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Comment by Ancalagon | Hacker News Reader

What’s with the contempt for twitter employees in this thread? I really hope Musk doesn’t come for your job next

The contempt for them on twitter is even worse. A ton of anonymous twitter accounts laughing at people losing their jobs.

it's not apples to apples but the other energy firms did the same to Enron employees when they were walking out with their boxes of stuff. iirc HR departments in competing firms put out gleeful notices that former Enron employees would not be considered for open positions. Everyone loves to point and laugh when someone a tick up on the perceived totem pole falls down a few notches.

Meh, being laughed at by people who couldn't have gotten hired to work at twitter short of buying the company is really easy to dismiss.

Can't blame them honestly. There was that Project Veritas video where they talked to some employees and they don't even hide how big of assholes they are.

I can tell you the viral "day in the Life" video that was going around in the last week or so did not help the situation much.

Loathe to give outrage reposters views but here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkQbHyLE6Tc

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?

Ouch, that's a pretty horrific video. I don't know if that kind of thing goes down well in the "influencer" or the SV tech scenes, but outside those bubbles it's clearly going to come across as narcissistic, entitled, and lazy. Which is unfortunate because I'm sure she's a wonderful person and a hard and competent worker, but there's a serious lack of judgement making that public.

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.

This is not the first time a twitter employee has implied a light work schedule. There were posts when the first Elon buyout rumor came around about twitter employee reporting remote work amounting to around 30 hours a week..

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"

> 1 hour of real work, couple hours of meetings

showing your biases a little too much there, aren't you?

Nope. My biases are clear and well known, I dislike everything about Silicon valley and the culture of Silicon Valley.

If I could make one plea to Elon, it would be to move Twitter out of Silicon Valley as fast as possible

Admitting you are bias doesn't remove the issue that you are bias.

Meh, this is just looking for outrage. And quite literally.

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.

Worth noting also that the poster has scrubbed her online presence, I would guess due to incessant harassment. Really stupid all around.

Wasn't that a Meta employee?

> I really hope Musk doesn’t come for your job next

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.

Feels like your painting a picture of these folks when you more than likely have no idea who they are or how they act.

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

You seem to be misunderstanding who I'm talking about, or even what TPS is.

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?

Apologies I misunderstood. And when I was remarking on Musk I meant those actually involved in the lay-offs.

This phenomenon didn’t begin with Twitter. Remember the whole ‘Learn to Code’ thing?

Because

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.

Calling their ad platform "auxiliary" when it's their core business is hilarious. You are completely out of your element here.

How is broadly laying off 25% of the org ever going to have the precision of pointed firings for excessive pronoun use? Even real-value is hard to measure at that scale.

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