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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

I think people might be missing the point here. Elon probably wants higher turnover.

These are very desirable jobs. People would bend over backwards to work at Twitter. Younger, cheaper people who have strong ideas of how to fix Twitter and would actually try to push these ideas. And these seats are currently filled with older, expensive employees who like things the way they are averse to things breaking. Either that or you are a rough and tumble old timer who can thrive in chaos.

This is very intentionally the model at his other companies. Or places like Amazon where they have almost perfected the art of extracting exactly 3 years of valuable work from young developers.

I don't think Musk actually cares about that 84th hour of work. But I think he is very much trying to signal to current and potential employees that this will not be a comfortable long term career prospect.

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> Younger, cheaper people who have strong ideas of how to fix Twitter and would actually try to push these ideas.

That's... horrifying, to be honest. Imagine the kind of young, cheap, starry-eyed people who think they know how to fix Twitter. Now, imagine a subgroup of these people who look at Musk's antics and decide "Oh this is the kind of company I'd love to work for."

Well, at least the eventual Netflix documentary is going to be legendary (assuming Netflix survives until then).

the word I think we might be searching for is predatory.

take people with no experience, no peers left to tell them better, and construct a complete new reality bubble with no continuity & no lessons of the past remaining. do what thou wilt with them.

> I think people might be missing the point here. Elon probably wants higher turnover.

It certainly is. But this is a shitty and stupid way to go about it. You ruin the lives and health of those who can't afford to give you the finger, for no actual benefit to anyone. (Say... they have family who needs their paycheck. Or they're on an H-1B.) Of the remainder, you chase away everyone who is competent and confident enough to work elsewhere.

These actions prima facie render one a bully and an idiot. All because Musk has a point to prove and wants to do it ASAP out of his own vanity.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/elon-musk-has-turn...

These are very desirable jobs.

s/are/were

I understand your point, but if he even gets a fraction of the talent they have to turn down at SpaceX or Tesla he'll do just fine.

Still a lot of Musk fanboys.

And it's still a large, complex, big-name Tech company; experience with working on problems at that scale could open doors later, regardless of who is calling the shots at the top.

There are lots of hungry developers around that world that would kill to work 12/7 and take home 200k USD

>People would bend over backwards to work at Twitter.

Sure, I'd love to work in a company with the guy that couldn't really decide whether or not he wants to go through the agreement he signed, carried toilet furniture in as his first job as the CEO and then is threatening to fire huge amounts of the current employees.

I mean, what could possible go wrong?

I know you are trying to be flip here, but I can almost guarantee you that their number of job applicants has probably exploded as a result of these shenanigans.

I seriously doubt that their volume of qualified applicants has exploded. Working at Twitter just isn’t competitive anymore, in terms of comp, WLB, and basic human decency. Unless he’s going to start paying people twice as much, most good engineers will go elsewhere. Maybe he can get away with it for something like self driving cars or rockets, but you want me to work overtime under the threat of a layoff for below market wages for a social network? Laughable.

If that is such a great idea then why didn't the earlier owners think of it? They are experienced business-people as well I would think. Were they just dumb? Or is this just the ego of Musk trying to generate the maximum of mentions of himself in the media?

I don't see any problem here, those who don't want to do this are more than welcome to leave. You can fire your employer, instantly. This isn't slavery.

There are already examples of his companies: SpaceX and Tesla. People are willingly rallying behind his vision and are being compensated for that through prestige/stock/pride/whatever.

If it was a minimum wage job, I’d have issues with this. But, these employees have $300k TC and have plenty of buffer. They had 6 months of heads-up to leave.

> These are very desirable jobs. People would bend over backwards to work at Twitter.

Every sane person I talk to has the opinion that there are not enough money in the world to deal with an asshole like Musk.

Time change but history repeats itself . It’s always right wing nuts and generally people who fall for cults who end up in the bunker where they discover that the person whom they thought was god , in reality just a human

> Every sane person I talk to has the opinion that there are not enough money in the world to deal with an asshole like Musk.

Yes. To the people you and I talk to. But if you talk to a 4th year computer science student at Cal Tech who is already putting in 90 hours of work a week for professors he hates, Twitter just popped on their radar.

Based on what? Why wouldn’t that student go work somewhere with great WLB, more pay, and less stress? What does Musk’s Twitter have to offer?

I won't speak for others but I didn't give a crap about WLB in my 20s. Or job security. I didn't have to be in school anymore!

If the job was fun and you got to work someplace cool that's just gravy - I was more than happy to cut into my video game time.

But even to this day, working 60 hours a week for a place where you can arbitrary push code into production and see what happens IS ALWAYS going to be more fun and rewarding than sitting in a team meeting reviewing the wording on BRDs for 20 hours a week.

> to this day, working 60 hours a week for a place where you can arbitrary push code into production and see what happens IS ALWAYS going to be more fun and rewarding than sitting in a team meeting reviewing the wording on BRDs for 20 hours a week.

This only works for subscale businesses. Once a company becomes big enough, that kind of approach ends up causing production outages, private data spillage, or PR / customer / regulatory shitstorms about changes that went in without anyone else being briefed about them. It's fine if you don't have a lot of demanding users or social relevance but I don't think this would be a wise direction for something the size of Twitter

Seriously, there’s zero chance of Twitter being some cowboy coder paradise where anyone who wants to can just arbitrarily push code to production, not with billions at stake. It’ll still have large company bureaucratic bullshit.

And if is that cowboy coder paradise, that’ll make me even less likely to climb in a self driving car or a rocket from one of Musk’s companies than I already am.

> Every sane person I talk to has the opinion that there are not enough money in the world to deal with an asshole like Musk.

You don't talk to any poor people. They already have a bad boss that underpays them, a bad boss that pays them well is a massive upgrade.

Those people can’t do the work in question, or they’d already be employed somewhere doing it. Twitter has paid well because they have to in order to hire good talent, and that won’t change.

.... you don't actually believe that do you? There are very few positions in rich, big companies and many many people competing for them. Many people could do those jobs but are unable to get in for a variety of life reasons.

That’s fair, when I said they “can’t do those jobs”, I meant a combination of “they can’t do and / or can’t get hired for those jobs”, and I don’t see why Twitter slashing staff, requiring more work, and likely paying less is going to change that.

Why would a job at Twitter be more accessible to someone in 2023 than it was in 2021?

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