> 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...
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.
https://tennesseestar.com/2021/11/30/new-twitter-ceo-why-sho...
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.
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.
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?
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?
Or maybe just doing their job.
Nobody elected the leaders of big tech and its more than reasonable to hold them to account.
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.
It sort of implies a CEO decision coming from solely a CTO perspective.
The new Twitter CEO has also worked at the company for over a decade so it’s probably been planned for a while.
The comic writer?
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.
[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.
Furthermore, a large part of most orgs is fixed-pie.
You must have heard the term "white-adjacent".
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
sadly though I dont believe this will be the case,
