Hackathons are not working more. They’re supposed to be a liberal period to work on whatever seems interesting to the workers. In Meta’s early days, they were a big part of their culture and Zuck in particular fed on them.

I don’t expect everyone to know anything about Silicon Valley hackathons, but no, they’re not just “more work.” However when people are already crushed by what’s going on at work, they don’t have a lot of creative energy just looking for an outlet.

In my experience, no one working for Meta does so for “spirit.” There are two kinds of people there:

1. Extremely smart and business savvy, there to make lots of money and pretty good at doing so. These people tend to be a little older and more cutthroat. They don’t have “spirit” to be crushed. They will stay or leave on financials alone.

2. Younger crowd, largely straight from college, working across product, engineering, and other operations roles. These folks don’t have “spirit” per se - they have operated on large paychecks and a high energy work environment full of the brainy types they roomed with at college. A posh office full of free amenities is half of what kept them going and the other half was youthful hormones fueled by each other and a general sense of being on top of the world by virtue of working there.

THAT last part has been crushed, but it is not what I would call “spirit” or “soul.” More like a collective delusion that fed on its own momentum. Like anything else so divorced from reality, it was always going to crash. It’s amazing they kept it going as long as they did.

Musk faces challenges attracting engineers

No shit. I have no idea who still works at Xitter. I think they must have whittled it down to workaholic Nazi pigs who personally share in Elon’s psychopathy. Because no self respecting tech workers would put up with his bullshit when there’s a whole industry they could go work in.

SpaceX is different. Aerospace is a narrower field and SpaceX is truly at the forefront of it. For a time, Tesla was also at the forefront, doing things that no one else was.

But Xitter and xAI or whatever the fuck it’s called… they have zero advantages with which to attract engineering talent. Elon doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing when it comes to software and never has. He tries to push tech workers around the same way, he’s going to find they can get other jobs at superior organizations and likely for more money.