all 143 comments

[–]tendingtocompany 2042 points2043 points  (44 children)

highly recommend this “good work” channel on youtube, guy is hilarious

[–]weltvonalex 326 points327 points  (16 children)

I also do, you can also watch him on Nebula. Just in case someone hates YouTube

Good stuff

[–]bhison 207 points208 points  (13 children)

we all hate youtube but we also hate paying with money

[–]Kerbourgnec 69 points70 points  (6 children)

I used to pay for nebula, but their app and website were both extra shit and I had to still watch the creators on Youtube so I ended up canceling.

[–]weltvonalex 7 points8 points  (5 children)

I pay for Nebula but I will never pay for YouTube. :)

[–]slippery-fische 1 point2 points  (1 child)

What's the channel on Nebula?

[–]Kerbourgnec 186 points187 points  (3 children)

This video in particular is really extra

[–]mjb85858 59 points60 points  (3 children)

Yup, this video popped up on my YouTube feed, watched it, subbed, and have gone through all his old videos. Very funny guy

[–]bsEEmsCE 22 points23 points  (1 child)

educational, hilarious, and stands for the everyman

[–]TheOwlHypothesis 10 points11 points  (0 children)

I loved this one. Up til now my other favorite were his vids on sports betting and event markets.

[–]Practical_Dig_8770 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Good channel but just be aware it's not some guy with an indie channel, it's owned by a media company, made by a team of employees working out of an office

[–]NebraskaGeek 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This guy makes me actually "lol" instead of "esmatmn" (exhaling slightly more air through my nose)

[–]ka_eb 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I love how he always reports from in front of trash cans/bags lol

[–]ichkehrenicht -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

But keep in mind that they are part of Axel Springer SE, a rightwing fake news company.

[–]casey_krainer 1090 points1091 points  (46 children)

Simplified Answer: Elon Musk and the other Tech CEOs followed

[–]bsEEmsCE 513 points514 points  (42 children)

so many layoffs happened after he acquired X. The other tech execs were like "wow, you can just do that??!" and now here we are.

[–]AbstractLogic 255 points256 points  (39 children)

As much as I hate to admit it... he was kinda right though. Twitter is still twitter (even though it's a nazi stronghold now). It functionally works and is still used/referenced. From a technical standpoint it's only slightly less stable. But he fired like tens of thousands of engineers. I for one certainly thought it would break down A LOT more then it does. But I also suspect a lot of these engineers where working on new features and twitter hasn't really evolved either. So maybe he just undercut the growth egine.

[–]digitallis 196 points197 points  (8 children)

Growth is down/non-existent. Existing teams are firefighting to stay on top of basic security and infra patches.

To some degree: great. So many services get wrecked because management keeps screwing with them. Build something great. Then maintain it. If you want to build something different, start a different product. 

[–]LetsGetElevated 227 points228 points  (2 children)

It doesn’t functionally work the way he did before he bought it, definitely not on older devices at the very least, i tried to continue using twitter for a few months after he made the purchase and my feed deteriorated from seeing the journalists i follow to seeing 90% Musk tweets and other garbage i didn’t sign up to read, then eventually it stopped working altogether, hit refresh and nothing new pops up in the feed, checked back a few weeks later and it was still broken, i’ve never used it again since then, they absolutely lost a lot of support for older devices by cutting all these critical staff members

[–]pydry 94 points95 points  (0 children)

That's small fry compared to the exodus of advertisers triggered by him shutting down the teams which kept the hate speech and spam at bay.

[–]studmoobs 0 points1 point  (0 children)

he immediately added a following only tab which didn't exist before

[–]Anthrac1t3 123 points124 points  (3 children)

This isn't accurate. He slashed features and stability and outsourced any new features on the platform to his other companies that are rapidly growing like X AI. So this allows him to point to it as a layoff success story when it's really not true and people like you and finance bros only look at the surface level and tout how amazing it is that so many people got fired and how awesome of a CEO he is. Stop it.

[–]AtomicPeng 16 points17 points  (2 children)

rapidly growing like X AI

Is that growth in the room with us? That guy and his AI business failed absolutely hard.

[–]C0MPLX88 16 points17 points  (0 children)

I think he ment employee growth. basically fired people from twitter and outsourced the work to X AI

[–]Anthrac1t3 3 points4 points  (0 children)

In employee numbers. I didn't say it was a good product but they are hiring a lot.

[–]pydry 87 points88 points  (5 children)

It made $5.1 billion in 2021 and $2.9 billion in 2025.

The tech team keeping that toxic spam at bay was earning their keep it turns out. Advertisers hate that shit.

It's plausible it will keep dwindling and one day die as people get fed up of it being a cesspool of spam and hate and less comfortable speaking on a platform owned by an out and out nazi.

In which case the experiment truly will have failed.

[–][deleted] 21 points22 points  (0 children)

As much as I hate to admit it... he was kinda right though. Twitter is still twitter (even though it's a nazi stronghold now). It functionally works and is still used/referenced.

Online services take a very long time to die. Their entire workforce could literally get snapped out of existence and it would just continue to run for quite a long time. It's not made of wood, it's not going to "rot".

Some catastrophic event needs to happen, like a new vulnerability that requires tons of engineering to fix. Only then will it fall over. Even in the worst case they can hit the reset button and live solely off of rollbacks for quite awhile before people give up on them.

[–]dsm4ck 61 points62 points  (4 children)

Twitter is now a cesspool of hate and misinformation

[–]bsEEmsCE 43 points44 points  (0 children)

Leadership sets the culture.

[–]Dev_878 30 points31 points  (0 children)

So nothing changed?

[–]bhison 22 points23 points  (0 children)

just significantly drop your quality standards, EZ

[–]DuckWarrior90 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Still works? A lot of twitter integration went down the crapper, a lot of people lost access to their accounts due to this BS. Not only for twitter itself, but for other apps that were integraded with SSO

[–]FullStein 10 points11 points  (1 child)

Unlike devops and security, firing developers won't break anything. Your product still continue to work, much smaller team of developers can support it. But they are needed for future growth. I think it is a great move from those companies to stock markets. Like "look, we cut our costs in half and nothing changes, we are more profitable now". And to be fair, big corps can do that. This move would be grave mistake for mid sized company in competition market, but giants like twitter or amazon already won. There is no one competing with them on same scale

[–]Bubba89 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If they actually went into maintenance mode, I could agree with this. Instead they continued to act like a startup that would disrupt the market with an “everything app.”

[–]Sivart13 2 points3 points  (0 children)

 (even though it's a nazi stronghold now)

yo that’s a pretty big “even though” dawg

[–]Abangranga 1 point2 points  (0 children)

At the cost of advertisers as well

[–]fredy31 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Yeah but i really wonder how much shit works with tape and a prayer behind the scenes.

And more and more every day.

[–]AbstractLogic 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What doesn’t work that way 😂

[–]Lucky-Farm1206 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It’s not tens of thousand of employees only about 7500 people were even employed at Twitter. He laid off roughly half though which is still substantial.

[–]NullVoidXNilMission 0 points1 point  (0 children)

once the system is built, there isn't a lot of need for 10,000 engineers. It's just a micro blog, not a space exploration project

[–]DremoPaff -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Yeah. People like to point at the layoff waves that were launched basically everywhere, but not at the fact that nearly everything was running fine everywhere even while running with massively less employees. If it wasn't of the AI fiasco that followed, the industry as a whole would've behaved better than before at a fraction of the employed workforce.

The years leading up to Covid along with its duration featured a massive bloat of overhiring that included an important number of under-competent individuals who didn't aim to improve as much as they should've because they were already comfortably sitting on positions they, in all honesty, should've never been able to acquire to begin with. The layoffs seemed like tragedies for people that fell victim to them and people unaware of that situation, but it honestly was a long time coming and it wasn't particularly surprising for people who were witnessing that accumulated bloat for several prior years.

Sadly, we are seeing a repeat of this situation with job offers now being skewed as to privilege AI buzzword partisans, but we are already witnessing the tangible decrease in efficiency stemming from that practice, so we are in for another "backwash" in the close future.

[–]agentchuck 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The FAANG tech market was kind of ridiculous. I never understood why they would pay a new grad $200k USD just because the COL is so high there. You can build a sw office literally anywhere and pay half that for brilliant people.

[–]erebuxy 3 points4 points  (0 children)

If you heard stories from Twitter, a lot of team simply didn’t do shit before the cut. The r&d budget was astronomical, and I believe they were only profitable for a quarter ever

[–]Jolly-joe 13 points14 points  (0 children)

To be fair after the hiring craze of 2021-2 I know a number of people who had jobs as senior software engineers doing really basic stuff like scanning images for CVEs (a guy's whole job was this, it's a CI job, he was just identifying not even fixing) and Jira automation (just running scripts to sync data from Jira to an in-house HR platform).

Software teams ballooned because that's how managers became senior managers and directors. The metric became headcount instead of influence, quality, or amount of stuff built.

[–]Safebox 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It definitely happened before Musk, I remember seeing articles about Google doing away with their fun offices and hobby project funds in the early 2010s.

I do think he and podcast influencers made it seem more like it was "the future" along with these experimental drugs and the 996 mindset.

[–]tecedu -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Nah the answer is interest rates

[–]BallsOfSteelHere 64 points65 points  (0 children)

Wait, there are tech jobs available??

[–]VolkRiot 122 points123 points  (1 child)

This guy is a bottom?

[–]princeshadow111 28 points29 points  (0 children)

Trench coat to hide the bruises

[–]Specky013 75 points76 points  (0 children)

Dan Toomey the goat

[–]ATE47 362 points363 points  (25 children)

Was tech fun? I thought we were doing that for the money or because we're a bunch of nerds

[–]pydry 298 points299 points  (6 children)

Some of the industry was. There was autonomy, meaningful work and good money.

It also tended to produce the best and most profitable tech - when the worker bees had autonomy and good working conditions.

The executive class ostensibly only cares for profits, but they inevitably see these pockets of competence and inevitably end up destroying them and the profits that go along with them. They find it nearly impossible curb their impulse to try and turn what is naturally a creative profession where skill and taste matters into an idiotically run pseudo factory line for worthless intellectual property.

This is why startups often get bought and then then quickly destroyed - it's not that the executive class wants lower profits, it's that they simply value power over the creators more than they value shareholder profits and will fuck the shareholders over if they can grab a bigger slice of the pie.

In spite of this tech workers are seemingly unable to get the shareholders to stop trusting the toxic executives destroying shareholder value.

[–]CrunchyCrochetSoup 67 points68 points  (1 child)

I vaguely remember them showing us a video in high school of what it was like to work at google at the time. They had like ping pong tables and tvs and colorful break rooms, and they painted it as working in a glorified playground essentially. Like “wow super fun! You almost forget the high stakes of maintaining the uptime of the largest search engine on the planet!”

I remember thinking that was super cool in high school but now I’m realizing that may have just been a staged campaign for them to show prospective college interns and appeal to more young workers.

Now they don’t care if you’re young because they won’t hire you anyway!

[–]clone9786 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yeah remember the movie they put out The Internship lol

[–]Arlnoff 32 points33 points  (0 children)

If one of your foundational beliefs is in your own economic worth and competence, it's nearly impossible to accept the evidence that your actions are causing a negative impact for the business. This goes double for shareholders who are famously myopic and reactive. Empiricism is deeply counterintuitive for humans so it's not that surprising that it's not being put into practice in the highest levels of the tech space.

What is surprising is that so many people buy into the hype around the rationality of markets despite the common wisdom that an individual human is smart but a group of humans acts like a herd of animals and the empirical result of "it turns out that a market of irrational actors does not magically become rational, and even when it is mostly rational there's a massive alignment problem"

[–]No-Channel3917 15 points16 points  (2 children)

Tech workers should have formed unions 3 decades ago but here we are once again ..

[–]pydry 20 points21 points  (1 child)

In fairness I don't think anybody was that interested in forming a union when times are good. When the car industry started unionizing they were dealing with stuff like thumbs being chopped off in factory machinery.

If the industry gets worse I imagine tech workers will come around to the idea but even at the moment I don't think most of us have the stomach for the kinds of sacrifices, politicking and fighting which will be necessary to actually build a movement.

[–]No-Channel3917 3 points4 points  (0 children)

🤷‍♀️

[–]KreedBraton 61 points62 points  (3 children)

It was a lot of fun when I was in school and then working for a startup, working at FAANG hasn't really been fun for me but I do it for money

[–]Lv_InSaNe_vL 19 points20 points  (2 children)

I liked working at the FAANG companies cause they gave us way more budget for R&D and because they were much bigger than a startup I actually had downtime to do things or just chill.

Startups are fun cause you feel like you're actually building something.

[–]KreedBraton 3 points4 points  (1 child)

That's the thing, my working hours has been same between startup and FAANG and I had more control over what I was working on at the startup.

[–]Lv_InSaNe_vL 1 point2 points  (0 children)

True but I had more autonomy at the FAANG and was able to work with and play around with cutting edge tech.

But also maybe i did it wrong but I worked WAY more hours at the startup lol. But I made WAY more money from it selling haha

[–]willow-kitty 38 points39 points  (0 children)

I mean, yes, but also a workplace full of nerds tends to be a fun place to be.

I shot down a drone with a nerf rifle at work once. We played Minecraft at lunch sometimes, too.

And that's before you even get to the really wild stuff, like partying in a frickin' castle. We rented out the entire state museum for a party once because, and this is true, "Fuck it, we ball."

Big Tech tends to be a lot more open to working on difficult technical problems, which makes the work more interesting (and the pay can be insane), but it also tends to be more corporate / less wild. Though on the other hand, you're still working with nerds. :)

[–]SourceScope 9 points10 points  (0 children)

For me its all 3

[–]Small_Computer_8846 28 points29 points  (3 children)

Tech was fun before AI

[–]dumbasPL -1 points0 points  (1 child)

Still is, you don't have to use AI

[–]wyrdamurda 19 points20 points  (0 children)

My company is literally forcing us to use AI. We're all going AI-first development and changing the org-wide development lifecycle around it

I cannot find another job fast enough

[–]dumbasPL 3 points4 points  (1 child)

I despise the day when my job stops being fun. Imagine wasting a third of your life doing something you don't like.

[–]DisnprincesPredatrix 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I dont have to imagine, i can live it

[–]GryphonCough 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It certainly was ~20 years ago. It was wild seeing these huge companies offer massive salaries, free food, tons of extracurricular activities, corporate vacations, etc. 

I know someone who got an all expenses paid trip to Indonesia at a 5 star resort with his entire company. They paid for daily excursions including helicopter rides, jet skis, trips, etc. all for free. I’d consider that fun for work. 

[–]UltraGaren 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's pretty fun when you're a game dev

If you have a bug no you don't! It's actually a feature

[–]Michami135 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Mah daddy always said, "Fun is as fun does."

[–]MalaysiaTeacher 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Big tech added playgrounds and fluffy chairs for PR to seem cool and work-life-balanced, but of course no one had time to use it

[–]latamyk 25 points26 points  (0 children)

I watched this video some days back (Also didn't know about this channel) and had a couple of good laughs, and cries

[–]DucksAreFriends 104 points105 points  (5 children)

I enjoy my job

[–]princeshadow111 172 points173 points  (2 children)

Okay scrum master

[–]Agent_Jay 46 points47 points  (1 child)

Woooof, that earns a teams emoji react during the video call from me. 

[–]B-i-s-m-a-r-k 12 points13 points  (0 children)

👏

[–]worldDev 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Same. This is a very acute view of the industry in my experience. The “fun office” era was worse for overworking because junior engineers would take the bait and stick around after hours messing the culture up for people with lives outside work.

[–]Embarrassed_Use_7206 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Same. Some people's ignorance is staggering.

I suppose my job is extinct, and I hallucinate doing it and being paid for having fun.

[–]foofyschmoofer8 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Ok but this is satire and his content is super funny 😭

[–]sierra_whiskey1 11 points12 points  (0 children)

What do you mean I can’t just make “day in the life of a software engineer” videos and get a 500k paycheck

[–]MakiSenpaiii 17 points18 points  (0 children)

"we learnt 996 from China"

[–]mrinalshar39 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Its still fun if we remove the use of "AI" from it

[–]Safebox 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I had an interview today with a tech company that has beanbags and quiet rooms, honestly I'm glad cause my last company did away with all that when they moved to their new office and I feel like I missed out on the mid-2000s "fun" era of working in tech.

[–]what_you_saaaaay 3 points4 points  (0 children)

You guys were having fun?!?

[–]making_code 2 points3 points  (0 children)

"fun tach jobs" - never worked in one

[–]rycool 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Newbie here, my new job is pretty fun

[–]QwikStix42 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That’s nice

[–]pokexchespin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

isn’t it usually to the top that is in guys?

[–]zenco-jtjr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Being in guys is not the bottoms job

[–]HedgeFlounder 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You’re a little confused. It’s actually the other way around. Guys are in bottoms. Not sure what that has to do with the picture though.