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Musk is reportedly looking to cut deadweight before Nov 1st when equity vests -- with layoffs possibly happening over the weekend. He might already have a basic

Musk is reportedly looking to cut deadweight before Nov 1st when equity vests -- with layoffs possibly happening over the weekend. He might already have a basic idea of key teams and for non-key teams he might be looking to cut very fast. I absolutely have done things like this when acquiring companies - sat with people, asked them to basically interview for their own jobs while showing me the most important thing they wrote in the last quarter. I've done this at a much smaller scale, one on one at the employee's desk, because the companies I've done this with have been 1/10 or 1/100th the size of twitter. I can see why it might make sense to just tell people to print stuff out to demonstrate competency, if you're otherwise planning to cut their entire department. Everyone gets a quick conversation with an engineer to talk about the code and gauge basic competency. If you don't suck, you stay. Seems not super crazy. It especially makes sense if you've locked out everyone aside from previously identified key personnel to prevent sabotage.

djur 4y ago
Do you understand why people who aren't making lots of money from it might be angry and upset about this process?
- Xeronate 4y ago
  The ability of the process to prune dead weight and the emotions of the people affected are kind of unrelated. It's a business not a charity.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - exadrid 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - dagmx 4y ago
      And you know the same people would be shedding tears if they were being cut short in any way. It’s a total lack of empathy.
    - jddil 4y ago
      You're on a board founded by a VC fund to market their investments, I would expect capitalists to be the majority here.
      - lupire 4y ago
        Hacker News is a recruiting website for those capitalists' employees. (Look at the only ads that ever appear on HN).
      - jjulius 4y ago
        You're both correct in this instance.
      - uni_rule 4y ago
        I don't doubt this site is mostly libertarian types but it still strikes me how such people can say some of the shit they do with a straight face. It's especially apparent how nuts some of them are when they are felating Elon Musk specifically.
    - tsol 4y ago
      You mean hackernews, the site for people who make ridiculous incomes for working on menial digital products like social media? It's strange when people walk into a room and assume everyone else must think like them.
      - undersuit 4y ago
        Oh we're supposed to make ridiculous incomes? Lets go tell my public sector employer.
        tsol 4y ago
        No, but you're supposed to understand that most of the people on HN aren't going to be dedicated against capitalism. I don't make much myself but I can figure that much out. SV is a capitalists wet dream.
        undersuit 4y ago
        Slight criticism of capitalism == dedicated against capitalism?
    - hnusersarelame 4y ago
  - DangitBobby 4y ago
    We should not celebrate sociopathy. Or short term thinking. Maybe take... I dunno, a couple of weeks to assess people's value? Instead of potentially firing people you actually should have kept around and spending 35% more on salaries for replacements and God knows how much in lost domain knowledge. Not ethical, not rational.
    - Xeronate 4y ago
      I'm fine with the argument that its not rational and not a good process because the outcome will be bad (firing people that you should have kept). I'm only pushing back against the idea that a business should put protecting peoples feelings over the wellbeing of the company. Sure do it humanely. Give a nice severance. But if people aren't producing the company has no obligation to keep them.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
> asked them to basically interview for their own jobs while showing me the most important thing they wrote in the last quarter This is builds the same dysfunctional system's that causing so many problems for Google - the people maintaining the vital systems won't have anything cool to show, but they will be the ones that made sure the bills kept getting paid. > I can see why it might make sense to just tell people to print stuff out to demonstrate competency All they are demonstrating their is their ability to sell themselves.
- throwaway09223 4y ago
  You're assuming this is the only process they have in place -- and there's no rational basis for that assumption. Look, we all should know how this works. We're viewing selective aspects of their process through the warped perspective of the national media. You're not hearing about any of the reasonable things they're doing because none of those things are interesting. You're only hearing about elements which can be presented as shocking, to get your eyeballs on news bites. Take a step back and think about perspective.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    We can only discuss the information given to us. Sure, the other processes may work, but the process that I'm addressing, your claimed process (so you could give us more information if you wanted) seems DEEPLY dysfunctional.
    - throwaway09223 4y ago
      Would you like to talk about my process? I'm happy to share details. All kinds of information is exchanged in an acquisition. The acquirer probably has an idea about how the company functions, which departments are key, which employees are key, and so on. They'll also have an idea about which employees or departments have been problems. I am thinking of a specific example where my large company acquired a small startup. It had a sysadmin team of three people. This team had been identified as a point of conflict within the company - holding up projects and refusing to adopt automated process. It was already decided that the manager would be fired. My job was to determine the extent to which the employees were contributing to the dynamic, to determine whether they were open to change, and to assess their general competency. We needed to know how much of the existing team could be kept on to help. I flew onsite for a few days. The story was that the acquiring company was gifting me to help their team, because they had been long complaining about needing headcount. I asked to be shown what people did day to day. I asked why it was done that way and I suggested new ways of doing it (how it would probably be done, post acquisition) and listened to their answers. I participated in their daily work routine. As I recall we decided to keep all the employees. They had been marginalized by a bad manager and they ended up doing quite well helping out with the transition. The information I gathered helped structure the layout of the new team. Their old (fired) manager had not done a good job of assessing their skillsets or giving them latitude to move their platform forward. Other times, I have identified people that needed to be let go. Sometimes it is clear that someone doesn't have the necessary skillset, isn't making meaningful contributions, or has some kind of personality conflict. I think we have all encountered someone like this in our careers at times. The twitter process sounds chaotic and driven by a crazy timeline for sure. The scale is far larger. But, the steps they're taking to attempt to achieve this goal don't seem inherently wrong. Asking someone to bring a real sample of their work to discuss in an interview is a great tactic. If you asked me to design a process to hold these kinds of interviews at scale I might do the exact same thing.
sour-taste 4y ago
What is going to happen to people's stock vests? There is no public company any more. Can they just hold the stock or do they get a cash value?
- code_runner 4y ago
  I believe the stock still exists (still has an active ticker/cusip) but trade volume is at 0. At some point it will be delisted and shareholders will just get cash. I assume grant vesting is still meaningful until that point.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  They get a cash value at the same $54.20/share as current holders get. They may be allowed to instead vest shares, but that would be a new agreement. The merger document converts it to cash.
xnyan 4y ago
>I can see why it might make sense to just tell people to print stuff out to demonstrate competency Review of work based on your last 30 days of code that’s printed out on 8.5x11s is nonsensical. I’ve never heard of anything like it in my software development career and can’t think of any reason one would do it except to encourage people to quit.
optymizer 4y ago
What a ridiculous viewpoint. I spent two days last week to write a single line of code. It cuts the startup time of the app in half with no downsides. I had to make sure it works in all flavors, on all OS builds, benchmark it to show it works, cherry pick it into various release branches, talk to people about it, etc If you ask me to print my code and defend it in a meeting, I will instead skip the meeting and respond to one of the dozens recruiters who reach out every week in my inbox. You can keep the engineers who wrote the slow code in the first place. I'm sure they'll have thousands of lines of code to print. It's just a demeaning process meant to assert the dominance of the new owners.
- jessaustin 4y ago
  Congratulations on your good work. ISTM if you could evangelize the improvement to all those different people, you could also evangelize it to one more person? Sure, your assigned Tesla auditor could be an idiot (although that seems less likely for a Tesla person than for a twitter person), but would it hurt to try?
- HWR_14 4y ago
  > If you ask me to print my code and defend it in a meeting, I will instead skip the meeting and respond to one of the dozens recruiters who reach out every week in my inbox. Isn't that his goal? Reduce headcount before vesting bonuses on Nov. 1st? It seems like you would be just the sucker that Musk is trying to get rid of before one last milestone cash payment. On top of which, why couldn't you defend that line in a meeting? "I changed this one line cutting the loading time in half for the program. It took 2 days of profiling to find where to change and another week to ensure that it works across all build targets and work on a deployment timeline." > 's just a demeaning process meant to assert the dominance of the new owners. It is in fact a bit of that. Employees who quit are cheaper than fired employees or continued-to-be-hired employees. doing something unreasonable to make them quit seems reasonable, even if that might skew more towards the better employees. But it's also a rough attempt to identify deadweight who cannot explain why they did anything of value in 2 months.
  - dotBen 4y ago
croes 4y ago
>I absolutely have done things like this when acquiring companies - sat with people, asked them to basically interview for their own jobs while showing me the most important thing they wrote in the last quarter. That a pretty bad method finding the bad apples, more of the opposite. Someone like Musk who claims to have Asperger's should know this.
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  It's a crazy thing to do Just shut the company down and start over, don't turn people's lives into a living hell for weeks or months
  - downvote_magnet 4y ago
    Being asked to summarize your recent work is "a living hell"? Have you ever done manual labor for a living? Or worked a service job? Or taken care of a relative who needs round-the-clock care? Would you really characterize as "summarize the last few months of coding at my software engineering job" as a living hell as compared to those things?
    - croes 4y ago
      Things like this are always context sensitive or it becomes a race to the bottom where only the people in the worst condition have the right to complain. You think manual labor is hard, try living in a Ukraine war zone, you think a warzone is bad, try living as a forced prostitute etc. And according to Dante there are seven circles of hell and if someone t plunges your future into uncertainty it's a valid kind of hell, just not the worst kind.
    - Firmwarrior 4y ago
      Have my boss' boss' boss' boss summarize what his teams are up to. Don't call everybody in and glare at them in a small room over the course of weeks like in "Office Space" I have enough perspective, savings, and self confidence that there's nothing a little prick manager can do at a job that will ruin MY life. But there are a lot of honest, hard-working people out there who just want to do their best and make enough to keep on top of their $7500 mortgage payments and don't need someone putting a boot on their neck
seattle_spring 4y ago
He's planning on laying off people without even letting their next equity tranche vest? I'm sorry but what an absolute piece of human garbage.
xfallow 4y ago
That sounds awful. Interviewing sucks and is one of the main reasons I don't move elsewhere for a pay-rise if my employer wanted to nitpick my work and make me justify my existence at the company why would I not just move on to a place that isn't insane?

djur 4y ago

Do you understand why people who aren't making lots of money from it might be angry and upset about this process?

Xeronate 4y ago
The ability of the process to prune dead weight and the emotions of the people affected are kind of unrelated. It's a business not a charity.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- exadrid 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - dagmx 4y ago
    And you know the same people would be shedding tears if they were being cut short in any way. It’s a total lack of empathy.
  - jddil 4y ago
    You're on a board founded by a VC fund to market their investments, I would expect capitalists to be the majority here.
    - lupire 4y ago
      Hacker News is a recruiting website for those capitalists' employees. (Look at the only ads that ever appear on HN).
    - jjulius 4y ago
      You're both correct in this instance.
    - uni_rule 4y ago
      I don't doubt this site is mostly libertarian types but it still strikes me how such people can say some of the shit they do with a straight face. It's especially apparent how nuts some of them are when they are felating Elon Musk specifically.
  - tsol 4y ago
    You mean hackernews, the site for people who make ridiculous incomes for working on menial digital products like social media? It's strange when people walk into a room and assume everyone else must think like them.
    - undersuit 4y ago
      Oh we're supposed to make ridiculous incomes? Lets go tell my public sector employer.
      - tsol 4y ago
        No, but you're supposed to understand that most of the people on HN aren't going to be dedicated against capitalism. I don't make much myself but I can figure that much out. SV is a capitalists wet dream.
        undersuit 4y ago
        Slight criticism of capitalism == dedicated against capitalism?
  - hnusersarelame 4y ago
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  We should not celebrate sociopathy. Or short term thinking. Maybe take... I dunno, a couple of weeks to assess people's value? Instead of potentially firing people you actually should have kept around and spending 35% more on salaries for replacements and God knows how much in lost domain knowledge. Not ethical, not rational.
  - Xeronate 4y ago
    I'm fine with the argument that its not rational and not a good process because the outcome will be bad (firing people that you should have kept). I'm only pushing back against the idea that a business should put protecting peoples feelings over the wellbeing of the company. Sure do it humanely. Give a nice severance. But if people aren't producing the company has no obligation to keep them.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago

> asked them to basically interview for their own jobs while showing me the most important thing they wrote in the last quarter This is builds the same dysfunctional system's that causing so many problems for Google - the people maintaining the vital systems won't have anything cool to show, but they will be the ones that made sure the bills kept getting paid. > I can see why it might make sense to just tell people to print stuff out to demonstrate competency All they are demonstrating their is their ability to sell themselves.

throwaway09223 4y ago
You're assuming this is the only process they have in place -- and there's no rational basis for that assumption. Look, we all should know how this works. We're viewing selective aspects of their process through the warped perspective of the national media. You're not hearing about any of the reasonable things they're doing because none of those things are interesting. You're only hearing about elements which can be presented as shocking, to get your eyeballs on news bites. Take a step back and think about perspective.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  We can only discuss the information given to us. Sure, the other processes may work, but the process that I'm addressing, your claimed process (so you could give us more information if you wanted) seems DEEPLY dysfunctional.
  - throwaway09223 4y ago
    Would you like to talk about my process? I'm happy to share details. All kinds of information is exchanged in an acquisition. The acquirer probably has an idea about how the company functions, which departments are key, which employees are key, and so on. They'll also have an idea about which employees or departments have been problems. I am thinking of a specific example where my large company acquired a small startup. It had a sysadmin team of three people. This team had been identified as a point of conflict within the company - holding up projects and refusing to adopt automated process. It was already decided that the manager would be fired. My job was to determine the extent to which the employees were contributing to the dynamic, to determine whether they were open to change, and to assess their general competency. We needed to know how much of the existing team could be kept on to help. I flew onsite for a few days. The story was that the acquiring company was gifting me to help their team, because they had been long complaining about needing headcount. I asked to be shown what people did day to day. I asked why it was done that way and I suggested new ways of doing it (how it would probably be done, post acquisition) and listened to their answers. I participated in their daily work routine. As I recall we decided to keep all the employees. They had been marginalized by a bad manager and they ended up doing quite well helping out with the transition. The information I gathered helped structure the layout of the new team. Their old (fired) manager had not done a good job of assessing their skillsets or giving them latitude to move their platform forward. Other times, I have identified people that needed to be let go. Sometimes it is clear that someone doesn't have the necessary skillset, isn't making meaningful contributions, or has some kind of personality conflict. I think we have all encountered someone like this in our careers at times. The twitter process sounds chaotic and driven by a crazy timeline for sure. The scale is far larger. But, the steps they're taking to attempt to achieve this goal don't seem inherently wrong. Asking someone to bring a real sample of their work to discuss in an interview is a great tactic. If you asked me to design a process to hold these kinds of interviews at scale I might do the exact same thing.

sour-taste 4y ago

What is going to happen to people's stock vests? There is no public company any more. Can they just hold the stock or do they get a cash value?

code_runner 4y ago
I believe the stock still exists (still has an active ticker/cusip) but trade volume is at 0. At some point it will be delisted and shareholders will just get cash. I assume grant vesting is still meaningful until that point.
HWR_14 4y ago
They get a cash value at the same $54.20/share as current holders get. They may be allowed to instead vest shares, but that would be a new agreement. The merger document converts it to cash.

xnyan 4y ago

>I can see why it might make sense to just tell people to print stuff out to demonstrate competency Review of work based on your last 30 days of code that’s printed out on 8.5x11s is nonsensical. I’ve never heard of anything like it in my software development career and can’t think of any reason one would do it except to encourage people to quit.

optymizer 4y ago

What a ridiculous viewpoint. I spent two days last week to write a single line of code. It cuts the startup time of the app in half with no downsides. I had to make sure it works in all flavors, on all OS builds, benchmark it to show it works, cherry pick it into various release branches, talk to people about it, etc If you ask me to print my code and defend it in a meeting, I will instead skip the meeting and respond to one of the dozens recruiters who reach out every week in my inbox. You can keep the engineers who wrote the slow code in the first place. I'm sure they'll have thousands of lines of code to print. It's just a demeaning process meant to assert the dominance of the new owners.

jessaustin 4y ago
Congratulations on your good work. ISTM if you could evangelize the improvement to all those different people, you could also evangelize it to one more person? Sure, your assigned Tesla auditor could be an idiot (although that seems less likely for a Tesla person than for a twitter person), but would it hurt to try?
HWR_14 4y ago
> If you ask me to print my code and defend it in a meeting, I will instead skip the meeting and respond to one of the dozens recruiters who reach out every week in my inbox. Isn't that his goal? Reduce headcount before vesting bonuses on Nov. 1st? It seems like you would be just the sucker that Musk is trying to get rid of before one last milestone cash payment. On top of which, why couldn't you defend that line in a meeting? "I changed this one line cutting the loading time in half for the program. It took 2 days of profiling to find where to change and another week to ensure that it works across all build targets and work on a deployment timeline." > 's just a demeaning process meant to assert the dominance of the new owners. It is in fact a bit of that. Employees who quit are cheaper than fired employees or continued-to-be-hired employees. doing something unreasonable to make them quit seems reasonable, even if that might skew more towards the better employees. But it's also a rough attempt to identify deadweight who cannot explain why they did anything of value in 2 months.
- dotBen 4y ago

croes 4y ago

>I absolutely have done things like this when acquiring companies - sat with people, asked them to basically interview for their own jobs while showing me the most important thing they wrote in the last quarter. That a pretty bad method finding the bad apples, more of the opposite. Someone like Musk who claims to have Asperger's should know this.

Firmwarrior 4y ago
It's a crazy thing to do Just shut the company down and start over, don't turn people's lives into a living hell for weeks or months
- downvote_magnet 4y ago
  Being asked to summarize your recent work is "a living hell"? Have you ever done manual labor for a living? Or worked a service job? Or taken care of a relative who needs round-the-clock care? Would you really characterize as "summarize the last few months of coding at my software engineering job" as a living hell as compared to those things?
  - croes 4y ago
    Things like this are always context sensitive or it becomes a race to the bottom where only the people in the worst condition have the right to complain. You think manual labor is hard, try living in a Ukraine war zone, you think a warzone is bad, try living as a forced prostitute etc. And according to Dante there are seven circles of hell and if someone t plunges your future into uncertainty it's a valid kind of hell, just not the worst kind.
  - Firmwarrior 4y ago
    Have my boss' boss' boss' boss summarize what his teams are up to. Don't call everybody in and glare at them in a small room over the course of weeks like in "Office Space" I have enough perspective, savings, and self confidence that there's nothing a little prick manager can do at a job that will ruin MY life. But there are a lot of honest, hard-working people out there who just want to do their best and make enough to keep on top of their $7500 mortgage payments and don't need someone putting a boot on their neck

seattle_spring 4y ago

He's planning on laying off people without even letting their next equity tranche vest? I'm sorry but what an absolute piece of human garbage.

xfallow 4y ago

That sounds awful. Interviewing sucks and is one of the main reasons I don't move elsewhere for a pay-rise if my employer wanted to nitpick my work and make me justify my existence at the company why would I not just move on to a place that isn't insane?