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This part caught my attention:
Davis, previously a director of product design at Facebook, joined Twitter in 2019 to lead its design team. He is Black and Asian, and was the first Black executive at Twitter to report directly to the CEO. The company had touted him as a hard-charging leader who would detoxify the platform, but he was also criticized by some employees for what they said was a blunt, aggressive management style.
Since they've clearly gone for the "diversity" angle here, I decided to read more[0] about Davis.
The comment occurred during a meeting in which Liz Ferrall-Nunge, who led Twitter’s research team, shared concerns about diversity at Twitter and referred to her experience as a woman of color. Mr. Davis seemed to dismiss her, telling Ms. Ferrall-Nunge, who is Asian American, that if she wore sunglasses, she would pass as white, three people familiar with the investigation said.
…Wow.
[0]:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210816090522/https://www.nytim...
Incidentally i hate the new redesigns of everything to have black and white buttons only. I end up constantly double pressing them because i never know which one is pressed. Same with youtube. Whoever started this trend should be fired.
I think their previous design was counter intuitive and we just got used to it. The changes they made actually makes more sense to new users.
For example. In the past, they used filled buttons to indicate unselected option (like follow button). Now it's filled when you are already following.
Here is the buttons i see now:
https://i.imgur.com/eNcYkIM.png
i dont see the pattern
I just joined twitter a month ago, after seeing their redesign, and deciding to follow a person I heard on a podcast. Never could make heads or tails of the old UI, and I thought it was ugly as sin to boot. The new interface seems like a massive improvement to me.
I think it's intended to push people into the premium version where you can customize your button color
wut? i wasn't even aware. What a world we live in
always.about.money
When you're divying free stuff up by race, you've got to maintain some standards. I believe the "sunglass test" was first proposed in one of David Duke's early books "Practical Segregation for Racists."
I can't believe that nowadays it is racist to try and not see race.
Ah yes, David Duke, an early pioneer in this space
He's the same guy who tweeted this:
https://tennesseestar.com/2021/11/30/new-twitter-ceo-why-sho...
This site.... is pretty biased and it appears they intentionally chose to _not_ connect the quote to it's source. It's from a Jon Stewart segment:
https://www.cc.com/video/vz5edd/the-daily-show-with-jon-stew...
Not sure if you just grabbed the first source or if you regularly get news from there, but if you do, you are being fed a pretty strong narrative that is doing a poor job of telling the story.
Here's the independent with slightly more context:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/twitter-pa...
Edit: As an aside, on the biggest problems on the internet which twitter itself perpetrates is what I call "this" culture. No one has to pontificate, just an empty quote or THIS and we have no more context. We are left to assume and depending on your bias one will just self-reinforce:
- if you agree with the quote: "he's one of us, and he gets it!
- if you disagree with the quote: "He's not one of us, and he's shown his true colors!"
Depending on the audience I've seen people of all stripes avoid adding actual commentary and use the _same_ quote to represent "both sides" as an example... fascinating stuff.
That’s the best part about recognizing that people of all different races, genders and creeds as people. They have exactly the same capacity to be shitty as anyone else. If this was a white executive this wouldn’t even move the needle but a black CEO is naturally held to a higher standard. Progress is measured by having their shitty behaviors reflect on them as an individual instead of their class.
Your comment _seems_ to imply that anyone taking issue with Davis' racism is racist themselves, because they wouldn't otherwise notice if Davis were white. Please let me know if my interpretation of your comment is inaccurate, but if it isn't, then that's a pretty horrific rhetorical device that you're employing.
Personally, I noticed this part because — according to the article — Davis was outspoken about diversity, and indeed one of the explicit reasons for hiring him was for him to "promote diversity". That's the context — _not_ his skin colour.
> Two years ago, the company brought in a blunt executive to make things move faster and to promote diversity. Then the problems began.
> Twitter employees who were aware of the episode said they expected better from Mr. Davis because of his outspokenness about diversity.
Oh no, you can absolutely rake this guy over the coals for being a racist asshole.
Here's the problem:
> He is Black and Asian, and was the first Black executive at Twitter to report directly to the CEO.
Does this mention that he is outspoken about diversity? Or that he was brought on to promote diversity in the company in any way more than his existence? Nope, it's just a hey this guy is black and that is notable.
So this seems really out place.
> Since they've clearly gone for the "diversity" angle here, I decided to read more[0] about Davis.
Why does him being black and casually mentioning it in his bio warrant you digging into his background? Would you have done the same if it said he was the first first generation college graduate? Obviously not.
So this guy absolutely deserves to be criticized because he is outspoken about diversity while being racist. The crucial point is that this criticism is that is has nothing to do with his own race. But you only even thought to look for that because they mentioned he's black. There are a million ways this guy could be a terrible executive worthy of criticism but you definitely had one particular way in mind when you went digging.
The authors of the article mentioned his race, but did not mention the race of any of the other _nine_ Twitter staff listed in the article. So the _authors of the article_ found the juxtaposition of his race and the criticisms against him to be noteworthy. Davis was also the _only_ person mentioned in a critical light in the article.
> But you only even thought to look for that because they mentioned he's black.
You obviously have zero evidence for that.
I can't speak the original commenter, but what would have prompted my concern is this sentence:
> The company had touted him as a hard-charging leader who would detoxify the platform, but he was also criticized by some employees for what they said was a blunt, aggressive management style.
"Blunt" and "aggressive" are very often used as euphemisms for "rude and offensive, but in a way the author finds socially acceptable".
“ If this was a white executive this wouldn’t even move the needle but a black CEO is naturally held to a higher standard.”
There’s zero evidence of this. But spout away.
Contrast to Apple, which uses a fully functional model:
https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovatio...
I find this evolution fascinating. It makes sense to me that the GM model worked for so long. If much of a company's advantages were cultural, you could put together teams that could out-compete startups within a large organization. Procter and Gamble needs to enter new markets with new products to grow -- there's only so big a market for soap or razors or drills.
But lots of tech companies today have a significant scale advantage. Google ads is most of their revenue; Netflix has a single product. Functional expertise that drives a 2% gain across the entire business is possible and valuable.
So ... why does Twitter want to go to a GM model? Are they watching Meta have success diversifying from Facebook? Or is there something else?
Netflix isn’t quite a single product anymore. They have a huge studio/content arm who likely knows or cares very little about the streaming side - and there are several of them per continent. From a consumer perspective, it may come off as one company though.
> If much of a company's advantages were cultural, you could put together teams that could out-compete startups within a large organization.
Only if you can make that small team culturally independent from the parent company, which IMO is unlikely, not least because first you have to create the team and hire or find (internally) people for it, both of which tend to imprint the parent culture, and then management has to be sufficiently hands off, which again could happen but what are the odds?
Avoiding the humiliation of senate subpoenas seems to be motivating the most recent rash of FAANG restructurings. No founder, deserved or otherwise, would willingly subject themselves to the indignation of senators making names for themselves. Google saw the stitches on the fast ball and had Pichai prepped and ready go, but apparently Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Zuckerberg were far more confident, and the results of their testimony spoke for itself.
"the indignation of senators making names for themselves."
Or maybe just doing their job.
Nobody elected the leaders of big tech and its more than reasonable to hold them to account.
The CEO has been with twitter for 10 years and been CTO and actively involved at top-level decisions for quite some time. This isn't some sudden decision pulled out of a hat. Not sure why some commenters seem to have such knee-jerk reactions to this change. Most of it seems to be sensible. The CEO came up through the ranks from starting off as an individual contributor at Twitter. He probably has a good grasp for what organizational changes can help the company and it is also very likely that this has been in the works for a while.
They were both fired because they were very expensive and a net negative on the company.
Dantley has an enormous ego, and that ego led to a bunch of fluff PR pieces commissioned where he bashed other employees which started a civil war. The guy who did the Google comic for years went to Twitter and made a comic about the civil war and HR accused him of racism (the comic was not racist) and made him take it down.
Montara made like 20 million a year but did absolutely nothing but send an email about the important of diversity every few months.
Only reason these guys weren’t fired a long time ago is that the previous Twitter CEO was totally checked out and obsessed with bitcoin. New CEO knows what’s going and and is cleaning house.
I don’t work at Twitter but I’m close to many who do so this is grapevine gossip.
Good to know. I knew Parag (the CEO) a bit from college (we both graduated the same year) and he was a very nice, humble and ridiculously sharp guy. Not at all surprised to see him rise to CEO and honestly, it feels like a much much better pick than your traditional MBA old-boys-club career CEO. Time will tell but I found it refreshing to see someone immensely technical (Parag won Gold in the international Physics Olympiad as a high schooler) being promoted from within and making it all the way to the top.
It's infuriating how information about his track record is less saught for and discussed publicly.
With what you've just added about Parag, I now see him as someone mistakenly judged, someone who's not given a chance or the benefit of doubt. Can't wait to marvel at the good decisions this stellar and technically-fit person will take as Twitter CEO.
Jack Dorsey may have selected the most logical executive in the board room with a decade's worth of familiarity with the company and its products.
Boy is for-profit operation a downer. We get so much from Twitter, but of course, that doesn't make enough money, so the march towards locking it down into a closed pipeline of corporate marketing/ads/curation/tracking for the product (us) at the expense of whatever made twitter great continues on. Like, my third party Twitter clients have less and less functionality as Twitter removes public API features. My ability to read Twitter without ads/paid tweets injected into my feed will likely go away, etc.
Turns out smart people who do hard work providing a massive public platform want to be paid for it. Who knew.
There is no evidence these changes are instigated by regular employees. This sort of stuff is usual driven by the the owners with larger stakes.
No profit = no business = no pay.
Huge profits = rich business = famously huge FAANG pay.
Wages and profits are separate. Sure, equity vested to employees blurs that, but stock prices need not track profits either!
Employees may also rather coast than go through a stressful shakeup that quite likely won't succeed in bringing in profits.
Even if employees do want the shakeup, they are in no position to agitate for it. This would be a purely coincidental alignment of their desires with the agitating investors'.
Please understand the basics of how Capitalism works.
> Wages and profits are separate
Of course. But if profit is zero, wages will be zero too before long. Who cares whether your aberage employee likes profitable shakeups, I’m saying it’s in their best interests regardless.
> Please understand the basics of how Capitalism works.
My god, I hope you’re more pleasant in real life. We’re done here
We're all more pleasant in real life :) This is the internet!
Fair enough, I suppose I got a bit carried away. A little good faith goes a long way
Well then don’t bait and switch.
If they charged a subscription fee from day one they would have zero users. This is a valid business model
If you do a bait and switch, then don’t come with the “they deserve to get paid” bullshit.
You can get paid for something without degrading its function.
I know little about how Twitter works, but it's interesting that a new leader would make such sweeping changes just a few days into the job. Usually, you would want at least a little time viewing and understanding the org from your new job/perspective before changing anything major.
It sort of implies a CEO decision coming from solely a CTO perspective.
These decisions are made weeks in advance or even months in advance.
I'm assuming that, as CTO, Parag had been in the room for all major company decisions for quite a while. I'm also guessing that the C-level conversations about this reorg had been happening for a while already, while Jack was there.
In the reality we have no idea how long this has been planned already. Another name just takes responsibility from that.
Exactly. I'm sure this has been discussed for months in the board. Maybe even was the reason he was appointed CEO.
Or perhaps an opportune time to make a change like this.
CEO does not have that much power unless he owns major part from the company. Board controls the company.
IIRC from Dorsey's departure announcement, his successor has actually been at the company for a long time.
Scott Adams talks about how it’s a common tactic amongst CEO’s.
The new Twitter CEO has also worked at the company for over a decade so it’s probably been planned for a while.
>Scott Adams talks about how it’s a common tactic amongst CEO’s.
The comic writer?
Yes, this guy:
"""
'Dilbert' creator Scott Adams said he felt 'abused' by Trump for failing to condemn white supremacists at the first presidential debate, but says he'll vote for him anyway
"""
https://www.businessinsider.com/dilbert-creator-scott-adams-...
The guy was CTO and they had a part-time CEO so I would guess he was running the business already to some degree.
New CEOs generally have a lot of political capital upfront and many are chosen because they have a specific vision and strategy the company should take. So it actually makes the most sense to be bold first since there will be big new changes anyway. He’s also “learning the ropes” so much can be forgiven from his first couple of months.
Finally his boldness will let him know the boundaries of his position & how much he can get away with. TLDR gotta flex to see your own power level.
I always feel that most reorgs are done not because they lead to a fundamentally better structure but just to shake up things and break some managers' fiefdoms that are causing political problems. You could almost pick two or three structures and rotate every three years (which basically happens when leaders get replaced).
After some decades in the industry I think any organizational structure will work if people are honest with each other and leadership proactively addresses problems. I have had countless situations where I pointed out to a VP that certain functions aren't performing and are causing problems for other projects but the VP just shrugged and basically said "there is nothing we can do". Considering that corporations are basically internally run like communist planned economies they share the same pathologies like counterproductive metrics, people pretending things are great and leadership ignoring glaring problems.
> Considering that corporations are basically internally run like communist planned economies
This is interesting not because of accuracy but because thinking of counter examples is really interesting. I don't study businesses much, do you know of any counter examples?
You’ll find more of the independent moving parts thing in larger orgs that Katamari Damacy like Cisco.
But Coase’s Nature of the Firm postulates that a reason for a firm is to reduce transaction costs. Running as a planned economy inside is intentional.
Since Twitter is large, you’ll see that they’re counteracting this with the GM structure. Smart imho.
"New hire announces that they intend to do their job"
It's about time, Twitter has failed to deliver for far too long and it's pretty clear things had to seriously change. I think the details of the structure are probably unimportant - these reorganisations are more about moving people up or out. It's all a bit academic since it'll all change once Twitter is acquired anyway.
Sucks, enjoy your silos.
I honestly wonder if a CEO who grew up outside the US is going to be a good steward of the uniquely American attitude towards free speech. Honestly, I don’t have a lot of hope for it.
Towards free speech? Twitter is not pro free speech. Twitter has long been pro free woke speech. In other words: Twitter is censorship. Remember that's the social network who allows talibans to spread their propaganda and hate speech.
Implicit in all these diversity pushes is a fixed-sized pie mentality. In that world-view, the only way to increase diversity is to replace white[1] executives with non-white ones. I'm not keen on the long term prospects of a company that is making its senior leadership hiring decisions based on a fixed-sized pie mindset. Frankly, while I'm not a fan of the racial discrimination aspect either, the lack of a growth mindset is what really predicts failure.
[1] The status of South and East Asians isn't entirely clear to me here. In my time in big tech I never noticed a shortage of South Asian senior leaders, so I suppose maybe they're no longer considered diverse? As for East Asians, every single one I've personally worked with is a big fan of meritocracy. Perhaps that's because they believe they will do well under those rules.
If you consider a certain threshold of match interchangeable then it makes sense. You're going to have bad hires no matter what. Complaining about fixed-pie replacement because one is a minority is not acceptable. The hiring committee probably worked hard to vet them, but things still go wrong, particularly if the organization trashes the person's incentives.
Furthermore, a large part of most orgs is fixed-pie.
> The status of South and East Asians isn't entirely clear to me here.
You must have heard the term "white-adjacent".
Paywall
Twitter is cancer and needs shutting down
The URL should be changed to cite the Wapo's story:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/03/twitter...
New CEO: "<Hitches up britches> Welp, time to put muh stank on it."
The changes include moving to a "General Manager model" for teams in the product and technology organizations, which will mean having one person lead the work in those divisions. "This will allow us to operate more cross-functionally and enable faster, more informed decision-making," the spokesperson added.
In other words:
We now have an Overseer role. Individual contributions no longer matter to management. Overseers will ensure the company's decisions are followed through at every level of employment. Now even the design teams will 'be on board' with the changes, or be gone.
No more dissent. No more questioning of the leadership. No more discussions.
The Overseer's word is law, people!
Many larger b2b companies operate with a GM model. Why? Their businesses are a portfolio of products that essentially need a CEO rather than a PM. True P&L accountability and control.
Different products within the company will have different needs at different times. Without a GM the Twitter Blue team ends up head to head with the Ads team during planning, and you can guess who wins.
Small products will get overly influential GMs who can move mountains within the company to get them what they need. It's less overlord and more political air cover, if done right.
GMs are almost always the first to get fired as well. It's a sort of end-stage of your career at a company. Few GMs can become CEO, so once you take that GM role you are on borrowed time.
I’m genuinely confused how you arrived at that? I just read it as “there’s now one person in charge of each of these divisions”, which seems like a pretty standard way of organizing things? Do you have a specific reason you think this would shut down discussion?
As a sidenote, "This will allow us to operate more cross-functionally and enable faster, more informed decision-making," is just completely devoid of substance. Do the people crafting these corporate statements actually believe that people don’t see straight through them? Nobody is going to read this and think, “Oh, thank god, they’ve assured us that the change isn’t going to communication worse and decision-making less informed, this is good stuff!”
I'm not sure it's completely devoid of substance. Obviously there's no detail provided, but it is stating the goals/benefits of a general manager model for those who aren't familiar with it.
It's the emperors new clothes. Nobody wants the be the guy saying "But what the hell does that really mean?" so everyone pretends it means something.
This is such a weird take and makes me question if you've ever worked in a large company to begin with? I think ICs would much rather be part of a cohesive team with an engaged leader that is advocating on behalf of the product the IC is involved with. That's a hell of a lot better than the typical dysfunction in large orgs/companies where ICs are just lost in a sea of confusion and politicking with no clear higher-level management structure to support the projects and products they are involved with.
I’m not sure if I agree that the take is “weird” or not … but one thing did stand out to me about your comment: the idea that this would result in helpful structure and clarity for ICs.
We don’t know the complete extent of the reorg, but my experience at large companies and living through multiple reorgs (10? 15? I’ve lost track) is that they usually don’t actually mean much for ICs on the ground.
The reorg usually is limited to VP level folks - they get moved around, but usually their teams stay with them. It’s usually not a big day to day difference for the folks at the bottom of the org chart.
Edit: I’ve also never experienced reduced confusion or politicking as a result of a reorg. Those things seem inherent to large power structures.
Live by the sword, die by the sword. Twitter employees are getting a taste of what has been dished out on Twitter users for years.
If that is the case then I would actually encouraged by it, Twitter social activist employee's are a problem for the platform.
sadly though I dont believe this will be the case,
