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   Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 12:50:11 JST Rod Hilton

   I want to expand more on the comedy of errors that led to the eviction of #Twitter from their Boulder, Colorado office.

   The story that leads up to this building even existing is bizarre and hilarious, so here goes...

   A thread 🧵

   https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/judge-ruled-twitter-must-be-evicted-from-colorado-office-over-unpaid-rent/

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     Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 12:50:00 JST Rod Hilton

     in reply to

     On June 13 2022, in the middle of all this uncertainty about the company's future, the new office opened.

     People still could not believe this happened. Even the people opening it were almost doing so ironically, embarrassed grins glued on their faces.

     It seemed like such a bizarre corporate failing - that the decision had been made to build it and the penalties for backing out were severe enough that they just kept on plowing ahead for 2 years, even though the space was going to be empty.

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     Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 12:50:01 JST Rod Hilton

     in reply to

     In April 2022, Elon Musk started the process of trying to acquire Twitter.

     The company was in a constant state of turmoil, with Musk trying to back out of the deal, the board trying to stop him with a poison pill, the board then forcing him to buy the company, etc.

     All the while Elon was talking about how many people needed to be fired and how much he hated remote work. A number of Twitter Boulder employees left due to the uncertainty, cutting down the already-shrunk number of people there.

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     Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 12:50:02 JST Rod Hilton

     in reply to

     People were shocked.

     Nobody wanted to rain on REW's parade but this building seemed like a huge waste of Twitter's money. The company had transitioned to remote-first, most employees wanted to continue working remotely indefinitely, and even before the pandemic hit it was looking unnecessary.

     The silence was deafening. Everyone was backchannel messaging each other.

     "Wait, they're still building this?"

     "I thought this was cancelled"

     "Who's gonna tell 'em?"

     "What a clusterfuck"

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     Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 12:50:03 JST Rod Hilton

     in reply to

     Then 2 months later in March, COVID sent all employees globally to their homes to work. Every employee in all locations worked remotely except for a few isolated folks who were keeping servers running near the two data centers and headquarters.

     2 months later, in May, Jack Dorsey announced that the entire company was Work From Home Forever - permanently. Even "when the pandemic is over"

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     Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 12:50:03 JST Rod Hilton

     in reply to

     There were some adjustment pains at first but after a few months folks became pretty comfortable working from home.

     Most of the challenges were actually due to the pandemic itself like school closures, and the vast majority of the company was on-board with remote indefinitely.

     Sometime around late 2021, after Twitter Boulder had been comfortably working from home for about a year and a half, we got an update from REW about how much progress was being made on the new office location.

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     Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 12:50:04 JST Rod Hilton

     in reply to

     This seemed strange at the time, since so many people had started working from home that it was honestly feeling like everyone who wanted to be in the office could probably just fit back into the Walnut office top floors. There was no demand.

     The new office would be much further away from the city transit hub, more inconvenient to get to, and people were upset that they were building a parking lot, as it would discourage eco-friendly transportation.

     But the 3D renderings did look pretty neat.

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     Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 12:50:05 JST Rod Hilton

     in reply to

     Twitter had been moving toward a "remote first" philosophy, and most of these teams were already geolocated. If you came into the office there was a good chance you'd spend most of the day in a conference room, if you could find one.

     So more and more people who were assigned to these work locations were just working from home and "never going back."

     I actually got in trouble with my manager, who was located in San Francisco, for not "badging in" enough. I sent her this.

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     Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 12:50:05 JST Rod Hilton

     in reply to

     In response to the general dislike for the two attempted expansions, REW announced in early 2020 that they would soon begin construction on a brand new office space to motivate people to come back to the office.

     The Walnut location would close down entirely, as would the nearby fake office. This new building was being built specifically for Twitter Boulder, and would easily house all current employees as well as all the ones that were going to be hired in the next few years.

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     Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 12:50:06 JST Rod Hilton

     in reply to

     Everyone hated this office too, and the people who were assigned to it started asking if they could move back to the Twitter Dungeon because it wasn't looking so bad anymore.

     Twitter Boulder had segmented into 3 classes. The upper class on floors and 3 and 4 in the actual office (where all the executives were located). The middle class in the dungeon. The lower class dumped into the unloved fake office where your company badge didn't even work - you had to carry a second one.

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     Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 12:50:07 JST Rod Hilton

     in reply to

     This location didn't connect to the Walnut office, so walking between offices meant taking the one working elevator down to the ground floor, walking outside, going about one block around the corner, entering the Walnut office, and finally taking the elevator up 3 floors.

     This office opened in December of 2019 in Colorado so it was cold or snowing often, which meant bundling up to go take a meeting or even get a printout, as the printer never worked and IT never visited.

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     Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 12:50:07 JST Rod Hilton

     in reply to

     Though there were windows, the work areas had no carpeting, so your rolling chairs would be constantly trying to smoothly inch you away from your desk towards the middle of the room, you had to clutch your desktop to stop from rolling away.

     When we asked for carpeting to be installed, REW threw some random rugs on the floor that weren't cut to fit the room, so they would sort of just lay in the middle of the room or curl upright against corners and walls.

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     Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 12:50:08 JST Rod Hilton

     in reply to

     There was a great deal of drama as teams fought NOT to be reassigned to the "Twitter Dungeon" as it came to be called (REW hated this name and thwarted attempts to have laptop stickers printed).

     It became the place to take meetings when the conference rooms on 3 & 4 were booked, or the floor with a guaranteed empty bathroom if the stalls were full.

     People would come down to use the facilities, then ascend back to the surface world while we digital Drow asked if they had news from the up above.

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     Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 12:50:08 JST Rod Hilton

     in reply to

     The discontent with the basement location was strong and the office was still growing, so another attempt was made.

     Twitter tried to lease the east side of the building but the landlord asked for too much money, so Twitter subleased the top floor of the building behind it.

     Subleasing meant it wasn't decorated with Twitter design or outfitted like the main office. There were still logos of the company that leased it out.

     It always felt like the fake office, which is how people referred to it.

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     Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 12:50:09 JST Rod Hilton

     in reply to

     Since it was in a basement, there were no windows. The entire area felt like some kind of Twitter-themed tomb with big glass walls or weird hanging soundproof panels separating work areas.

     Nobody liked being down there because it was separated from the main common areas and all of the other employees. It felt isolated & lonely - coming into the office typically meant you wouldn't see anyone else except when you took the extremely slow elevator upstairs for lunch.

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     Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 12:50:10 JST Rod Hilton

     in reply to

     Twitter operated out of a Boulder office on Walnut St. for years, mostly housing the employees of Gnip, a company that sold Twitter data to enterprise customers which Twitter had acquired.

     The Walnut office consisted of the top two floors, 3 and 4.

     Slowly the office morphed from being "Gnip" to being a genuine Twitter office, with folks from all kinds of teams working out of the office including Timelines, DMs, Trust&Safety, and Tweets. Most of the teams were geo-distributed.

     It grew fast.

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     Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 12:50:10 JST Rod Hilton

     in reply to

     By early 2019 people started cramming extra folks into the desks ("desk buddies"). People who were often in meetings (product mostly) were asked to hotdesk.

     To alleviate this, Twitter leased the basement of the building, as floors 1 and 2 were leased to other companies. Construction on the basement location was pretty secretive, with the REW (Real Estate and Workplace) team wanting to unveil the new space in a grand opening when complete.

     August 2019 the space opened and... everyone hated it.

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     Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 12:50:23 JST Rod Hilton

     in reply to

     It honestly seemed like something that had just fallen through the cracks. Like the team designing and building it simply never got a memo to stop, and kept at it. Something that someone, somewhere should have seen as a line item and said "no, axe that" to save money in the middle of this acquisition.

     It was almost unreal that nothing had stopped it from being completed. And it wasn't just a fake thrown together pseudo-office, this was *gorgeous*.

     Twitter iconography everywhere.

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     Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 12:50:23 JST Rod Hilton

     in reply to

     People were asked to come into the office, largely so photos could be taken without it looking abandoned. It didn't work, even the grand opening of the space only brought about 15 people in, 2 of whom were required to be there to staff the front desk.

     3 days later, Elon Musk was invited to an all-hands AMA where he was repeatedly asked about remote work and layoffs, to which he was noncommittal about his plans, though he did talk a bit about alien civilizations.

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     Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 12:50:23 JST Rod Hilton

     in reply to

     So there sat this new building. A huge, cavernous waste of money. A monument to a corporate unwillingness or inability to change course in light of new information. A shrine to inflexibility.

     Countless art installations from who knows how many local artists, all for an audience of nobody, locked behind badge access.

     Engineering areas filled with hundreds and hundreds of dual monitor setups connected to exactly zero computers. A sparkling new, modern constructed abandoned ghost building.

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     Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 12:50:23 JST Rod Hilton

     in reply to

     Musk completed the purchase of Twitter 4 months later, and almost immediately fired the entire Twitter Boulder team.

     The TwitterBoulder Twitter account never even posted about the opening of its new office, the account seemingly abandoned since 2021 save for one Tweet the day Musk began buying shares, advising employees to take care of themselves.

     The Site Lead was the only person who even mentioned the opening publicly, in a Tweet replied to almost entirely by ex-employees wanting to "visit"

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     Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 12:50:23 JST Rod Hilton

     in reply to

     The new office rivaled the SF headquarters in expense if not size, including a full kitchen for in-house chefs to cook meals for employees, but no chefs were ever hired.

     I'll bet the vast majority of Twitter Boulder alum reading the headline "Twitter evicted from Boulder office" are picturing Walnut St, completely forgetting that the headlines are referring to the new office, one they never stepped foot in or likely even saw.

     Paul Cantrell repeated this.
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     Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 12:50:23 JST Rod Hilton

     in reply to

     It is stunning to think of all the people who were paid money to design & build this office, all to have the company kicked out of the space without anyone ever even using it.

     There have been so few people to ever step foot in that building that I would imagine everything is still in absolutely pristine condition, but branded with Twitter design that now has to be ripped out by a landlord who constructed the building just for Twitter, and never collected a dime.

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     pettter (pettter@mastodon.acc.umu.se)'s status on Sunday, 18-Jun-2023 16:17:33 JST pettter

     in reply to

     @rodhilton ...the floors weren't flat?