Elon Musk is a nice chap

[Kjelt]

Perhaps his plan is to create a 40 billion$ tax write off before the end of the year.

[JohanH]

The doors are locked and it looks like the staff have walked out.

 And people trusted this trainwreck to take them to Mars. 

[tszaboo]

I've been following the news, and it's been quite comical. I hope others will realize who they have been working for. I guess we can conclude at some point that 95% of Tesla's success is done by the engineers putting in the countless hours of unpaid overtime, often during the weekend with the treat of being fired if you don't work 10 hours on a Sunday.
I mean the guy just fired 50% of the workforce, and told the rest that they have to do mandatory overtime now. I really wonder when the servers will shut down.

[Psi]

Twitter needed to change if it's to become profitable.
And of course that has to be Elon's first priority.
Investors and management boards as a group like to keep risks low and go after short term gains. Where as an individual company owner will take more risks and look more at long term goals.


There are two approaches to making changes.
- The slow methodical way with lots of meetings, reports and market research, etc
- The chaotic 'throw everything at the wall to see what sticks' approach. Keep changing things on the fly to see what happens. Learn and innovate fast.

We all know Elon favours the 2nd option.
It's the same as the difference between NASA and SpaceX.  NASA spends an insane amount of time and money to get their rockets right first time.  Elon builds them like lego and blows them up to learn and improve the next one.  So far the SpaceX approach seems much cheaper and faster and definitely more interesting to watch.

I don't think Elon is really all that concerned about destroying twitter in the short term. He believes if he builds a better twitter people will use it.

The challenge that he faces is that social media is more of a touchy feely social science and not technical science, and he has Asperger's.
So we will have to wait and see if his idea of a 'better twitter' is actually what the people and advertisers want.

[Psi]

I mean the guy just fired 50% of the workforce, and told the rest that they have to do mandatory overtime now. I really wonder when the servers will shut down.

I don't think we can make the assumption that twitter needed all of that workforce, and that with 50% less the remaining employees must work twice as hard to get the same work done.
I would expect that most of what those 50% were doing was not all that important (side projects and things other than core functionality)

The employees that remain will likely have a much higher percentage of people who truly enjoy the work and honestly want to make twitter better, rather than people who show up for a pay cheque.
Any engineer knows that your productivity is directly tied to how much you enjoy the work you're doing and it can be a 2x or 3x factor.

[tszaboo]

I mean the guy just fired 50% of the workforce, and told the rest that they have to do mandatory overtime now. I really wonder when the servers will shut down.

I don't think we can make the assumption that twitter needed all of that workforce, and that with 50% less the remaining employees must work twice as hard to get the same work done.
I would expect that most of what those 50% were doing was not all that important (side projects and things other than core functionality)

The employees that remain will likely have a much higher percentage of people who truly enjoy the work and honestly want to make twitter better, rather than people who show up for a pay cheque.
Any engineer knows that your productivity is directly tied to how much you enjoy the work you're doing and it can be a 2x or 3x factor.

OK, and then he introduced, that you can walk away from the company with 3 month of severance, and people - get this- choose to walk away. As I hear he is down to 10% of the original employees, but the news are contradicting.

[Psi]

yeah, I ignore rumors about most of this stuff, really need a 1st hand source saying it and even then the info is still somewhat questionable.

I 100% believe there are many many news articles and posts with totally made up things about Elon just for the clicks.
And i don't mean just quoted out of context, which I'm sure there is lots too, but totally made up.

It happens for any hot topic, clickbait works.

[wraper]

but I am betting that at least 90% of the employees that have not already been let go or resigned are updating their resumes and looking for jobs.

Good luck with that considering Meta fired 11k of employees including 2.4k in California. Not to say recession is coming.

There is no possible way he was able to learn how the company works and what everyone he let go does in such a short period of time. I have seen companies acquired before with far more tact that still failed because the new owner didn't understand the company culture and they lost key people, which then made the jobs of everyone remaining much more difficult and crushed morale so the dominoes kept falling.

IMHO what he does not like the most is the previous company culture. Frankly from outside it looks like a woke shithole which do not care about making the money for company. So he crushed it on the root to outright implement a new work culture rather than do a hopeless attempt trying to change existing one in a long term.

[tszaboo]

but I am betting that at least 90% of the employees that have not already been let go or resigned are updating their resumes and looking for jobs.

Good luck with that considering Meta fired 11k of employees including 2.4k in California. Not to say recession is coming.

Facebook's share price has been in a steady decline since the rebranding, and Zukenberg is hell bent on making his Metaverse work. That nobody cares about. 90% of the people are not interested in VR, 90% of the remaining people don't own a gaming PC strong enough of that, 90% of the remaining people are not interested in crypto, digital ownership and other bubbles, and probably 50% of the remaining group loathes Facebook enough not to sign up. So what does he do? Pour Billions into developing this:

 

[Sal Ammoniac]

The employees that remain will likely have a much higher percentage of people who truly enjoy the work and honestly want to make twitter better, rather than people who show up for a pay cheque.
Any engineer knows that your productivity is directly tied to how much you enjoy the work you're doing and it can be a 2x or 3x factor.

That’s fine if you’re a twenty something single guy with no social life, but if you’re married, and particularly if you have kids, forget it. If you fall into the latter category and decide to take Musk up on his offer, you’d better have a divorce lawyer on retainer.

[Bud]

Musk forcing employees to work 24/7 is a clickbait BS. There are labor laws, none of Musks on the planet would be able to do that. Especially when all the liberal hienas will be watching to bite him on that.

[wraper]

[james_s]

Good luck with that considering Meta fired 11k of employees including 2.4k in California. Not to say recession is coming.

You've listed one other company that let go around 10%, now realize there are literally thousands of tech companies in the Bay Area and PNW. Layoffs are common in tech, it comes in cycles, 10% is clearing out the dead weight. It may take a bit of time but I think most of the people that were let go or resigned from Twitter will find something else without too much difficulty.

I'm not a fan of the Twitter company culture either, but it is what it is, and if you cause enough of the critical people that know how things work to leave then what exactly do you have left? I think most of the advertisers would have eventually come back after the acquisition, but the very public way this whole shit show is going down I think will scare off a lot of them for good. Twitter was never a cash cow and now they have a massive drop in income and entire teams have resigned.

[james_s]

That’s fine if you’re a twenty something single guy with no social life, but if you’re married, and particularly if you have kids, forget it. If you fall into the latter category and decide to take Musk up on his offer, you’d better have a divorce lawyer on retainer.

If it were me, I would take him up on his offer to buy time, and then immediately set to work searching for a new job. Then again, the 3 months of severance is pretty generous and it could be worth just taking that to preserve my mental health. I have about 2 years of "screw you money" though so my situation may be better than a lot of them.

[TimFox]

A recent news article about the layoffs and Musk's thin skin about criticism.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/technology/elon-musk-twitter-fired-criticism.html

[wraper]

Good luck with that considering Meta fired 11k of employees including 2.4k in California. Not to say recession is coming.

You've listed one other company that let go around 10%, now realize there are literally thousands of tech companies in the Bay Area and PNW. Layoffs are common in tech, it comes in cycles, 10% is clearing out the dead weight. It may take a bit of time but I think most of the people that were let go or resigned from Twitter will find something else without too much difficulty.

I'm not a fan of the Twitter company culture either, but it is what it is, and if you cause enough of the critical people that know how things work to leave then what exactly do you have left? I think most of the advertisers would have eventually come back after the acquisition, but the very public way this whole shit show is going down I think will scare off a lot of them for good. Twitter was never a cash cow and now they have a massive drop in income and entire teams have resigned.

They can find another job but it will be problematic to do at big tech, and small companies do not pay nearly as much. Which is a huge problem to people living in bay area due to astronomical cost of living.

[wraper]

A recent news article about the layoffs and Musk's thin skin about criticism.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/technology/elon-musk-twitter-fired-criticism.html

It's not a thin skin. It's idiots talking shit about company owner in business chat. Big brain.

[AndyBeez]

I ain't no Muskovite, but hell yah, aboot time someone send a rocket up the sector.

Wearing my (tweed) business modelling hat here, Twitter, Yahoo, Facebook, Insta, Google and a whole flight lounge of Crypto startups, are what I term Campus Corporations.

The Campus Corporation is a business with a culture matching the laid back campuses from whence their employees originate. Rather than being a place where people come to work, it's the place where dudes come to hang out. And dudettes, if they can stand the geek banter.

I remember visiting a 'major internet startup' in central west London and leaving the place wondering, why the hell do they need a slide in the lobby? Is the answer because, that's what they did at Stanford? Okay, it was to keep their employees happy, but who the hell employs five year olds?

Whether you call them a new media, web based or pure digital business, regardless of how many thousand over keen and super excitted employees slash interns fill their Jungle Book themed gym for puppy yoga, there will only ever be three people in that organisation that will be able to deal with your problems in an effective way.

Elon may have his head in some weird molniya orbit around reality, but he might just be on the right trajectory.

[Sal Ammoniac]

Elon may have his head in some weird molniya orbit around reality, but he might just be on the right trajectory.

It appears that Musk is taking Twitter from what you call a Campus Corporation mentality to a Soviet labor camp mentality...

[wraper]

You've listed one other company that let go around 10%, now realize there are literally thousands of tech companies in the Bay Area and PNW. Layoffs are common in tech, it comes in cycles, 10% is clearing out the dead weight. It may take a bit of time but I think most of the people that were let go or resigned from Twitter will find something else without too much difficulty.

[james_s]

They can find another job but it will be problematic to do at big tech, and small companies do not pay nearly as much. Which is a huge problem to people living in bay area due to astronomical cost of living.

It's all a tradeoff, the big companies pay more because they typically have higher expectations but the smaller companies are not exactly offering poverty wages. I work in software and I make a pretty good living at a company nobody has heard of. Also big tech will be hiring again, probably in a year or so, we've seen these kinds of cuts before and we will see them again, things will perk up eventually. If a person wants to work long hours at high intensity there are scores of startups that offer the potential of a big payoff if they succeed. Twitter can't really offer that, it's already a mature company.

[james_s]

The employees that remain will likely have a much higher percentage of people who truly enjoy the work and honestly want to make twitter better, rather than people who show up for a pay cheque.
Any engineer knows that your productivity is directly tied to how much you enjoy the work you're doing and it can be a 2x or 3x factor.

I think the employees that remain will be a much higher percentage of people that are desperate and do not have another option lined up. I would expect at least 50% of those still there to depart within the next year as they find other jobs, dependent on what the overall economy does.

Do you think anyone is going to enjoy working in a place where they've seen more than half of their colleagues let go and where others are fired at the drop of the hat for saying the wrong thing? A place where they are expected to work long hours and exceptional work is merely a "passing grade"? I don't think so. I've never worked at Twitter or had any desire to do so but I have almost my entire career in the software industry and I know the industry better than most of the armchair quarterbacks out there commenting on it. You don't retain and recruit top talent by being volatile and impulsive and making unreasonable demands.

[coppice]

You've listed one other company that let go around 10%, now realize there are literally thousands of tech companies in the Bay Area and PNW. Layoffs are common in tech, it comes in cycles, 10% is clearing out the dead weight.

Well, that's the theory. Many studies show that in layoffs its usually the very best people who move on, because the people with get up and go find it relatively easy to do so.

[james_s]

Well, that's the theory. Many studies show that in layoffs its usually the very best people who move on, because the people with get up and go find it relatively easy to do so.

You seem to be confusing layoffs with resignations. Layoffs are involuntary, it's true that people often resign around the time layoffs are occurring but that is a separate issue.

[TimFox]

Well, that's the theory. Many studies show that in layoffs its usually the very best people who move on, because the people with get up and go find it relatively easy to do so.

You seem to be confusing layoffs with resignations. Layoffs are involuntary, it's true that people often resign around the time layoffs are occurring but that is a separate issue.

Parsing his sentence, I believe he means that when a layoff ("RIF") occurs, other people (who the employer intended to retain) get up and go, as a result of the situation (understaffing and bad morale) caused by the RIF.