Comment by ilrwbwrkhv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilrwbwrkhv | Hacker News Reader

I don't think his management style is brutal.

I think it is quite surprising how little people work at a job.

In most companies, you can get rid of 50% of the company and things will still keep running and even improve.

He just wants people to do a good job. Is that too much to ask?

Add in the general leftist messaging which are popular in tech companies about mental health and taking time off, it is quite easy for those who want to take advantage of it to not work really hard and hide and keep getting a fat paycheque for a really long time.

The amount of money tech workers get paid is ridiculous. Compared to a librarian let's say. Do you think a tech worker is working as hard as a librarian? Hell no.

So I think its time to make sure that the work matches up to the hundreds of thousands of dollars they are taking home every year.

Aside: I really hate how news has become opinion pieces. "Brutal management style" is an opinion. The news should report the news. "X happened at Y". I have seen a lot of this lately. "X happened. This should make you angry." Don't tell me how to feel or second derivatives of events. Just present the event.

I think its very funny how you note that you can get rid of half the employees at most companies with no effect and then attack “leftist messaging.” One would imagine that market competition would immediately eliminate such inefficiencies. I suggest you read some Graeber.

> He just wants people to do a good job. Is that too much to ask?

No, but that's not what he has asked for. What he asked for is this:

----- From: Elon Musk

To: Team [at Twitter]

Subj. A Fork in the Road

Date: Nov. 16, 2022 [time stamp removed]

Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.

Twitter will also be much more engineering-driven. Design and product management will still be very important and report to me, but those writing great code will constitute the majority of our team and have the greatest sway.

At its heart, Twitter is a software and servers company, so l think this makes sense.

If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below:

[Link removed]

Anyone who has not done so by 5pm ET tomorrow (Thursday) will receive three months of severance. -----

Doing a good job is a very different request from "extremely hardcore", "long hours at high intensity", and "only exceptional performance counts". It's especially onerous to ask people to commit to this without specific details (weekends too? I assume yes), no mention of pay raises for working more hours, no mention of equity rewards (in fact, they were getting equity and now aren't, which is effectively a pay cut), no severance agreement to review before deciding, and 1 day to decide. Brutal fits IMO.

In all honesty, this doesn't look all that bad to me. And it feels what a new boss would say to rally people around his cause.

Every company/boss has this sort of management speak 101 sort of speeches they give. I think Amazon also has some principle of management which they told me during the interview which was basically the corporate speak 101 sort of material. In my own experience I've heard quite a bit of these boss speeches.

These are not the things you quit for. You just neglect it and do you job. There is no management police who walks around the cubicle like a beat cop to enforce this.

> In most companies, you can get rid of 50% of the company and things will still keep running and even improve.

Maybe. But you have to take a few months to figure out which 50% if you have half a braincell. Especially if it is a complicated company in field outside your expertise, which for Elon this is (although he might have seen this different when taking over).

By this point you could have picked up a random person on the street and they easily would have done a better job than mister impulsive over there.

I mean the guy accidentally bought a company — a company to whose product he is addicted to. My speculation how that happened: his right leaning followers got constantly banned, so he wanted to proof to then, that the liberal snowflakes at Twitter HQ will not take his generous offer because they are against free speech and have political motives. So his prediction was that they would say no, because in his mind that is who they are and he could then take this No as ammunition to his followers. But the twitter people were not lefty liberals but mostly business people and so they said yes and from that point onwards everything mister impulsive did was pure and utter panic.

What we have observed here is not how someone in control looks like, even if we generously assume he is pretending not to be in control for stupid 12-dimensional chess reasons us mere mortals are just too simple to understand. He is giving orders people will not follow, that makes him look weak. He makes impulsive decisions he has to wheel back hours later. He wants screenshots of source code to make hiring ad firing decisions.

You could literally make a wet towel the CEO of Twitter and it would be running better than under him.

And even if we generously assumed that this is part of an painful restructuring the company might have needed, nobody remotly in control would plan to do it that way in a company that relies on money it gets from advertising and has workers who are heavily sought after and can literally pick a new job hours later if they choose to do so.

It is surreal that people think he is doing any of this purposefully.

He sent out an email saying all offices were closing immediately due to his concerns of being sabotaged, then a few hours later sent another email that software engineers needed to meet with him in person the following day, even asking remote people to fly in immediately.

That’s chaos, but his sycophants are so devoted they’ll delude themselves into thinking this is genius.

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