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Twitter to start layoffs -internal email
- efficax 4y agoi’d really be struggling to sleep tonight if i worked at twitter
- andrewrice 4y agoThey organized this quicker than I expected. I'm very curious about the criteria they used to decide who goes.
- ethagknight 4y agoProbably whoever leaked the email is layoff #1
- zanagon 4y agoha ha. No. They're the sneaky one that will have put in thousands of lines of whitespace and punctuation fixes which the software used to fire people will detect as "ultra active". They'll get a promotion and double bonus.
- rsanheim 4y agoFor engineers at least: git ls-files -z | xargs -0n1 git blame -w | perl -n -e '/^.?\((.?)\s+[\d]{4}/; print $1,"\n"' | sort -f | uniq -c | sort -n | head 1500 Merged with a hitlist of people who have made anti-musk comments internally or externally of course. A purge based on silly metrics and grudges, as all good bullies and tyrants do.
- datalopers 4y agoSo much for that $8/mo rollout
- posguy 4y agoSo much for trying to cut infrastructure spending costs by November 7th too: https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-orders-twitter-cut-infrastructure-costs-by-1-bln-sources-2022-11-03/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-orders-twitter-cut-i...
- type-r 4y agohttps://archive.ph/nqOKJ https://archive.ph/nqOKJ
- refurb 4y agoHe's owned it for a week and people are like "why haven't you turned it around yet?!?!?"
- seattle_spring 4y agoNot really. If that’s what you got out of the comment you replied to, you may want to read it again because you definitely misinterpreted its point.
- davidguetta 4y agoIs this really Musk doing ? So many compagnies are laying off these days it was probably in the work for a while
- danuker 4y agoI suspect the nonzero interest rates are making capital actuallly prioritize returns. Therefore pie-in-the-sky projects not making money are scrapped.
- dmonitor 4y agoI would say it depends on how many get laid off
- greenthrow 4y agoHe came in saying he was going to lay off half the staff and you ask whether it's his doing?
- klyrs 4y agoHe came in swinging for 75%; it now sounds like somebody talked him down to 50%.
- bikeshed 4y agoit's wild that Musk was trolled into paying $44B to destroy a perfectly viable company.
- refurb 4y agoDo you have a crystal ball? How do you know how things will turn out? I mean, it's not like Twitter had some amazing business plan going forward.
- dilyevsky 4y agoHis determination to set his 44B on fire is commendable
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jesuscript 4y ago[flagged]
- jsonne 4y agoLosing 200 million a year and mostly being not profitable is viable? Edited to say "mostly" not profitable.
- rtlfe 4y ago> Twitter said in the email that its offices will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended in order "to help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data." Is this normal during mass layoffs?
- posguy 4y agoSeems very unusual to suspend all employees badge access, given "Some employees have been ordered to work in the office every day of the week to meet the deadline" per this article: https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-orders-twitter-cut-infrastructure-costs-by-1-bln-sources-2022-11-03/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-orders-twitter-cut-i...
- anikom15 4y agoYou only need the badge to get in. Makes perfect sense.
- klyrs 4y agoImagine being on the team that's clearing out everybody's desks. Once that's done, you're no longer needed. But hurry up, now.
- anikom15 4y agoThat work is probably contracted.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- austenallred 4y agoIt’s unusual for a new owner to lay off 50% of a company at once
- barnabee 4y agoI have seen investment banks disable all logins for a whole division or trading floor, invite the people they aren’t firing to an all hands / town hall meeting to tell them as much, then announce to everyone else on the floor that they no longer have a job and will be escorted out of the building with any belongings they choose to collect within 30 minutes. I’m not sure how normal it is, but it doesn’t objectively seem like there’s anything wrong with it.
- sroussey 4y agoTop talent would have already left by now. Others wait for severance (which may be pitiful in this case). I watched this long ago, and see it repeated.
- cyode 4y agoStripe set a high bar today in terms of severance, you can almost guarantee Twitter’s terms aren’t going to be as generous.
- orange_joe 4y agoCalifornia law requires 60 days notice or 60 days pay, so I'd assume that's what they'll be getting.
- mulletbum 4y agoPitiful is better than nothing.
- COGlory 4y agoThis headline is starting to get old. Shit or get off the pot.
- TigeriusKirk 4y agoI'm following the Twitter story with close interest, but even I don't think we need a submission for each micro-event individually.
- hamandcheese 4y agoOn the flipside, HN threads get very confusing when new information surfaces hours after hitting the front page. New arrivals start "correcting" people who commented with out of date information.
- HappyTypist 4y ago'Hide' takes one click :)
- rvz 4y agoYeah, it is getting quite boring since all of this market chaos was expected and as you can see, everyone here being surprised that these layoffs in general are happening. The news need an outrage story to get clicks and eyeballs for their ad money, so why not give Twitter and Elon Musk more attention and drama? It is the same pattern. But I don't think a social network with a head count of more than 7500+ and increasingly burning hundreds of millions of cash, nearing into the billions for years is sustainable. The layoffs where going to happen either way; with or without Musk's takeover of Twitter. But of course I couldn't care less on what happens to Twitter, Elon Musk can do whatever he likes with it and yet the screeching loudmouths relying on Twitter will end up screaming in outrage and will calm down and end up paying for their verified checkmarks.
- twtrgrunt 4y agoReady to watch this stupid company burn to the ground, and take elon with it
- nemo44x 4y agoI guess the company is $1B/year in the hole and they need to close that. Will they get there cutting 3k people and charging $8/verified? The math isn’t too crazy. -> I made some shitty comments last night about this (firing lots of people) in another thread. I regret them because it was mean. It was meant to be cold in a business is business sort of way, yes, but they came off as mean after I read them again.
- rl3 4y ago>The second source described the proposed cuts as "delusional," adding that when user traffic kicks up, the service can fail "in spectacular ways." >Teams across Twitter are racing to present a plan to achieve the cost savings by a Nov. 7 deadline, according to one of the sources and the Slack message. Some employees have been ordered to work in the office every day of the week to meet the deadline, the source said. Bringing his renowned brand of work-life balance to Twitter I see.
- type-r 4y agoDo we consider it reasonable that a mature service of 16 years is exposed to 'spectacular' failures when there's a traffic surge?
- guax 4y agoIf a well estabilished restaurant loses half its waiters right before the biggest dining week in the year, is it reasonable to expect that it fails in spectacular ways?
- rl3 4y agoYeah, but firing half the waiters on short notice is the unreasonable part.
- freejazz 4y agoAre you the kind of person that screams at your waiter or waitress when your expectations aren't met?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rl3 4y agoI doubt they are, let alone the kind of person that hurls random personal attacks at strangers based on shaky analogies.
- truetraveller 4y agoPreface: Not questioning anyone's ability, and don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. I understand there's red tap, politics, etc. Twitter's UI design and usability is lacking greatly. Till this day, I'm confused. This button, it's to see who replied, and this button it's to view actual comments. Clicking an image on a tweet shows a different view with replies in comparison to clicking the body of the tweet. And once I finally get to see comments, it shows me 5 or so comments, with a "show more" that shows 3 more. Content is just one long stream of white without any grouping/sections. And both sidebars are white. Truly a pain. I've noticed these problems like 5+ years ago. And these problems are not subjective, but objectively wrong. I believe some of these layoffs are correct.
- carbonx 4y agoAgreed. A regular frustration for me is clicking on a tweet that is a replay to a tween, and then I still have to scroll back to see the original tweet. I'm old and mostly use desktop, so I don't really know that's how it works on mobile.
- userbinator 4y agoThat's because it was optimised to show you ads, and not for your comfort. Otherwise it wouldn't be a ridiculously bloated SPA, and instead be more like Nitter or some of the other alternate UIs that have appeared. Given the focus on $$$, I doubt Musk will change that aspect of Twitter in a direction that's better for you.
- truetraveller 4y agoDefinitely, platforms optimize for ads. But these things are actually not concerning ad display/engagement. On the contrary, these UX improvements would increase my engagement, and thus ad engagement.
- can16358p 4y agoInstagram is also optimized to show me ads, but it also has an arguably nice UX too, at least much better than Twitter IMO.
- Ayesh 4y agoThree HN top posts about Twitter, Lyft, and Stripe laying off people, and looks like just a start. In Twitter's case though, the writing was in the wall ever since Elon fiasco began.
- kyrra 4y agoChime: 12% https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33455728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33455728 CloudKitchens: https://archive.ph/t46mK https://archive.ph/t46mK Amazon hiring freeze: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454151
- barnabee 4y agoAll of these companies and many more have too many people. They have never lived through a period of stagnation or decline. Investment banks and many other industries were that way once. It’s not new. This doesn’t mean Twitter is about to die, nor does it mean they are saved. For tech to get sustainable, it is just the start, though.
- drstewart 4y agoWhy does it look like just a start? What information do you have?
- tamaharbor 4y agoMaybe the US is in a recession.
- dehrmann 4y agoWhat's interesting is this is almost the opposite of April, 2020. Rather than low-wage service sector workers getting laid off, it's high-wage tech workers.
- tppiotrowski 4y agoHalf of Twitter employees number 3,700 and if on average they make $100K then that's $370 million off Twitter's expenses. Does anyone know if that would make them profitable if current revenue doesn't decline?
- mc32 4y agoTotal cost per employee is likely double their salary figure. Also the ave. salary is going to be way more than 100M/yr/employee. [M as in the Roman numeral M]
- cbtacy 4y agoUmmm... no. Fully burdened costs is total cash comp plus between 25% and 35% as a general rule in the US.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tqi 4y agoA general rule in the US, not in tech. If you look at most tech salary data points[1], equity and bonuses will often be an additional 50%-70%. Your estimate[2] likely only factors in the cost of benefits and employment taxes. [1] https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/ [2] https://web.mit.edu/e-club/hadzima/how-much-does-an-employee-cost.html https://web.mit.edu/e-club/hadzima/how-much-does-an-employee...
- imron 4y ago> Also the ave. salary is going to be way more than 100M/yr/employee. I find that very unlikely! (but that’s because you made a typo)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- modeless 4y ago
- breput 4y agoThe entire memo is posted here: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/3/23439802/elon-musks-twitter-layoffs-start-friday-november-4 https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/3/23439802/elon-musks-twitt...
- rtlfe 4y ago> Thank you for continuing to adhere to Twitter policies that prohibit you from discussing confidential company information on social media, with the press or elsewhere. Ha.
- middleclick 4y ago
- mzs 4y agoThank you, also response from employees: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/twitter-layoffs-elon-musk-fires-staff-how-many-rcna54799 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/twitter-layof... reporter's thread: https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1588335697785589761 https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/15883356977855897... >Employees in Twitter just got an email from their bosses saying layoffs are coming tomorrow. >Those who are staying will get a note tomorrow in their work email. Those who are let go will get an email sent to their personal address. >Slot machine-style layoffs. >Some employees I'm hearing from at Twitter are desperate to get laid off and get severance. The work culture there is beyond toxic. >Some are afraid to push back against Elon because they don't want to risk getting fired for cause — disagreeing with Elon — and losing severance. … >"At the end of this nightmare, I better get a cash prize," one told me.
- ruralthinker 4y agoI am a software engineer and I am a little worried seeing all these layoffs. No company will have 100% layoff, so it could be possible to weather this downturn? What could be the best strategy to get through this difficult period?
- COGlory 4y agoThis happens every decade or so. Don't live beyond your means and you will be OK, even if you get laid off.
- heartbreak 4y agoThese layoffs are because someone bought the company and saddled it with enough debt that it’ll take a billion dollars per year to pay the interest. This is nothing like Stripe’s 14% layoffs from elsewhere on the HN homepage.
- ummonk 4y agoNevertheless it does add to all the hiring freezes and layoffs we are seeing from other large companies (including, as you mentioned, Stripe).
- MexicanJoe 4y agoI don't know the American market, but they are screaming for qualified developers in Europe and Asia where I work. I have been around long enough to know that if you are a good developer there will always be work for you. Especially if you are not super specialized and open to working with people.
- Godel_unicode 4y agoThere are plenty of highly paid dev jobs in the US too, it’s just that the market isn’t river-of-lava-on-the-sun hot like it has been the last 10+ years.
- throwawaysleep 4y ago
- dmak 4y agoI don't know why comments are so against these layoffs. Twitter is known for having a "chill" work environment and I have heard many stories of people just slacking off and doing other things while getting paid. I would actually like to see Twitter's team and culture rebuilt regardless of who bought it.
- seibelj 4y agoBigco software engineering has been quite chill / slack-off for some time. Rude awakening for a lot of devs if they have been resting on their laurels.
- fzeroracer 4y agoBecause you're not going to know who the 'slackers' are in the first week or so of owning a company and actions like these are a great way to ensure that your company doesn't get rebuilt. Despite how many Musk reply guys seem to exist, most of them aren't engineers and even fewer of them are dumb enough to work for a Musk-owned Twitter where you get to be overworked and underpaid.
- VirusNewbie 4y agoWhy not? If the rumors are true, there are people who don’t commit code (or design docs etc) for months on end. Wouldn’t it be pretty easy to identify those people?
- fzeroracer 4y agoBecause you and I both know those rumors aren't true. Upper management at any big company isn't going to let any of that slide no matter the culture. And implying that 50% of people are that level of unproductive is laughable by any metric. You could probably make some shit up by pointing at a technical manager that hasn't written code in a while but that's not indicative of their actual performance.
- tppiotrowski 4y ago"If you do not receive an email from twitter-hr@ by 5PM PST on Friday Nov. 4th, please email peoplequestions@twitter.com" Reminds me of that AOL employee that kept their badge for 6 months after they were laid off and kept eating at the cafeteria (or something along those lines)
- erehweb 4y agoPerhaps you are thinking of this story? https://www.inc.com/john-mcdermott/eric-simons-interview-young-entrepreneur-squatted-at-aol.html https://www.inc.com/john-mcdermott/eric-simons-interview-you... - not directly an AOL employee, but an entrepreneur on the office space.
- seattle_spring 4y agoHonest question: Why would anyone willingly stay at Twitter? He seems extremely employee unfriendly, and it’s not like working at Twitter is some noble cause. Why wouldn’t you immediately go work somewhere else, assuming you’re reasonably employable?
- afavour 4y agoBecause you'll get severance if they fire you.
- halfmatthalfcat 4y agoAll Tesla employees (some who had worked there for 10+ years) who were laid off this year got 1 week severance. You think he's gonna let Twitter employees get anything of value out the door?
- fooey 4y agoAnd Tesla is being sued for WARN Act violations, which mandates 60 days severance, but it remains to be seen if they can enforce it > An employer who violates the WARN Act notice requirement is liable to each affected employee for an amount equal to back pay and benefits for the period of violation up to 60 days. An employer who fails to provide notice as required to a unit of local government is subject to a civil penalty not to exceed $500 for each day of violation. The penalty may be avoided if the employer satisfies the liability to each affected employee within three weeks after the closing. In any suit, the court, in its discretion, may allow the prevailing party a reasonable attorney’s fee as part of the costs. These are the only remedies that WARN provides. That fine might not be large enough to discourage bad actors
- Aeolun 4y agoMaybe it counts per day of violation per employee? As in, they’re all separate offences, not one offence against 1000 employees.
- jeffbee 4y agoHaha "including your spam folder"? These guys are using gsuite email, why would official internal emails be in spam? Are they planning to have some 3rd-party layoff contractor send the mails from Bulgaria or something?
- TigeriusKirk 4y agoNote that it says if you're let go, the email will come to your personal email. I assume because your access to corporate email will already be revoked.
- jef_leppard 4y agoThe way this entire thing has been run is a f*cking disgrace. Yes they have a business to run. Yes they need to do what they need to do to keep things healthy on that end, but these are PEOPLE we are talking about here. They have lives and families. The amount of contempt I have for Musk over the way he is treating them is unbounded. We used to think this guy was Bruce Wayne. Turns out he's Lex Luthor.
- buscoquadnary 4y agoWow laying off a large chunk of an unprofitable company is lex luthor evil? Guess the bar for super villain has become substantially lower.
- seanmcdirmid 4y agoLex Luthor would never make so many stupid comments on social media. Musk is more cartoon villain than comic book villain. But I think the Joker once lampshaded that a CEO was more evil than he would ever be. Its probably somewhere in the Even Evil has Standards trope (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvenEvilHasStandards https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvenEvilHasStand...).
- krapp 4y agoLex Luthor did, however, take forty cakes. That’s as many as four tens. And that's terrible.
- jef_leppard 4y agoLayoffs are part of business yes (pretty much what I said in my parent post). What I have a problem with is the way this is being done. Forcing people to quit by dropping arbitrary deadlines without any notice? Notice of 84 hour work weeks? Sleeping in the office? Asking devs to print up their code? All this because he doesn't want to pay severance etc. I think that is hella f*cked up.
- marcusverus 4y ago
- wongarsu 4y ago> His team of outside advisors has spent the last week determining which engineers to keep based on their contributions to Twitter’s codebase, according to employees involved in the discussion [from the verge article] That's a striking difference to the stripe layoffs discussed earlier today, and the experiences many others shared there.
- bigmattystyles 4y agoDumb question - but for those that remain, now that they no longer have RSUs / ESPP / etc, would you expect their salaries to be made commensurate to what their comp was before? How is this usually handled for companies that go from public (and where a large part of comp is stock) to private?
- tetranoir 4y agoLikely turns into cash over the same period at the buyout price. It technically depends on the change of management clause in your contract. The firings will reduce the owed cash that Elon has to payout as a result of the stock swap. Smart move
- avrionov 4y agoThere are RSUs. When a company goes private, the RSUs convert to cash on the same vesting schedule. Of course the company can cancel them, but they usually keep the vesting schedule to keep the employees. For the Twitter employees (if they keep their jobs and the RSUs are not canceled) this is a very good deal, because the stock price was really high due to the deal.
- rootusrootus 4y agoIn our case the RSUs all insta-vested and got paid out, then got replaced with nothing.
- cbtacy 4y agoThat is not universally true. Sometimes it works like that, sometimes it doesn't. Depends on the buyer and given that this particular buyer doesn't seem interested in respecting legal contracts, I wouldn't be confident that it will work with Twitter as you describe here.
- Macha 4y ago1. Delayed Cash bonuses with similar vesting times to RSUs 2. Delayed Cash bonuses with vesting terms tied to some company metric or calculation derived from company metric 3. Not replacing it to cause attrition to reduce costs 4. Some sort of hypothetical share tracking unit that only has a value if the company goes public or is bought again
- orange_joe 4y agoIf I worked at twitter I'd unionize with the remaining employees.
- bigmattystyles 4y agoThis is weird, wouldn't this give those who think they are likely to be laid off time to to do damage, or plant a dead-employee switch? Obviously it's illegal but usually, don't companies announce layoffs only as soon as they've laid the people off and revoked their access?
- dorkwood 4y agoDon't worry, they've already revoked access. From further down the article: > Twitter said its offices will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended in order "to help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data."
- bigmattystyles 4y agoYea, hopefully that includes remote access too.
- klabb3 4y agoI'd honestly not be surprised if they are primarily looking to lay off folks that are ideologically or politically opposed to Musk's values. Perhaps even getting rid of entire teams that in Musk's view aren't contributing to his vision? In fact I think trimming the bloat by performance metrics is at most a secondary objective.
- resoluteteeth 4y agoI wouldn't be surprised if Musk wanted to do that, but I'm not sure it would be that easy to identify people who are opposed to Musk's values in a few days any more than it would be to decide based on performance metrics.
- Test0129 4y agoTwitter was also very bloated. Musk has an agenda, some of it is personal. I think from a business standpoint this was well overdue especially from some ex-twitter employees I've talked to. It's also not the first time I have seen this type of layoff. I was a part of a few companies that got taken over by vulture capitalists and it's much the same. Everyone gets sorted into an arbitrary bucket based on metrics. Usually, these include commits, vacation taken, etc. Then the MBAs sort the list and fire the worst. Hostile takeovers are always, always bad for the employee. Twitter, however had other problems than a usual company. A dramatic lack of profitability, too many salaries to pay, etc. I'm not saying his methods are just but for Twitter to even have a chance at profit there needs to be some very, very dramatic changes. If you were to believe the media Musk is literally destroying free speech (on a private platform?) and firing people for no reason. I doubt he would do this. He's a jerk, but he's not an idiot. It doesnt help twitter employees happen to be the most vocal, often whiniest, group of people so this is getting megaphoned to death in a way that wouldn't happen almost anywhere else.
- klabb3 4y agoAgreed. > It doesnt help twitter employees happen to be the most vocal, often whiniest, group of people so this is getting megaphoned to death in a way that wouldn't happen almost anywhere else. Yeah, and it's not just employees. Everyone seems to think Twitter is bigger and more important than it actually is. It's got significantly fewer DAU than say snapchat. It's also: - primarily public one-to-many so the social graph is less important than other mutually social platforms. - mostly ephemeral, so the value of historical posts is.. Low. Much lower than say YouTube. - no local communities with independent moderation (like reddit) - primarily immutable text and links, which is cheap and easy to host Out of all big platforms today, Twitter is by far the easiest to replace gradually, imo, with the least amount of upfront resources and least impacted by network effects.
- lostdog 4y agoThere are always comments about "why do they need X,000 people" every time a company's staffing gets talked about. I guess we are finally getting an answer. We will get to see whether the layoffs effect the technology and the development pace, although a lot of the real information will leak out through rumors. Personally, I am sad about these layoffs. Even if there are many many lazy Twitter engineers hanging out on the roof, it's still sad to see people treated so poorly. Elon just treats people with such disgust. I have seen the inside of companies like Twitter, and usually people check out because leadership fails to set any direction. An engineer joins, tries to get some things done, and then finds that they cannot within the company's structure. That engineer will give up and be "unproductive" for the rest of the time their. Elon could have handled the takeover in a serious and humane way. He could have set some product direction, given the employees some time to realign and get some of his features built, and then fired those who could not or chose not to keep up. Instead, he immediately forces everyone to work through the weekend on a random feature, and cuts people ASAP in the most malicious way he could. I am really disgusted by this brand of "leadership," and it's hard to reconcile this with someone I'd like to respect for bringing electric cars to the masses, and the U.S. back into the space race. I feel deeply sorry for the Twitter engineers who are being squeezed for no purpose but selfishness and meanness, and I hope it doesn't spread through the industry.
- throw__2sdfw 4y ago
- koonsolo 4y ago> forces everyone to work through the weekend on a random feature Is this for real? In Belgium, most developers would have a good laugh, go home and enjoy the weekend.
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
- seibelj 4y agoIt’s like HN discounts all his other successes and can’t believe he can attract high performing employees. He clearly solved much harder problems than short-form blog posting so it’s not a stretch to think he can flip Twitter back to an IPO quickly.
- tetranoir 4y agoA large % of the $44B that Elon paid is likely in unvested RSUs. Firing people is a way for him to save money for sure. You can probably find this number in the 10K or 8K
- firebones 4y agoIt's typical for unvested RSUs to accelerate and vest on change in control. Based on the 10k, there were about $2.2B worth of unvested RSUs at the start of 2022. Musk's $44 billion likely covered some or all of that (or whatever % vested and/or wasn't already forfeited) so it's unlikely there is any real savings. Unless some of those RSUs converted to Private MuskBucks, then he may be saving something.
- coredog64 4y agoAllegedly Twitter employees with unvested RSUs were scheduled to get equivalent cash payouts on the same schedule as RSU vesting. I don’t think this will solve his debt problems, but it’s gonna move the needle.
- ExMachina73 4y agoThis feels very reminiscent of when Steve Jobs came back to Apple in an official CEO capacity. He laid off 3000 people in his first year as CEO and was ruthless with axing unnecessary projects and product lines. He also installed key NeXT employees into positions of influence. The rest is of course history. I'm curious to see how this plays out for Musk and Twitter.
- metabagel 4y agoI bet he didn’t lay off 50% of the workforce in the first week.
- sgerenser 4y agoThey did lay off about a third of their workforce, albeit not 1 week after jobs returned: https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/08/29/1997-apple-bites-the-bullet-cuts-4100-jobs/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/08/29/1997-apple-bites-the-... At the time, Gil Amelio was still CEO as well, so can’t necessarily pin this one solely on Jobs.
- ExMachina73 4y agoVery true. Furthermore I'm curious to see where Twitter will innovate moving forward. After S. Jobs "slashed and burned", he set his teams first on the iMac and then iPod in Aug. 1998 and Oct. 2001 respectively. I keep reading articles about how Musk wants to turn Twitter into an "app for everything" similar to WeChat in China. I'm a bit skeptical.
- nemo44x 4y agoWhen you do a renovation, you don’t try and work around the existing structures. You demolish them and rip it down to the studs - to the “good bones” that hold it all up. Then and only then can you install your newly designed structure inside the old structure. This is how a rebuild is done.
- koluna 4y ago
- linuxhansl 4y agoReminds me of he typical corporate take-over locusts. 1. Take over. 2. Layoffs. 3. Profits go up short term. 4. Then you notice all of the folks missing. Productivity drops. 5. Revenue drops, followed by dropping profits. 6. Folks move on to the next take over. Difference, crucially, here is that Musk actually owns the shop, so we'll see if it is different with Twitter.
- type-r 4y agoSounds like a success to me vs. the existing trajectory of a cumulative 16 years of being unprofitable.
- nwiswell 4y agoExcept if Musk succeeds in ultimately destroying Twitter he's holding a $44 billion bag. Kind of overshadows making a couple of years of modest profits. You'd think he'd be more circumspect about how he handles this $44 billion asset which he does not yet fully understand during his first week on the job, but I guess that's not his style.
- nemo44x 4y agoMusk has said there’s too many managers. But people here think he’s firing talented engineers. It sounds like they are culling the many layers of management and flattening the company out.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Aeolun 4y agoThey spend more than 1 billion a year on infra?
- abledon 4y agogod paywalls are annoying
- nonethewiser 4y agoCould you imagine if Elon lays off 75% of Twitter tomorrow? There is virtually no chance. But just imagine.
- fashiontechguru 4y agoDoes he have people coding through the weekend to get new features done who might unknowingly already be listed as getting fired on Monday?
- owyn 4y agoAnd are those features going to be developed in the best possible way? If I had ideas for how to revamp a service I would talk to the people who knew how it worked and come up with a plan to develop those features and make a big deal about every feature that got launched. I can also imagine hacking something into production this weekend and getting fired next week. I can't see how demanding big changes like this in a week will result in anything but massive technical debt.
- prvc 4y agoA more accurate title would have "reducing its workforce" in place of "layoffs". The email does not use that term, which has a different meaning, and different implications.
- homelessgolden 4y agoThis is going to be interesting whichever way it eventually goes - Either Musks pulls this off and turns Twitter around - Or he manages to destroy it There will be lessons learned either way and I have a feeling this will eventually lead to major changes in tech. Industry culture.
- dehrmann 4y ago> There will be lessons learned either way Not necessarily. Musk is such a wildcard that lessons won't be generally applicable.
- ck2 4y agoAll the layoffs in the world aren't going to pay $1 BILLION PER YEAR in financing. Isn't it just a question of "when" not "if" it's done? They've never made more than half billion per year and much of that was some kind of financial "restructuring"
- wildpeaks 4y agoBetween the ever increasing "recent tweet" notifications spam that hides my real notifications in the noise and having to use more and more tricks just to preserve a chonological timeline containing only the people I follow and their tweets/retweets, the friction had already reduced my Twitter usage. And now with the way things are going, this might soon be the final nail in the coffin. Good thing I still have HN, Reddit and (already way too many) Discord servers.
- fassssst 4y agoThe entire conversation just assumes that Twitter had too many people and needs to be slimmed down. Is that not the propaganda the new owner has pushed? Why take it as fact? Seems like he’s just doing the usual private equity things that we all despise.
- sidcool 4y agoI am OK with Twitter sucking as a service than such chaos and poor employee treatment. As much as I like Elon, companies don't need to be run as inhumane productivity furnaces. How Elon operates may be appropriate at Tesla and SpaceX, but not everywhere.
- throwawayxyz1 4y agoThese employees were dictating the world whats right and wrong. Now lets see how long they suck up for money
- r721 4y ago>Oh, fun detail about the layoff email to Twitter employees today. Not only is it unsigned (the signature just says "Twitter"), but the "To" and "From" lines of the email both just say "team (All Full Time Employees)." No one in leadership attached their name in any way. https://twitter.com/WillOremus/status/1588358993293979649 https://twitter.com/WillOremus/status/1588358993293979649
- sMarsIntruder 4y agoI really don’t understand this comments madness for Twitter. There are dozens of threads in HN regarding recent layoffs, but here we have the explosive mixture of Twitter and Elon Musk. I understand you don’t like the guy, and that’s completely fine, but many arguments here are totally unreasonable. Hundreds of CEO did the same thing in the past years and that’s capitalism my friends, deal with it. Twitter was (and still is) a completely disaster in terms of management and lazy people, and needs a “cleaning” to survive. No, go with the downvotes, I don’t care. This is insane.
- nunez 4y agoI get when and why companies lay people off. Sucks, but it makes sense. What Musk is doing with Twitter employees isn't a layoff; it's tossing employees into the trash. Let's compare how Stripe and Lyft have handled their RIFs this week: STRIPE: - 14 weeks severance pay - Approximately 14 weeks of health insurance - Waived RSU cliff and accelerated vests LYFT - 10 weeks of severance - Something like 20 weeks of healthcare coverage - Accelerated vest - Notified via work email - Not immediately locked out of their systems TWITTER (under Elon) - Asked to work well beyond 40 hr/wk - No severance - No vest - Notified via personal email - Crapshoot whether they can access systems later today This is reprehensible. I know I'm a small fish, but this was a chief reason behind me not buying another Tesla next year (which I was going to finance next month). I cannot support leaders who treat their people like this.
- ikrenji 4y agoyeah i genuinely don't understand how tesla or space X can be successful if he treats people there like this too.
- neonate 4y agohttps://archive.ph/2zXOx https://archive.ph/2zXOx https://web.archive.org/web/20221104032724/https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-start-layoffs-friday-morning-internal-email-2022-11-04/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221104032724/https://www.reute...
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