11 ms·

Firing 25% of the workforce "for cause" looks like a very hard sell to me, and would open up Twitter for a barrage of lawsuits - and rightly so. Even laying of

Firing 25% of the workforce "for cause" looks like a very hard sell to me, and would open up Twitter for a barrage of lawsuits - and rightly so. Even laying off 25% of the workers would be hard to justify at this point. I'm certainly curious where this all is going.

hef19898 4y ago
Stories like this make like the employee protection I enjoy even more.
- kingsloi 4y ago
  /cries in an at-will state/
  - Y-bar 4y ago
    Unions. Not just for fancy Europeans and factory workers. If your colleagues gets fired for some bs reason you and your other colleagues can stand for each other by striking.
    - Archelaos 4y ago
      ... and codetermination. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany
      - AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
        I read this as "code termination" instead of "co determination" and was about halfway through the wikipedia article and quite confused before I figured it out.
        adolph 4y ago
        Yeah, its what happens when you get fired but everyone wraps their arms around you in a big group hug so security can't get to you: de-termination.
      - kazen44 4y ago
        exists in most northern and western european companies aswell.. Unions in europe also seem far less militant than those in the US.
        kwhitefoot 4y ago
        > Unions in europe also seem far less militant 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.
        int_19h 4y ago
        It should be noted that European unions were no less militant originally. Being militant (and strong enough) is what gets you concessions - including better arrangements for future deals.
        kwhitefoot 4y ago
        Of course, no argument there. But European society even then wasn't quite so polarised as the US seems to be now. So being militant was effective. Somehow unions in the US seem to have got such a bad reputation that even those who would benefit from them don't join.
        uni_rule 4y ago
        I presume because their functional existence is already a given. America still hasn't quite gotten over the Pinkertons.
    - freeopinion 4y ago
      Unless some of your colleagues don't go along with it and are willing to train recruits enough to keep the ship afloat. Unions: the anti-anti-trust weapon in the war to win the balance of power.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    Fwiw all states are at-will, though there are varying exceptions from state to state.
    - kingsloi 4y ago
      Yeah I know broadly they all are, but some states offer slightly more protection. 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.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        It might be immediate, it might be end of month, might be some other period. In any case COBRA kicks in and can be paid for retrospectively if you need it.
      - ufmace 4y ago
        Generally the end of the month that you were terminated in, unless you pay the same company to keep the same plan via COBRA. It's the same plan, you're just paying what you paid for it before plus whatever the company was paying for your share, which is generally much higher.
    - teraflop 4y ago
      Montana is the biggest exception. It's only at-will for a 6-month probationary period, and after that, you can generally only be fired for "good cause".
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        Good cause could be Twitter is losing money and has massive debt.
        Cogito 4y ago
        A redundancy is different to being fired, and comes with a payout depending on length of tenure with the company. 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.
- btilly 4y ago
  TANSTAAFL. (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.) 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.
  - prottog 4y ago
    Indeed! Harder to hire, harder to fire. Like most such schemes, it advantages those already inside at the cost to those looking in from the outside; see also rent control.
  - kenjackson 4y ago
    If increased employee protection causes you to layoff almost everyone in a country -- you probably had little good business reason to be in that country. 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.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      Whether it does or does not protect them, employees will pay for these protections in the form of lowered salary and fewer jobs available. Nothing comes for free.
      - danielheath 4y ago
        That's absolutely true, but in practice most people would experience substantial hardship if they suddenly lost their job. 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.
realgeniushere 4y ago
Even California still has at-will employment. He doesn’t need cause, or anyone else to agree on what that cause is.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  He might if he wants their options not to vest. [Edit: Or to have to pay their golden parachute.]
  - bigiain 4y ago
    I wonder if even Musk would be so publicly ruthless as that? 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?
    - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      Musk made an offer, voluntarily closed off his ability to back out, then tried to back out and couldn't. He has been thoroughly outmaneuvered by Twitter's management (or outmaneuvered himself, same effect). So I'm not super high on his ability to foresee consequences at the moment. 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.
      - realgeniushere 4y ago
        I think it was a good gamble. If old management had budged by even 1% or 2% of the original deal, the savings would have easily paid for all the lawyers Musk and Twitter had to hire. Just a calculated risk that didn’t pay off. That’s how calculated risks go sometimes.
- whateveracct 4y ago
agsnu 4y ago
Tesla is currently engaged in litigation over allegedly firing employees without providing necessary 60 day notice period under California law, denying them pay as a result, so it would appear that Musk has precedent.
- refulgentis 4y ago
  Precedent is when there's case law backing something. I think you're thinking of Musk's PR and decision making, not the company: there certainly isn't case law for letting go of _25% of the company, for cause_
  - ajb 4y ago
    Yeah, the term is "has form".
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    > Precedent is when there's case law backing something. 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
    - anecdotal1 4y ago
      > Musk has precedent The "has" makes it seem like it was a legal statement. It probably should be been worded differently
      - MikeTheGreat 4y ago
        Agreed. Perhaps something like "...so that's a precedent that shows that Musk is willing/has done something like this"
      - 4y ago
MichaelCollins 4y ago
How many devs at twitter have no code to show for the past month, because they swept up by the impending doom of Musk's takeover and stopped working? I would guess more than a few. Firing those "for cause" will probably be easy; they stopped working for a month and anybody can get fired for that. Those that remained productive will probably have better prospects for keeping their jobs, and for suing if they're fired.
- ska 4y ago
  > because they swept up by the impending doom of Musk's takeover and stopped working? 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.
- 98codes 4y ago
  We've known that lines of code were no indication of code quality or developer productivity for well over two decades now -- why would it start to matter now, particularly for those at more senior levels?
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    > We've known that lines of code were no indication of code quality or developer productivity for well over two decades now 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.
    - covidiot5 4y ago
    - watwut 4y ago
      Zero code situation is wishful thinking - poster just made it up.
eqbridges 4y ago
Can you cite where it’s been said he’s firing 25% (or any significant percentage) “for cause”? 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.
- sp332 4y ago
  From WP: "Layoffs are expected to begin ahead of Nov. 1, when Twitter employees are slated to receive additional compensation related to stock grants." 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
  - eqbridges 4y ago
    What you're saying does not make any sense relative to the question asked.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - assetlabel 4y ago
    Elon Musk says "This is false": https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586831721386766337 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586831721386766337
- saurik 4y ago
  (I am not responding to the "25%" part as I did not use a percent myself, but am responding to the second, stricter, statement.) 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 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.
shaburn 4y ago
Lawsuits are often free financing to fractional future payouts. Especially when the terms are too cush from being clubby. That's like half of Elon's call on this bet.
memish 4y ago
> Even laying off 25% of the workers would be hard to justify at this point. It wouldn't because we're in a downturn and Twitter was already planning layoffs.
- gaadd33 4y ago
  Did Twitter already file a WARN act notice about the layoffs? If not, how can it be justified under that?
  - Aleksdev 4y ago
    Correct me if I’m wrong but it all really depends on the contract. I understand there are labor laws in place but if the person agreed to something then I don’t think California law can do much.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      From what I've seen posted elsewhere California requires companies laying off more than 50 individuals to file. Failure to do so cause the state can step in and force the employer to pay a couple months of severance. Most California labor laws cannot be waived by contract
    - themitigating 4y ago
      "You're honor, the so called victim agreed to be murdered by me" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_agreement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_agreement
    - prmoustache 4y ago
      That is usually the opposite. If a contract contain illegal clauses, those clauses are nil.
      - Aleksdev 4y ago
        I see, I worked in America but never in California. That make more sense now.
prvc 4y ago
>Firing 25% of the workforce "for cause" looks like a very hard sell to me 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.?

hef19898 4y ago

Stories like this make like the employee protection I enjoy even more.

kingsloi 4y ago
/cries in an at-will state/
- Y-bar 4y ago
  Unions. Not just for fancy Europeans and factory workers. If your colleagues gets fired for some bs reason you and your other colleagues can stand for each other by striking.
  - Archelaos 4y ago
    ... and codetermination. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany
    - AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
      I read this as "code termination" instead of "co determination" and was about halfway through the wikipedia article and quite confused before I figured it out.
      - adolph 4y ago
        Yeah, its what happens when you get fired but everyone wraps their arms around you in a big group hug so security can't get to you: de-termination.
    - kazen44 4y ago
      exists in most northern and western european companies aswell.. Unions in europe also seem far less militant than those in the US.
      - kwhitefoot 4y ago
        > Unions in europe also seem far less militant 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.
        int_19h 4y ago
        It should be noted that European unions were no less militant originally. Being militant (and strong enough) is what gets you concessions - including better arrangements for future deals.
        kwhitefoot 4y ago
        Of course, no argument there. But European society even then wasn't quite so polarised as the US seems to be now. So being militant was effective. Somehow unions in the US seem to have got such a bad reputation that even those who would benefit from them don't join.
      - uni_rule 4y ago
        I presume because their functional existence is already a given. America still hasn't quite gotten over the Pinkertons.
  - freeopinion 4y ago
    Unless some of your colleagues don't go along with it and are willing to train recruits enough to keep the ship afloat. Unions: the anti-anti-trust weapon in the war to win the balance of power.
- masklinn 4y ago
  Fwiw all states are at-will, though there are varying exceptions from state to state.
  - kingsloi 4y ago
    Yeah I know broadly they all are, but some states offer slightly more protection. 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.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      It might be immediate, it might be end of month, might be some other period. In any case COBRA kicks in and can be paid for retrospectively if you need it.
    - ufmace 4y ago
      Generally the end of the month that you were terminated in, unless you pay the same company to keep the same plan via COBRA. It's the same plan, you're just paying what you paid for it before plus whatever the company was paying for your share, which is generally much higher.
  - teraflop 4y ago
    Montana is the biggest exception. It's only at-will for a 6-month probationary period, and after that, you can generally only be fired for "good cause".
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      Good cause could be Twitter is losing money and has massive debt.
      - Cogito 4y ago
        A redundancy is different to being fired, and comes with a payout depending on length of tenure with the company. 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.
btilly 4y ago
TANSTAAFL. (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.) 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.
- prottog 4y ago
  Indeed! Harder to hire, harder to fire. Like most such schemes, it advantages those already inside at the cost to those looking in from the outside; see also rent control.
- kenjackson 4y ago
  If increased employee protection causes you to layoff almost everyone in a country -- you probably had little good business reason to be in that country. 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.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Whether it does or does not protect them, employees will pay for these protections in the form of lowered salary and fewer jobs available. Nothing comes for free.
    - danielheath 4y ago
      That's absolutely true, but in practice most people would experience substantial hardship if they suddenly lost their job. 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.

realgeniushere 4y ago

Even California still has at-will employment. He doesn’t need cause, or anyone else to agree on what that cause is.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
He might if he wants their options not to vest. [Edit: Or to have to pay their golden parachute.]
- bigiain 4y ago
  I wonder if even Musk would be so publicly ruthless as that? 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?
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    Musk made an offer, voluntarily closed off his ability to back out, then tried to back out and couldn't. He has been thoroughly outmaneuvered by Twitter's management (or outmaneuvered himself, same effect). So I'm not super high on his ability to foresee consequences at the moment. 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.
    - realgeniushere 4y ago
      I think it was a good gamble. If old management had budged by even 1% or 2% of the original deal, the savings would have easily paid for all the lawyers Musk and Twitter had to hire. Just a calculated risk that didn’t pay off. That’s how calculated risks go sometimes.
whateveracct 4y ago

agsnu 4y ago

Tesla is currently engaged in litigation over allegedly firing employees without providing necessary 60 day notice period under California law, denying them pay as a result, so it would appear that Musk has precedent.

refulgentis 4y ago
Precedent is when there's case law backing something. I think you're thinking of Musk's PR and decision making, not the company: there certainly isn't case law for letting go of _25% of the company, for cause_
- ajb 4y ago
  Yeah, the term is "has form".
- guerrilla 4y ago
  > Precedent is when there's case law backing something. 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
  - anecdotal1 4y ago
    > Musk has precedent The "has" makes it seem like it was a legal statement. It probably should be been worded differently
    - MikeTheGreat 4y ago
      Agreed. Perhaps something like "...so that's a precedent that shows that Musk is willing/has done something like this"
    - 4y ago

MichaelCollins 4y ago

How many devs at twitter have no code to show for the past month, because they swept up by the impending doom of Musk's takeover and stopped working? I would guess more than a few. Firing those "for cause" will probably be easy; they stopped working for a month and anybody can get fired for that. Those that remained productive will probably have better prospects for keeping their jobs, and for suing if they're fired.

ska 4y ago
> because they swept up by the impending doom of Musk's takeover and stopped working? 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.
98codes 4y ago
We've known that lines of code were no indication of code quality or developer productivity for well over two decades now -- why would it start to matter now, particularly for those at more senior levels?
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  > We've known that lines of code were no indication of code quality or developer productivity for well over two decades now 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.
  - covidiot5 4y ago
  - watwut 4y ago
    Zero code situation is wishful thinking - poster just made it up.

eqbridges 4y ago

Can you cite where it’s been said he’s firing 25% (or any significant percentage) “for cause”? 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.

sp332 4y ago
From WP: "Layoffs are expected to begin ahead of Nov. 1, when Twitter employees are slated to receive additional compensation related to stock grants." 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
- eqbridges 4y ago
  What you're saying does not make any sense relative to the question asked.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- assetlabel 4y ago
  Elon Musk says "This is false": https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586831721386766337 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586831721386766337
saurik 4y ago
(I am not responding to the "25%" part as I did not use a percent myself, but am responding to the second, stricter, statement.) 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 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.

shaburn 4y ago

Lawsuits are often free financing to fractional future payouts. Especially when the terms are too cush from being clubby. That's like half of Elon's call on this bet.

memish 4y ago

> Even laying off 25% of the workers would be hard to justify at this point. It wouldn't because we're in a downturn and Twitter was already planning layoffs.

gaadd33 4y ago
Did Twitter already file a WARN act notice about the layoffs? If not, how can it be justified under that?
- Aleksdev 4y ago
  Correct me if I’m wrong but it all really depends on the contract. I understand there are labor laws in place but if the person agreed to something then I don’t think California law can do much.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    From what I've seen posted elsewhere California requires companies laying off more than 50 individuals to file. Failure to do so cause the state can step in and force the employer to pay a couple months of severance. Most California labor laws cannot be waived by contract
  - themitigating 4y ago
    "You're honor, the so called victim agreed to be murdered by me" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_agreement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_agreement
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    That is usually the opposite. If a contract contain illegal clauses, those clauses are nil.
    - Aleksdev 4y ago
      I see, I worked in America but never in California. That make more sense now.

prvc 4y ago

>Firing 25% of the workforce "for cause" looks like a very hard sell to me 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.?