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by fullsend 1317 days ago
The extreme and somehow flowery language in all these posts from Twitter engineers is so indicative to me of some kind of delusional rot. “My team worked SO hard every single day to Change The World, the smartest people on the planet Earth, the greatest engineers ever to touch a keyboard, no one has our scale, no one has our problems.” So caught up in their own bullshit that they are like fat, happy hens who don’t see the fox in their midst named Elon. It reminds me of Billy Bob Thornton in Fargo Season One. “The maps used to say ‘there be dragons here’. They don’t anymore, but the dragons are still there.” These people live in a bubble where they reinforce each other.
4 comments

Given this is just a series of positive testimonials of the skills of a manager's direct reports, all recently fired and looking for new work, your take comes off as extremely uncharitable.
If these people were so incredible and intelligent and hard working and were changing the world for the better. If they truly were the paragons they are made out to be, then why were they the ones fired?

Let's be honest, Twitter has underperformed for a long time. It has been openly known as the rest and vest place. This type of flowery nonsense would be difficult to believe about the better half of their engineers, much less the bottom half that was let go

dude do you expect the guy to say "my entire team were utter dipshits; never hire them"
You have so much vitriol toward and schadenfreude over the pain of a person who... helped vision and motion impaired people use Twitter? Yikes.
It’s a sense I get from the collection of posts not just this one in particular. Perhaps harsh and hyperbolic. What happened feels like a clash of two worlds - the soft sounding environment of Twitter and the sometimes brutal or cruel environment that Musk clearly encourages (though he would argue it’s just efficient and necessary I’m sure).

I saw one thread where people who were one day posting #lovewhereyouwork got fired the next day after working over the weekend for a project Musk announced by email on a Saturday. It’s like they couldn’t imagine that a flippant billionaire was working them and slaughtering them like sheep. So used to a corporation that coddled them, that they walked into it smiling. I don’t use terms like bullshit hatefully…I think it is bullshit. Smart and well intentioned people, but sort of delusional nonetheless. Talking about missing time with family because, “I get to solve problems at scale no one else does.” Companies are not families, what you are doing is not always important. I think calling each other “Tweeps” is an example of this. You forgot that when the easy money party stops they will treat you like what you are to them, a line item.

The disconnect between what was actually written and what you think was being said is astonishing.
This is ridiculous. This is clearly a manager trying his best to soften the blow to his team after they were just fired by talking up their work and impact.
I think OP's point was that clearly there is a disconnect between what people at Twitter are/were saying/thinking, and reality. Unfortunately, when your words or ideas come into conflict with reality, it is rarely reality that is wrong

For example, if someone were cut from a sports team and the coach went and talked about how good that person was, and how hard they worked. Well it raises the obvious question, if they were so good and did work so hard, why did they get cut? And why does everyone get so upset when people ask the obvious question?

The whole team was cut. It's pretty obvious Elon just decided accessibility is a waste of time.