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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
by 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 agoIn 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 agoAll these people are making 200k a year and will have no problem finding another job.
- sam_lowry_ 4y agoIn 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 agoSo it sounds like exactly zero people who have committed code recently will be fired, right?
- jesuscript 4y agoDepends on how Caligula feels next week.
- boc 4y agoRight but the people who bring in the money (advertising sales) probably got axed because they don’t write code.
- sam_lowry_ 4y agoRightfully so, because 8€/month for blue stamp needs neither.
- Macha 4y agoAs I saw pointed out elsewhere, with a headcount of only engineers and these alleged 10 managers per engineers, this would leave twitter with like 630 engineers and 6300 managers which is a clearly a drastic underestimation of the number of engineers and that's before you count roles like sales, support, etc. Don't take everything Elon tweets at face value
- talaketu 4y agohttps://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586686935518498816 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586686935518498816 > There seem to be 10 people "managing" for every one person coding Take this literally, not as as a ration. - each SWE in a product team has an EM, Dir Eng, VP Eng, PM, Director Product, VP Product, ...
- Macha 4y agoSure, but that team may have N engineers and those VPs may have N teams, so that doesn't seem so ludicrous for a 7000 person company. Or even 3500 person company by EOD. Certainly in my company there's about a 200:1 engineer:VP engineering ratio, so pointing out every engineer reports to a VP is kind of a meaningless statement
- ghaff 4y agoAnd there are also finance people, HR people, sales, etc. people. The company is far from entirely engineers, their managers, and the managers of their managers.
- cjrp 4y agoSo there's overlap between every developer
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sam_lowry_ 4y ago630 coders is quite a lot for what Twitter does. They do not own datacenters, AFAIK.
- oxfordmale 4y agoIt is still never nice to lose your job, especially if you have a mortgage matching based on your 200K salary.
- woofyman 4y agoSmart people live below their means.
- throwawaytwit9 4y agoYeah right. Because smart people can always control the circumstances of their life like an illness, elder care, affordable housing, change in market conditions, etc.
- exitb 4y agoLike Elon Musk.
- philliphaydon 4y agoThe majority of people who earn more spend more.
- badpun 4y ago> Smart people live below their means. > The majority of people who earn more spend more. You don't need a Prolog engine to compute the conclusion...
- windmaster 4y ago:-)
- pieter_mj 4y agoI do, but when I earn more, I definitely spend more :)
- thatfrenchguy 4y ago
- taurath 4y agoMany will be fine, there also may be many who will not. Not everyone makes that much at twitter, not everyone is in a role that is competitive right now. The ones who make the least are the ones who will suffer the most. Stop being callous.
- throwaway4aday 4y agoThe ones who make the least will also be in the most commonly available roles so they too should have no trouble finding a job elsewhere.
- throwawaytwit9 4y agoThat’s not the point. Dignity and respect. Going in a different direction? Fine. Make cuts. But, no one deserves to be treated as disposable playthings. Zero communication and unreasonable demands create anxiety. Contrast this to stripe. I fail to see how one’s income determines the respect they should receive.
- nerdawson 4y ago6 months ago I would have agreed but it seems like the landscape has changed radically since then.
- ghaff 4y agoEven leaving aside that a lot of these people are not engineers but customer support, finance, sales, etc. even developer hires in the current market are very measured and selective at most companies. First of all, probably nothing will move forward until after the holidays. It's not unreasonably pessimistic to think that it may take 6 months or more for someone to get a new position even as a developer.
- beardedman 4y ago> in the US and less civilized countries Going to have a hard time finding some goodwill when you refer to other countries as "less civilized". A tad hypocritical.
- taurath 4y agoMy apologies, it might have been more accurate to say "in the US and similarly uncivilized countries".
- luckylion 4y agoAdding a little love to the world every day, huh?
- taurath 4y agoThe cruelty is the point here in the good ole US of A.
- etiennebausson 4y agoThat was my though as well before even reading the comments. I suppose I should admit as an European that confidence in your own superiority is not solely and American trait.
- nivenkos 4y agoThe US is far wealthier though, like just compare the developer salaries for a start.
- numlock86 4y agoWhat's a $250k payroll worth if that's also what you have to pay for the average hospital visit? I'd stick to my €100k and not have my life ruined just because I broke my leg or my kid is born with a heart disease.
- firefoxkekw 4y agoThe personal financial security shouldn't be provided by corporations, is your problem, so you should be the one who solve it, if you want financial security just make sure you are highly employable at any point. Most people fired from Twitter will find a new job without problem and if they can't, is their problem, not mine.
- bordercases 4y ago
- chess_buster 4y agoIt should be provided by the state like in Germany – where it's an insurance you pay into if your an employee
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- throwaway4aday 4y agoLike Unemployment Insurance? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_insurance_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_insurance_in_the_...
- naijaboiler 4y agoThis is a very very naive take from someone who has no empathy and no understanding of macroeconomics. In a down economy, human resources and artificially underutilized and many competent workers with solid financial discipline will still find themselves in financial trouble.
- firefoxkekw 4y ago<< This is a very very naive take from someone who has no empathy and no understanding of macroeconomics. >> If your argument is an ad hominem, ok so.
- somedude895 4y agoIt's okay to feel bad for people who lose their jobs. But business cycles are important for a healthy economy. Unsustainable ventures need to die or be pruned at some point if you want to generate lasting prosperity. Whether this specific instance actually serves to create a more productive and more dynamic company remains to be seen, and it sucks for the people affected, but if they're skilled and useful – as every person should always strive to be – they'll be fine. It sounds heartless, but it's the reality.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hankerito 4y agoAs a european though, it is absolutely crazy to see you can do this on a day by day basis. Here you would have at least 1 month, more likely 3 month, prior notice to just being kicked out and having your accounts closed. You would also have to state a business reason for people who are employed as fixed staff. This gives people time to react to these kinds of things. Edit: Sorry, this refers to a comment further below: Also, comparing this to the pandemic is kinda crazy, isn't it? It's one thing to have a global scale event effecting the lives of billions and another of just buying a company for way tooo much because you wanted to make a dumb joke about smoking weed. America truely is a heartless, dystopian society...
- PeterStuer 4y agoIn the European places you never get fired. They just make sure you quit.
- philliphaydon 4y agoNotice period is different from redundancy. Redundancy can mean you leave the day you’re made redundant. But they must give 30 days notice that redundancies are going to occur. In australia you cannot hire for a redundant role for I believe 9 months? If you do you must rehire the people made redundant or face big fines.
- deleted 4y ago
- anthropodie 4y agoThere is no security. You never know when things will go wrong. When pandemic happened software companies like Twitter were untouched but millions of workers felt its impact shaking them to the core and hence preparing them for better choices next time. The employees that are laid off I wish them best of luck but they should have been prepared for a day like this. They were earning good. It's things like this which transforms people. Maybe someone out of these employees will start next billion dollar company, who knows?
- TigeriusKirk 4y agoI've been laid off in downturns a couple times before, so it has been me in that pit. But you can't have the boom without the bust, and shrinking bloated companies is a thing that has to happen one way or the other. Also, the Twitter layoff in particular has had about as much advance notice as anything I've seen. It's been clear for months and months it was going to happen. Plenty of time to get yourself in order or get out first.
- ShamelessC 4y agoNo one said we needed “the boom”.
- nilsleep 4y ago"less civilized countries" the arrogance, and you are the one asking for empathy?
- dopidopHN 4y agoIn civilized countries, you don’t loose your healthcare when your loose your job. It’s tie to your human status, not to a contract with a random corporation. Also, civilized societies have come up a long time ago with appropriate social nets that mitigate the hurdle of unemployment. And our food is vastly superior.
- TecoAndJix 4y agoI'm with on on everything but the food! I can get like 10 different kinds of apples at my grocery store, a dry aged ribeye, and there is an entire row dedicated to different types of sparkling water. If i want fresh noodles for fish soup I can go 10 minutes down the road to the Asian grocery and get Bok Choy, fishballs, and udon noodles. The only thing not near me is a reliable source of rainbow colored bagels that my daughter loves.
- dopidopHN 4y agoWould saying that in the US I struggle with bread, cheese and wine give too much away? It’s fine: you can find anything you want. But you have to suffer posh places and step markup. I just want some decent unpasteurized cheese. Joke aside, I was more thinking of culinary traditions. Like cooking things from the season, from scratch and eat it with other human beings around a table. US friends: that when I look at you like barbarian : when you shovel food in your mouth between you desk and break room. Get a table, look at your food! Talk to another human about his food. Share food and diner time.
- throwaway6734 4y agoWhat was the average salary of a Twitter employee? It's great to see the fat getting cut and hopefully more companies follow suit
- zjlnd 4y agoI think the empathy is limited only in this particular case. Twitter has a) been exemplifying cancel culture itself and b) been a major tool for cancel mobs to organize and defame. The latter was intended and encouraged. Some here have perhaps been victims themselves, for relatively mild things (I'm not talking about the really egregious cases where cancellation has been justified!). If you live by the sword, things may turn around at some point.
- bananapub 4y agodon't forget immigration security - if you're on an employer-tied visa then you must find a job extremely quickly or leave the US and start the process over.
- irthomasthomas 4y agoI must confess that I am finding it difficult to muster sympathy for them. And this coming from a man that despises Musk's behaviour, and wished he had been barred from buying Twitter. My reason being that during the pandemic, I repeatedly told people that my biggest fear was not the virus, but the economic collapse that would be the inevitable result of global lockdowns, and the authoritarian dystopia being shaped by the censorship of contrarian views. "First you are working from home, and then you are just... at home.", I said. And people who tried to share that view on Twitter where harassed and banned. Perhaps I will be proven wrong, and the economy will quickly rebound, who knows. But being gagged from even discussing the possibility of the events we now see unfolding, has left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Watching twitter ban dissenting doctors and scientists reminded me of Hannah Arendt and the Eichman trial: "The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution" And this from a NYT movie review: "Arendt concluded that evil in the modern world is done neither by monsters nor by bureaucrats, but by joiners. That evil, Arendt argued, originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning that they give themselves fully to movements. It is the meaning Eichmann finds as part of the Nazi movement that leads him to do anything and sacrifice everything. Such joiners are not stupid; they are not robots. But they are thoughtless in the sense that they abandon their independence, their capacity to think for themselves, and instead commit themselves absolutely to the fictional truth of the movement."
- elcomet 4y ago> First you are working from home, and then you are just... at home Being at home seems indeed scary compared to dying in a hallway of an overloaded hospital
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Der_Einzige 4y agoBtw arendt is hella, hella racist. Look at her essay on little rock. No defense for that, and she's extremely overrated.
- UncleMeat 4y agoEven worse than that, immigration status. Getting laid off when on H1B, especially when other companies are freezing hiring and we are getting close to the holidays when everything takes longer is terrifying. You are on a clock for being simply kicked out of the country.
- eppp 4y agoWas this not known when signing up for H1B?
- UncleMeat 4y agoOf course it was known. The system itself is shitty to immigrants. But "well you signed up, deal with it" is an empathy-free way of responding to this sort of situation. An Indian or Chinese citizen can come to the US for undergrad, get a PhD in CS at a top US university, be unable to get o1 for a variety of reasons, end up with h1b, and be on a decades-long waiting list for a green card. This person can get married and raise a family while still waiting for that green card. Being weeks away from deportation is unimaginably terrifying.
- prvc 4y agoWhat makes them entitled to stay in the US without working in a "specialty occupation"?
- kaashif 4y agoI mean, some people are coming at this from some kind of altruistic angle, but let's be pragmatic: immigration is the American superpower and the key to expanding the dominance of American companies decades into the future.
- UncleMeat 4y agoYep even if you take a maximally cynical view and think of policies exclusively from the perspective of rival nation states, I have no idea how you'd conclude that pulling very large numbers of smart people from China to the US is bad for America's hegemonic influence in world politics.
- prvc 4y ago> I feel bad for people who are laid off by the machinations of billionaires. Do you have different feelings about people who are laid off by the machinations of centi-millionaires?
- Macha 4y agoGenerally the centi-millionaires don't have a fan following cheering them on, so there's less of an opposing view to require a comment like the top level one to be made
- spamizbad 4y agoI feel like Musk is making a spectacle of Twitter layoffs as a way to curry favor with those who very vocally disliked Twitter’s moderation policies, most of whom were just social media clout chaser types. Makers getting sacrificed to please the attention-seeking “professionals”
- s1k3 4y agoHas musk publicly flouted the layoffs? Isn’t this all tech journalists reporting on it? Sounds like he’s trying to cut to profitability to me… after spending 44 billions dollars.
- warlord1 4y ago[dead]
- WalterBright 4y agoBusiness in a free market is a constantly changing and chaotic system of creative destruction.
- DesiLurker 4y agobut underneath this 'business' there are real humans with kids & mortgages and a life. we dont/should't have to live to feed some capitalistic ideal of maximizing the line rather it should be other way round. looking at US for last 40 years which way you think its been going?
- phendrenad2 4y agoFalse dichotomy. It's possible to feel empathy for someone who takes a bitter pill, but if the pill makes them and society better, I'm not going to be shamed by you for saying it's a good thing.
- Overtonwindow 4y agoSounds like what you’re really saying is “from each according to their ability; to each according to their need…” Also I’m sure you didn’t have this intention, but your comment made me think about East Germany. When the wall came down, there were all these state owned companies that had to be sold, something had to be done with them. They could not produce enough income to maintain the workforce that they had. This really upset a lot of people and they lost their jobs. It was not their fault, it was the fault of the state and the structure of the company. Twitter apparently is quite bloated, and for the company to survive and succeed it needs to cut costs, or go out of business. Germany could’ve easily just closed all of those companies in the east and laid everyone off, but they did their best to sell them so that people could still be employed.
- UnpossibleJim 4y agoIt's that whole thing of reacting with great sadness to hearing of one person's death and being numb to hearing of a plane crash (I'm mangling the saying). If we stopped to think about all the individual tragedies that go on every day around us, nothing would ever get done, we'd stop eating and we'd never get out of bed. People have to cope, and we shouldn't have to feel guilty about it.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoWell people can be hard to replace thanks to skills and training they received on the workplace... which they can quit on a short notice if they are offered better pay elsewhere, causing enormous problems for business owners. So it kinda checks out. Obligations shouldn't be one way, they should be mutual. If you want an ironclad employment security, etc, etc, you should also accept to be bound to your workplace until the business hires somebody else to do your work who is as qualified to do your work as you are. And if you think that your obligation is only to work well until you decide to quit at the moment of your choosing... then you should also accept that this moment might be chosen by your employer.
- VancouverMan 4y agoI think it would be easier to feel sympathy for these Twitter employees had we seen them show sympathy for the various people that were suddenly banned from using Twitter, and/or other platforms and services, often with the flimsiest of "justifications". In at least some of those cases, it was a matter of livelihood and financial security for the people who were banned, too.
- acdha 4y agoHow do you know they didn’t? Are there any specific cases you can point to so anyone else can decide whether to agree with your assessment of how warranted it was? Speaking of which, why is this blame directed at Twitter employees rather than the managers setting the policies? Why are they also to blame for unspecified “other platforms and services” where they presumably are not in policy-making positions?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- acdha 4y agoI won’t quote your reply since you deleted it but I would suggest reviewing that list of suspended Twitter accounts and looking for any example which supports your original claim that this is being done callously on flimsy grounds. Conservative grievance peddling is a popular way to assert group loyalty but it’s hard not to recognize how routinely they leave out the parts about knowingly violating the terms of service repeatedly and ignoring warnings. People make mistakes but they also correct them and there’s no reason to believe individual Twitter employees were callously nuking accounts, much less at the scale where it’d justify being dismissive about thousands of people losing jobs they were performing satisfactorily.
- turtlebits 4y agoToo many people are unreasonably attached to their jobs. If you work in a country/state that is "at will", you should take that seriously as if you could lose your source of income at any time. That includes financial planning and money set aside for these types of events.
- rbetts 4y agoOne of the richest people in the world overpays capital holders and slashes labor by 50% in order to own "the world's town square". Remarkable demonstration of labor weakness.