Musk's takeover of Twitter will revolutionize the software industry
I think Musk is starting a new business trend (that used to be normal) by making people actually work.
I absolutely love what Musk is doing. The days of using businesses to provide cover to useless do-nothing Marxist academics is coming to an end. The gravy train is over.
Imagine sitting at your desk for most of the day working. If you’re a fellow normal person, this doesn’t sound strange. To a company like pre-Musk Twitter, however, it’s a foreign concept.
Don’t believe me? Here’s a day in the life of a Twitter employee:
I’ll go on a limb and say this wasn’t a nose-to-the-grindstone Trump supporter. I’d also guarantee this person didn’t spend over five minutes the entire day thinking about tech problems.
Here’s one from a guy who’s one of the few successfully doing tech comedy. He did this video of a typical day:
If I had that life I’d definitely hang myself. The public transportation alone, not to mention behaving like a pre-teen, sleeping with stuffed animals and playing in bathtubs of food, would drive me over the edge. He definitely worked more on his channel than his day job.
Anyway…
When people like myself who’ve owned tech companies say he can fire 90% of the staff, we’re not being flippant. A tech company needs to be engineering-heavy, not management-heavy.
Back during the tech boom, recruiters would fall over themselves for us coders. I could throw a rock and hit a recruiter and land a six figure job while I was in my early twenties, with only a few years of experience. I felt like a diva.
The perks of some companies included free vending machines, Foosball in the office, bonuses, and ways to attract talent that was new at the time. The company I was working for had unlimited drinks and snacks, and we could request our favorite drinks.
That recruiting and retention approach was innovative, as the old stuffy suit-and-briefcase IBM corporate world was being ushered out to make way for coders like myself who’d come to work in basketball shorts half-baked and eat all the snacks in the break room while writing code as “Tool” blared in my headphones.
Damn I miss those days.
“DC, sounds like you were like these Twitter losers.” No, there was one HUGE difference: I actually worked, albeit comfy as hell. I WANTED to be at work. For the first time in my life, I looked forward to work. Leaving at 18:00 was such a bizarre concept, and I’d work an average of ten-twelve hours per day.
In the San Francisco tech world run by Marxist academics who’ve never written a line of code in their lives, that might sound like slave labor. I loved it, and I think Musk will make the tech industry great again, where challenging projects will pull the industry into a desire for work.
It makes good business sense to pamper your engineers, but idiocy like red wine on tap is a little much. Musk will change the industry by changing the culture at Twitter where it will once again be a place where work actually happens, and the industry will follow suit.
One point lost in the non-tech world is Twitter hasn’t been a tech company for a good while. Sure, they use tech, like servers and programming tools, but in modern times, a social media platform is about as technologically innovative as a pet rock.
You couldn’t pay me to work at a social media company. If I were ever recruited by Truth Social, I’d have to think about it, but still, no, I couldn’t do it. Beyond the platform itself, for any social media platform, there’s no upside. No innovation. Nothing new. Nothing exciting. That’s true for every single social media project.
Except Twitter.
How can that be? Because Musk has a few side projects going on, like space exploration, creating and launching satellites into orbit that circumvent Earth-bound internet, tunneling (which is very difficult), engineering a new Tesla phone, and of course, Tesla.
All of this spawns from the goal of getting civilization to Mars. Starlink will connect Mars and Earth communications. Boring will provide livable dwellings for humans on Mars. SpaceX gets us there. His robots go first and do the prep work. It’s all interconnected.
Meanwhile, earthlings benefit from new technology and products in the wake of this innovation.
These are projects that require real engineering. With a social media platform, I could lock a monkey in a cage with a monitor and keyboard and in six weeks he’d get a social media platform to alpha. With Musk’s projects, they innovate technology that didn’t previously exist and requires extremely smart people and long hours.
Space exploration drives technology. To do things in space, it requires solving very, very hard problems. Lots of math and physics. It’s not trivial, and to develop software to drive this technology is beyond innovative.
Musk wants to make Twitter a software company, not only for the social media project, but for his other projects, like his X project.
As Musk has said, he wants an American version of WeChat. “But D.C., Apple and Google have the monopolies on the smartphones! They’ll shut down Musk!”
Wrong:
He’s going to turn the iPhone into a Sony Discman.
If you’re an engineer at Twitter, you hit the lottery. If you can impress Musk’s engineers, you’ll have opportunities to work on REAL tech with his other companies. Even building the OS and app store on the Tesla Phone, and integrating it with Twitter, would be an incredible ground-breaking project that any software engineer would love.
All of this innovation requires people working. It requires smart people, and not woke losers with a degree from academia who think a day at work is nothing more than a day at the spa. Hard engineering problems don’t care about your pronouns or if you feel offended and need a safe space booth.
The hard problems make engineers want to work, because it’s fun and challenging. That’s what it’s all about and it’s really that simple.
Musk is going to suck up all the top-notch engineering talent and leave the woke carcasses behind. This will cause those remaining to fail, spawning a new technology industry with new products and services and incubate a new generation of engineers.
One way to visualize this is to envision what would happen if Wal-Mart, Target, and the others ceased to exist tomorrow. The mom-and-pops would begin to sprout back up, driving the economy to the stratosphere. This is what will happen in tech, driving aerospace, energy (like nuclear), and emerging industries that are still teetering on science-fiction, but soon crossing over to reality.
I could care less about who is or isn’t banned on Twitter. I think social media is stupid, but Musk’s takeover will liberate technology and innovation.
The coffee industry is about to be flooded with applications from wokesters previously employed by the tech industry.