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Twitter’s mass layoffs have begun

• spiderjerusalem 4y ago
  > Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1 billion all sound and fury, signifying nothing
  • chris_wot 4y ago
    Didn’t he take out $13billion in debt?
    • aenis 4y ago
      Yeah, but lots of the debt is actually on company's books - as is the case with LBOs. This is yet another case of barbarians at the gate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarians_at_the_Gate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarians_at_the_Gate) - corporate raider running a company into the ground.
      • MangoCoffee 4y ago
        maybe we don't know yet. Musk might be able to pull a Dell with Twitter. Dell went private loaded with debts then add more debts by buying EMC and now Dell is public again.
        • jdub 4y ago
          Dell had a way to make money and didn't have a halfwit with zero domain experience in charge.
        • nova22033 4y ago
          https://www.cultofmac.com/448147/today-apple-history-michael-dell-says-hed-shut-apple-refund-shareholders/ https://www.cultofmac.com/448147/today-apple-history-michael... October 6, 1997: Michael Dell makes an infamously bleak appraisal of Apple’s fortunes. Asked what he would do with the struggling company, the founder of Dell Inc. says he would “shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
      • kortilla 4y ago
        That only works when the company has enough cash or assets to buyout the new owner for more than they paid. Twitter was definitely not a case of sitting on a mountain of assets that can be broken up and raided.
        • aenis 4y ago
          For sure, as far as LBOs go, this is probably one of the worst ever. Normally the raider pays a bit of a premium over the assets, then divides them, props them up a bit, and collects a profit. I can't imagine this being possible with Twitter. Nothing to break up. Nothing to prop up. And if he gets his way, he will be competing with Parlor for the niche market it caters to. Or 4chan :)
  • aenis 4y ago
    Not sure how lean do they run their stuff - I'd assume at least lean-ish, considering they have (had?) a lot of good engineering talent working on it. Asking for a large reduction while at the same time culling staff seems like wishful thinking.
    • lordnacho 4y ago
      I went to visit a team at Twitter that seemed to have very little to do with their core business. They'd bought some company that my company was using (can't even remember, Fabric or some crash profiling thing?) and I got invited to see their fancy building on Market Street. But my sense was there were many peripheral teams that your average Twitter user would never notice if Twitter were to cut them.
• osullish 4y ago
  If true, I find the 'print out the code you wrote in the last 30-60 days' very grim and a very blunt tool for evaluating productivity.
  • netsharc 4y ago
    Why would anyone subject themselves to such humiliation? (Well, a fat paycheck is probably an answer). It feels more like a weeding-out process, if I were a giant jerkoff billionaire, I would know anyone who submits to this bullshit will submit to further humiliation...
    • zmxz 4y ago
      Why do you think it's bullshit and why do you think it's humiliation? Aren't all employees, in all companies on this planet, submitting to some form of dominance in exchange for money?
      • dthul 4y ago
        It's humiliating because printing out code (or more commonly "printing out emails") is literally a meme, and I have read multiple articles alleging that after printing, the employees were instructed to shred the papers, without anyone having looked at them. That sounds a lot like Musk trolling by demanding his underlings print their code.
        • boringg 4y ago
          That sounds like a rumor.
          • dthul 4y ago
            Reported here: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-30 https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-30 He usually has very accurate inside information.
• xiphias2 4y ago
  ,,The ML Ethics, Transparency, & Accountability team was one of a kind'' Sure, something nobody has heared of and nobody knows why it should be at a company like Twitter.
  • lm28469 4y ago
    > nobody knows why it should be at a company like Twitter. If you don't know you're the problem tbh
    • xiphias2 4y ago
      Can you explain how the team added value to shareholders who want to maximize their long term ROI (which is the job of the CEO)? We're living in a world where voting rights of pensioners have been delegated to big companies like Vanguard and Black Rock. They clearly are not keeping the best interest of the shareholders which would be their duty, and vote politically instead.
      • aenis 4y ago
        That's easy. I work for a company that has a similar body. Its a PITA but they prevent over-zealous POs and engineers from building creepy things that get the brand in trouble. (E.g., "why don't we record our users and predict their sentiment from facial expressions and tone of the voice" - those people will tell you why it's a bad idea). There, hope it helps.
        • majjgepolja 4y ago
          • lm28469 4y ago
            Do you have any source for that or are you an armchair statistician ?
            • 4y ago
• lm28469 4y ago
  Remotely logging off employees without telling them anything says a lot about the people in charge
  • zmxz 4y ago
    What does it say about people in charge and what does it say about employees? Asking without implying anything.
    • lm28469 4y ago
      I might be a bit idealistic here but I like the notion of respect. Disabling badges, laptops and email addresses of your employees with no direct communication isn't very respectful in my book. Regular companies do meetings, shady companies send a pre recorded video to their employees, and then you have Musk, just logging you off. I guess he missed the part were "transhumanism" still contains "humanism"
      • kortilla 4y ago
        I don’t think you’ve witnessed many mass layoffs. What you’re describing is how companies do relatively small cuts. Even Stripe’s layoff was far less than 50% but it got pretty impersonal. They just paid severance better from what we know so far.
      • zmxz 4y ago
        > I might be a bit idealistic here but I like the notion of respect Doesn't respect work two ways? You give respect, you get respect? It's easy to make Elon Musk the bad guy, but people who were let go were freeloaders. Let's not try to make them anything but that, we've all seen plenty of Twitter employees using up work-time to be active on various social media. They didn't show respect to the employer because their work and demeanor did not reflect it. The "boss bad, worker good" just doesn't apply here. Twitter is a troubled company, I'm surprised Elon bought it in the first place but I'm absolutely not surprised by the wave of layoffs. You can assume the moral high ground and employ the talent that Twitter has decided to part with and prove your words with actions. Are you ready to do so? Should we, the IT experts, not be thrilled by so much experienced talent being available for employment?
• aliljet 4y ago
  I'm pretty curious about how and where Twitter employees were distributed. For a company ostensibly worth $44 billion, having 7,500 staff feels pretty damn lean. It feels like Musk isn't just purging people, he's purging the Twitter culture...
  • bluescrn 4y ago
    For comparison, SpaceX runs an entire private space program on ~12,000 employees. Near-weekly launches. Rocket development+production. Building+deploying Starlink. (Although that's just a number from a quick googling. Maybe they outsource a lot of manufacturing etc?)
    • esoterica 4y ago
      Spacex also makes less revenue than Twitter with their higher headcount.
      • parkingrift 4y ago
        It’s privately held so we don’t actually know that. However, SpaceX was valued at around $120 billion in their last funding round.
    • wildrhythms 4y ago
      NASA has 18k permanent employees which I thought was surprisingly low. https://www.nasa.gov/about/index.html https://www.nasa.gov/about/index.html
      • breezedream 4y ago
        Government typically has a whole ton of contractors, sometimes twice the number of FTEs, but a cursory Google indicates NASA has only about 1000 contractors. Interesting, but the contract money probably goes to acquisition and commercial partnerships (https://www.osbp.nasa.gov/docs/top20_2020_contractors-TAGGED.pdf https://www.osbp.nasa.gov/docs/top20_2020_contractors-TAGGED...). That said, their FY22 budget is “only” $30B, which is less than Elon just paid for all of Twitter. This number usually surprises people but a lot of other space-related work is within the USAF and NRO budgets.
• redwood 4y ago
  In my view no single medium (the media is the message) has done more to weaken the quality of public discourse in the world than Twitter. But maybe Facebook proves that even if you're allowed to use prose crazies dominate so maybe the issue is deeper
  • MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
    Twitter is the most interesting on the internet, by far. If the discourse quality sucks, you're following the wrong accounts.
    • koheripbal 4y ago
      All the nobody asinine replies are noisy. It can definitely do better.
      • nemo44x 4y ago
        Isn't that the point of the subscription? People that don't pay will be buried and you won't see them.
  • tomp 4y ago
    Really? On which other platform can you directly communicate (or at least listen to, unfiltered) to the worlds dictators, political leaders, and billionaires?
    • thundergolfer 4y ago
      You’re missing the point of their comment. If the medium is the problematic thing being focused on in their comment then who the communicating parties are is not significant. Checkout Postman and McLuhan.
      • whoooooo123 4y ago
        A lot of people reading this aren't going to understand what you mean by "checkout Postman". I'm guessing you mean "read Neil Postman's books"? If so, I agree - especially Amusing Ourselves to Death.
• jfk13 4y ago
  And here come the lawsuits... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-04/twitter-sued-for-mass-layoffs-by-musk-without-enough-notice https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-04/twitter-s...
  • randyrand 4y ago
    good luck.... Twitter is at-will. Companies usually fire people on Friday, and show you the door the same moment.
    • teraflop 4y ago
      As the first paragraph of that article points out, advance notice is required by federal law, if the company is sufficiently large and if sufficiently many people are being laid off at the same time. At-will employment is not relevant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraining_Notification_Act_of_1988 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...
      • randyrand 4y ago
        I don't see how you could give legitimate advance notice before you are in control of the company.
        • swores 4y ago
          By paying them for the 60 days notice period from the day you notify them, that's how.
          • jfk13 4y ago
            That probably works in the US but in some jurisdictions (e.g. parts of Europe) -- where I presume Twitter has [or had!] employees -- there are requirements for an actual consultation process before substantial layoffs.
        • deleted 4y ago
• rob74 4y ago
  > “To help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data, our offices will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended,” the email reads. “If you are in an office or on your way to an office, please return home.” Welcome to the dystopian future... I find it a bit galling how companies can force you into home office nowadays if it suits them (you want to avoid your underlings congregating in the office in such a situation), but also force you to come to the office when it suits them.
  • kortilla 4y ago
    What are you talking about? The announcement says people should leave the offices. How is that dystopian?
    • moron4hire 4y ago
      It's really to keep people from talking about details and exchanging contacts last-minute.
    • lm28469 4y ago
      > How is that dystopian? You could generate all the electricity needed for the next 20 generations by harvesting the energy generated by the eyes rolling of people who live in countries with workers rights who just read that comment
      • fullmoon 4y ago
        I live in a modern central European nation. There is nothing dystopian about denying people that are no longer employed office access.
        • lm28469 4y ago
          > There is nothing dystopian about denying people that are no longer employed office access. That conveniently leaves out the dystopian parts. Being logged off remotely, no personal communication, no delay, &c.
• newaccount2021 4y ago
• mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
  What a contrast in leadership when you compare the way Twitter is doing this (rumor is right before bonus/stock vesting and cold impersonal email) and how Stripe is conducting their layoffs (empathy, 14 weeks severance, bonus payouts, etc.) Which company is going to have an easier time hiring after the dust settles and they have a growth stage again?
  • cocochanel 4y ago
    whichever pays more
    • aenis 4y ago
      Nah, people do remember what companies do and many avoid shitty companies. I work in HR, and on macro scale this is clearly visible. Some of our clients have a hard time filling roles despite paying competitively or even generously. Sure, for some people thats not an issue, but it is a thing, and it gets more visible with engineering roles, for some reason.
      • luckylion 4y ago
        Yeah, that's why they all avoid working at Apple, Google etc because those companies illegally conspired to keep their salaries down.
        • watwut 4y ago
          Google does not have reputation for particularly toxic workplace. They are not super clean of course as you mentioned, but their reputation is not bad at all. And while Apple has worst reputation then google, it is still fairly good one.
          • luckylion 4y ago
            Sure, my point was that "past behavior" barely matters. Compensation, social status and work expectation is what makes people go for or avoid companies. If Google didn't pay as much, fewer people would bother jumping through hoops. If Apple had an oil-industry level social status, Californians would think twice about working there (or they'd get a cover job to use when talking to neighbors and friends). How they fire people means very little, because very few people in tech think of themselves as the ones being fired in the near future (most likely also why few people in tech are into unions, they don't feel as replaceable as factory workers).
• rejor121 4y ago
  I honestly hope this forces twitter to crash and burn. I feel sorry for those who would lose their jobs. That said, twitter is utter garbage and is nothing but a place for people to complain
  • Ptchd 4y ago
    Complaning is also important...
• brainwipe 4y ago
  Feel for the workers being laid off and those that remain. I've been in teams that got decimated and the aftermath is rough. Although it's just a job, you can't help forming a bond with those that you work together with. Hope that those looking for new challenge find it and those that remain can grow into new things without doing the work of 3 people.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• PeterStuer 4y ago
  Everywhere I worked access to systems was revoked before people received their termination communication from HR. This is standard practice in industry to prevent last minute IP theft, or destructive revenge actions at an emotional time.
  • i_am_proteus 4y ago
    For the employee(s) being laid off, yes. I've never heard of a company closing their offices entirely during a layoff round. (That doesn't mean it hasn't happened!)
    • tumetab1 4y ago
      I think it means that they feel that they can do it safely without it. It also saves them from having journalists taking photos. Your security team and HR team must be really good lay-off some many people without causing violence, law suits, data leaks. I can easily imagine that if 50% of people present in a office were laid off some would start a protest within the office which could degrade into some violence, damages and law suits. Also, having the HR systems automation must be really on par to revoke access correctly to so many people.
• maxpowersage 4y ago
  • pertymcpert 4y ago
    Why does it warm your heart?
    • maxpowersage 4y ago
      For the exact reason I'm being down voted.
      • pertymcpert 4y ago
        Which is?
        • maxpowersage 4y ago
          The exact reason Elon Musk is laying these people off.
          • maxpowersage 4y ago
            I mean you literally could not give me a more perfect example of why I am happy today. Flagged and downvoted.
          • pertymcpert 4y ago
            > For the exact reason I'm being down voted. > The exact reason Elon Musk is laying these people off. Still not sure what you're talking about. Are you saying that you're being downvoted because Twitter is reducing costs?
• iwiser 4y ago
  [dead]
• the42thdoctor 4y ago
  Let's wait for the severance package, I hope they do something similar to Stripe.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• code51 4y ago
  > "Twitter’s newsletter service Revue will be shut down by the end of the year. Revue was acquired by Twitter in January 2021 for an undisclosed amount. The report also says that Notes, a longform posting feature, is on hold, as is Twitter’s plan to build crypto wallets." All these are look so distant to Twitter's core value.
  • yabatopia 4y ago
    What exactly is Twitter's core value? Some say it's the world's town square. Fine, but how do you support (pay for) that? Town squares are generally funded and maintained by public organisations and tax money. Twitter is a private company and I don't think there's much enthousiasm for giving Twitter public funding in order to run it.
  • SilverBirch 4y ago
    Why do you think that? Twitter has tonnes of journalists who are running a substack or patreon, Revue would have let Twitter get in on that revenue stream. Building a tool for longer form content seems like a totally reasonable leap for twitter, and crypto - whilst a bit bullshitty - would be a fine way of moving payments into twitter which is another great monetization strategy. All of those projects seem reasonable extensions of Twitters core business.
    • mikkergp 4y ago
      Also odd since Jason Calacanis promoted this idea via "essays": https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1515094823337832448 https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1515094823337832448
      • SilverBirch 4y ago
        I don't think the decision to lay off the teams is odd. It is quite clear that Elon Musk's plan is "We're going to fix this by firing 90% of you and expect the remaining 10% to work 10x harder". They're not dumping any of these ideas, they're just expecting to deliver them with far fewer engineers (who, btw, will not be earning 10x salaries).
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• exitb 4y ago
  It's interesting how the firing process presented in the movie Up in the Air (2009) was supposed be inhumane and insulting. Well, look where we are now.
  • swores 4y ago
    Either you or I, and I suspect you, have misunderstood the film's intention if you think that we the viewer are meant to agree with any of the options used by Clooney's character's company, that they were the humane option. Humane would be telling the person who works for you that you can no longer employ them, not hiring some stranger to come and tell them.
    • exitb 4y ago
      I don't think that either the direct or remote methods presented in the film were humane. Certainly not what I meant. I do think though, that checking your e-mail at 9AM to see if you're fired is considerably worse.
      • swores 4y ago
        Definitely agree!
• pavlov 4y ago
  In four years Musk will be bored to death with Twitter and will sell it to private equity and the Saudis for $5 billion. At that point it will be mostly a platform for porn creators and crypto pumping, the only two verticals where Twitter seems to be actually growing lately.
  • napolux 4y ago
    !remindMe 2027
  • pjc50 4y ago
    Given that Twitter the company owes $12bn to Morgan Stanley, that will be a serious problem for them.
    • SkipperCat 4y ago
      Meh, Morgan Stanley has had bigger losses. How much of it is actually their money anyway? My guess is the losses will be passed down to the individuals who gave MS the $$$. Morgan probably bundled it all up, made a nice fee, and passed it on to Musk.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • lultimouomo 4y ago
        > Morgan probably bundled it all up, made a nice fee, and passed it on to Musk. It has not. The debt was conditional on the acquisition of Twitter by Musk, so Morgan Stanley could not sell it before the acquisition was completed. But the debt was necessary for the acquisition, so the acquisition could not be completed without the debt money. Therefore, they had to happen at the same time, with M&S fronting the money. Of course the terms of the debt, and the price of the acquisition, had to be both defined for everything to move forward, so they were finalized months ago. When Musk signed a contract with Morgan Stanley, money was cheap, so the debt has very low interest. When the debt has actually been issued, a few days ago, money had become more expensive; Morgan Stanley won't find anyone to buy it as-is. To sell it they will have to discount it quite deeply, losing a bunch of money; otherwise they'll be stuck with it.
• suyash 4y ago
  Too much bloat, lazy workers who are overpaid. The whole Silicon Valley needs a big cleanup.
• jdub 4y ago
  Musk is capricious, cruel, and clueless. Whether or not you liked Twitter, it's a culturally significant platform, and Musk has almost certainly destroyed any hope it had of surviving. In barely a week. Hopefully it destroys him, too.
  • alluro2 4y ago
    If you're basing part of your comment on this event, it might be worth noting that the article states the layoffs were being mentioned before Musk.
    • pas 4y ago
      > layoffs were being mentioned before Musk does that mean anything? (especially "mention" seems to carry no predictive value here.) were layoffs mentioned for years and nothing happened? were they put on hold because the ex-CEO wanted Musk to take the blame?
    • goodpoint 4y ago
      Musk is capricious, cruel, and clueless in general.
    • nameless912 4y ago
      Sure, but I imagine the pre-Musk layoffs would have been similar to what we're seeing in Twitter's peer companies (~10-15%, generous severance payouts, etc.) as opposed to what's happening now. To throw your hands in the air and claim that layoffs were an inevitability is a weird way to shield a dude that is just being cruel because he thinks he's God.
  • wreath 4y ago
    Twitter’s cultural significance is almost net negative. It has been a vehicle for divisiveness and culture wars and not only a vehicle but a self driving one if you catch my drift.
    • _djo_ 4y ago
      That depends on which aspects of Twitter you focus on. It has added a ton of value for niche interest areas, open source intelligence and reporting, news from underserved areas or issues, and so many others. The value isn't in the loudest and most active accounts, but the long tail of expertise that was previously either not widely visible or connected in the way Twitter enabled. All that will be lost.
• slowhadoken 4y ago
  Sweet let me know when they’re hiring.
• MangoCoffee 4y ago
  The ML Ethics, Transparency, & Accountability team. i find it interesting Twitter need a ethics, transparency and accountability team for ML. is Twitter worry about creating a Skynet or something?
  • mr90210 4y ago
    You need ethics as soon as you start dealing with privileged access to public’s data.
• ankurdhama 4y ago
  > print out the code you wrote in the last 30-60 days This is either a joke or Musk (or his team) doesn't know about something called version control and how it can be used.
  • Bhurn00985 4y ago
    It's not about version control, it's a test to see how compliant you are.
    • chii 4y ago
      having a bunch of yes-men working for you isn't a recipe for innovation - it might lead to possibly some short term profit (if any), but absolutely and surely a long term decline.
      • Bhurn00985 4y ago
        indeed, and based on what I've seen so far, I don't believe Musk is looking to position Twitter as an innovative company going forward
  • havblue 4y ago
    Is everyone using the same version control system? I wouldn't be surprised if some people have code that would get missed if they just had IT pull everything.
• taurath 4y ago
  Since apparently nobody else in the thread has any empathy for those who've lost their jobs, future access to healthcare (in the US and less civilized countries), and financial security, I guess I'll be the first: I feel bad for people who are laid off by the machinations of billionaires. I wish we lived in a society where it wasn't optimal to act like raving lunatics will tear down every bit of security you have at a moments notice. For those who are cheering this on - good thing its not you getting mauled by tigers in the gladiator pit, huh?
  • rbanffy 4y ago
    In CA, at least, Twitter may be liable for violating labor law with layoffs like this. It may be worth looking into it and lawyering up. And, shouldn't need to say this, unionize!
  • polote 4y ago
    All these people are making 200k a year and will have no problem finding another job.
    • sam_lowry_ 4y ago
      In a recent Tweet reply, Elon says that there are 10 people managing for 1 person coding. Based on my experience in a 2nd tier SV company I believe this to be true
      • LightG 4y ago
      • UncleMeat 4y ago
        So it sounds like exactly zero people who have committed code recently will be fired, right?
        • jesuscript 4y ago
          Depends on how Caligula feels next week.
• SavageBeast 4y ago
  Now is a good time for us all to chill, take inventory as the year draws to an end and uncertain economic conditions have us all a little on edge. Change happens, it's uncomfortable at first but it can be made to work for you too. Change isn't always bad. Can anyone look at Twitters performance as a public company and say that no changes were warranted? Twitters "mission" wasn't exactly being well executed either. Something was bound to happen eventually and this was a long time coming. Had it been some Generic Private Equity Company that took Twitter private nobody would even be talking about this at all. But since you-know-who lead the buyout a lot of people have their tails in a knot over it. Has anyone considered what a giant hornets nest Elon has kicked in all this? I personally feel sorry for the poor bastard myself and I bet he wishes he could go back in time and ctrl-z all this terrible idea. More or less he's put a big chunk of his lifes work on the line over a silly tweet about buying Twitter. You know this all started off as a silly tweet, that turned into a funny joke, that got serious and became a potentially career wrecking mistake with too much momentum to stop.
  • pjc50 4y ago
    > More or less he's put a big chunk of his lifes work on the line over a silly tweet about buying Twitter. It's a forty-four billion dollar drunk ebay purchase. But it comes after previous occasions when he'd been told by the SEC to stop making stock-price-moving announcements on twitter. It's just astonishingly irresponsible of him to have got in this position in the first place.
    • SavageBeast 4y ago
      > It's a forty-four billion dollar drunk ebay purchase. ROFL!!! Well said! Very succinctly put.
  • LadyCailin 4y ago
    The lesson here is that he is not exempt from the consequences of his statements. And good! Hopefully he learns a lesson. When someone has such a gigantic platform in which to influence the lives of so many people, he absolutely should be humble and thoughtful about what he says. If it takes a $44 billion dollar lesson to teach him that, then oh well.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• skc 4y ago
  Serious question about this Twitter sale and how people expect it to go. What does it really matter to Musk or the other investors if this thing fails spectacularly.
  • phendrenad2 4y ago
    I don't think there's anyone on earth who can afford to lose $44 billion dollars.
    • skc 4y ago
      My point is even if that 44 billion was pissed away Musk is never going to be destitute. The people that get hurt in this sort of thing aren't the rich and powerful.
• crnkofe 4y ago
  Looking at how Musk handles business and public comms makes me loose more and more respect for this guy with every passing second. It's all fun and games when you have a few hundred mills in the bank. Hopefully the people that left were prepared. Given his public behavior it was kind of expected. I'm not sure if people that stayed are now worse or better off.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • i_like_apis 4y ago
    • iamdbtoo 4y ago
      > They made a ton of cash, will likely get a lot of severance, and work in an industry and area where it is easy to do that with their experience. Is that all one's life boils down to?
      • luckylion 4y ago
        No, they also got the opportunity to build a system to make people miserable at scale. And, it's important to remember that, their life isn't over. They're not being marched into the ocean this afternoon, they just need to get a new job in the area, which is unlikely to be too hard.
      • westpfelia 4y ago
        This is America. A persons value is 100% derived from the increase in capital they provide billionaires.
      • throwaway09223 4y ago
        We're not talking about life, we're talking about their job. The answer is yes: Jobs generally boil down to exchanging labor for cash. When people are willing to do a job without pay, we call it "volunteering" instead.
• tinyhouse 4y ago
  Ex-Tweep here. US employees need to really thank the WARN act. Without it everyone would likely be fired on Oct 31 with no severance. Now everyone is kept on the payroll until Jan (NY until Feb!) and then getting one more month of base salary. We'll see what happens with lawsuit if they manage to get their Feb vest and bonus as well. (they deserve the bonus at least prorated to Nov). BTW, lots of ML people got hit, also some brilliant ones. Cortex org got hit hard. I guess Musk doesn't care about people running experiments in Notebooks on expensive GPUs. 50% layoffs and likely more attrition soon due to mandatory RTO and people who cannot work 996.
  • DesiLurker 4y ago
    as I said earlier, he probably thinks the entire twitter ML/AI can be served by tesla dojo cloud. he might hire more loyalists from tesla to see that happens in twitter. regarding RTO/996 I dont see why any good developer should still stay beyond say six more months when economy starts to recover. Musk may think he is a Messiah but so far he has shown he's just a slavedriving billionaire. Those who can escape would as soon as they can & twitter will be left with lifers.
• maxpowersage 4y ago
  You could say, they were 'deplatformed'
  • bigbluedots 4y ago
    Took you a while to think of that one eh?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• warlord1 4y ago
• tibbydudeza 4y ago
  I got laid off but least I had the dignity of being told in person, given time to hand over my projects, allowed to remove my personal stuff from my work laptop (did not have any) and a generous severance package - it was about a month. So thankful I don't work in the US.
  • s1k3 4y ago
    If you worked for a high profile company that just went through a tumultuous acquisition with a polarizing figure. Do you suppose you would have been given the same dignity? These actions aren’t about you the individual. They’re about protecting the business against malcontents. With large polarizing companies this is a likelihood. Not so much with random company b with a couple hundred employees.
    • tibbydudeza 4y ago
      It is the 2nd biggest retailer in our country - 90,000 people. I am a professional adult not some immature kid that is gonna delete databases or servers - did not even lose my dev rights to our SAP systems or company email until the last day. Maybe if you treat your employees like babies.
      • trashtester 4y ago
        If you lay off 4000 people where perhaps 1000 could seriously harm the company, and where you know that a large fraction hates vehemently, I think it's wise to take precautions.
        • tibbydudeza 4y ago
          Point taken.
• yread 4y ago
  Are there any successful stories of company turn-arounds that start with firing 50% of your workforce?
  • phendrenad2 4y ago
    IBM
• sidcool 4y ago
  And they are being handled abysmally badly so far. We don't need more Elons. Growth at such human cost is best avoided.
• losvedir 4y ago
  And so the grand experiment begins. I feel bad for the folks losing their job because that always sucks, and I hope there's a decent severance package. Now we'll see what happens to Twitter... I hardly use it, so if it implodes it won't bother me too much. But I am curious to see if all the "how do you need X people to do Y?" commenters are correct in this case. The app is simple but doing simple things at scale is hard. I wonder if we'll see more downtime and issues now. I think this is also a great experiment for everyone who either thinks Elon is a genius and the greatest thing to bless this Earth, or those who say he's overrated and Tesla and SpaceX were successes independent of him. I think Twitter has been around long enough that we've all formed impressions of it. Let's see what this single change of replacing ownership actually results in. Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years?
  • mshenfield 4y ago
    Twitter won't die, but it won't make much of a profit either. Elon Musk will find another buyer in 2 years for $25 billion and make most of his money back while leaving the company saddled with most of the $11 billion in debt financing.
  • Waterluvian 4y ago
    I'm curious how they decided who to fire and how they can do it so quickly without accidentally axing critical people.
    • KingOfCoders 4y ago
      Critical is mostly subjective to whom you ask. In one way everyone is critical, in another no-one is critical (Except E.g. Ive or Jobs). That said, I would think they are axing critical people. Then struggle and either fix it or go under. Whenever I was involved in layoffs, critical people have been laid off (from my perspective). As a manager I was forced to lay off critical people before M&A. Because they we're critical positions I did rehire the positions after acquisition.
  • mabbo 4y ago
    > Anyone want to make predictions about the state of Twitter in a few years? Myspace still exists in some form.
• bArray 4y ago
  > Yep, the team is gone. The team that was researching and pushing for algorithmic transparency and algorithmic choice. The team that was studying algorithmic amplification. The team that was inventing and building ethical AI tooling and methodologies. All that is gone. If you want to justify your position, I would suggest highlighting the positive changes you _did_ make, rather than the positive changes you _intended_ to make. If you didn't make any notable positive changes over the time you worked there, that might explain why you no longer do work there. 'Ethical AI' in my opinion is essentially the AI version of 'positive discrimination', i.e. they will keep biasing the inputs and outputs until the algorithm yields the desired result. In this case the desired result in not equality, but "corrected equality". Don't get me wrong, biased and misleading training sets are a problem, but the AI itself is not unethical. Also I would like to know whether algorithm transparency included blue check-marks (that were obviously biased), or government take-down requests, or the promotion of completely random people for no apparent reason? There was never any intention for algorithm transparency, this is Twitter's 'secret sauce' after all.
  • lagolinguini 4y ago
    > If you want to justify your position, I would suggest highlighting the positive changes you _did_ make, rather than the positive changes you _intended_ to make. Imagine where the world would be if bell labs didn't invest all that money into positive changes that people _intended_ to make.
    • bpodgursky 4y ago
      Twitter does not have the luxury of being the Ma Bell monopoly. If Twitter had a vice-grip on the social media market, we'd live in a different world... for better or for worse.
    • ptero 4y ago
      The comment you replied to did sound callous given the fact that the author probably just got laid off. Specifically on your response: while planning specific changes is good and so is attempting to solve hard problems, during mass layoffs the teams with few accomplishments are usually hit first. Ambitious plans seldom help. Mass layoffs are rare, but this is something one should keep in mind. My 2c. Specifically on Bell Labs, new employees until the 1990s were told "you have a job for life" (paid by the AT&T's monopoly generating huge cash flows). But when the AT&T became less profitable and mass layoffs did start, as far as I know they followed the same pattern.
• seydor 4y ago
  • DeathArrow 4y ago
    Yeah, but they have lots of people working on PR and "ethical algorithms".
    • nonethewiser 4y ago
      I think people need to take a step back and ask themselves, "are the projects I'm working on directly increasing revenue?" If not, bye bye.
  • cgeier 4y ago
    It sounds like you are implying Polish workers are smart enough for 280 char messages, but not much more?
    • PaulHoule 4y ago
      Polish devs have a pretty good reputation.
    • DeathArrow 4y ago
      I think it has something to do with Polish notation.
    • magic_hamster 4y ago
      I believe that was sarcasm. Obviously the challenges running a platform like Twitter are not coming from the length of tweets.
    • seydor 4y ago
      They are pretty good and cheaper than SV probably Twitter is still worth it for the 280 chars. Sure video and images and 27/4 availability are desireable, but not essential
      • 4y ago
• paganel 4y ago
  In all the brouhaha about the Twitter acquisition this piece of info had personally escaped me: > Musk’s deal to buy Twitter included making the company take on $13 billion in debt from banks, which means Twitter will owe about $1 billion a year in interest payments puts things in a slightly different perspective. I had somehow assumed that all the acquisition money had come in from Musk himself together with a bunch of other business "friends" or investment vehicles, didn't know there were direct bank loans involved.
  • trashtester 4y ago
    There is not much difference. This is just one way to structure that. Basically, this is like a mortgage, where if Twitter goes bust, the bank takes a loss. But if Twitter just falls in value compared to the purchase price, the bank gets their money back. For Musk (and potential other owners), this means he doesn't have to offer any other collateral than Twitter for that loan.
    • paganel 4y ago
      I was mostly thinking on the recurring price of paying that debt, which, if I’m not mistaken, in cases like this one falls entirely on the acquired company (Twitter, in this case). This is irrespective of Twitter’s financial status, that money has to be paid on a recurrent manner. That’s an extra cost on future Twitter of which I was not aware of, a cost entirely brought by this acquisition.
• Overtonwindow 4y ago
  Layoffs are really tough on anyone, but Silicon Valley lay-offs are met with more indignation. Most people get laid off, they take the severance, and they start looking for a new job. With Twitter, etc The decision to lay someone office met with such indignation like how dare you lay ME off. The whole response to the layoffs just doesn’t sit well with me. It’s the righteous elite complaining that they have to eat cake
• jwilk 4y ago
  Archived copy without GDPR nag screen: https://web.archive.org/web/20221104125809/https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/03/twitter-layoffs-elon-musk/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221104125809/https://techcrunc...
• irae 4y ago
  The specific team the article mentions, the "inventing and building ethical AI [stuff]" seems like a very reasonable choice for layoff. This is a company in debit, and as such I see no good reason for them to have a long term, unknown timeline, unknown outcomes and (likely) expensive team. Especially considering how much AI critics accuse AI of being racist, sexist and all sorts of impossible to judge human behavior without bias.
  • trashtester 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure Elon has more confidence in the Tesla AI team. I suppose he will move someone he trusts into a team lead for whatever AI activities (if any) Twitter will have in the future.
• gtirloni 4y ago
  Where does Twitter fit in Musk's multi-planet strategy?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• i_like_apis 4y ago
  What a bunch of ridiculous whining here. They are laying off a large portion of workers who have previously expressed being hostile to the new leadership. There is bloat, laziness, aimlessness, and the company is being taken in a radically new direction. It’s pretty tactful so far, as far as I am concerned. We haven’t even seen the severance. You have nothing to complain about. First priority is to protect Twitter systems, so locking everyone out temporarily (or as the case may be, permanently) makes a lot of sense.
  • roflyear 4y ago
    They are breaking the law by not giving 60 days notice. Disagree with it all you want it's still the law.
    • i_like_apis 4y ago
      Nope, that is not the law. I’ve seen more than a few of these things and had a partner in HR. You’re confused. Employees can be terminated with 0 notice. (Which is how it should be). You’re probably thinking about some payroll law. Termination is different.
      • notacoward 4y ago
        You can be terminated for cause without notice. Layoffs are different, and different again in each jurisdiction. Both the federal government and California, where Twitter is headquartered, have specific laws for this exact situation, and Musk et al are in clear violation of those laws plus the agreement under which he acquired the company. Either your partner in HR (notably not legal) is misinformed, or you misunderstood what they told you. Regardless, you're the one who's confused - and that's trying hard to give you the benefit of the doubt.
        • i_like_apis 4y ago
          Nope. Not in California. Employment contracts with a CA entity are “at will” / can be terminated with no cause and no notice. Which is how it should be IMO. Anyway just google “ca at will employment” and you can learn about how you are wrong here. Here’s an article that explains it in paragraph 2 https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/state-and-local-updates/pages/employment-at-will-in-california.aspx https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/... I have been close to the counsel and HR during execution of several CA layoffs, within blocks of Twitter HQ :)
• iorrus 4y ago
  I’d be more likely to work with Twitter now to be frank. Elon is obviously trying to implement an engineering lead organisation where coding and productivity are valued. A lot of these companies tend to be manager heavy, I’ve worked in places where it seemed over half the people in meetings were managers or other unproductive people. It frequently felt like these people were stifling the work as they all had their own agendas etc. Elon is an engineer first and has s big vision. If you’re one of the people left it must feel like the company has taken a new direction.
  • duhast 4y ago
    Entrepreneur, salesman, celebrity or populariser? Sure. Definitely not an engineer.
    • topspin 4y ago
      I don't see how his ventures could have made the progress they have with a business/finance/sales person calling the shots. Elon is adept at engineering; you can see it whenever he is interviewed and goes down rabbit holes about metallurgy, simulations, manufacturing, etc. The achievements of Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink and others would not have happened without thousands of correct evaluations of and decisions on technical matters, and Elon is the singularity around which all of that orbits.
  • VHRanger 4y ago
    Given how Musk treats employees, I was wondering where the kind of sycophant ready to sacrifice their life at the altar of an uncaring billionaire actually existed. Glad to know they exist
• coffeeblack 4y ago
  Awesome. Finally we get more honesty in the public debate again.
• 4dregress 4y ago
  How is this affecting no US employees? For example you cannot just fire people in the UK like you can in the US, it is against the law.
• KaiserPro 4y ago
  THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion. Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive". Musk is not a proponent of that. He is a micromanaging, capricious, easily distracted, arrogant and vindictive CEO. If twitter thrives then we can expect copycats to try and spread his shitty work philosophy (like everyone idolises Jobs.)
  • chinathrow 4y ago
    > then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion. To other CEOs: you can make a distinction right there when you fire people and do not need to look to Musk.
  • lupire 4y ago
    What's sad to me is, OK, if being a real hard-driving exploitative ass really is what it takes to organize people to make amazing products (mostly Jobs, a little of Musk), why aren't there any good people who do that to make their employees do great things for the world, and then put the profits to good use? (better use than Musk's "buy a $1M car and crash it immediately" style .) I think a lot of people would be OK with being pushed hard to really do something great, if they were paid fairly and the economic profits spent on good areas of society/customers, but not to enable a man-child's ego and waste. (It related to the philosophical idea (not the implementation details) of Gates's "tax my consumption, not my income".)
    • naasking 4y ago
      > why aren't there any good people who do that to make their employees do great things for the world, and then put the profits to good use? (better use than Musk's "buy a $1M car and crash it immediately" style .) You mean like the guy who's trying to address the main existential risks facing humanity right now? Last I checked, Musk created Tesla to counteract the existential risk of climate change, Neuralink to counteract the existential risk of AI, and SpaceX to counteract the existential risk of asteroids and other planet-killing catastrophes. Maybe that's why the people at his companies stay despite being pushed so hard? He could definitely stand to be less of an ass, but I can at least recognize that Musk is actually doing the kind of good work that you're talking about.
• bogomipz 4y ago
  I was curious about the second Tweet on that page, which states: >"Yep, the team is gone. The team that was researching and pushing for algorithmic transparency and algorithmic choice. The team that was studying algorithmic amplification. The team that was inventing and building ethical AI tooling and methodologies. All that is gone." Does anyone if this team published any of their research on algorithmic transparency and algorithmic amplification? Could anyone say more about their work and what if any literature or tooling might be available to the public?
  • Der_Einzige 4y ago
    I interviewed for this team and the interview experience was so, so bad. The manager was extremely rude, and I was treated poorly in general. I don't like Tesla, but Elon having trouble with this team in particular is no surprise. The ethical AI folks who wrote the fairseq library at Microsoft have done more for AI Ethics and fairness than every single one of twitters AI ethics and responsibility folks.
• gregors 4y ago
  Why would any engineer stay at this point? Either, you still believe in the long term vision and that some day it make you rich or you can't find another job. Is the first choice even plausible now?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • rc_kas 4y ago
    I also wonder this. But probably the answer is that it take a few weeks to months to find a new job. .. also many I'm sure wanted to stick it out to cash their profit shares.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• stokesr 4y ago
  Notified of your being let go via a personal email? So no opportunity to back up your data, save contacts (which might come in handy for finding other employment), any notes or drafts... Brilliant idea, honestly ...
  • DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
    Literally no place I’ve ever worked in my decades in the tech industry were laid off workers allowed any physical or virtual access to company property post layoff. I’m sure it happens sometimes, in rare circumstances, but to pretend that this is especially egregious is disingenuous.
  • wussboy 4y ago
    You'd think a little bit of forethought would cause you to have done that at any point in the last few weeks since this shit-show started, just in case.
  • lopkeny12ko 4y ago
    "Back up your data?" Why would you back up company data to your personal storage? That sounds like huge legal trouble
• bichiliad 4y ago
  When there were layoffs at Etsy back in 2017, one of the unintended consequences were that a lot more people quit voluntarily afterwards. Attrition was a lot higher than expected. I have to believe that the people who remain are not all going to want to stay at the company that Twitter is becoming, whether it be for lack of institutional knowledge, peer support, or just because they liked their coworkers and are sad to see them go. This is a sample size of one, of course, but the layoffs at Etsy were a whole lot smaller than these ones were rumored to be.
  • teeray 4y ago
    I bet there’s two things that cause this: 1) those who quit in solidarity, because they don’t like where things are going 2) those who are saddled with the work of those who were laid off / quit and burn out, causing them to quit (which can snowball to others remaining).
    • geomark 4y ago
      Regarding your point number 2, I've been having this debate over on Twitter (ha) about how much those who remain are saddled with extra work. I've been through a few layoffs in my career, though none as large as this one, and what usually happened was those of us who remained ended up with less work. That is because the ones who were let go were almost always low performers whose work usually needed a lot of review and redesign by the more competent ones, which was more work than just doing the whole thing over from the beginning. In some cases when it did cause a large burden to the remaining employees the project left behind by the laid off ones was left to die. And that often was the right answer since the low performers had so often been shuttled to projects that weren't very valuable to begin with. With no visibility into the Twitter case I don't know if there is much of the same effect that I experienced, although I am reading a lot of opinions on HN and elsewhere that some of the groups that have been decimated should have been killed off long ago.
  • el_benhameen 4y ago
    I kind of figured this was part of the goal at Twitter. 75% of staff was the number that was originally floated, so maybe the thinking here is that after a brutal layoff round, another quarter will say “fuck it” and leave.
• bena 4y ago
  One thing that's always felt distasteful is the practice of essentially making the company buy itself. Musk bought Twitter, but Twitter itself is on the hook for $13 billion of that. It reminds me what happened with ToysRUs. It was saddled with the debt of having been taken private by vulture capitalist, eventually couldn't make its interest payments and folded. Despite never really having a down year of sales. That's right, it was sold, not because it was losing money, but because it wasn't growing at the time. Profits were stagnant. So they were essentially made to buy themselves and the people who engineered this deal and "bought" ToysRUs collected consultancy fees and percentages and made out like bandits. The difference here is that I don't think there's a clear way for Musk to extract that kind of money from Twitter in the same manner.
• brandonagr2 4y ago
  How much blame should go to Jack + Parag for _doubling_ the twitter work force in just the past couple of years?
  • throwayyy479087 4y ago
    None. They have the correct political opinions so are immune here
• rubyist5eva 4y ago
  Saw a leaked video yesterday from a meeting that Elon wants to basically copy WeChat and become the "everything app" in America. He also laughed at the engineers when they told him that "edit is incredibly complex". Couple that with mass layoffs/restructuring. This saga is gonna be interesting to say the least.
• john-radio 4y ago
  A lot of the tweets that are quoted in the article have been removed. For example, Twitter employee Cristina Angeli is mentioned in the story for having tweeted an image of "staff members... flooding an internal Slack channel with blue heart emojis as they wait to learn their fate tomorrow", but that tweet is deleted on twitter itself because "This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules." This is ironic if you consider all the complaining that Musk does in the public sphere about "freedom of speech" (I know that the first amendment only applies to government censorship, but Musk likes to pretend not to), but it's also significant because - Smart journalists are going to stop relying on Twitter's API now. News and blog sites love to render Twitter URLs as a preview of the tweet; but if Twitter under Musk is going to start removing tweets that go against its corporate interests of the hour (is it against Twitter policy to post screenshots of any corporate Slack channel, or only Twitter's own?), then people had better take screenshots of the tweets they want to quote, just in case.
  • UpToTheSky 4y ago
    Does Twitter have any way to prevent/punish using screenshots instead of the Twitter embed thing when you put Tweets on your website? Twitter can probably not use copyright to fight this, a Tweet probably does not fall under copyright because it is too short, right?
    • buggeryorkshire 4y ago
      I'm sure the BBC did exactly that for ages, iirc because somebody who got their tweet embedded by them changed their display name to "big dogs cock" or something.
      • oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
        That sounds like a flaw in the embedding technology — surely the display name should be whatever it was when the tweet was created?
        • r00fus 4y ago
• alistairSH 4y ago
  And the class action for WARN Act violations has already been filed. Sounds like the Chief Twit didn't give 60 days warning OR severance, as required by law. https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/4/23440304/twitter-mass-firing-class-action-lawsuit-violation-federal-warn-act-notice https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/4/23440304/twitter-mass-fir...
  • TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
    And we all know that fines are just fees for rich people.
    • q1w2 4y ago
      This is a non-substantive comment more appropriate for other social media platforms.
      • TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
        Well people don't seem to get it, so I guess you're right. As others have pointed out, Elon has already been involved with WARN lawsuits from former Tesla employees. He surely understands that the law exists, and what Twitter's obligations are under it. So what else could result in this apparent indifference, which so many other people see, and care about so deeply? Ergo, he must not care about the legal implications of how he is going about these layoffs. Hence, he must be ready to just pay the fines. But, sure, expecting people to connect those dots must be more appropriate for other social media platforms.
        • alistairSH 4y ago
          And not just Musk. Big companies regularly put themselves in a position to be fined by regulators. Either their lawyers are stupid (they probably aren't) or it's just a cost of doing business (it probably is).
    • alistairSH 4y ago
      Sadly, as best I can tell, there are no real fines for WARN violations - at worst, Musk as to pay 60 days income and benefits, as he should have done in the first place. There might be a $500/day penalty as well (not sure if that's per person or total - either way, chump change to most employers that are subject to the WARN act).
• jmclnx 4y ago
  deleted, wrong thread. Was aiming for this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33465770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33465770
• kraig911 4y ago
  Truly hope that we can use this as an opportunity to make something people want. Obviously we all use Facebook and Twitter because I guess that's all there is. I hope this create an experience vacuum for people on the web because virtual reality snooze offices and/or racially and class deriding ad driven posts that are 140 words are less is not what I thought the future would be.
  • mikkergp 4y ago
    Interesting to see if VC's/Angels will be chatting up some tweeps as they exit.
• thinkingemote 4y ago
  Musk and friends compare Twitter to other tech companies and see that it's ratio of employees to revenue is lowest. He therefore thinks he must halve the number employees and/or increase revenue to get this ratio up. From the chat log exhibits from the Twitter vs Musk case: https://danluu.com/elon-twitter-texts/#47 https://danluu.com/elon-twitter-texts/#47 A VC (Jason Calacanis) does back of the envelope calculations: Twitter revenue per employee: $5B rev / 8k employees = $625K rev per employee in 2021 Google revenue per employee: $257B rev2/ 135K employee2= $1.9M per employee in 2021 Apple revenue per employee: $365B rev / 154k employees= $2.37M per employee in fiscal 2021 Twitter revenue per employee if 3k instead of 8k: $5B rev/ 3k employees= $1.66m rev per employee in 2021 (more industry standard) Elon: "Insane potential for improvement"
  • dmix 4y ago
    Only 3 years ago Twitter had 5000 employees. They now have 8000 in 2022. That's a massive headcount growth for a company whose stock price declined significantly since then.
    • pyrrhotech 4y ago
      And no notable features have been released
      • scarab92 4y ago
        It seems like most of the layoffs are in trust, comms, creative, policy, wellness and those supporting these functions. If the rumours of 50% downsizing are correct these functions were way bigger than I expected.
      • GVIrish 4y ago
        You didn't see Twitter Spaces, Fleets, Birdwatch, Tweet Editing, and Twitter Blue? Some of those features have been successful for them, some not, but they've been releasing features.
        • 4y ago
• Tainnor 4y ago
  I don't care a lot about Twitter itself, and I'm willing to entertain the notion that it could function equally "well" with a much smaller fraction of the workforce... But this is something that should be implemented gradually. Here is someone who just stepped into the company, and he's laying off people en masse. Even if you concede that Musk is some sort of genius (which I don't, but that's besides the point), that doesn't mean that you can just walk into a company and tell from day 1 who is productive and who isn't. And even if you could, making redundancies obsolete isn't something you can just do in one go, even if certain people and processes are inefficient there would probably be a need for a transition period where the institutional knowledge can be transferred. Given everything else I know about Musk and this deal, this looks to me like a knee-jerk action, not a careful business decision.
  • dmix 4y ago
    It's almost like blaming the new president for having to raise taxes after the last president spent too much $$ and raised the deficit during the good times. When Twitter massively expanded their headcount over the last 3 years their stock price was nearly 30%+ higher than it was before the stock market tanked. People here aren't paying the bills or looking at the financial sheets. We're taking a human look at it (which is good) but there's more to this stuff. The C-suite was probably waiting for Musk to take over to make any hard choices that were coming anyway.
    • r00fus 4y ago
      All of what you said does not absolve the fact that Musk is acting whimsically and clearly showing errors of judgement in his words an actions since taking ownership. Memes aside (I kinda LOL at his sink joke), he is breaking laws and terminating entire departments without any handover or planning. The entire verified fiasco is a good indicator - the new process won't actually require verification of identity - is essentially a shakedown of existing verified users.
      • type-r 4y ago
        source for breaking laws? I've only seen speculation over the past few weeks that he's not paying severance, however in actuality we now see he's paying them until beginning of Feb to not work.
• FortiDude 4y ago
  hot take: big tech layoffs are actually very good because they release into the wild a slew of competent workers with great credentials who will hopefully get hired by a company which does something useful for humanity instead of selling ads
  • algoatecorn 4y ago
    hear hear
  • robswc 4y ago
    Big tech layoffs are never really "good." Even in the way you're describing. Its a nice notion... but I imagine most of the laid off workers will be doing the same thing, just at another company.
  • alex_sf 4y ago
    It's Twitter, though, so the 'competent workers' piece is questionable.
• ergonaught 4y ago
  Musk lost the thread a while ago but it’s weird watching people complain about someone doing what he wants with something he owns. Like, it’s his. It is his property. He bought it. Big fan of judgement swarms over what you do with your property, are ya? No? (Not an endorsement of his management techniques nor this idiotic purchase, but, it is his now.)
• TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
  I don't get all this antipathy towards what Musk is doing. It's an established maxim of the venerated Warren Buffet that the very first thing you need to do after buying a company is clean house, and get rid of the people who put it in the shape that made it buyable to begin with, starting, and especially, at the top.
  • hankerito 4y ago
    I would say, a lot of it has to do with style? Even if something is necessary - and I have now idea if it is - but even if, there are better, more friendly and respectful ways of dealing with all of this right?
    • TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
      You suggest you don't even know if it's necessary to cut staff, but if you had bought Twitter, currently losing money for 3 years in a row, what would you do to turn the ship around more "respectfully?" I think most people who are whinging about this -- especially here, on this forum -- are people who wouldn't think twice, if this were happening at any other big "Web 2.0" company. And, in fact, they'd probably cheer on the "decisive" and "courageous" leadership. I think they just don't like Musk, and don't like that he's bought Twitter, because they believe the narrative -- as I've seen many people suggest -- that it's going to somehow veer hard right, and become 4chan 2.0.
  • narrator 4y ago
    The line between public and private has been blurring very badly since 2016. People are treating Twitter like it's an extension of the executive branch and somehow it's illegal for Musk to just buy it and run it how he sees fit.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• casey2 4y ago
• gdubs 4y ago
  Be Civil. Really shouldn't have to be said. Lots of gross comments here today, and I don't have the time to go check every last username but I only hope it's not long-timers here who are being so snarky and callous at people losing their jobs. And if it is, y'all should remember that the best developers have long memories. Would be wise to have a little empathy and delight a little less in the turning of the business cycle, even you think it benefits your interests.
  • Papirola 4y ago
    > y'all should remember that the best developers have long memories is this a threat?
• TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
  All the hysteria around the purchase proves that Twitter, as it has existed, was very, very important to a lot of people.
• johnsea 4y ago
  The former owners of Twitter got 44 billion. Why don't they care about their ex-employees? It's a bit cheap to blame Musk (only).
• Kye 4y ago
  Link to search LinkedIn for Twitter employees posting in the last 24 hours. It's more or less 100% people looking for work (at least from the view of my network), so it's a great place to start for people looking to hire. https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?authorCompany=%5B%2296622%22%5D&datePosted=%22past-24h%22&keywords=twitter&origin=FACETED_SEARCH&sid=(zd&sortBy=%22relevance%22 https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/content/?authorCompa...
• Bhilai 4y ago
  Sorry to say this but comments on this thread are very disappointing and show a basic lack of empathy in HN crowd. I am obviously generalizing and I know most of you are not heartless souls. FFS people, a huge number of people have lost their livelihoods, sense of belonging and might fall into financial hardships in current market conditions. Whatever you think of Elon or Twitter employees, its good to be grounded in suffering of fellow techies.
  • idlewords 4y ago
    Those techies had years in which to organize their workplace under US labor law to forestall exactly this kind of outcome. For the past 20 years, there was no group of employees on earth with more latent power than US tech workers, but this very fact blinded them to the possibility that they might ever lose this power. What feeble efforts there were at collective action were organized around divisive "social justice" topics rather than securing a permanent voice for labor in tech company governance and decision making. Twitter workers are highly intelligent and the current pity party for them is unseemly. Everyone in the industry saw a day coming when the music would stop, whether because of economic changes or automation, but no one chose to act.
    • kjkjadksj 4y ago
      Don't blame labor for failing to unionize when media has been filling the room with anti union sentiment for a century.
    • dangerwill 4y ago
      Any time a whiff of union talk for tech workers comes up, the industry recoils in abject horror driven by many years of anti-union propaganda ("unions = evil" or "how DARE you well paid, lazy programmers ask for even more"). Especially here in HN given its hyper-capitalist slant. I think it's a bit disingenuous to put all of the blame on tech workers
      • idlewords 4y ago
        Is the argument here that capital should have been more supportive and nurturing? Imagine if the OG labor movement had been such hothouse flowers.
• spyremeown 4y ago
  I have a question: why companies like Twitter need so many people? I'm sorry but it doesn't seem that hard to replicated Twitter functionality and scalability (with the right people on team). What are the engineers actually doing the whole day? Why do they need so many lines of code? All mysterious to me.
  • clusterhacks 4y ago
    My experience is that software businesses and teams have an internal pressure to grow the number of software engineers on staff. I have seen three things swirl together to cause that. 1 - During periods of company growth (increased revenue and profits), there is a tendency of leadership to not have their hands on the wheel. You tend to see growth in company "cost-centers" instead of "profit centers." So you'll get new efforts that don't directly contribute much in increasing revenue. Early in my career I wasn't tuned into the need to really build your work and projects directly into profit center activities. 2 - Internally, I have seen people grow the number of staff underneath them as an almost weird way of justifying a promotion (eg, "executive VP mucky-mucks have N employees and I'm now managing N employees, promote me to executive VP mucky-muck"). 3 - I have seen smaller companies really focus in on the revenue and/or profit per employee number to guide hiring plans. So during a good period of revenue/profit growth, a CEO/owner-type will say something like "It looks like every engineer I add at $1X0,000 is resulting in $[2|3|4]X0,000 additional revenue or profit - let's just keep adding engineers." These napkin calculations are devoid of deeper market analysis. If you went one-on-one with every single software engineer at a big tech company or in a smaller org, you probably wouldn't find many who aren't busy with work. You just probably would find a bunch on "nice to have" work instead of real revenue generators.
  • philjohn 4y ago
    It's a fair question, and shows that a lot of these sites are like icebergs - they look simple until you delve beneath the surface. How are you detecting human trafficing and reporting it (FOSTA-SESTA)? How are you detecting CSAM and reporting offenders to NCMEC? How are you detecting and removing spam? How are you preventing fraudulent ad clicks? How do you deal with "whale" accounts (very large follower counts) and returning an algorithmic feed for their followers? I interviewed for their deveng team and they were doing things like build-caches because it sped up compiles and increased productivity. Also optimising the Scala compiler (more productivity gains).
• acoustics 4y ago
  It seems like people have a totally different thought process when it comes to Elon Musk and Twitter and I can’t pin down why. Whenever a layoff announcement is posted on HN, many people closely scrutinize the wording of the announcement and the severance conditions. Words of consolation are given freely, and occasionally people will offer to help with finding new work. In this thread, though, I find people saying that former Twitter employees need to suck it up and not be entitled babies. Many who have ardently supported remote work policies (and would raise pitchforks if their employer tried to drag them back into the office) are calling Twitter employees entitled and coddled for attempting to push back.
• browningstreet 4y ago
  I'm personally quite curious how much alignment there is between Jack and Elon, and yet.. Jack was the CEO not too long ago. Jack didn't fix a lot of the things Elon is worked up about. Which makes their communication and cooperation perplexing.
  • mikkergp 4y ago
    Jack I think blamed the board for a lot of the inaction which is why he was supportive of Elon taking it private.
• tiffanyh 4y ago
  I wonder how people will measure success for Elon/Twitter. Will it be based on revenue, earnings, MAUs, or some other metric.
• kweingar 4y ago
  One thing I’m surprised to see such little commentary on is the fact that Musk violated California’s WARN Act by not providing appropriate notice of layoffs.
  • nostromo 4y ago
    If you give those employees 60 days of severance, you would not be in violation.
  • codeslave13 4y ago
    From posts elsewhere. They are still employed till feb. Just do not report for work. So no violation
• anonAndOn 4y ago
  Does this mass layoff comply with the WARN Act and California's mini-WARN?[0] What about all of California's protected classes?[1] The pregnant ladies let go before their FMLA seem especially aggrieved. Maybe some lawyers here can chime in: How soon will we see some class action lawsuits? [0]https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/layoff-protections-california-employees.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/layoff-protections-c... [1]https://www.employmentattorneyla.com/blog/2017/june/what-are-california-s-protected-classes-in-emplo/ https://www.employmentattorneyla.com/blog/2017/june/what-are...
  • s1artibartfast 4y ago
    Class protection doesn't mean you cant fire minorities and pregnant women. It means you can't fire people for being minorities and pregnant.
    • anonAndOn 4y ago
      Firing a pregnant lady in CA simply as a cost cutting measure usually results in a nice settlement for the pregnant lady. FAFO, Elon.
      • s1artibartfast 4y ago
        Not legally. They would have to prove that they were being targeted and fired for being pregnant. Laying off half the company is pretty strong evidence you aren't targeting based on protected class.
        • anonAndOn 4y ago
          Do they? Or does Elon have to explain in front of a judge that employees about to go on protected leave/ older workers/ less fanboy were not unfairly targeted? My money is on settlement to prevent any judge from seeing how the firing decisions were made.
          • 4y ago
• eddsh1994 4y ago
  "HN: Who wants to be hired?" is going to be wild next month
• neel8986 4y ago
  The way employees were treated was beyond disgraceful. Really feel sorry for my younger self who believed that Musk truly cares about Humanity. Never ever hero worship a billionaire while thinking he will change the world. They are all ego manic pos hungry for more and more control. Small things you can do a) If you care about environment don't buy an over expensive electric car. Think about efforts to improve Public transport b) SpaceX is not about putting man on Mars. It is about elon wanting to control world's internet through Starlink. Whenever a small nation falls for the trap raise your voice.
  • kylehotchkiss 4y ago
    There are other billionaires out there doing good things, without needing to have a weekly news scandal: Bill gates foundation has made tremendous progress with healthcare in developing countries. He’s probably made as much progress that can made in these countries as the walls he’s hitting seem to be corrupt/incompetent governments rather and money or technical. Mark Cuban’s cost plus drugs company is making a life changing difference for Americans paying a lot per month in medicine, often saving their customers hundreds of dollars per month, and committed to expanding their selection of generic medicines.
  • CrazyStat 4y ago
    Starlink's total bandwidth is about the same as a small regional ISP. There is no way it will ever "control the world's internet". Starlink will serve many places where terrestrial wired or wireless access doesn't make sense, including oceans, very rural areas, uninhabited areas, airplanes, rockets, etc. It will never be able to serve 1% of a high density city. It will never control anything on the scale of the world's internet. This is an absurd conspiracy theory.
    • brtkdotse 4y ago
      Can't find the article now but it made an interesting point that Starlink is just busywork for SpaceX to keep launching rockets.
      • 4y ago
• billfor 4y ago
  I want to know if the product manager that was raving about the yoga rooms and free wine on tap was fired.
• xivzgrev 4y ago
  Elon Musk is great at building new things. Time will tell if he can re-invent an existing thing. So far, it's not looking great. Corporate raiders / PE usually have a well defined thesis and plan to hit the ground running - Elon clearly does not. His plan seems to be "I need to double free cash flow ASAP, we'll figure out how along the way". Trying to figure out how to lay off half of the company, without negatively impacting free cash flow, in a week seems like a fool's errand. I think his success has gone to his head. But time will tell.
  • pphysch 4y ago
    > Corporate raiders / PE usually have a well defined thesis and plan to hit the ground running - Elon clearly does not. He clearly does, but most people don't care to engage with it in good faith. Something like: - Twitter's value is its integrated GLOBAL network of professionals/leaders/celebrities - Twitter Co has not remotely leveraged this, going for a FB/Reddit/etc content-centric advertiser model instead - Sprinkle in some "super app" ambitions. If the new KYC subscriber model is successful, then Twitter could disrupt LinkedIn, then possibly payments too. SV has been captured by advertisers and many people think "there are no alternatives". But there clearly are.
    • cmeacham98 4y ago
      > - Twitter's value is its integrated GLOBAL network of professionals/leaders/celebrities This seems to directly contradict Musk's plan to start charging these people $8/month (previously was going to be $20/month).
    • philjohn 4y ago
      It doesn't sound like the subscriber model will be KYC (no verification of identity).
• fast-nim 4y ago
• jimcavel888 4y ago
• pelasaco 4y ago
  I'm never happy with mass layoffs, but reading some tweets and going through some profiles linked to the article, it is clear to see that some people who were fired, weren't happy with the company. So regardless of their performance, maybe was everything that they needed to find their happiness in another company?
• zppln 4y ago
  So, article is a bit vague on who were let go. Is this gonna have any real impact on operations going forward? Could you really axe half the staff and not?
• Animats 4y ago
  Craigslist has about 50 employees. If it really had to, Twitter could probably run with 50 employees and AWS.
• steve76 4y ago
• ta238911 4y ago
  I never understood why people like Musk are admired that much. He's a bully, period. If you cheer a bully, you're probably also one.
• flappyeagle 4y ago
  Elon is pushing a giant reset button on Twitter. This is long overdue and the pain is a result of accumulated managerial debt. Twitter will be fine operationally. It might have some short term hiccups as people pick up the pieces but the network effects and the value proposition are unchanged. Letting go of these people also makes room for more wild thinkers and hacker types to join the party. Sometimes the team that got you there isn't the team that can take you to the next level. I feel bad personally for everyone who liked their job, but many of these jobs existed for years longer than they should have. These are all smart individuals who have a big important company on their CV. No one is going to fault them for being laid off from Twitter when the cuts are this deep; they're already neck deep in recruiter spam if they have any degree of competence.
  • ctvo 4y ago
    > This is long overdue and the pain is a result of accumulated managerial debt. The pain is the result of Elon Musk overpaying 3x for a company he didn't want to buy and aggressively cost cutting to lower expenses. 1 billion a year in debt interest payments due to the 12 billion in loans he took on to purchase Twitter matches reality more closely than "accumulated managerial debt". > Twitter will be fine operationally. I'm unsure how anyone can say this with any confidence. > Letting go of these people also makes room for more wild thinkers and hacker types to join the party. I think I met you at a gathering in SF once and had to walk away from the conversation.
    • flappyeagle 4y ago
      > The pain is the result of Elon Musk overpaying 3x for a company he didn't want to buy If he were put in charge of twitter and paid no money, I don't think his actions would be any different. He's that kind of crazy.
• waynesonfire 4y ago
  cleaning house. nice. we should do the same. during production incidents there are 4:1 managers to engineers.
• thexumaker 4y ago
  Is anyone actually looking to hire Twitter people? It was known as a rest and vest place with a bunch of leetcode engineers lmao.
  • Kye 4y ago
    Their posts on Linkedin are being bombarded by recruiters. So yes.
• saisundar 4y ago
  A grim day. As a tech worker, my solidarity is entirely with the employees of Twitter. The irony is that Twitter, more than any other social platform, helped create the aura around Elon, Tesla in particular. In some sense, Twitter was quintessential to what Elon is today. For him to now - make a bid for twitter - back out of it in futile - acquire it, lay off execs - lay off half the force Is surreal. If this had been anyone apart from Elon, they would have been ostracized. I am saddened, but also a bit terrified since I see strong parallels between Elon, and... Other such figures. But Elon now owns a social media platform that "informs" upwards of a 500million users a month.
  • davesque 4y ago
    It's really an ironic saga that's unfolded between Musk and Twitter. I've said many times that I think Twitter facilitates a Jekyll-to-Hyde-like transformation in people that are predisposed to it. I think the fantastically rich are disproportionately represented in that group. If you're surrounded by yes men (and that includes Twitter followers), you're going to turn into an awful person. So Musk has come back to ruin the very thing that created him. This story is not new to humanity. The golem has returned to destroy its creator.
• thepasswordis 4y ago
  How many of these employees signed a letter of "demands" towards their new CEO? I'm sorry, but I have a really difficult time feeling anything other than schadenfreude for these people. You guys are making how much money working at a company which appears to be unable to actually make money, and at which you appear to see yourselves more as activists than employees. The gall of these people to then put together a letter of "demands" (not suggestions or requests, DEMANDS), and then the next week complain that they're being asked to show what they've been working on for the last month is just... Sorry guys, but the gravy train of $250k/yr as a 23 year old product manager working 2 hours a week remotely while making tik toks about how cute your life is are over.
  • barbazoo 4y ago
    It's Schadenfreude btw.
• martin1975 4y ago
  Personally, I'd keep the software devs + QA. Most of them probably don't care so much about politics/culture and are hopefully motivated by doing a good job. Without dev+QA, there's no Twitter. So I would understand a total mgmt purge....
• partiallypro 4y ago
  I'm not a huge Musk fan, mostly because of his political ramblings and especially revolving around Ukraine; but I find the sudden hatred of him pretty odd. Mass layoffs happen all the time, Square just announced a 14% cut yesterday. In terms of Twitter's current moderation nothing has really changed on the platform, I'm an avid user and have seen no difference. It's not really just Musk, it feels like there is a turn on any social media platform that doesn't do wide arrays of censorship that lean whatever way you're inclined to agree with (this includes conservatives hating TikTok.) Musk has said he wants a free-speech platform but has never claimed it would have no moderation. There was a piece somewhere about a rise in the use of the N word, but there was no follow up showing if those accounts were banned. Seems like an important part of the story. Honestly some of this feels like a hit job. I've not found anyone that can point to something inherently wrong with the new vision of Twitter that isn't based in some crazy hyperbole not in tune with reality. Twitter has been horribly run for ages, someone trying to revive it isn't bad. When I use a platform, unless the person is a literal Nazi or Communist, I don't care what their political beliefs are. I care about the product. I think that is being lost on people where now everything revolves around politics. It's kind of sad, especially when we all basically agree on 90% of things and policy. We used to complain about data silos and filter bubbles...and now people just leave platforms because leadership may not share their political views? How is that good? I think the media itself has fed into this because they have always hated social media (for better or worse) for making them no longer the first source of news when print was already dying.
  • sbf501 4y ago
    It is illegal to do layoffs like this at scale without following the California WARN act: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/03/tech/twitter-layoffs/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/03/tech/twitter-layoffs/inde... It's a dick move and demonstrates someone who doesn't understand how to build worker loyalty. Forcing people to tap dance 80+ hours a week or be fired (without mega compensation) doesn't earn you loyalty. Yeah, he claims he works 120 hour weeks, but he also reaps nearly all of the compensation. But I think the benefit of all this is having someone trying to break the laws. He's pentesting federal & state worker protections. That's a good thing in the long term, not so much in the short term.
• memish 4y ago
  There's an asymmetry here where Twitter and other companies get blamed for layoffs, but didn't get praised for providing highly paid jobs that put their employees in the top 1%. Even Stripe just had layoffs and they are a much more productive, tighter run ship. Twitter cutting deeper than Stripe shouldn't be surprising. It's not a secret that they were overstaffed and are known for rest & vest. This goes way back. In 2014 there was a show called Silicon Valley that had an entire character and subplots based on this phenomenon in tech companies. Big Head hanging out on the roof resonated for a reason. Compassion is warranted regardless and productive employees got caught in this too, but that doesn't mean we have to engage in selective amnesia and kneejerk outrage.
  • cochne 4y ago
    Well, it's mostly not Twitter betting blamed for layoffs, it's Musk. Twitter provided those jobs, not Musk. Musk is doing the layoffs, not Twitter. So someone not responsible in the least for the creation of those jobs is ending them. That is not to say the layoffs were not needed or justified (I don't know) but the asymmetry exists because it's an asymmetric situation.
    • hackerlight 4y ago
      Layoffs that improve economic productivity should be celebrated. The executives who do them should be congratulated. They are creating economic surplus by freeing up labor to add value elsewhere in the economy where it's needed more. So few people understand how much human prosperity would be stunted if people weren't allowed to be terminated when they were no longer productively adding value in a position.
      • RockyMcNuts 4y ago
        it's important to distinguish short-run productivity and long-term sustainability. systems need slack. if you take away all the shoulders on all the highways you will get improvements in throughput and cost per trip. and any breakdown will be much worse because responders can't get through to clear it. layoffs shouldn't be celebrated because they cause pain and they mean someone screwed up. time will tell whether Musk is putting the business on a sustainable footing or killing a golden goose.
• fredgrott 4y ago
  Some context, these are the platforms that are at 1 billion or getting close to 1 billion users: FB Instagram Youtube Linkedin Notice that twitter, despite it's age is nowhere close to closing on LinkedIN's current 700 million users. Those worried about Journalists have not followed the upswing in Instagram users by journalists...some well known Liberal leaning journalist networks are now current Instagram users and creators. The Twitter employees let go, got a gift of being freed from working for someone that factually is perceived as white superior race advocate including racism. Advertisers, current Twitter employees and users all have the most important vote and objection to this...our feet and attention.
• gigatexal 4y ago
  Let's all open our personal professional networks to help these folks laid off find work. Nothing we can do about Elon owning Twitter now but what we can do is help those affected by the layoffs.
• busyreading 4y ago
  Hot take, this was bound to happen at one point or another. Everything I’ve read, and witnessed from using the platform always came back to this thought: “how are they even making money on it?” Policies also placed were just not popular regardless from what you heard from the vocal minority. I personally hope Twitter develops into a platform that has more fair policies, and makes some sort of profit. It sucks to be laid off, but honestly it was a bubble waiting to burst. At least these people are getting some sort of severance. The only thing I hope is that the COs don’t get their golden parachute. They haven’t done much for the platform, and only made it worse for a majority of the user base.
  • CobrastanJorji 4y ago
    "How are they even making money on it" is such a weird question about a business whose revenue is over a billion dollars per quarter.
• OOPMan 4y ago
  I imagine that, like a lot of big companies, Twitter has a lot of fat that could be trimmed.
• christkv 4y ago
  Payed fully until February 2nd. Is there anyway for me to sign up to be laid off ?
• twawaaay 4y ago
  > Musk’s team has already tried to evaluate the productivity of Twitter employees by asking engineers to print out the code that they have written in the last 30 to 60 days. Musk also brought in Tesla engineers to look over Twitter code. At one company I worked we had a bug in the software for the device we were manufacturing. There were millions of units at peoples' homes and the bug caused couple hundred of these units to loose the content of their flash, every day. This in turn a huge ongoing loss both financial and reputational for the company. Because of the nature of the bug, we spent something like 3 months trying to find it. We even built a special lab with dozens of units hooked to specially designed rig to have a chance to observe one unit in the process of getting wiped. Finally, one guy with an oscilloscope cracked it. It was electromagnetic interference between two different circuits within device causing the flash to receive a command telling it to wipe itself clean. The fix was one line, two characters really. I am sure Tesla engineers will do a good job evaluating worth of each one of those lines people printed out.
  • marvin 4y ago
    If I had planned and written those two characters, I would have appended a comment like yours and any sensible engineer would have praised the solution. It’s fairly obvious their metric isn’t «number of lines of code».
    • twawaaay 4y ago
      My point is, looking at the code you are unlikely to be able to judge the value of it. Code is not valuable in itself. Code is liability because it costs a lot now and will have to be maintained in the future. Frequently, best solutions and decisions are the ones that result in avoiding to write any code. As to code, I put a lot of effort into solving complex problems with simple code. Anybody can write complex code. It takes experience and effort to make stuff look simple.
      • kamaal 4y ago
        I think their point is in the era of OKRs, they are more interesting in knowing if you have been coding up the next billion dollar app, or working on maintenance stuff to keep lights on. While the latter is equally important, its the former that brings in the next billions in profit.
• christkv 4y ago
  The growth of employees between 2020 and 2022 was insane. There is no way you add 50% more employees over that period and have any sort efficiency. https://www.statista.com/statistics/272140/employees-of-twitter/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/272140/employees-of-twit...
• rootos 4y ago
  Who gives a shit?
• strangattractor 4y ago
  I fear Elon may have inadvertently laid off potential baby mommas for his next family. Literally throwing out the baby with the bath water type of situation.
• fleddr 4y ago
  Amidst all this doom and gloom and supposedly inevitable failure of Musks' Twitter, I find it interesting to reason about that being a reality. What would replace it? Nothing. As much as I dislike Twitter overall, it's not replaceable. The main characters driving it (journalists, politicians, the like) have no other central gathering place where they would have the cultural influence that they have now. Their status is exclusively bound to Twitter and cannot be reliably replicated elsewhere. Have a look at the typical big accounts, with hundreds of thousands of followers and a decade-long history of a few dozen tweets per day. These are the 1-10% Twitter users generating 90% of activity on the network. Where would they move to? Reddit? Discord? Mastodon? Facebook? I don't think so, that would be a worse experience but more importantly, the audience won't follow. Twitter power users see themselves as creators, but they are not in the ordinary sense. A photographer or videographer produces tangible content that can stand on its own. As such, they can move it across networks. The same thing is not true for a tweet. Sure enough you can move a tiny piece of text to another social network, but it makes no sense there. It doesn't have the cultural relevance or unique twitter mechanics of amplification. When your creation is snippets of texts that generate outrage, you're in Twitter prison. Bottom line, I believe the above is what would keep Twitter alive even if temporarily takes some hits.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• martin82 4y ago
  very exciting times. taking Twitter out of the hands of the woke mob seems to be a real chance to create a useful social network again. we currently do not have a proper social network: * Twitter is infested by bots * Facebook is a ghost town for our parents * Instagram is just for narcissists in yoga pants * TikTok is literally a Chinese cyberweapon designed to degenerate western youth Reddit is somewhat OK, I guess, but like HN, feels too anonymous and therefore not very social.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• sidcool 4y ago
  Just to add, Elon tweeted the following: "Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day. Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required"
• KETpXDDzR 4y ago
  Video of Twitter office from inside: https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1585394822407368705/pu/vid/720x1208/pJWKk98KQAD-alPD.mp4?tag=14 https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1585394822407368705/pu/...