Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/25/technology/twitter-employ...
> At the meeting with employees on Monday [April 25], executives tried to assure employees that they wouldn’t be shortchanged by Mr. Musk’s acquisition. Mr. Agrawal told employees that their stock options would convert to cash when the deal with Mr. Musk closes, which he estimated would take between three and six months. Employees would receive their same benefits packages for a year after the deal was finalized and there were no immediate plans for layoffs, he added.
https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1587042365084209153?...
> I talked with an engineering manager who was at Twitter for 5+ years, and got laid off on Sunday "for cause". They were too exhausted from working over the weekend to talk longer: they first need to sleep.
Also one perennial observation with authoritarian-friendly people is that in their dog-eat-dog fantasy they are the badass warlord sitting atop a pile of bones rather than the nameless goon that lies at the bottom of the bonepile.
That said, should Twitter eventually fall apart it will never be the fault of Musk. It will be because insiders preventing his vision, or the government blocked him, or any number of excuses.
Musk doesn't meet the cause outlined in their employment contracts. They'll get their executive early termination severance but it'll require some legal action first.
Do they even have employment contracts?
Does this mean that they have or deserve different rights under contract law than others do? What if their counterparty is even less "strapped for cash"?
Both are injustices. The former isn’t much of a risk to life. The latter could literally result in life or death situations.
If someone has 10 lollipops and loses 1, that’s not “selective empathy” to feel differently than about someone else who has 1 lollipop and loses everything.
Now, at some level, it still stinks that the CEO is getting paid so many tens of millions of dollars for less than a year's worth of work. To solve that, you'd have to cut CEO pay in the first place, because just removing the parachute would incentivize clinging to their existing paychecks.
I had reports from friends who worked there that they were asked to stay available over the weekend, presumably for situations like this, or requests from the "war room" group that has been setup.
One of the things Elon said was that there appears to be 3 managers for every engineer. I understand the need for a few PMs but if there really was a 3:1 ratio that’s just absurd.
Maybe more interesting, there are a lot of roles that have "manager" in the name somehow. Product Manager is the obvious one, Program Managers exist, and I'm sure there are others, not to mention that every function has managers in one shape or form if they're at all scaled out -- there's managers for designers, lawyers, accountants, etc at a fairly predictable ratio at every company I've worked at.
Amusingly, Twitter was one of the most manager-lite companies I ever worked at when I started. In 2011 the ratio was a lot closer to 50:1 than it was 1:10.
Perhaps Musk is simply taking everyone with manager in their role and implying they're managing other people. This is not the case and is willfully misrepresenting people's work if so. Par for the course for this guy, though.
Even laying off 25% of the workers would be hard to justify at this point. I'm certainly curious where this all is going.
If your colleagues gets fired for some bs reason you and your other colleagues can stand for each other by striking.
That's because unions are an integral part of the way many of the countries socio-political systems work. In Norway, for instance, the trades unions and the employers get together once a year to hammer out what is called tarriflønn, essentially the going rate for each broad type of job. The state provides a referee for the meetings whose job is to keep them on track and to encourage both sides to compromise. Unions and companies work together rather than fight each other, most of the time.
But this can only work if there is a broad consensus that we are all in the same boat and that we will all be better off if we work together.
The attitude, that appears to be common, in the US that employers are always exploitative, employees are always lazy and thieving, that the government is just a parasite, and that the aphorism "Good enough for government work" is a synonym for delivering shoddy work means that no one trusts anyone so you end up fighting all the time.
On a side note, what happens to health insurance for employees who're let go? Does it end the time of your last day or midnight? I was too afraid to Google it as I likely knew it's be pretty cut throat, but have always stressed about it regardless.
Fire for cause means "you aren't doing your job properly."
Redundancy means "your job is no longer required."
If twitter restructures to save money, the jobs that no longer exist have been made redundant.
Maybe I misunderstood the point you were trying to make?
In US usage, the general term here is “layoff”. And severance is not a legal requirement, and practices vary considerably by industry and, within industries, by individual firm. Layoff is eligible for unemployment, while firing may or may not be. (The line is also looser because the US has at-will employment, so there are very little general rules–other than those in particular employment contracts of unionized or high-status employees–around termination other than for prohibited purposes, or–mostly around warning periods–mass terminations, but there are conditions for unemployment assistance.)
The downside of employee protections is that it makes companies more reluctant to hire. And also once hired, the salary to be offered is reduced to cover the estimated current value of the future employee protections. These are real downsides, particularly for young people who are trying to get a foot into the corporate ladder.
I have even personally witnessed a situation where a company evaluated a legal change to increase employee protections, and decided to layoff almost everyone in a particular country before the new law took effect. (The company was Pictage, the country was Argentina, and this was a bit over a dozen years ago.)
So I'll take the up front downsides of at will over the hidden downsides of employee protections.
Employee protection exists because there's a huge power imbalance. A company who can constantly just say, "we'll fire you if this doesn't get done" and colludes with other companies on such matters makes it very difficult for workers. This is why employee protection, unions, etc... exist.
Nothing comes for free.
I wouldn't, but being in a country with employee protections means the people around me are almost never placed in a desparate situation, and I am meaningfully safer because of that.
People should save for a rainy day, anyway. Why must the employer be their parents?
I don't buy the idea that people in a free country like the US somehow found the one and only job they could ever have.
It's inevitable.
And when people get desperate some turn to crime. Which then increases your costs through increased taxation for policing and incarceration and secondary effects such as reduced safety and increased personal costs due to crime, such as increased insurance costs and the greater threat of being targeted.
So when all costs are internalized, worker protections pay dividends at making a society better for all involved, for example the many northers European countries with very low crime and very strong worker protections.
"Extreme"? What nonsense. I know many middle class people who don't have a spare $400 for an emergency. They also have a boat in the driveway. They don't have an income problem, they have a spending problem.
> And when people get desperate some turn to crime.
Or sell the boat. I remember one couple I counselled that couldn't pay the rent, but had a new car. I suggested they sell that, and buy one they could afford. I was surprised to find out that's just what they did.
It's not a poverty problem, it's a financial management problem. Don't conflate that with being actually poor.
> when people get desperate some turn to crime.
Crime causes poverty, not the other way around.
The downside to treating employees like children is a lower standard of living.
As to finding another job: of course they will, but switching costs are pretty high for job changes.
This kind of directly speaks to the commenters point. There may have “little good”, but enough reason until the legal change to increase employee protections created “no good reason”.
People use the same argument to justify removing minimum working age laws, weekend laws, OSHA laws, EPA protections, retirement, healthcare etc.
In a pure unregulated market, employers would be able to offer employees much higher salaries!
The reality is somewhere in the middle. Though what America thinks is reasonable is very different than what the rest of the developed world thinks is.
Maybe not, but the world isn't zero-sum. Some things really do raise or lower the overall average.
> I have even personally witnessed a situation where a company evaluated a legal change to increase employee protections, and decided to layoff almost everyone in a particular country before the new law took effect. (The company was Pictage, the country was Argentina, and this was a bit over a dozen years ago.)
What was the law change? And how long would it have been before those employees were laid off otherwise? That's an interesting datapoint to hear about, but "employee protections" can mean many different things.
> So I'll take the up front downsides of at will over the hidden downsides of employee protections.
Unfortunately you don't get to skip out on the hidden downsides of at will either.
The 2008 financial crisis had left the company in a position where it needed to downsize anyways, and the board of directors gave the CEO the choice between covering that liability by making the US layoff bigger, or avoiding the extra liability by getting rid of basically the whole Argentinian operation. The CEO chose to preserve US jobs.
The Argentinian operation would have seen a layoff either way. But nowhere near as dramatic as the one that actually happened.
At-will is a huge risk for the individual, since they're going from roughly 100 % employment to 0 % employment.
On the other hand, in a decently sized organisation (where employee protection is typically enforced), being stuck with a bad employee and asking them for meaningless work that bothers nobody else means paying for 100 % capacity and only getting, say, 94 % of it. Over a large number of employees, the organisation can be fairly confident of what this percentage will be. Much smaller risk.
In other words, the utility cost for the employer of employee protection is smaller than the utility cost of at-will for the individual.
(Homeowner's insurance is a similar type of situation. Makes no sense to the individual if you look at the dollar costs, but in terms of utiles it does actually work out for both parties in most cases. Another case is hedging major business expenses -- costs more, but you and the counterparty both lose fewer utiles from it.)
Yep, that why software engineers in California and New York, where there are a lot of employee protections, don't get paid as much as SWEs in the Midwest or the South, where there are less... Right?
Or maybe the real economy is more complex than the kiddie models you were taught in Econ 101?
Innovation hubs move. Historically, this has always been true. Right now those are SV and NY.
It won't remain so.
Innovation hubs have been in China, Middle East, Venice, London, etc.
The printing innovation lasted around 300 years. Steam engine another 150 years. The industrial revolution less than 100.
How long do you think computers will dominate major innovation? And if it does, will the innovation hub stay in SV ?
What happens if biotech takes over? MRNA tech ? Driverless cars ? VTOL ? Rocketry or Space Tourism ? ML or low-code apps changing the dev of software as we know it today ?
Do you see any of those hubs in SV ? Are they in SV today ?
Regardless: yes, all of these things are in SV today. If any of them proves to revolutionize society in our lifetime I think you'll find SV will retain its status.
My only note it is that isn’t 40 years. For SV it’s more like 60 years (going back to the founding of Fairchild) or even longer if you want to go back as far as HP and other radio shops.
For NYC, it’s even longer. IBM has had a major NYC presence since at least the 30s (and obviously its main HQ is less than 40 miles from midtown)! Bell Labs/AT&T was based in Manhattan before moving to New Jersey and obviously is still in the NYC are. And that goes back to the 20s I think.
Not to mention other NYC and NYC adjacent companies like GE. So we’re going back 100 years or more for NYC and 80 for SV.
Xerox’s history combines both areas.
And as you said, Texas has a strong history too with the Motorola stuff and Silicon Prairie.
Historically speaking, Seattle is a relatively new entrant in computing and innovation, only really being a hub for 40 years or so (unless you count Boeing and then it back over 100 years), but is the home of two of the biggest companies of the last 50 years, Microsoft and Amazon.
Dozens and dozens of cities all over the world have tried to be the Silicon Valley of X and none have succeeded. And New York is extremely unique as a global center in dozens of different industries from finance to media to fashion to the arts.
Obviously things could be disrupted. But both of these areas have been innovation hubs for over 100 years, which given the short history of this country, is remarkable.
Both are at will states. So easy to hire, easy to fire.
When California says you can fire an employee for any reason, what they really mean is any reason except for a bunch of reasons we've decided are unacceptable.
You can still see this in many developing countries, children on assembly lines in China, or how a clothing factory in Bangladesh caved in killing most women working there.
TANSTAAFL is obviously and demonstrably false - child labour leaves them without education and traps them in poverty. Their creativity and future potential is lost to society. Employees without hands are an obvious loss to society. But the employer doesn't care, he saved a few bucks on safety. He isn't paying the cost. This argument further extends to education and beyond.
The argument of TANSTAAFL was used by coal companies in the 1920's. At the time they used to hire assassins to murder Union leaders and even killed the local sheriff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg9xywAxb10
This also sometimes happens in developing nations today, sometimes at the behest of western companies.
This is a fallacy. Companies will pay employees as little as possible. Why would they pay you more just because employee protections were removed?
And vice versa… if multiple companies want that resource.. they all have 20% more to bid with
I wonder how many his employees in Tesla/SpaceX/where ever are currently incentivised by stock options, who’d watch their boss doing that to Twitter people and wonder why they bother working evenings and weekends, if the options can be yanked as cruelly as that?
Also, because of being outmaneuvered, he may be seeking any chance to stick his finger in the eye of the people who did it. That the logical consequences will be that his finger gets cut off... well, as I said, I'm not sold on his foresight at the moment.
Elon is interacting and trying to dodge this act. He seems to want to cut Twitter's workforce at a scale that the WARN act covers.
There's the WARN Act, but I don't think that impacts what happens after a duly-warned layoff, unless I'm mistaken?
Technically the company can't get around the WARN act through severance but it is essentially pre-paying the damages so there's no reason to go to court.
No, you're thinking of a restricted version of the second definition from Merriam-Webster, while it was clearly the first definition that was meant.
precedent. noun
1. an earlier occurrence of something similar
2. a : something done or said that may serve as an example or rule to authorize or justify a subsequent act of the same or an analogous kind a verdict that had no precedent b : the convention established by such a precedent or by long practice
The "has" makes it seem like it was a legal statement. It probably should be been worded differently
"...so that's a precedent that shows that Musk is willing/has done something like this"
Those that remained productive will probably have better prospects for keeping their jobs, and for suing if they're fired.
To a first approximation I would guess 0.
When a company is teetering on calamity, people don't just stop doing things, they just stop doing things in organized, co-ordinated ways.
More than that, firing people for cause usually requires records and a demonstration of dialog the the person (not all jurisdictions) and is hard to demonstrate.
You're severely overstating it. The difference between 500 loc and 5000 loc isn't a clear signal of anything. But zero lines of code certainly is. Firing people because the VCS shows they stopped working is common.
I have no stake in the matter. My supposition that some employees simply stopped working comes from my experience seeing similar things happen at other companies during periods of uncertainty, and from my knowledge that quite a few twitter employees were very uncertain about their future with twitter.
Should I be fired?
You can do -100. You can do 100. You can net zero from 100 adds and 100 subtracts (abs=200). But it’s something. If you have long stretches of zero that’s not good.
But I hope they have something productive to show for the other 20 odd days that month they collected their paycheque for…
not everything is committed in a VCS: you have documentation, architecture, RFC etc etc depending on the size of the company and seniority of the employee.
I don’t think it’s an absolute rule that no commits means someone isn’t developing. But it’s probably a reason to have a conversation.
Sometimes a great engineer spends a month tracking down a 3-line fix, and that’s just what happens with complex software. But by and large, if an engineer averages only a few LOC a month (and I’ve unfortunately seen this way too many times) then we probably have a problem on our hands.
How do the individual stats look at the end of the month/quarter/Musk Layoff Review Period when these kinds of days are relatively common?
It does, however, bring up the point that one should always be mindful of what their output looks like and how easy it is to prove. I'm sure everyone has worked with a 'meeting commando', who loves to discuss edge cases and bikeshed instead of shipping code. Maybe they've carved out a nice niche doing so, and have convinced others in the company of their (dubious) value, but it shouldn't be surprising when the company is sold/acquired/RIFd that someone else might expect someone with an engineering title to have more tangible contributions to point to.
I think a lot of software engineers get too comfortable with the idea that meetings are deliverables - they aren't; meetings are coordination and planning. if nobody completes the work that was coordinated and planned, the meeting was nothing but a waste of time. Depending on your seniority as an engineer, you may have written code to decide that the work should be done, or you may be tasked with writing code to carry out the plan. If you're an engineer and you're not writing code on either side of meetings, you should dig deep and figure out why.
The only parties being cited as fired for cause are the outgoing executives, and WaPo article at the top of this post provides reasons for that.
I think this might be the confusing part, because he's trying to claw back as much compensation as possible, maybe he's trying to avoid paying severance as well
Elsewhere in this thread, people are discussing a potentially-credible (but maybe you disagree) report on this from Gergely Orosz that does not paint this as "only the 3 senior executives".
https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1587042365084209153
> I talked with an engineering manager who was at Twitter for 5+ years, and got laid off on Sunday "for cause". They were too exhausted from working over the weekend to talk longer: they first need to sleep.
What I'm trying to wade through is the vast oceans of nonsense being fielded in the media and in comments that do not add anything to the story and are just trying to prop up one side or another. There's an ocean of difference between one item of hearsay that you point out (hell, maybe that one EM was due to be fired "for cause" who knows? do you? I sure don't!), and 25% of the workforce being fired "for cause", and 4 executives (not 3 as you point out).
This is an oxymoron, so either the tweeter or the manager have no idea what he is talking about.
And the WaPo article states: “ The first round of layoffs, led by his lawyer Alex Spiro, will target 25 percent of the workforce”
It wouldn't because we're in a downturn and Twitter was already planning layoffs.
Or much more likely you give them 2-3 months severance which is basically the same as saying "you are laid off in 60 days, don't bother coming back to work". Technically they would be breaking the law but the severance would count against the damages under the WARN act so there's no reason to go to court about it.
EDIT: You might have to file with an elected official actually, the website is a bit unclear: https://edd.ca.gov/en/Jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WARN
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title29/cha...
§2102. Notice required before plant closings and mass layoffs
(a) Notice to employees, State dislocated worker units, and local governments
An employer shall not order a plant closing or mass layoff until the end of a 60-day period after the employer serves written notice of such an order—
(1) to each representative of the affected employees as of the time of the notice or, if there is no such representative at that time, to each affected employee; and
(2) to the State or entity designated by the State to carry out rapid response activities under section 3174(a)(2)(A) of this title, and the chief elected official of the unit of local government within which such closing or layoff is to occur.
If there is more than one such unit, the unit of local government which the employer shall notify is the unit of local government to which the employer pays the highest taxes for the year preceding the year for which the determination is made.
Tesla filed 3 WARN notices in California in July so Musk or Musk’s lawyers at least know how to file them.
From what I understand, Twitter’s standard terms of severance allow for two months salary and benefits and some sort of accelerated vesting towards the next quarter. That’s been the big question for employees because they vest quarterly (though each person could have a different vest date) and the terms of the acquisition were that RSUs were converted to cash to be paid out on the vest schedule. Some in the press speculated that Musk was trying to avoid paying our November 1 vests by firing early, but given that you’d need a WARN notice anyway, that wouldn’t prevent anything. If there was an accelerated vest you missed by a few days, that might be something that could be avoided, but I don’t know.
Still, even if you are paying out two months of benefits and salary (and potentially maybe even more, with accelerated vesting), that doesn’t mean a company doesn’t have to file a WARN notice.
And with the expected figures being 25% of employees (~1800 people), that figure would qualify as a mass layoff by federal definition, irrespective of the company’s total size, and irrespective of the 50 or 100 per site thresholds that are true for specific states.
Their CEO told them no layoffs were planned in the immediate future just a few months ago.
Why would this be? Musk has already signaled his lack of confidence in the previous management, why would this not extend to their hiring practices, training, HR policies, etc.?
The "for cause" bit is a transparently vindictive breach of contract. They will get their money and then some. In fact they may know some lawyers who know how to take Elon's money.
Closing the sarcasm, yes, layoffs have costs (various costs, including to the morale), but there are reasons why organisations do them anyways.
So, really those two long sentences should be rewritten:
Mr Agrawal, as an officer of the company, engaged in rampant speculation, perhaps to reassure employees (or himself) that their jobs were safe for three months to a year, even though Mr. Musk had repeatedly indicated otherwise.
2 - Depending on size of company and location, mass layoffs mean a ton of people looking for jobs at the same time.
Better to get ahead of such things, in my experience.
I actually think that, below the CEO level, the managers are engaged in wishful thinking, rather than deceit.
How do the designers who work at these tech companies not understand that repeatedly annoying non-user visitors doesn't make them want to sign up? Nor incentivize others to link to it?
I know how it happens, I've designed many a KPI. Something so fundamental and important as the default non-user first-exerpience (not just a 'signup flow') should be evaluated more holistically than just looking at numbers.
But I guess when you have layers of middle managers it's safer to point to a spreadsheet than make hard choices.
They'll tolerate you if you produce content to help keep the paying users engaged, but plenty of businesses choose not to pursue customers who are unlikely to generate profit.
It absolutely does, and that is precisely why they keep doing it. It doesn't work for the kinds of people that browse hackernews, but that's not their core audience anyway.
It's like saying ads don't work because you and me never click them because we use an adblock. Clearly they do work, and quite well...
>He requested that logged out users visiting Twitter.com be redirected to the Explore page that shows trending tweets and news stories, according to employees familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission. Before, visiting Twitter’s homepage while logged out showed only a sign-up form,
- https://twitter.com/joshelman/status/1586812933043933184
> Changing the logged out home page of Twitter to show more content is likely one of those “easy fixes” that has symbolic effect but very little to no metrics effect. I ran A/B tests on this in 2010. Usually the best way to grow Twitter active users is make people sign up first
Are ads for logged-in users so more profitable that it's worth it?
This is likely true, but only if there's an X. Facebook's growing sign-in box as you scroll down is not easily clicked away from.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. That’s why the Facebooks die and the Apples and Googles last.
You see videogames employing these psychological tactics constantly nowadays to completely min-max human behavior into spending money.
And I think that's probably true! But the person without much computer skills comes in with an expectation that stuff is gonna be hard. The egregious signup page isn't a surprise in that sense, it's just one of the many things they have to struggle with to use a computer.
An A/B then doesn't show any benefit for removing the signup page, only downside, because an A/B test only tests what happens if one feature changes. Our intuition can still be right; if we could do all the work to make it so a website is actually easy to use for someone without a lot of skills, like how Apple radically simplified the state of affairs with the iPod, that will positively defy peoples' expectations and make the app more accessible -- even if just simplifying any individual component doesn't do that.
Did get a phone-number nag that I was able to ticket myself out of.
Call me crazy, but maybe a site should be designed so people actually enjoy using it, rather than always optimizing for "growth".
Other instances here:
the site works whenever i login via a fresh, private browser session. for a minute i thought i was blocked after muting the words "elon" and "musk"
Doesnt work for me
Corporate raid is aimed at making changes to the company specifically to increase share price. The idea is that the resulting share price increase covers at least significant part of the cost of getting majority stake. This makes the buyout relatively cheap or even free.
Which of course makes little sense if you are also taking the company private.
I would also like to point out that the whole point of buying a controlling stake in the company usually is to exert some control. And to buy it out completely and take it private is to exert complete control without having to explain yourself (too much).
There is, of course, possibility of the investor buying shares because they are content with current management and do not plan to interfere even after they have acquired majority stake. But this, in my experience, is quite rare.
Care to point to your sources or are you just spreading misinformation?
Saudis are second largest shareholder in Twitter but their share is relatively slim. Also, just because Saudis bought the same thing I bought does not immediately mean they are my finance partners even if it somehow helped my goal.
Saudi finance partners were the reason he tweeted 'Funding Secured' in relation to Tesla. That's Tesla, not Twitter, but does show he has partnerships with the 'well connected Saudis'
Here, official Saudi statement that they are maintaining their $2bn stake in the company because it is in the long term interests of the Kingdom. So, maybe just business partners, not finance partners, although that's $2bn of cash that Musk won't have to pay out. Anyway, the substance of the point remains intact - there are many plausible reasons the current owners of twitter could want to continue operating it that are not in the classic corporate raiding plan.
Good luck finding some at Twitter.
If you look at twitter's own financial filings, they could easily be profitable if they just dropped their R&D budget. The filings claims in the 2021 year it only cost about $500 million to "operate" the platform, and the platform bought in over $5 billion in revenue.
All Musk is doing is switching the company priorities from growth to profit extraction.
In theory, you can drop the R&D spending to zero, and you can sit there claiming a cool 90% profit ratio. However, some of that R&D spending is probably "necessary" to the continued functioning of twitter as a platform, and it's improvement. If you dropped R&D to zero twitter (the platform) would slowly wither and die, but theoretically there is a happy medium where you can maximise for long-term profit and extract the maximum value over time (though, it still might be profitable to run the company into the ground eventually)
And what do they have to show for it?
The dirty not so secret of “we could be profitable if we just dropped our R&D budget” is that maintaining your existing revenue depends on that new development work.
Elon wanted to back out and the executives finessed him masterfully. Everyone with vested shares is a recipient of a $44,000,000,000 cash infusion into the bay area economy, while media stupidly focuses on cliffs and parachutes that wont be paid.
I don’t care what Elon does with Twitter tbh, as long as it’s something different. Good luck to him.
Musk won't change anything for the better.
On the other hand Musk's other companies don't seem to be as bad.
I will delay judgement on Twitter until I see what he does. There's no need to come to a strongly held conclusion about what he'll do from Twitter at this point. Everyone who's doing so is showing more about their opinions and prejudices than anything else at this point IMO.
How is it legal to (even threaten) firing if a new assigned task that takes a long time is not done on time?
In general employers are able to benefit from this symmetrical relationship more often though since they are only losing a small percentage of their workers while the employee is losing 100% of the income they were getting from that employeer.
GP was clearly talking about the assymetry of consequences, not the action itself. You intentionally misinterpreted them.
In general, I'd say at-will still favors employers, who are in a better position to structurally mitigate the threat of a critical employee leaving, even though they often don't do so.
A business can and must hedge against critical employees leaving. It's much harder as an employee to hedge against your employer giving you the boot.
There ARE "insurance" products that will "defer your credit/mortgage payments in case of a job loss" - they are almost all universally some form of scam (or at least a very bad "insurance").
But the bigger point is that unemployment insurance is very little money compared to a good professional salary.
I suppose the ultimate protection a person has is savings, and it's likely more cost-effective than any form of insurance - except it's hard in practice for most people, partly because they barely have any disposable income, and partly because it requires the degree of self-control many (if not most) don't have (and the overall culture isn't encouraging it).
You can debate whether it's enough or fair or whatever, but insurance against unemployment does exist for employees.
In tech, it is relatively easy for an employee to hedge against getting fired. It is a well paid job, in high demand.
It is not the same if the company fires its janitors, but I don't think I will stay in a literally filthy company that fires its janitors.
> In tech, it is relatively easy for an employee to hedge against getting fired. It is a well paid job, in high demand.
I have a friend who several years ago who was laid off with 3 months severance. They left feeling cheerful, telling people that if they couldn't find a job in 3 months, they deserved to be fired. Fortunately it only took slightly longer than 3 months and it's something we can laugh about now. The whole "it'll be easy to find a job with this skill-set" is true right up until it's not and is a risky backup plan.
Employers do not experience this same effect. Even if lots of people get laid off from a company without notice, there will almost always be people who are willing to take new jobs there.
Not really. I have not once been asked for references from previous companies.
You might make an assumption from the last item, but without specific details and by the time you might be confirming employment the ineligibility for rehire likely will not disqualify the candidate…especially if other former employers have you tagged as eligible.
If I quit without notice, high revenue systems could fail or not launch.
I kind of like software because of this. An individual has great value. Of course, I wouldn’t want to work for a company that fires people Willy nilly.
But for software at-will can definitely be asymmetric benefiting the employee. Software developers aren’t replaceable cogs.
In the US.
I'm glad I work in a country where workers actually have rights.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin...
Fascinating.
Of course, this comment is predicated on the assumption that America's loose labour laws are the reason for this salary disparity, and I'm not personally willing to follow you to that conclusion.
I think it's far more likely that American software engineers get paid more because the industry was effectively born there, and it was born there due to historical accidents like the US being where the transistor was invented, the advancement of technology due to government spending during World War II and the subsequent space race, etc, not to mention the US being the center of the VC world, which has its own deep history.
In other words, America has A but not B, Europe has B but not A, and there doesn't happen to be a place with both A and B, but it's not impossible in principle. Workers would still need to decide if they value A or B more, even if in a perfect world they could have both.
If it's the latter, absolutely you are right, and it is certainly the case that tech employees today are forced to make the choice between New York/California tech salaries and strong labour laws, regardless of whether or not there's a necessary inverse relationship between those two things.
If you can fire low performers, average performance will be higher, which means average pay will be higher. The risk is that you personally get mistaken for (...or correctly assessed as...) a low performer. Hence, tradeoffs.
There are states in the US where teacher's unions are out-lawed. US workers don't have rights. I have a feeling you might feel differently if not part of the segment of the working class that happens to be seeing benefits atm.
That’s a bold statement. Care to back it up?
> Collective Bargaining: The law limits collective bargaining for most public employees to wages. Total wage increases cannot exceed a cap based on the consumer price index (CPI) unless approved by referendum. Increases from the bargaining process for teachers are applied only to the base wages, and do not include the additional salary of teachers. Contracts are limited to one year and wages frozen until the new contract is settled. Collective bargaining units must take annual votes to maintain certification as a union. Employers cannot collect union dues, and members of collective bargaining units are not required to pay them.
1. https://www.businessinsider.com/states-where-teachers-unions...
Yes, in the EU I get paid a lot less, but the cost of living in Europe is also not nearly as expensive (although we also do pay more taxes). That's not even accounting for job security or workers rights, I seem to just have more money left over each month on average than any Americans I know of in the same industry because the cost of living is just lower and I have less heavy unexpected expenses (healthcare being the big one of course, but when I hear what US SWEs need to pay just to stay housed and fed, it makes absolutely no sense in prices compared to the EU).
That's not a case of risk aversion, its a case of relative vs absolute pay. In relative pay, the EU pays their employees just straight up better. The US is only better in absolute pay, but that gets drained quickly due to the local economy scaling up to match.
All of these relationships are two way. If they make a demand to change the expectations of working hours and work time, you say no, I won't do that. They can fire you if they don't like the relationship, but even in the US you're likely to win at least unemployment benefits.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/electronic-arts-faces-overt...
There are legal, labor, consequences for cultures that expect more than 40 hours on average.
You can fire an employee for no reason at all since employment is "at will". Musk probably assumes a good deal of the workforce is lazy and/or incompetent and he doesn't want to pay them. So he's figuring out who to fire.
It’s very common for companies to let individuals go before bonuses vest.
Usually your contracts doesn't specify time worked per week, only that you finish your work.
I think this is a reality check and a power play by Musk to remind employees of the fact.
I personally can’t see a good reason why it should be illegal outside the rare edge case where there is only a single employer in a geographical region, and even that unfortunate situation should probably be remediated with a different type of government intervention.
Employers should be able to be unreasonable and shoot their business in the foot, no?
No.
Not when they hold an employees ability to meet basic human needs and their access to Healthcare over their employee's heads.
At-will employment is ideologically built on the equal splitting of the power between an employer and employee. The reality is as far from equal as can be.
For certain types of jobs it's still the most effective method out there.
Not saying it's worth doing, or a good job, but they're out there, especially in the smaller towns.
There is a big one: the employer/employee is not a balanced relationship, the employer clearly has more power over where things go. So it's absolutely normal to protect the employee from being asked too much, especially when said employee doesn't benefit from the overtime.
There is a big bias towards taking companies as important citizens whose needs must be catered for, but it's taking more and more importance when the actual citizens aren't listened to. It is important to put companies back to what they are: a social construct for exploiting people and make profit from their work.
Sure it is, they want my labor, I want to sell my labor. We agree on a price.
If my price changes, or they are unwilling to buy it any more I find a new person to buy my labor.
I was looking for a job when I found this one, and I will be looking again when I find my next one.
Don't frame not wanting to take abuse as being entitled.
Everything in this story is a complete mess. The acquirer, his attitude towards workers, the entitlement and complete delusion of the workers and even more than that the misleading of the public AND the workers of the previous arguably failed management, along with their belief that they are the ultimate gatekeepers of truth in this world.
I'm not sure what deeper societal lesson this whole thing entails, but it definitely in part shows two societies, both of which are completely detached from the normal hardships an average human on this planet has to go through.
"Workers" is strange to me when talking about people who make 5-10x the national average (i.e. make more than many average executives in other industries). They're employees, but "workers" implies blue collar in my opinion. I'm fine with including staff in retail, restaurants etc, but someone making $500k+ a year doesn't fit into that category.
You are (understandably) conflating "worker" with "working class", but these are different contexts. A worker is anyone who must, well, work for a living as opposed to their income coming from property/capital.
Tying it to the salary makes sense to me. If you get paid minimum wage, asking you to work overtime without additional pay is unjust. You get paid a minimum wage worker's life-time-earnings per year? It's perfectly fine to ask you to come in this weekend for an urgent project.
Yes, I am a well-paid SWE. But I must still work for my salary; my income does not come from owning capital. That's the crucial difference.
Something on fire? Sure. Regulation means this project must be done Monday? Maybe, thought I'm wondering why management didn't start it sooner. A failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
New CEO sets an arbitrary deadline for no reason other than to cull the heard? Fuck that.
I imagine that at this point, many are staying until they get fired so they can collect severance pay.
That is what I would do. I absolutely would not work for Elon’s Twitter long term unless they paid me a king’s ransom, but I would definitely stick around and jump through the hoops just long enough to get a nice payout.
You look at your bank account and think "yeah, I AM a Rockstar! I DO deserve this! Everybody wants to be ME!"
Rinse and repeat that general attitude for ten years or so and blammo (which is even more explosive considering large chunks of the millennial generation were already coddled—and yes, I'm a millennial). You get a bunch of entitled brats who view anyone who isn't doing what they're doing as _less than_ (which is ironic considering those "less-thans" keep the bubble they live in running—electricity, food delivery, sewage systems, etc).
Pepper in the absolutely psychotic, cult-level diatribe these people sputter about "changing the world" and "making dents" and you have a low-level Jim Jones field jamboree brewing. It's absolutely zero surprise what's come out of SV over the last decade and change.
And that doesn't even factor in the pharmaceuticals!
Oh Lordy…I had a boss send me to a “management seminar that he found exceptional” that turned out to be that train wreck around 20 years ago. I think I lasted maybe an hour before I got up and left in the middle of the session with the speaker yelling at me to sit down (and some rude asshole trying to block me from leaving…unsuccessfully).
I called my boss and told him I left, that I didn’t care if he got a refund, and to fire me if he wanted (he didn’t).
Both behaviors are ignorant and exist in an altered state of reality that's long-term destructive.
The idea that an employee doesn't think think they need to work overtime even though the company has just changed ownership, because they think they know better than the company owner what needs to be done, view his requests as "whims", and believe that because the owner had comments and opinions about the company that singled out no engineer or manager by name that they therefore should be allowed to disregard this direction, is one of the most entitled things I've ever heard. Doubly so if they were one of the ones who had spent the past few years personally shitting all over Musk publicly.
Of course Santa Barbara is nicer, but the bay is nicer than most of the world. Maybe 75%.
it's the epitome of Twitter, overflowing with righteous indignation online but won't get off their ass to do anything IRL.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586885887341645824
I have a hard time believing there was not complicity between the 3 key execs, and Yoel Roth, according to that image.
This wasn’t needed and will be looked upon with embarrassment by him and all of tech in a decade.
If that doesn't make sense to you, not much will.
For sure it will be a hard time for the current team - both those that stay and those that go as it is with any significant change.
Solving the problem of fossil fuel for private transport? Meh.
Massive cost reductions in space exploration and development of reusable rocket boosters and technology to get us back to the moon? Pushover.
Ensure more people can drop the n-word and spread disinformation and hatred of democracy for free? This is important.
We don't live in Elon Musk's head and someone, at a personal level, can choose to take it as the GP's interpretation, but I think "Context is important" doesn't make sense at all when we all have the same context with different possible interpretations.
However, that doesn't mean I have to interpret his tweets in the worst possible way, or that I can't remind other people of basic principles of civility.
Cash flow last year $630 million.
I think 25% staff reductions is just a starting point.
A salesperson that has the ability to call the head of an advertising agency and get them to answer the phone is maybe the most valuable possible employee in any ad-supported business.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272140/employees-of-twit...
I remember it was a common meme on HN to ask what Twitter's thousands of employees did all day, even back in 2015. So maybe I'm falling into that trap. But I do still wonder.
They only have made a profit 2 out of the last 10 years.
This year is on track for a gain, but they sold some ad service for a billion which distorts things.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/unde...
The problem is, when the Fed gives out exceptionally cheap interest, it makes it incredibly easy to apply this strategy even when the underlying business would not benefit from it.
We simply left the tap on _way_ too long.
From 2016, the Glazers paid themselves annual dividends from the club, at over
£20 million every year from 2016 to 2020. In that same period, the club's debt
repayments "all but ceased", described The Daily Telegraph, while interest
payments continued. While paying dividends was common in business,
Manchester United were the sole Premier League club to "pay regular
dividends of any kind", reported The Daily Telegraph in May 2021
In these cases, cutting expenses by firing people is usually the first step, since the business' revenue stream can usually continue on autopilot for a while.
I expect Twitter to report record-breaking profits next quarter and Twitter's share price to go up accordingly. Maybe even enough to fill in some of Musk's hole.
LBOs were a cure to the poison of the post-war conglomerate [1]. Those were run as personal fiefdoms by aloof executives and their cronies.
The traditional check was M&A. Conglomerates having no clean competitors, this–in practice–meant a buyer putting up cash and borrowing the rest, buying the company, taking out a loan in the company's name, using that to pay themselves and then paying back the personal loan. The only purpose the buyer's credit served was to gatekeep. LBOs compress that process, letting anyone challenge management if they can convince investors/lenders to back their vision.
The debt financing burden is a further burden on Musk: twitter generates no free cash flow. Musk has to pay the creditors, and his co-investors are not likely to put in more cash. Musk and every other investor bought-in to a deal that now would be valued at about half what they paid. Depending on how the debt is secured, this also means twice the percentage of the company's value is now encumbered by that debt. That means that if Twitter were sold today the equity investors could lose nearly their entire investment.
Even a lousy LBO would be of a company you can asset-strip to reduce the debt. What could Twitter sell? The financing really does not make sense.
Cut expenses to the bone, resulting in a higher profit margin on the same revenue, coast on that revenue while dismembering the business for anything valuable, and then load any transferable debt to the carcass and declare bankruptcy?
Before reels or tiktok or stories or shorts, there was vine and people loved it. But it didn't make any money.
Part of me hopes he does, because that's the only way the Tall Poppy Syndrome folks have any chance of learning. But most of me has more empathy than they do.
More than likely they’re fairly normal employees. Granted they make more than most but that doesn’t mean they have “Tall Poppy Syndrome”.
The ONLY bad guys in this scenario are Musk and his yes-men
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
The Tall Poppy Syndrome folks are not those at Twitter. I know a few, and respect them, and have no problem with them making more than most (as I did myself when I worked at FB). No, the TPS folks are those right here bashing Twitter employees, as you yourself complained about. I don't know who they are, but I do know how they act because they're acting out right here in front of us.
> The ONLY bad guys in this scenario are Musk and his yes-men
So you no longer have a problem with the haters? What changed in the last two hours?
The video was posted by a remote financial analyst who was visiting the SF office for the first time. She describes what amounts to maybe an hour of break time, including lunch -- the rest of her day is meetings and working time. The perks are nice, maybe too nice you could argue, but the notion that the video proves she (and other Twitter workers) don't do any "real work" is idiotic. It's a short video, a tiny sample of her work day -- why would she dedicate any portion of it to showing her crunching numbers in Excel or whatever?
This just adds fuel to the fire that for the most part Twitter has a bunch of part time employee getting very high full time wages.
Now there is a large segment of the population that believe 32 hour work weeks should be standard, if your one of those then I suppose their posts will not spark much respond, but for most people that will spark strong negative emotions.
> She describes what amounts to maybe an hour of break time, including lunch -- the rest of her day is meetings and working time.
then it should not be labeled as "a day in the life"
Watching the video the person comes away with an impression this is more than just 1 hour of the day. I also suspect you are giving this person far too much credit for the amount of work they did that day. I am guessing it was more like 1 hour of real work, couple hours of meetings, and the rest socializing / using the "amenities"
Also, if you are going to the office after being remote, meetings and discussions tend are always the point. Otherwise you could have stayed at home.
showing your biases a little too much there, aren't you?
If I could make one plea to Elon, it would be to move Twitter out of Silicon Valley as fast as possible
She is shown scheduling a 30 minute meeting which seems to be the only work done before getting ready for lunch. After lunch plays foosball and meditation and exploring. Now that might be entirely reasonable if she comes to work at 11am and leaves in the evening or clocks back on to do some work at night, or did a bunch of other work before lunch. And having a lot of meetings is what happens when you're a remote worker who comes into the office once a year. None of that comes across to in the video though so what it actually looks like is about 3 hours of meetings (which are mostly taking pictures of one another), and the rest of it lounging around eating and drinking and unwinding.
1. Twitter, the core application, is literally a weekend junior dev project. The only engineers on the payroll who provide actual value, out of THOUSANDS, are those who scale the application and infrastructure. The vast majority of these people have been paid huge comp packages for doing effectively nothing. Sure, there are auxilliary applications like the ad platform, business intelligence, etc, but there is no world in which you need the enormous engineering staff they have to build or run these. Most of these people are useless.
2. Twitter employees have been complicit in curbing free speech, in a highly partisan manner, for years now.
> I really hope Musk doesn’t come for your job next
I suspect that if you provide actual, tangible value and you're not actively silencing people for using the wrong pronouns, you'll be safe.
So, don't accept anything that doesn't preserve your rights to your Tuesday equity grant.
Details here: https://edd.ca.gov/en/Jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WARN
Key Provision: "Layoff of 50 or more employees within a 30-day period regardless of % of workforce. ...."
Penalties for Violation: "A possible civil penalty of $500 a day for each day of violation. Employees may receive back pay to be paid at employee’s final rate or 3 year average rate of compensation, whichever is higher."
Whether you're guilty of murder or not is of course established after the fact. And you can do nothing wrong in the act of killing someone and still get screwed by a jury. Just ask the political left what they think of Kyle Rittenhouse being innocent.
You can certainly follow the law and go to jail regardless.
"Employers who fail to provide notification must provide their laid-off employees with back pay and benefits for the period of the violation (which means the amount of time by which their advance notice fell short of 60 days)."
The value of ripping off the Band-Aid could easily be worth two months of severance in his mind.
My understanding is that this was a take private so all stock was acquired already (ie vested options get paid and unvested get terminated at Close).
This is exactly what would happen if you acquired our company. It’s not like a purchaser would have the honor long term vesting schedules. They bought everything already that was available to be sold. Those who didn’t vest were dragged along into the deal.
That is a terrible deal. I've worked at a company where all outstanding RSUs would vest immediately at the time of purchase; was that an unusual arrangement?
I don’t see any reason to suspect they’re going to somehow violate the law and cost themselves additional fines if or when they do it. This is just about speculation about what Musk will eventually do.
Termination on the basis of poor performance (legally, "incompetence") requires supporting documentation, such as written reviews of the employees' performance prior to the termination. And legally incompetence only tests the employee's performance at tasks actually within their job description; an employee can't be fired for incompetence at other tasks. Very importantly, a new boss coming in and deciding that employees weren't performing up to his arbitrary (and new) standards doesn't pass muster.
A mass layoff for "performance" reasons has never been sustained by a labor department. The penalty is $500 for each day of violation (meaning each day short of the 60 required by the Warn ACT), plus all salary and bonuses that would have been paid during the 60 day period, plus legal fees incurred by the employees to protect their rights.
Additionally, a "for cause" termination on performance (or any other grounds) opens the employer up to per se libel lawsuits. Literally, all the employee has to do is submit a copy of the termination letter into evidence and they win unless Twitterlon can demonstrate that the employee was actually incompetent.
I beat even Elon, at this moment, does not have a full accounting of what the layoffs will be. This is all just pure media hype and nonsense with very little basis in truth or reality
Unless I’m missing something, the only sources for this article are a mix of speculation and anonymous sources who can’t even agree with each other about the layoff.
How did people communicate before the invention of Twitter and employer provided email and slack channels?
This is basically what news is. The media "exploits" (reports on) current events, gets traffic and then pays its employees
https://www.washingtonpost.com/search/?query=twitter+elon&fa...
Did a quick search of Elon + Twitter. Everything they reported seems factual and tied to things that actually happened? If Twitter does lay off a large amount of people will you admit that Washington Post probably had good sources or continue to be continually skeptical?
I think part of wanting a good media atmosphere is rewarding news sources that are shown to be reliable - and I would argue Washington Post is close to that.
WaPo isn't the best of new reporting agencies [0], but it's certainly not the worst. They do have standards and they don't make up the large majority of their data. Meaning, they have actually talked to someone that is 'familiar' with the 'deal' at some point 'last week.' It's not pure speculation on WaPo's part, though it maybe pure-unrefined-grade-A speculation on the contact's part.
If I had to bet, and many HNers out there are currently in that seat, then I'd bet on their reporting over other forms of pure speculation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Post#Criticism_...
News agencies are organizations made of humans that have flaws and we should always treat with a critical eye. But we shouldn't just dismiss one out of hand as not one of the best because of the existence of a "Criticism and controversies" section on Wikipedia especially when it is FAR tamer than many mainstream competitors.
They were told that these were performance based terminations, despite not receiving any negative evaluations during their time at Twitter. They were also told they needed to sign NDAs in order to receive any severance.
Can't confirm the %.
Tweeps are being told these are performance-related terminations, not layoffs. It was posited that "performance" was referring to Twitter, not the employee. I simply pointed out that's exactly what a layoff was, and performance in this context can only mean the employee, not the company.
In most cases, an employer will want at least something in return for providing severance pay.
But NDA is another reason, or even keeping unemployment insurance premiums low by having everyone that accepts severance state that they are voluntarily leaving the company in exchange for the severance.
By voluntarily separating, they cannot collect unemployment benefits from the state, which means the state charged the employer less in unemployment insurance premiums.
But I suspect it’s mainly as a carrot to sign the NDA/non-compete/whatever else they want you to sign to keep not talk about what happened.
These kinds of things are not always about the strict minimum cost actions. In general, it is a better world with some degree of human consideration being part of things.
I am quite sure many of the cases I had involvement in could have been done cheaper. However, I am also quite sure the people involved had what they need to get through to their next gig with few worries too.
That is worth a lot and these days one can never know who may be working for or with who.
I hope you start a company and are in a position to give severance to fired employees and not make them sign non-competes.
If the employee doesn’t like the terms, they’ll just get the statutory minimum.
It’s pretty rare anyone takes that option though!
Lots of coasters in big companies can get with good rating just be being on the good side of manager/peers and even get Bonus points if you are vocal about DEI and activism.
No, this is pissing on people and claiming it's raining.
There are people who build multiple successful companies and then there are who prioritize well-being and pick some weird hill to die on.
He's a really good marketer, a good businessman but I do not think he knows what he is doing when he requests access to the codebase behind a massively distributed and scalable system such as Twitters backend
People like Walter Isaacson have a better opinion about him
It's probably worth it to find a labor attorney.
- four people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity
- numerous employees contacted by The Post, who spoke on the condition of anonymity
- tweets from some of the people involved
- photos obtained by The Washington Post
- A document filed with financial regulators Monday
- interviews and documents obtained by The Post
- court records
Numerous employees - how much insight does a web developer at Twitter have into the inner workings of the management shift happening right now?
Photos of what? The conference room? Are we going to pull in a body language expert to analyze what Elon was saying by walking into the room with sneakers instead of dress shoes?
There is no accountability for sources in journalism, and it's why I think it's 99% useless garbage and never read it. Journalists and publications find the sources they want to tell the story they already planned to write regardless of reality.
There's actually quite an involved skill to reading and fully understanding this kind of writing - and it's infuriatingly difficult to pick up that skill (I've been developing it by spending time talking to professional journalists, but I'm still not there yet).
When you read "another person familiar with the deal who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters", you need to translate it to something more like the following:
The journalist who wrote this has found a credible source, who has insider knowledge.
That source has requested anonymity, and the journalist finds that request credible.
The journalist then used their skills and experience in writing about this area over the course of their career to evaluate if that source was trustworthy. They also considered if the source had their own motivations which could affect what information they chose to share and why.
The journalist may have then cross-checked that information against other sources of information to help evaluate its credibility. This becomes more important the more high stakes the claim in question becomes.
An editor (and potentially even separate fact checkers) evaluated the statement as well, and applied judgement as to whether it held up firmly enough to be published.
There are so many phrases like this in top-tier journalism. When an experienced journalist reads an article from someone else that says "a senior official in the administration said..." they can often narrow that down to just a dozen or so potential people, based on their knowledge of that beat.
As a non-journalist reading newspapers this is pretty infuriating, because there's this whole language that you need to know about in order to fully understand what's being communicated here.
Edit: forgot to mention the deli!
Click bait headlines, stories with weak fact checking or even printing outright lies has decreased (at least my) trust in news articles and has resulted in me questioning facts and anonymous quotes more frequently(which may be a good thing).
Examples are the New York Times writing a hit piece against Tesla, where it turned out they had driven the car in circles in a parking lot for hours to get the battery to run out, but didn't think that Tesla might be able to get data on what they did. Turns out the author of the article works for the oil industry. The NYT also regularly publishes as fact things told to them by the Pentagon and three letter agencies, rather than calling the information alleged.
My perception of recent news tends is that sources that were in the accurate/quality tier are shifting to the fast/anonymous tier. In the short term their reputation plus speed and sensationalism will make them seem like the best of both worlds. In the long run people will just recalibrate their opinions of previously esteemed sources.
The Washington Post and the New Yorker have higher editorial standards than Fox News.
There are important stories for which it simply isn't possible to get an expert to go on the record, for all kinds of reasons.
What's going on inside Twitter right now is a great example. Anyone who leaks details with their name attached to them will clearly get fired, or sued, or both.
That's why good journalists quote anonymous sources. If they could get a reputable source to go on record instead they would obviously do so!
edit: typoz
This would assume that the previous management had an incentive to cut costs and remove 50% of their workforce... which is probably not the case at all.
They probably don't know who the unproductive ones are anymore because without a fresh look at things they can't think about it objectively. They give tasks to people and they get done at the same speed as they've always been done with. How do you suddenly decide: Hey actually guys, I know we were working like this for 6 years but actually, we should be 40% faster on every single task so... you know.. start working faster please and everyone who doesn't gets fired. It's just not realistic for existing managers to do this for so many reasons. Unless absolutely forced by financial realities which was apparently never the case for Twitter.
Previous management at Twitter didn't own a significant percentage of the company shares. Why be the "bad guy" when the paychecks are still rolling in? But when it's your "own money" at stake, you get much more motivated to cut unnecessary costs. Even if that makes lots of people on the Internet hate you.
Your original comment stated: "If there was a way to determine the least performing 50% of employees in a matter of two days, they wouldn't be there in the first place anymore."
Therefore you, not I, implied that there are relatively unproductive workers at Twitter (not unreasonable, of course - there's always going to be a performance spectrum) - and you suggested that the previous management would have removed them if there was an easy way to identify them.
This is what I was disagreeing with - your premise that the previous management would have removed their most unproductive 50% if there was an easy way to identify them.
Potentially, but not necessarily. Some high performers may reasonably think "finally someone who is going to cut through all the bullshit in this bloated company and demand some accountability". Look through some of the stories when Steve Jobs rejoined Apple; it wasn't that dissimilar.
Now, that said, folks like this usually want and demand an inspiring leader. Some may think Musk fits the bill for that (I think I probably would have years ago), but these days I usually just want him to STFU with so much of the bullshit nonsense he sends out. I mean, the day after he closed the Twitter deal he tweeted a blatantly ridiculous and libelous story about Paul Pelosi - it's just more of the same stupid shit from him.
As for employees being happy that "lazy" people are being fired, if that's true why are companies so cautious about hiring and firing?
> The company has yet to release a formal announcement of the acquisition. The communications department has gone silent. Rumors have swirled about layoffs, with some notices going out quietly.
Is it just me or is this headline totally misleading?
No formal announcement yet folks.
"Twitter to lay off 25% of workforce in first round of job cuts"
I opened the article thinking this was a formal announcement. But it's nothing of the sort. It's just speculation at this stage.
Hope that clears things up.
> ...according to four people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them, as well as tweets from some of the people involved.
E.g. according to Business Insider Facebook should have fired half the company, according to “sources”, but that hasn’t happened to my knowledge yet
Either put a name to it, or dont report on it
Quote Orwell, Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. You need to get people to tell you about all those things, and as that someone who dislike them being printed has power (it ain't news otherwise,) you need to find a way to make people talk to you. "Help me to rekt your career and life" just don't cut it.
The "media" did this to themselves, now at this point no one would trust any news story that is only validated with "anonymous sources" as the media has proven they are either incapable of vetting these sources for truthful info, or do not actually have any sources at all and are just making shit up for the clicks
Either way they have given the public no reason to trust them at this point
Seems Elon is keeping his machinations to himself.
Currently the target is Nov 8, but a lot could happen before then.
The entire waiving of due diligence thing is also such a weird talking point. There was no contingency on due diligence, but part of the deal did include access to the information he would need to do it and any incorrect information in public filings should have been enough to get out of the deal.
Tweeting it out, well. I could resist that urge just fine.
This is how you get a press that only uncritically regurgitates press releases.
Now, this of course assumes that engineering managers are not solely doing employee management but also are serving some "tech lead" type roles. I.e. even if an engineering manager isn't coding I think it's essential that (a) a considerable portion of their time is spent doing code reviews, (b) they should be working closely with product managers to define stories and requirements before the dev team starts implementing, etc.
That is, having line engineering managers solely do "people management" is universally a bad idea in my opinion. They should be getting their "hands dirty" in the tech aspects as well in order to be effective.
I doubt though that Musk can figure out the actual workhorse in a short time. The posers are very good at self promotion.
Weeding out those who change pronouns in documentation and agitate on Slack would be a reliable start. From there, close reading of PRs, their usefulness and code quality is required. LOC is not an indicator.
As for managers, most of them are useless.
2. As another commenter mentioned, I don't even think this would be possible given California WARN Act requirements, but I'm less sure on the legal requirements here.
Large-scale labor law violations are not impossible, or even unprecedented for Musk-owned firms.
Did you expect him to say it is true?
Honestly, it's pretty ridiculous how people conflate "Elon is a bad guy who stretches the truth all the time" with him sending out a completely unambiguous statement that, if it were a lie, would easily be proven wrong in one day. Point being, people who do stretch the truth/over-promise know how to do it in a way that isn't falsifiable in 24 hours.
Just consider his infamous "Funding secured" tweet. I considered that a lie, but there is obviously enough wiggle room/deniability over what "secured" actually means. That's not the case here.
In any case, the deadline has already passed. If there were to have been mass layoffs before the Nov 1 deadline, it's too late.
> After engineers, some of Twitter’s highest paid employees work in sales, where several earn more than $300,000
that should reduce operating expenses significantly, several hundreds of millions dollars?
Advertising spend doesn't work like pharmaceutical sales. They will renew precisely because they like the ROI, whether they get pampered or not, because as advertising channels, social media platform are additive. If it gives you positive ROI, you're strictly better off advertising on a network than not advertising on it, because the social networks themselves are mutually exclusive in terms of attention. That is, you can't access Twitter's eyeball-seconds any other way than through Twitter.
I see no reason to doubt it. But I would need some evidence before believing, and this thread has none (in any direction).
I mean, not all of the business -- but businesses can and will sever contracts because they lose their favorite point-of-contact.
> They're spending money on twitter for the benefits it brings them
What if those benefits are already pretty slim, and they've been thinking of dropping Twitter entirely, but for the efforts of their Twitter AE?
I don't understand this mindset that all salespeople are fungible drones.
They absolutely will. Media buyers for the gigantic companies expect to be wined and dined very aggressively. Early in my career I worked for an agency that had a couple truly massive EU companies as clients. You know these names. I saw first hand that the personal charisma and relationship of the agency owner was the only reason those execs kept coming back. And he went to very great lengths to stroke their egos.
With buyers that big, there's always another agency. So as soon as the buyer doesn't like something, buh bye.
Boom 0 cost, infinite money hack
Tomorrow's news: "HN business man solved the recession"
Edit: per Wapo but you can see the cost structure from 10ks mostly
Terminating huge amounts of the workforce when they have next to no knowledge of the inner workings of the company... well, it's going to be a disaster, and I think all the tech people here know it. I'm sure there are some areas to cut, but they almost certainly don't know which yet. Cutting 25%, you're going to mess up. Then you have to face the reality that the other 75% will be seeking the exit - few want their workload to increase by 33%, plus work for someone as mercurial and abusive as Musk and his team, plus be a party to the dying company which will inevitably become a more effective tool of the alt-right and extremists.
Contract says you get the stock if you work for a certain period of time at the company. Consequently, if you're fired or quit before that period elapses, you don't get it.
Not sure if it applies to stock vesting. From what I understand, the main goal is to prevent an employer from firing someone at e.g. 19 years 11 months tenure purely to avoid paying them a pension.
The middle ground I have decided on with my husband(since he wants a bigger car) is Model Y this year and the Cybertruck for me since I have had my reservation since the beginning and I will just wait for it(probably at least another 1-1.5 year even on an early reservation).
Link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/all-in-with-chamath-ja... Also on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCESLZhusAkFfsNsApnjF_Cg
Supposedly has a couple million listeners.
Sacks and Calacanis were named in the lawsuit between Twitter and Musk.
And it is very clear that none of them have any real tech insight, but a lot of VC / raccoon mindset.
Isn't the Tesla software allegedly a horrific mess? I suspect they may have been taking notes, instead.
Do either of these guys even know how to program? Calacanis has been making tech content for decades, and I've never once heard him talk about writing code.
Why not hire them into "Chief of Staff" or "Chief of Fuck You Parag" roles?
They both have plenty of experience running tech companies and are advising on structuring the team… I know everyone’s trying to jump on the hate bandwagon but this is a stretch.
Like I said though, I have no horse in this race, so whatever ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
1 - https://medium.com/craft-ventures/announcing-craft-iii-1-1-b...
To date there's:
- Reports that he had Tesla engineers with him when they interviewed some Twitter engineeers. Currently the biggest arguments against that are: Tesla engineers belong to Tesla (we have no idea in what capacity they were they) and "that's an ineffective strategy to review a codebase" (we have no idea if that's what they were actually doing.
- Reports that he gave a team until Nov 7th to roll out a paid subscription
- Reports that he may lay people off (unverified)
- Carried in a sink.
None of these things are particularly unreasonable - Twitter owes something like 1 billion in debt payments this year and brings in close to $500 million, so layoffs were probably coming regardless.
I don't really see what the big deal with Musk buying Twitter is, except as cover for being mad about him unbanning people.
> None of these things are particularly unreasonable
Six business days to come up with a system to process $6m per month of income.
Nothing unreasonable indeed...
Twitter (and really, BigCo in general) engineers are accustomed to their foosball tables, catered meals, wine bars, beer taps, rooftop gaming session, and endless meetings and code reviews.
It's possible that Musk is trying to set the reasonable expectation that a total comp package worth $400k should be exchanged for actual productivity, rather than playtime and busywork.
Which single developer can rollout payments globally in 6 days? How much time do they set aside to ensuring regulatory compliance with dozens of jurisdictions that have occasionally conflicting rules?
I too thought I could rewrite twitter and instagram in 10 days with a few JS and PHP framework when I was fresh out of uni
Tell me you've never been hired at Twitter without telling me you've never been hired at Twitter, lol. Every company has some dead weight, sure, but what you describe isn't remotely applicable to most people.
Would you want to be in that kind of situation?
As a salaried SE, why would you care? Or is that about SV's love for paying in stock instead of cash?
> then within days, is threating 25% layoffs.
That's an unconfirmed rumor at best, a lie most likely.
The difference is that usually it's not covered minute-by-minute on all the major news outlets.
No one would want to be in this situation yet it happens every day. Where I'm at, new VPs take over our division every couple years and every time they reorganize everything, rename everything, promote some people, lay off a bunch of people, bring in their "people", change polices and procedures, etc. It sucks but it's part of business as far as I can tell. If I walked out every time this happened I think I'd be hard pressed to keep a steady job.
New ownership seems to have changed that, not only in the things that were rumored they would do, but also in the abysmal communication during the whole thing.
This kind of thing happens all the time and it's always a risk, but that doesn't mean that people have to like it.
> None of these things are particularly unreasonable
I see you're not an engineer according to your bio. Can you explain how you came to the conclusion that having one work week to roll out a brand new feature is reasonable so I can tell you how completely wrong you are?
You know this?
1. It's not like this should come as a surprise to anyone at Twitter. If you work at Twitter and haven't been updating your resume and reaching out to other contacts, don't know what to say.
2. Remains to be seen what severance package laid off employees get, but with the California WARN requirements I think it's likely to be at least a couple months, which is fair. Looks like Musk tried to screw over some of the top execs by firing "for cause" (and note, in an exec's contract "for cause" can't just be "we don't like the job you did", it pretty much always has specific stipulations about breaking laws or company policy, e.g. sexual harassment), but they have more than enough resources to sue if necessary.
3. Is there anyone who reasonably thinks that Twitter has a lot of unproductive employees that should be let go? I think unions can do a lot of good, but not if it's the standard "once you're in the union it's nearly impossible to let you go" situation. Highly productive employees hate working with people who just "phone it in".
My guess is he plans to sue the board and the (now ex) CEO using the internal data to at least get back all the money they get (or more).
Somehow I think they will be specially focusing on twitter more
However he tweeted that there are 10 people managing for every one dev. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586686935518498816
Also Layoffs before vesting denied. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586831721386766337
Bring back Vine? https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586918804780630016
Not sure I would trust in tweets much. Twitter took on a lot of debt.
What would the figure usually be.
You have marketing managers, people managing account maintenance, people managing bot reports, etc etc.
It seems to me, that's almost like complaining that an office or shop has 10 times more managers than maintenance guys. Both are locations where business are carried out rather than the actual business itself.
It's exhausting how much attention this gets and how everyone has an opinion about it.
Journalism continues to fall in the "bullshit" camp that Frankfurt warned us about:
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691122946/on...
It's up to us to fine-tune our bullshit detectors in the current climate.
For example, I can't imagine the WaPo taking this same tone with regard to a Bezos acquisition or contract, or publishing confidential leaked details of inside business discussion, as it would almost certainly upset their owner and lead to 'a change in leadership' at the Post. The same is true of their coverage of the unionization effort at Amazon warehouses and distribution centers. Similarly, the CIA and NSA deals that AWS has engaged in aren't getting this level of scrutiny from the Post either, and there's little chance of the Post ever printing anything [like the 2010] "Top Secret America" series on how defense contracts are doled out to intelligence contractors.
"(2020) Amazon: We Totally Don’t Want To Spy On You. Also Amazon: We Just Hired The Architect Of The NSA’s Mass Domestic Surveillance Program"
https://dailycaller.com/2020/09/10/amazon-surveillance-nsa-d...
However, most people view that outlet as a highly partisan right-wing opinion-centric source (with rather limited sources), not at all the 'traditional unbiased news media' - which instead avoid the story, and instead just churn out a stream of pro-government, pro-corporate propaganda 24/7. This is pretty unhealthy IMO, since, ahem, 'democracy dies in darkness', and is the kind of behavior you see from Chinese and Russian state media, not from independent journalism.
They didn’t wake up in 2013 and suddenly decide they won’t have any integrity.
However, your point is pretty valid - back in 2002, the WaPo regurgitated US government talking points on (non-existent) Iraq WMDs without bothering to do any investigative pushback.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/10/11/c...
What more are you expecting from them?
Uhhh... you must not ever read WaPo. They run critical coverage of Bezos and Amazon all of the time.
Bezos bought a new paper, so he can have a mouth piece when he needs it.
Musk just bought a bigger mouth piece, without any of those pesky editors.
Musk and his investors just bought a massive amount of power. Which We basically lost.
Welcome to the oligarchy.