[StudentStuff]

All a CEO does is set and push forward a certain culture and a handful of goals, but that is a full time job. Square isn't anything revolutionary or particularly special, the only trick they have is picking up customers who don't understand merchant processing and are willing to pay an extra 1% or so to avoid ever thinking about it.

Edit: I'm not referring to what a CEO is accountable for, just what they actually have control over. A CEO is not god, despite what some may believe!

[danpalmer]

> picking up customers who don't understand merchant processing and are willing to pay an extra 1% or so to avoid ever thinking about it

I don't think that's particularly fair to Square, for three reasons:

- For much smaller merchants, it can be cheaper overall than traditional payment processing, as you don't have to buy expensive hardware.

- Not having to "think about it" is probably underrated, the cost structure of traditional payment processing is very complex and can make it more difficult to know how you need to mark up your products to maintain a target margin, whereas with Square you're guaranteed a flat rate which will make a lot of other decisions easier.

- They provide a lot of other services for small businesses, like point-of-sale (I think the software is free for that? Big saving for small merchants) and payroll software (again a time/cost saving).

I think it's entirely reasonable that a thinking person might decide to pay 1% for these things, rather than because they don't know any better.

[chk_ur_autism]

Actually, a CEO is accountable for everything. Absolutely everything. The buck stops at the CEO, and anyone who thinks otherwise is misguided. Therefore, the issues at Twitter are Jack's fault, full stop.

[faceyspacey]

I agree. I also think Twitter's in a rough place for one reason: 140 characters doesn't make sense anymore. But dropping it would be even scarier for them, as that's been their defining thing for so long.

When did 140 chars make sense? In the beginning of the social internet 10 years ago. For people new to sharing, it relieved pressure around saying something. For psychological reasons the false restriction made sharing on the internet frictionless. When the expectation is intentionally low, you don't have to worry if you're sharing enough or too little. And perhaps more subconsciously, such a low limit just kind of speaks to you, saying: "just say anything, and spit out."

But now, people are very accustomed to sharing. They don't need these training wheels.

It seems to me, regular people don't use twitter. Only various professional niches. That's just a problem, and will result in Twitter leaking users from their staple niches gradually over time, and probably has been going on for a long time now.

So in short, Jack's job and the decision he has to make is a very hard one. They've been too scared to make the hardest of decisions, and very naturally as a result have only rolled out these minor attempts. It seems like a very logical sequence of events to me.

They gotta do something bold, or die.

I'm not saying removing the limit is the answer on its own. I think it's more of a symbol of a willingness and capability to get back in the game. Do that along with something totally fresh front-and-center within the feed, and they would have a good recipe for success. Make a big moment out of dropping the restriction, and see what happens. Hell, try it for 30 days, and see what happens as a grand experiment.

[QML]

The 140 characters make sense — if you do textual analysis, the average sentence turns out to be around that number of characters.

The issue is that Twitter is seen as a medium of expression, but I don’t think it’s suppose to be a platform where people go in-depth with their thoughts; more for momentarily formed opinions, ideas, or announcements.

For publishment, people should be using something like Medium.

[speedplane]

Every new medium of communication effects the substance of that communication. I doubt they can change the 140 character limit without changing the substance of conversation, but that may be the point.

[StudentStuff]

Definitely, a CEO is accountable for everything, but a CEO's influence is quite limited overall, their biggest power is to shut down whole divisions of a company, but actually changing said division? That is a much more difficult task that a CEO cannot achieve on their own, no matter the effort put into said task.

[jdmichal]

The biggest power of a CEO is culture. Look at Uber and all the negativity their culture is getting, fed by the specific instances where that culture allowed terrible things to happen.

And yes, a CEO does not change the culture on their own. That's impossible by definition -- the culture is the sum result of all the actors within the company. But a CEO is expected to lead the culture of the entire company, typically by stating values and setting goals and incentives that actually match those values. If they cannot do this, then they are unable to do their primary internal-facing job. This is one of the reasons that Steve Jobs was so well regarded. For whatever flaws he had, there was no mistaking the culture he was leading, and the results matched.

A great example, from a development perspective, is unit tests. Everyone loves to talk about how much we need unit tests. How great unit tests are. How they will make our software better. This is stating values, but you also have to back that up, and that's where things fall apart. The moment any kind of crunch happens, unit tests are the first things thrown out the window. Despite the fact that when you're working quickly, you probably need those tests even more. And all this is because, even though everyone states the value of tests, it's not actually part of the culture. The goals and incentives aren't there; there's no penalty to not following the line.

[speedplane]

Also, developing big projects practically require tests. I haven't seen a large project without them. Not sure where you work, but if they are the first thing that is thrown out, there is something definitely wrong not just with the culture, but with the engineering.

[jdmichal]

Completely agree with you. Part of the big fight is getting people to understand that tests are an asset and not a liability to working quickly and safely. There's a huge visability problem, in that management doesn't have insight into all the times when a bug wasn't committed because of a unit test. Functional and integration testing doesn't have this problem as much, because those typically have much better visability.

[speedplane]

> The biggest power of a CEO is culture.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this, but it seems a bit simplistic. CEO's are also in the position to be thought leaders, public advocates, build hype, and internally, guide the company to specific results. Workplace culture is extremely important, but not everything.

Also, I'm not sure that enforcing unit tests is exactly a "cultural" issue. How many unit tests you write is a decision that weighs current development speed against future development speed and reliability. That is of course influenced by culture, but not exactly culture itself.

[jdmichal]

> I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this, but it seems a bit simplistic. CEO's are also in the position to be thought leaders, public advocates, build hype, and internally, guide the company to specific results.

At least the first three of those are different ways of setting culture. The last one is so loosely defined that it could mean anything.

The sum of all actions of all actors within a company is its culture. If people act in an obsessive way about UX, then you have a culture of obsessive UX.

The CEO has the power to shift these cultures. There are many tools, as you point out, but the biggest one is setting appropriate goals, with the proper aligning (dis)incentive structure. These are set on his subordinates, who then filter it down and specify it for their subordinates, and so on down the entire chain.

> Also, I'm not sure that enforcing unit tests is exactly a "cultural" issue. How many unit tests you write is a decision that weighs current development speed against future development speed and reliability. That is of course influenced by culture, but not exactly culture itself.

If you supposedly have a culture that values writing unit tests, then that should be reflected in action. The idea of tossing unit tests should be met with disdain, the same way we value not murdering people and murder is meet with disdain. It's not about tradeoffs, it's about stated cultural values (talk) versus the actual culture (walk). If there's nothing holding you to the stated cultural values, that's a management failure.

[speedplane]

Normally, I would consider culture to be work ethic and how employees treat each other beyond the purely transactional business sense. You're defining it to be something much broader, that's fine, but I think that broader undertanding is better captured by the word "leadership".

And as far as my last factor ("internally, guide the company to specific results"), I mean that CEOs make a lot of day-to-day tactical decisions. E.g., how many engineer/sales/marketing people do we add to that team, do we need a bigger office, do we sue someone or not, do we take VC money on the offered terms or hold out for something better.

These tactical decisions are less visible, but probably make up a good deal of a CEOs day.