Musk Can't Catch a Break
Three days of strikes in Iran, are people working from home less productive?
Elon Musk is the new Donald Trump — this is my new theory. And by that, I mean he’s now enemy number one for the mainstream press. No matter what he does, they will always attack him now, because it’s good for their numbers. Not that I mind, per se, as I’ve never liked Musk. Just as I never liked Trump. But it does clearly show how the majority of journalists don’t care about the facts or the context of this facts in the wider scope of history as much as they care about whatever their own agenda is at the moment. Musk has not changed at all in the last ten years and he used to be a press darling. He’s now being dumped on not because of what he has done, but because the zeitgeist turned on him. Anything he does will now be reported with hyperbole and drama dialled up to the max. And if he stops doing stupid shit, the press will just take invented stories on him (from the “intelligence community” or any other questionable source) and publish those. Just like they did with Trump.
But more on Musk and Twitter in a moment. First I should explain why this newsletter is being released so late in the day. Basically, I’m currently very busy, trying to get a lot of stuff done before the holidays. So newsletters might be late and maybe also sporadic into the new year. Things will stabilise again in 2023, I hope. Please bear with me in these trying times. This morning, for example, I was busy recording footage for Scenic Tarkov. Then I wrote some stuff that might or might not get released some time soon and also did some important organisational work. After that, I went for a run in the cold and here we are now. So let’s get into the recent tech news.
Musk to Step Down as Twitter CEO
A lot has happened at Twitter in the last few days. After catching a lot of flak for banning journalists that had reported on a banned Twitter account that was reporting ADS-B information on Musk’s private yet, Musk reinstated the tracking account and unbanned the journalists.
Obviously, I am against banning journalists on a social media platform. That is a very dumb move that’s extremely dangerous to a democratic society that respects the rule of law. I must say that I found it disappointing, though, that my colleagues only cried out when some of their own, from mainstream places like The New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN, got censored. They don’t care about normal people getting censored, banned and shadow banned at the behest of the FBI. And they don’t care about the President of the United States getting banned. In that case, they always say that owners of social media companies have the right to ban whoever they want. They only care and object to this right when they themselves or their friends are threatened. How predictable …and extremely unprofessional.
In another unpopular move, Musk decided to exercise his right as the owner of a social media platform to ban links to other social media platforms — clearly to stop people from advertising their Fediverse accounts. He also had to walk this decision back under intense criticism. It’s almost like its not a good thing to allow billionaires to buy social media platforms and then exercise their right to do whatever they want with these platforms. It’s almost as if platforms like Twitter are important to our societies and democracies now and need protection from this kind of thing. Funny that I’ve been saying this for years and that the people who’ve been attacking me, and other people like me who say this, with the above mentioned “owner’s prerogative” argument are now sad that Musk is using that very argument to do things they don’t approve of. According to them, free speech needs constraints. But only if these constraints don’t impact the people and services they like, it seems. Man, I dislike hypocrites so much.
Anyway, all of this back and forth seems to have exhausted Musk as well, because last night he started a poll on Twitter asking if he should step down as CEO of Twitter. Unsurprisingly, the users voted for him to step down.
He must have seen this coming. The guy isn’t a genius, but he also isn’t dumb. The only way I can interpret this is that he already made the decision to step down before using this poll as a shield and will now govern the site through whoever he picks as a CEO replacement. This takes his persona out of the spotlight a bit (not that that’s gonna help him, as I explained above, the press has picked him as their new target now) and probably also addresses the criticism he’s gotten by Tesla shareholders and others for not spending enough time with that company. I’m sure that whoever will be the next Twitter CEO, Musk will still continue to make the decisions behind the scenes. You don’t spend 44 billion dollars to just throw it all away a few weeks later on a whim. And as The Register points out astutely:
Note, however, that his poll about his tenure as CEO does not mention a timeframe for his departure. Musk could agree to step down as "head of Twitter" on Monday, or some time in the year 2050.
“Head of Twitter" is also a nebulous term, given Musk owns the company. As president or chair (Twitter currently lacks a board) or even chief janitor, he would retain enormous influence regardless of whose business card reads "CEO".
Three Days of Strikes in Iran
As I’ve reported on before, the Iranian regime has been executing protesters to quell the popular uprising against the religious government in the country. NBC suspects this is a tactic to create fear within the ranks of the dissenters, which sounds like a logical assumption.
Notwithstanding this disgusting tactic, there have been reports all over social media sites that significant parts of the Iranian population are participating in a three-day strike on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday to protest the brutal crackdowns of their government. Once again, the reporting from big news organisations is sorely lacking. It seems that, unlike Ukrainian war propaganda and being angry at Elon Musk, the popular uprising in Iran just isn’t on the agenda for whatever reason.
Salesforce CEO Says New Hires Are Less Productive
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff isn’t happy with the recent hires at his company. They are not productive enough, in his opinion. He suspects this is because these people are used to working remotely.
In a message posted on the corporate Slack channel at the end of last week, as revealed first by CNBC, the billionaire questioned how his organization could increase the potency of its most recent hires.
"New employees (hired during the pandemic in 2021 and 2022) are especially facing much lower productivity. Is this a reflection of our office policy? Are we not building tribal knowledge with new employees without an office culture," Benioff asked.
The CEO signed off by saying he was "Asking for a friend."
Salesforce was all-in with working remotely at first (and they bought Slack, which is one of the tools instrumental to the shift to remote work), but then things changed, it seems.
At the start of this year, Salesforce pinned its colors to the mast of hybrid work, warning that back-to-office mandates don't work. Then at the start of this month, Salesforce called hundreds of workers back into the office. This followed slowing sales growth at the company.
This loss in productivity seems to be a wider trend within the tech industry.
Salesforce's headcount grew during from around 35,000 in 2019 to circa 49,000 in 2020, up to 56,606 in 2021 and 73,000 this year. Other tech firms recruited heavily during those times too and are now coming under pressure. Google, for example, has hired 37,000 people in this calendar year alone, and Meta swelled from 58,000 in 2019 to 87,000 by the third quarter of 2022.
Meta is laying off 13 percent or 11,000 employees and Google is under fire from a large institutional investor that wants management to make employees more productive while paying less them less. Amazon is expunging 10,000 people.
Salesforce has itself started to reduce its workforce, chopping hundreds recently, but this was a fraction of its total headcount and appears to have been a decision to clip the worst performing salespeople.
I would love to see some age statistics on these employees. While I’ve been noticing a sharp drop in productivity at pretty much every single company I’ve interacted with since mid-2020, I’ve also recently been told by many people that a lot of new employees from the Zoomer generation (born between mid-1990 and early 2010s) seem to be less productive than Millenials or Generation X people. I have heard this from people running companies, people in HR departments and also from Millenials who said they have an easy time finding jobs right now and are being told in interviews that “younger people” are bouncing from jobs because their work ethics aren’t up to standards at the companies in question. This certainly jibes with what I overhear when listening to Zoomers talk about their jobs in public. It’s only anecdotal evidence of course, but I’ve now heard it so often from so many different sources that I’m starting to think there’s something there. Maybe that’s the real issue instead of remote work?
A Really Bad Idea Reported on Really Badly
One of the things I really like about working as a tech journalist is that you learn something new every day. There’s always something fresh to discover and I love getting excited about new technologies and products. I have also learned to be careful about getting too excited, though. You need to examine every story before you very critically in this job, lest you turn into The Verge:
Google is developing an AI model that can decipher difficult-to-read handwriting, with a focus on notes and prescriptions written by doctors. The search giant announced during its annual conference in India on Monday that it was working with pharmacists to create a tool in Google Lens that can decode messily written medical notes.
This is the worst kind of uncritical, pandering tech reporting and exactly what has made me despise a lot of my colleagues. Whoever Jess Weatherbed is, she just uncritically parroted a press release here, without even stopping for a second to think this story through.
Google uploading your doctor’s notes to their cloud? I mean, what could possibly go wrong? It’s not like your doctor’s notes are the most private kind of data anybody could have on you. And you’re uploading them to Google because you can’t be arsed to try to decipher some handwriting?
How about mentioning that in your story? Or the fact that knowing all about your health is Google’s new raison d'être. And where all of this is leading.
Tech journalists. They pop blood vessels only thinking about Elon Musk banning Mastodon accounts. But they’re totally fine with a massive corporation knowing everything about everybody’s health issues. No wait. They just haven’t caught on. They praised Musk for years too, didn’t they? They’ll start complaining about this shit about ten years after it’s too late.
Carmack Quits Meta, Apple Fights Unionisation, Russian Oligarch Dies in France
In other news, John Carmack, who created Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake — who later was instrumental in bringing the Occulus VR headset to market — has left Facebook Meta1. And in leaving, he didn't mince words. He thinks Meta is inefficient and bloated and might soon sail into troubled waters. His story is typical for a technologist who just wants to solve engineering problems, get things done and then runs headlong into the soulless minions of orthodoxy (ie. management).
"This is the end of my decade in VR. I have mixed feelings. Quest 2 is almost exactly what I wanted to see from the beginning – mobile hardware, inside out tracking, optional PC streaming, 4K (ish) screen, cost effective. We have a good product. It is successful, and successful products make the world a better place. It all could have happened a bit faster and been going better if different decisions had been made, but we built something pretty close to The Right Thing. We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy. An org that has only known inefficiency is ill-prepared for the inevitable competition and/or belt tightening.”
"It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I'm evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover. I could have moved to Menlo Park after the Oculus acquisition and tried to wage battles with generations of leadership, but I was busy programming, and I assumed I would hate it, be bad at it, and probably lose anyway."
Meanwhile, Apple has been quite crafty at trying to prevent its workforce from unionising. They simply created a sham union to derail the actual process of workers organising themselves to fight for their rights. With the lack of common sense and basic understanding of history at display with many tech employees these days — see The Twitter Files among a host of other evidence — it doesn’t surprise me that stupid tricks like this would actually work.
Apple has been accused of creating its own labor organization to prevent workers from forming an employee-run union, according to a complaint filed on Friday.
The Communications Workers of America (CWA) filed a complaint with the federal US National Labor Relations Board charging Apple with unfair labor practices. The complaint contends Apple created an employer-controlled labor group called "Employee Forum" at Apple’s Easton Town Center store in Columbus, Ohio as a way "to stifle union activity." The CWA says Apple has been opposing worker efforts to organize for better pay and working conditions throughout the year and "has chosen to create a company-controlled union to coax workers away from organizing independently" rather than negotiate.
Russian oligarch Dmitry Zelenov has died in Antibes on the French Côte d’Azur on 9 December. He had a dinner with friends and then, feeling unwell afterwards, fell off a stairwell. He died of cranial trauma on his way to the hospital. Zelenov made over a billion dollars in Russia with real estate deals. I don’t know if Zelenov was anti-Putin or opposed to the war in Ukraine, but there have been a lot of rich and powerful Russians who’ve had strange falls lately.
On My Desk Today
Alright, that’s it for today. This newsletter was actually a good chunk of what’s on my desk today. I also wrote a short blog post in my notebook by hand last night that I’ll need to transcribe and put on my blog. I’m hoping I’ll be able to do this before I go to bed.
Not sure when the next issue of the newsletter is going to hit, but it’s probably going to be mostly about The Twitter Files again. There’s more stuff I feel like I should cover here to give you an overview. It sure as hell isn’t being covered in the mainstream press, that’s for sure. I hope I’ll get to that soon.
Facebook had acquired Occulus in 2014.