The Meltdown of Twitter

If you’ve been trying to keep up with all the Drama at Twitter since Elon took over, I bet you’ve found it as confusing as me. It’s been such a wild ride that it’s difficult to distinguish the reality from parody sites like The Onion, and I frequently find myself guessing wrong as to which it is.

Gergely Orosz over at the Pragmatic Engineer has a great synopsis timeline with plenty of reference material to keep up with it all. You can read the full breakdown here:

The Scoop: Twitter's ongoing cruel treatment of software engineers

👋 Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. We cover one out of five topics in today's subscriber-only The Scoop issue. If you're not yet a subscriber, you also missed this week's deep-dive on The story of Linear.

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-twitters-ongoing-cruel

The cliff notes version of the saga so far:

Week 1: 50% Layoff

Week 2: Oops, can you come back? And now, everyone codes.

Week 3: The “Twitter 2.0” Ultimatum

In the week since the Twitter 2.0 Deadline ( Nov 17th)

End of Remote Work
Except I closed all the offices
Except come back Friday night at 2pm for a Code Review
Announcing that we’re “Done with Layoffs”
Layoff the european offices
Start “Accepting Resignations” From the Twitter2.0 fiasco
Weekly Code Reviews with Elon
And summary terminations due to “poor code quality” on Wed Nov 23rd, the day before Thanksgiving.

I’ve seen lots of articles talking about how Elon is mimicing great leaders of history, turning around slow and bloated companies. Honestly, I don’t see it. This reads like Dilbert comics come to life.

The Meltdown of Twitter - a Timeline