, you know, is this something we can do? There's been mock-ups.Share
Casey Newton
35:51
So even before
Musk
, you all were talking about bringing back some sort of short form video, something under the Vine
brand.Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
35:57
Yeah. I mean video has been on the radar and sort of talked about for years.
Share
Kevin Roose
36:02
When they inevitably make, you know, the movie about what's happening at
Twitter
now.Share
Casey Newton
36:08
Who do you want to play you?
Share
Kevin Roose
36:09
Who you want to play you? But also like what are some of the big scenes from the last week?
Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
36:15
It probably be the most boring. Like you could probably make a really interesting ethereal horror movie out of, just like constantly walking around with nothing. You know, one of those films that has no audio, no no dialogue.
Share
Casey Newton
36:26
You mean because everyone's working from home, or because it's quiet, or... what do you mean?
Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
36:31
There's no communications. So the only people talking or like people in a corner but it's not like, oh the whole company went to an all hands and learned what's happening. It's everybody asking, "Are we ever going to see him? Should I keep doing my work? Do they even serve lunch anymore?"
Share
Casey Newton
36:46
So as as we're recording this, we don't know what might happen to your job. As you think about it. Do you want to be working at
Twitter
in three months or do you feel like you're ready to be somewhere else?Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
36:60
I won't be staying at
Twitter
in the long term.Share
Casey Newton
37:02
Why not?
Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
37:03
Culture is real. I mean culture seeps through the product, you know, for all of
Twitter's
faults, a lot of the way the company behaved was because people cared so much, and that can be infuriating in its own ways. I mean people have seen this so now we're moving into the phase equivalent to move fast and break things with no care for the people who are using it. Which just sort of defeats the point.Share
Casey Newton
37:23
I mean, what are what are your friends and family sort of like texting you? What kinds of what kind of messages are you getting?
Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
37:32
My dad basically messages me every morning and says, "Has it happened yet?"
Share
Casey Newton
37:36
Meaning have you been fired?
Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
37:38
Yeah because he's reading the news about like the work hours and stuff and he's been wildly speculating about what kind of labor law lawsuits are going to come out about the hours and so on.
Share
37:47
But more with regards to me, he's like, "Has it happened yet?" And that's really it. You know, no one knows anything and I know as much as my family because we're all reading the same updates.
Share
Casey Newton
37:57
Yeah. Okay.
Share
37:59
Alright, Fulcrum, yhank you for coming on Hard Fork and-
Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
38:03
No problem.
Share
Casey Newton
38:03
You know, keep us posted.
Share
Kevin Roose
38:05
Yeah. Yeah. Good luck out there.
Share
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum
38:06
Thanks so much.
Share
Casey Newton
38:10
All right. We'll be right back.
Share
Break
Casey Newton
39:01
Before we go, we should say we did reach out to
Twitter
and ask them to respond to what you just heard from employees about what's been going on inside the company. They didn't write back. The company has also said nothing publicly since the deal closed.Share
39:17
So the closest we can get to understanding their point of view is probably from
Musk's
Twitter
feed, where he's been tweeting things like, "Twitter's
current lords and peasants system for who has or doesn't have a blue checkmark is bullshit".Share
39:32
And, "To all complainers please continue complaining but it will cost $8". He also recently changed his bio to
Twitter,
"Complaint hotline operator and his location to hell."Share
Kevin Roose
39:47
Casey, thank you for entering the
Twitter
bunker with me yet again and thank you for all the hard work and reporting you've been doing.Share
Casey Newton
39:56
It's been my pleasure and looking forward to what the next week brings.
Share
Kevin Roose
40:02
And if people want to send you any huge scoops about what's happening at
Twitter
, you can send those right over to Casey, His email address is kevin. roose@nytimes. com.Share
Casey Newton
40:12
You know, you can't people still can't tell their voices apart. I hear this every week.
Share
Kevin Roose
40:16
But seriously, if you want to email both of us about something, the show's email is hardfork @nytimes.com.
Share
Casey Newton
40:24
But If it's a scoop, you're going to want to send that as a DM two @caseynewton on Twitter.
Share
Kevin Roose
40:28
Do not do that. Send it to send it directly to me, kevin. roose@nytimes. com. I've heard that this Casey Newton fellow is an impersonator scammer.
Share
Casey Newton
40:38
Oh no! Hey, I pay my $8 a month, Roose!
Share
Kevin Roose
40:41
And he's probably gonna steal your Cryptocurrency.
Share
Casey Newton
40:42
How dare you!
Share
Kevin Roose
40:43
Alright, let's see the credits.
Share
41:12
See you next time.
Share
Casey Newton
41:13
While you're sticking with the
AI-generated
prompt on the episode.Share
Kevin Roose
41:16
You know what? Could an
AI
do this?Share
Casey Newton
41:19
Kevin, just flip me off.
Share
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Casey Newton
Kevin Roose
Twitter Employee - Mockingjay
Twitter Employee - Fulcrum