Twitter reduces BBC hacks to tears with redundancy notice Radio 4 showed why it’s the guardian of all that is good, sensible and British this morning by collapsing into laughter while reviewing Jack Dorsey’s rambling farewell to 8 per cent of Twitter staff. Beeb biz hack Simon Jack rounded off a discussion about the Twitter reorg with tech reporter Dave Lee by noting “I’ve never …
Thank you Mr Jack Dorsey for the line,
The world needs a strong Twitter.
There was me thinking world peace or elimination of starvation or even clean water for everyone however it's twitter. The benefits of talking bollocks on a global platform are essential to human advancement and evolution. Apparently without facebook we would be back in the stone age.
"The benefits of talking bollocks on a global platform are essential to human advancement and evolution. Apparently without facebook we would be back in the stone age."
The late, great Douglas Adams summed up this marketing bollocks far better than I can:-
Meanwhile, back on pre-historic Earth...
Chairman - Yes, and, and, and the wheel. What about this wheel thingy? Sounds a terribly interesting project to me.
Marketing Girl - Er, yeah, well we’re having a little, er, difficulty here…
Ford Prefect - Difficulty?! It’s the single simplest machine in the entire universe!
Marketing Girl - Well alright mister wise guy, if you’re so clever you tell us what colour it should be!
> "The benefits of talking bollocks on a global platform are essential to human advancement and evolution. Apparently without facebook we would be back in the stone age."
Made me think of the How? Why? Where? phases (again Douglas Adams)
Twitter and Facebook are very much 'where shall we have lunch'. There's certainly no 'How?', and the the only 'why'? is 'why bother to visit?
@Boltar
...if you listen to a lot of Millennials long enough...
I can see where you're going wrong.
Never in all of history, has one generation had so much to say of such little value. I'm a Gen xer, and we talked bollocks with the best of 'em, but seriously - the Millennial’s seem to be stuck on transmit as a generation, there's next to no receive going on.
I can't comprehend the rampant and fervent seeking of extremely transient fame. Fleeting moments as a z-list celebrity seems to be the prime, nay, sole generational driver. There's so much more they could be doing than sucking up the intellectual droppings of The Orange County Is Essex cast from twatter, or the bellend that is Russell Bland, but nay, they have millions upon millions of followers.
Perhaps and amount not that dissimilar from the projected savings?
Corporate Salary Funding 101 (basic MBA)
Sack the plebs and use those saving to fund our retirement packages.
They don't contribute any bullshit to the company so they can go.
As for us, the Senior Manager can party until the company goes TITSUP. Then move on to the next Sucker Company, Rinse and repeat.
"Sack the plebs and use those saving to fund our retirement packages."
On a related note, Twitter poaches top Google executive as new chairman.
Too soon, methinks?
I've heard this line a couple of times now while going through rounds of sackings, er sorry I mean restructuring.
And all I can think of is, it's a damn sight easier for you, you corporate drone, than it is for the people you are sacking.
And you can shove your "journey" right up your arse.
Thing is, ex-Twitterers probably won't find it hard to find new jobs. The company is useless at imagining cool ways to make money from Twitter, but it has a good-ish tech/engineering rep.
I wonder if a year from now the survivors at Twitter HQ will envy the dead.
"It's the jargon that annoys me. "We're on a journey together.""
Its psychology for idiots - the idiots being the ones spouting it , not being given it I mean.
Its supposed to make the person having the shit thrown at them feel as if they and the one dishing it out are sharing the suffering in some way by using faux bonding phrasiology.
IMO you either have to be remarkably socially inept bordering on Aspergers (not hard in a tech company), or be suffering from some sort of psychiatric disorder in order to believe anyone would fall for this patronising schtick.
I'll go with the latter. Us (edge)-aspies usually are usually aware of our limitations and have developed work-arounds by that stage in life.
My money is on 'Non-violent sociopathy laced with a good dollop of narcissism." Typical big-corp-management stuff.
@boltar
IMO you either have to be remarkably socially inept bordering on Aspergers (not hard in a tech company), or be suffering from some sort of psychiatric disorder in order to believe anyone would fall for this patronising schtick.
Lots of this garbage is produced by HR. HR, as we hopefully all know, aren't the sharpest tools in many toolkits. They really don't have anything better to do than sit around and dream this guff up, and because they're not very bright, they think that people will fall for it the same way they would.
Either we have smarter people in HR, which seems a waste; management grow some balls and act like men, which seems unlikely; or we proles have to suck it up and ignore that patronising arse embarrasing himself by spouting such drivvel, and contend ourselves that the next gig probably won't be worse.
In my last job I was a union rep (yeah we do exist in local government) Post outsourcing I spent most of my time helping people coming to terms with not working there imminently. Came the time I wanted to be off myself and I knew all the buttons to press.
Funded 18 months sailing to the Caribbean and back.
AC because I would like to repeat the procedure but not do the union rep thing first.
"Thing is, ex-Twitterers probably won't find it hard to find new jobs."
That's true. Especially since it's mainly programmers who are going. I'm not sure that fits with the aims of making twitter a more agile and nimble company who will develop new software and get it into the hand of users more quickly when they just sacked half of the people doing that specific job.
...these announcements take.
I remember at one corporation I worked at there was a exec meeting to make 80 staff redundant. I was expecting a load of hand wringing, heated discussion and sadness.
All they did was look down the list of branches and the staff numbers.
"Ahhh look Preston office has 78 staff! Sorted!"
That was it. Took maybe 20 seconds to change 78 peoples lives and then onto the next item on the agenda.
No consideration of the work they did there (some offices did specialist schemes and work). Just that the number fitted the closest.
This post has been deleted by its author
BBC World Service was slashed and burned not too long ago. Fantastically interesting programmes and, for many countries, a trusted source of information, went up in smoke, and lose experienced journalists were lost. I can think of a lot of other things I would have given up, funded by public money, than that.
@Hollerith
That's just about when I stopped listening to the BBC World Service. It changed suddenly and not for the better. If I listen talk radio then it is most likely to be NRK P2 (the nearest thing to BBC Radio 4 in Norway), either over the ether or via the internet. Although I suppose that P2 is no longer safe given that the Blue-Blue minority coalition government has proposed a cut in real terms in funding to the NRK in its latest budget.
If this trend continues then in a few more years internet based brain fart publishing networks Twitter and the like will be the only way to get any "news".
@Creatoroftwitt: streamlined roadmap for Twitter, Vine, and Periscope and they are shaping up to be strong. The roadmap is focused on the experiences which 3/14
@Creatoroftwitt: are usually riddled with corporate speak so I'm going to give it to you straight. The team has been working around the clock to produce 2/14
@Creatoroftwitt: Team, We are moving forward with a restructuring of our workforce so we can put our company on a stronger path to grow. Emails like this 1/14
I wouldn't trust Simon Jack's technological insight. Couple of years back on Today he got an interview with Warren East when he was still at ARM but stumbled over the fabless model. The latter took multiple attempts to explain, dropping in complexity each time until he actually said 'ARM make chips' - the only known instance of such a thing being said and a sorry reflection of Jack's grasp of tech.
In all other regards his reporting is excellent (seems well connected in the City) but he's willingly admitted he gets his tech understanding from his school age daughters and that it doesn't extend much beyond Apple devices.
A friend who's quite senior in the BBC Radio News hierarchy (no name no blame) tells me that (of course) they shouldn't have burst out laughing, but it was a sort-of verbal slapstick comedy moment. Usually they are the recipients of BBC Human Remains &/or Internal Comms emails full of Corporate Speak just like that. The BBC is great at buzzword bingo. It was the sheer relief of the shit descending on some other poor sods for a change that triggered it.
...does a smaller team do more stuff? Answer: it doesn't unless the big team you're comparing it to is actually full of wasters.
In which case the whole text of the message is entirely corporate double-speak and should just read: "there's a lot of dead wood in the team, and your time is up".
They just have to hope the management is skilled enough to identify the dead wood and not accidentally cull lets say 16% or more of the people actually doing the work.
Also, Twitter has ~4000 people? doing what exactly?
...does a smaller team do more stuff? I suspect that it's by virtue of the old favorite of "efficiency savings". Please try not to laugh.
In which case the whole text of the message is entirely corporate double-speak Nothing unusual in that, is there?
They just have to hope the management is skilled enough to identify the dead wood and not accidentally cull lets say 16% or more of the people actually doing the work. To paraphrase Dr Johnson "That, Sir, is the triumph of hope over experience".
Also, Twitter has ~4000 people? doing what exactly? I'm not even going to try guessing...
There is also the problem that once FUD sets in amongst the staff the good ones will bale out of their own accord, leaving only the dead wood anyway.
The fourth and fifth words were corporate speak. "moving forward"
"Team,
We are moving forward with a restructuring of our workforce so we can put our company on a stronger path to grow. Emails like this are usually riddled with corporate speak so I'm going to give it to you straight."
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
