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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

• 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.
    • tsunamifury 4y ago
      Buddy you’ve drunk too much of the kookaide. Musk is telling stories. Look at what he did to the ca bullet train. Don’t believe his “vision” Is for good.
      • naasking 4y ago
        My claim was not that Musk was "good" in whatever way you conceptualize that. My claim was that Musk's main focuses are commercial ventures that are very targeted at combating the main existential risks facing humanity. This is exactly the kind of good that the OP was talking about.
        • simiones 4y ago
          That's your claim, but it's simply and obviously false. SpaceX is not about "making humanity interplanetary", it is about selling cheap rockets for commercial exploitation of space (and/or it is a DoD weapons "defense" program). Tesla is a car company, aimed at making and selling cars. Stopping global warming requires more mass transit, and Musk is actively opposed to that. "Making humanity interplanetary" is simply impossible with current or forseeable technology, so there is no sense in attempting yet (especially since we can develop this technology on Earth, by creating self-sustaining habitats in the Arctic desert, if we really want to).
          • naasking 4y ago
            > SpaceX is not about "making humanity interplanetary", it is about selling cheap rockets for commercial exploitation of space (and/or it is a DoD weapons "defense" program). Sure, as an interim step to making humanity interplanetary. Are you suggesting that he could find commercial success without taking those intermediate steps? > Tesla is a car company, aimed at making and selling cars. Tesla make solar roofs and grid level energy storage. Like I said, it's portfolio is very clearly geared at climate change solutions. > Stopping global warming requires more mass transit, and Musk is actively opposed to that. Maybe he is (I've heard he's a bit of a germaphobe). I suspect he also recognizes that America is a car culture and that that won't change anytime soon.
  • Medox 4y ago
    He did "put the profits to good use", donating $5.7 billion of Tesla shares to charity in 2021: https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/elon-musks-philanthropy-and-donor-privacy/ https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/elon-musks-philanthro... After the Twitter poll for offloading 10% of his stake.
    • fishywang 4y ago
      that was for tax reasons.
      • s1artibartfast 4y ago
        You can't net money by donating to charity. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a tax deduction is.
        • pmonks 4y ago
          No one said you could. That doesn’t mean it’s not still financially beneficial.
          • Jensson 4y ago
            How can it be financially beneficial if you lose money doing it?
    • vletal 4y ago
      Or. Maybe, just maybe, he used it to avoid paying taxes like other billionaires do. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/03/business/donor-advised-funds-tech-tax.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/03/business/donor-advised-fu...
      • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
        This article is about DAFs. Is there evidence that's what Musk is doing?
  • ttoinou 4y ago
    Because no one has the same definition of what "great" is, and right when you start making money others will hate you and consider your vision bad (cf. Other comments replying to you)
    • yafbum 4y ago
      Musk indeed appears to see himself as an agent of humanity's salvation, including in its treatment of Twitter employees. And to be honest, while I and likely many people would see it as self-serving delusion of grandeur, it's hard to believe he's not at least genuine in his belief: you can't really suspect him of wanting to take over Twitter (and all of its headaches) for money.
      • georgeg23 4y ago
        Sadly his whole save humanity thing is a schtick.. If you investigate his back story, who he works with, it becomes clear it's not about Mars. His real enterprise is a massive DoD program, built off the Strategic Defense Initiative (the "real" Star Wars). Republicans have been trying to resurrect it for decades and Elon was part of it since at least 2001. The idea is to intercept ballistic missiles from space and end the threat of nuclear armegeddon. In that sense he is trying to "save humanity", but it's misguided because the project is already aggrevating China and Russia and is fundamentally destablizing to the nuclear stalemate/M.A.D. This project, operating under the Space Development Agency and working with the Missile Defense Agency, requires Republicans to fund--Biden and most Democrats been trying to stop it. Twitter helps Musk with the elections and boosting Republican power, while currying favor from them when it comes to these contracts. If you're interested to know more, Mike Griffin is the ringleader.. he goes way back with Elon. Read his career history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career Starlink is building up the basic tech for these constellations--currently just sensing ballistic missiles and hypersonics--but with Starship, putting kinetic weapons in orbit become feasible. Some good references here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilities
        • 4y ago
  • yafbum 4y ago
    Look up Bosch. It's a very large family-controlled company, and their dividends are 92% allocated to a foundation. I think in time we'll see similar examples in tech. EDIT: Bosch is a tech company too, just an earlier generation.
    • Barrin92 4y ago
      I think what would help with that is that we start not contrasting Bosch with tech, given that Bosch is a technology company in the most literal sense of that term. A lot of tolerance for these mistreatments comes from the mistaken illusion that 'tech' somehow requires people to act like megalomaniacs. A fair amount of car parts in Musk's very own car company come from Bosch
      • yafbum 4y ago
        Absolutely agreed. But they're also an old school manufacturer as opposed to the more modern form of IP-focused tech company that tries as hard as possible not to be in the manufacturing game.
      • pedrosorio 4y ago
        > I think what would help with that is that we start not contrasting Bosch with tech, given that Bosch is a technology company in the most literal sense of that term Took the words out of my mouth.
    • sam_lowry_ 4y ago
      Patagonia does the same.
      • yafbum 4y ago
        Yes (and it represents ~2% of Bosch by revenue)
    • alephnerd 4y ago
      To be fair, foundation ownership is used more as a way to bypass estate taxes in German businesses [0] as a charitable foundation can continue to give 30% of it’s income to the family who founded the foundation. This is a common corporate structure for a number of other family run German companies (ThyssenKrupp, Aldi, Lidl, Bertelsmann, etc) to bypass estate taxes. In American terms, it would be the equivalent of the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation owning 60-70% of Meta’s stock, and Zuckerburg’s children continuing to get dividends and a significant ownership stake in FB while also bypassing estate taxes. [0] - https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=f1b666a8-1257-4d81-b28c-26f81ecba298 https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=f1b666a8-1257...
  • nucleogenesis 4y ago
    It doesn’t take being horrible and exploitative to build amazing things - it takes that kind of to make insane amounts of money building amazing things.
  • SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
    Lots of companies are in this space doing what they can, but they’re focused on actually doing the work and getting their hands dirty as opposed to Musk’s wide noise making. Look at immunotherapy and age research, the trying to find a cure and mechanism for Chronic Fatigue (an illness which disables millions), the people who documented the genome of humanity, and NASAs astronomy stuff. There are biologists trying to prevent further extinct amphibians. There’s linux, and git, and countless open source software we use daily.
  • BurningFrog 4y ago
    To me, at least SpaceX and Tesla do do great things for the world. Not with their profits, but as their primary product. Tesla is getting the world off fossil fuels, and SpaceX is getting humanity into space. > Musk's "buy a $1M car and crash it immediately" style When did that happen?
    • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
      We don't really have a plan to stop using fossil fuels for electricity generation so this is a bit overstated. Electric cars are good but it's not a complete solution.
      • BurningFrog 4y ago
        Sure, I used too big words. Tesla is arguably doing more than any other company to decarbonize the world, but that is very far from a complete solution.
    • sgarland 4y ago
      He bought a McLaren F1 and wrecked it ~1 year later. [0] If you don't follow cars, this is an extremely special car. It was designed and built before the modern supercar era, long before computer design had the power it does not, and it still utterly destroyed anything that had come before it, and would come after it for quite some time. The engineering detail in it borders on absurd. They only made ~100 of the road-legal versions. [0]: https://www.thedrive.com/news/32191/did-you-know-elon-musk-wrecked-an-uninsured-mclaren-f1 https://www.thedrive.com/news/32191/did-you-know-elon-musk-w...
      • BurningFrog 4y ago
        So it was an actual accident, that he and Thiel were lucky to walk away from. The post I commented made it sound like he destroyed it for fun, perhaps to taunt poor people. Maybe you can see why I'm unimpressed with the quality of the anti Musk rants here?
• miohtama 4y ago
  Unfortunately treating employees nice has never been a necessity, and we have Amazon as a prime example.
  • JKCalhoun 4y ago
    To be sure, they treat employees nicely because they have to - lest their competitors get them. Altruism has never been a part of it.
    • deleted 4y ago
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  • WalterBright 4y ago
    There are a lot of very wealthy people in Seattle from being employed at Amazon.
    • socialismisok 4y ago
      Anyone working as an engineer could get paid more and get better benefits from other tech companies. Leaving Amazon my pay nearly doubled.
      • nfRfqX5n 4y ago
        Amazon cash sign on bonus is absolutely insane in this market. Making pure cash while all stocks are down probably makes the Amazon pay $100k more than a competitor.
    • VirusNewbie 4y ago
      Any mid level tesla swe that joined five years ago is a multimillionaire most likely.
• yodsanklai 4y ago
  It's a free market. He'll keep employees who adhere to this culture and those who think the pay is worth it. Others will go work somewhere else.
  • altacc 4y ago
    Classic free market fallacy. It's only a free market if there are other options available. Those in power control the options available and low regulation free markets enable them align at the lowest common denominator.
    • FormerBandmate 4y ago
      Highly paid Twitter SWEs have a lot of other options, although the tightening job market is making it harder. Twitter’s competitors are also recruiting directly from it
    • incone123 4y ago
      At present there are other options available for Twitter workers. You make a reasonable point though; Its easy to imagine skilled engineers are doing well but equally we could say that its just the lowest common denominator terms and conditions for that kind of job are better than those for most other jobs.
    • infamouscow 4y ago
      Twitter employees are compensated better than 99% of the US population and have more employment options available to them than virtually anyone on the planet. Give me a fucking break.
    • q1w2 4y ago
      The job market for engineers is still incredibly competitive.
    • mc32 4y ago
      Are you saying all other companies are just Musk-company clones and thus treat their employees as Musk does? I get the feeling people think Musk's management style is an outlier and that's why they are complaining --but you seem to be sayin, "they're all like that and we have no options".
• inglor_cz 4y ago
  SpaceX does not seem to have a problem attracting talent and even poaching it from competitors. The difference might be in the fact that Musk founded it and allegedly takes part in the recruitment process himself. Maybe he wants to do the same at Twitter. Turning an already existing company with an already existing company culture around is much more complicated, though.
  • TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    SpaceX is going somewhere. Twitter is going nowhere. This is a political play. Musk may be a competent engineer, but he's used to being Emperor. He's completely out of his depth with culture and politics. So he's unprepared for the brutal muck-racking, humiliation, and character assassination that underpin political power games. The "You can have free speech for just $8/month" accidental branding is already such a bad look. I don't see that he has the instincts, talent, or experience to even understand why - never mind to do better.
    • ok123456 4y ago
      > Musk may be a competent engineer What has he personally engineered. He's an 'ideas guy' and maybe a manager.
  • dver 4y ago
    Does Twitter have the ability to have a mission vision that people will sacrifice for? That's what keeps the recruiting pipelines full for the other companies and allows for the "we put up with Elon's BS" culture. Tesla, saving the work through EV SpaceX, projecting humanity into the cosmos Twitter, ?
  • CommieBobDole 4y ago
    I think the difference is SpaceX doing cool cutting-edge things with rockets. People want to be a part of that and are willing to take less pay and poorer working conditions to do so. Twitter is boring. Its explosive growth days are behind it, working there now is basically about maintaining a legacy platform that has a bunch of problems that mostly aren't technology problems. It's about as interesting as working for a big insurance company; if the paycheck and working conditions aren't there, you're not going to be able to attract talent.
• yafbum 4y ago
  I think Apple (esp successful as it was under Jobs) and Amazon (known to put its employees in the wringer) have already made that point. China is going to make that point louder over the decade to come (eg TikTok is successful here, a lot of it on the backs of people working "996" over in China). Luckily we'll still have Oracle as a counterexample... Tech companies that treat their employees right might put a veneer of strategy to it in order to make it palatable to shareholders ("we're not wasting your money, we're retaining critical talent"), but I think the real reason that some CEOs and company cultures value treating people right is just for the sake of it, not because of ulterior motives. I guess, as the boss, it's kind of nice to work at a place where people don't hate your guts bc they think you're a psychopathic monster. Being nice to employees is a value that's easier to sustain when there's massive profitability growth but it is not necessarily done in pursuit of profit itself.
• admissionsguy 4y ago
  Then stop being employees. Jesus Christ, you people take those massive salaried yet act like little children throwing tantrums because you fear your boss may not coddle you as much.
  • orange_joe 4y ago
    Why is it the entrepreneur’s moral right to seek the most for themselves, but when employees do so you act like they’re children.
    • luckylion 4y ago
      Everybody does it. But many consider one side to be immoral while doing it.
      • orange_joe 4y ago
        Sure, but there is an actual moral distinction between seeking the most by endangering the livelihoods of ~7K-10k(the number of employees, dependents + indirectly supported workers) and seeking the most by ensuring the worlds wealthiest human can only remain in the top 10 wealthiest humans. If the workers really push him, he might only have a hundred billion instead of hundreds. Tech workers are well paid, but their bosses have the wealth of kings.
      • SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
        Elon Musk isn’t going to be kicked out of the country he’s settled down in if he loses his Twitter job. Elon Musk isn’t going to lose his healthcare, his livelihood, his means of housing and feeding himself, just as the winter holidays are about to begin in the United States. Yes I think it’s immoral to put a person with a visa in a situation where they risk deportation unless they get hired just when hiring is slow, not just because of the job market but because other hiring managers are literally spending time with their family.
        • orange_joe 4y ago
• sedeki 4y ago
  Do you think tech employees have ever been treated too good? This is the reality for a lot of working adults. Elon Musk would probably suck as a middle manager for the reasons you state. And probably as the big boss too. I believe his opinions are correct. But I wouldn't necessarily want to work for him. He is a machine.
  • 131012 4y ago
    He is not a machine. He is a meatbag, like you and me, with a lot of money and ego.
    • khazhoux 4y ago
      I interpreted "machine" as "unburdened with empathy."
      • DonHopkins 4y ago
        "Lawnmower". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246
• bhawks 4y ago
  996 culture in China already highlights this as a valid strategy. Perhaps a little too obscure for the typical pointy haired boss. Elon will be a great poster boy.
• time_to_smile 4y ago
  Tech "treated employees right" because for awhile software engineers had a "monopoly on skill". If you rewind to around 2008 and earlier there really were more getting work done, building real things jobs out there than people who could do it. There were a lot of startups that hand a hard time getting people to just build the initial CRUD apps to start their business. Startups and smart companies realized that if you couldn't compete on pay you could compete on how you treated employees. In the years leading up to the start of the current boom the pay differential between big companies and startups was't as vast as it is now. Then industry started pushing hard to create more software engineers from the traditional path of increased undergrad comp sci enrollments to the development and expansion of the bootcamp industry. Then the money started to go up and more and more people started rushing into the industry for the money. When I started in tech ~2005 almost every software person I knew got into the field because they loved to write code and build things, when I talk to recent software engineers almost all of them answer that compensation is their main driver today. Now anyone hiring today (or let's say 3 months prior to today) will claim that it's still really hard to find good devs. However the amount of work being done that is essential and productive has dramatically decreased. Head counts have been expanding because money was flowing and managers need more people under them to get promoted (this logic flows even to the CEO level). But now this long, long tech bubble is starting to burst and we'll companies across the board start asking "how much of this work is really necessary? how can we become profitable?" and we'll realize as an industry that we are way over indexed on software engineers. This is exactly what happened during the dotcom era, I guess most people are just too young to remember. Anyone who could use a computer got hired to work in tech, paid ridiculous for the time, there were tons of people enrolling in EE and CS, a huge number of software engineers. The the bubble burst and a lot of the engineers disappeared, CS enrollments dropped radically, salaries went way down, and the only people left in the industry were people who just really like writing code and building things.
  • xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
    There's parts of what you wrote that are somewhat accurate but for the most part this is nonsense. > when I talk to recent software engineers almost all of them answer that compensation is their main driver today. I don't really understand what you're saying here. If you're trying to imply that folks are getting into the industry solely to make money, there is some truth to that but it's hardly the majority. That being said it's foolish to imagine that if the money dried up that everyone writing software would keep doing it. But software isn't going anywhere, so neither will the money. Outside of a few areas, the global situation is that software engineers make decent salaries but are far from the top, especially outside of North America.
• barbariangrunge 4y ago
  > 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. Layoffs aren’t the same as mistreatment. It matters more how he treats the employees who stick around and the new ones he brings in
• nxmnxm99 4y ago
  • davewritescode 4y ago
    I do agree there's a lot of people in tech who don't work hard and the problem has only gotten worse recently. I personally appreciate a blue collar approach to development. Don't be arrogant, do what you say you will and make sure that you're putting in your 40-50 hours a week of work, not 20 hours of work and 20 hours of ping-pong and bullshitting. Above all, be a professional. However, if you think for a second that you can replace US developers, building products for Americans with someone from Nigeria you are off your ass. The hardest part of software development isn't yolo-ing code into an IDE. It's collecting requirements, troubleshooting and translating that into both code and requirements docs for other teams. This is hard for native english speakers and approaching impossible for offshore teams. It works reasonable well with teams in the Americas because the timezones are close and the culture/language barriers aren't as high.
    • EMM_386 4y ago
      > However, if you think for a second that you can replace US developers, building products for Americans with someone from Nigeria you are off your ass. I've been a SWE for decades and have worked on large, complex projects. I've always been an IC, never officially a manager (personal choice), but at the moment as part of my regular job writing code I am also managing a team of 10 developers from a country where they are being paid around 1/5th our rates and they are doing a very good job at at it. I don't make the hiring decisions where I am at the moment, and this was the decision. It turned out that, yes, good developers from country X can easily replace good developers from country Y. It's the same skills, you either have them or you don't.
      • davewritescode 4y ago
        I'm late to respond but the reason it's likely working is because you are involved.
    • 4y ago
• snarf21 4y ago
  Are these layoffs even legal under the WARN act?
  • octokatt 4y ago
    Nope. Lawsuit filed. 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...
    • mbreese 4y ago
      Yeah, but you know people will be given a severance package if they sign those rights away. That’s the quid pro quo here.
    • DannyBee 4y ago
      Federal WARN act penalty is 60 days severance (California's calculation is more complicated, but it still limits penalty period to 60 days, AFAIK). So they won't care much - spin the wheel, see what a court decides, etc. It won't get people their jobs back - reinstatement is not a penalty in either WARN act.
    • s1artibartfast 4y ago
      This is basically fake news and a performative suit. The WARN act states that companies that dont provide notice have to pay 60 days severance. the penalty is reduced by any severance pay from the employer. Twitter is already paying 60 days of severance. I know this is a heated topic with diverse opinions, but lets try to improve the quality of information and knowledge.. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?sectionNum=1402.&nodeTreePath=3.5.4&lawCode=LAB https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
  • tofuahdude 4y ago
    It depends. People are jumping to conclusions on this point before full information is available. There are many carve-outs that will dismiss WARN liability: if severance packages are offered and accepted (with appropriate conditions), the WARN act is irrelevant.
• PM_me_your_math 4y ago
  Twitter employees were treated nicely. Too nicely. And yet they were not productive. The only new features they introduced in 10 years were losses in excess of 200MM to 1bn+ and the banning/shadow banning of those who went against the group think, fun police, and thought-gestapo. Each staffer had 10 bosses and every department had a ton of waste. Musk could never show up again after some changes, and the company would perform better than under the previous leadership.
  • EMM_386 4y ago
    It is incredible to look at these companies and see the staggering amount of losses and costs they have, plus the headcount. There could be entire departments dedicated to figuring out whether or not the "like" and "retweet" buttons should have rounded corners or not, that sort of thing. At some point, reality has to hit and apparently, Musk is the one who's going to bring it. Is it being done in a shocking way to those who haven't been through this with other companies? Maybe. But how else is this company going to actually ever become profitable?
    • watwut 4y ago
      Musk paid huge money to get that thing. He paid multiple times the estimated price. The company is now in deep deep debt that was not nearly as large before - because company now owns the money Musk did not had. He is not hand of the market. He is someone who made pretty bad business and has very little chance to fix. And yes, there is likely someone doing UI decisions. Usually it is good idea to have special people good with visuals to make these artistic decisions.
      • EMM_386 4y ago
        > Usually it is good idea to have special people good with visuals to make these artistic decisions. The question is, how many people?
        • watwut 4y ago
• Noe2097 4y ago
  > tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they will be productive" Is/was it? The shortage of qualified engineers have made some employers extra careful/generous, to attract and keep them. Or some others to divert brains away from their own occupations which could have ended up competing with them.
• jollyllama 4y ago
  Have employees taken license with being "treated right"?
• linuxftw 4y ago
  I mean, there's the possibility that Twitter was entirely mismanaged and they had tons us useless staff. Given their profitability, I'd say this is exactly the case.
• SicSemperUranus 4y ago
  Are people really expecting Twitter to survive The Musk? His rash actions almost feel like sabotage. I honestly expect Twitter to be dead or irrelevant in 2 years at most.
• A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  This is the part that concerns me as well. WFH was a fluke of sorts and the timing allowed a lot of workforce to maintain rather adamant pose. My company's management is already using all the 'key' words in meetings like 'in person collaboration' and so on suggesting they are planning an RTO. They just don't seem to dare to do it yet, because they poached a whole lot of people from companies that did RTO. This would like leave a bad impression.
• golemotron 4y ago
  > The issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion. It's never been in fashion on the whole. Tech is little privileged bubble in the work world with little exposure to what happens outside of it.
• lumost 4y ago
  I suspect that part of this is a re-buttle to WFH. In the past, managers generally could see who was doing what. Now it's based on trust. If someone decides to watch TV all day while sometimes checking slack... well then they can. No one ever had any idea how long coding tasks took anyway. Some people are doing fine in this new world, and some are struggling. Whether I'm succeeding or struggling depends on the day.
  • lithos 4y ago
    Why should a manager care as long as the employee's output is average or better?
    • lumost 4y ago
      It's been known for a long time that the output of teams is highly variable, and difficult to compare within an organization. If your team isn't delivering, and you are delivering slightly more than the average - where does that leave the company?
• grumple 4y ago
  There's already a bigger org doing this - Amazon. They are constantly hiring and struggling to replace those who leave - even during their new corporate hiring freeze. Tech workers are still in very high demand. And the younger generation seems much more willing to unionize or refuse poor working conditions.
  • delfinom 4y ago
    Amazon is a completely asinine company that not only recognizes the need and difficulties to continue replacing turnover, they continue to actually maintain a turnover goals and mechanisms. I really do think they are going to speedrun themselves to labor pool exhaustion in a first for a company in the US. Their management seems fully head in sand. But hey, even Bezos said in an interview that he doesn't see Amazon lasting forever, even 30 years tops.
• khazhoux 4y ago
  > THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion. How bold, to speak for everyone ;-) I really don't see this as a "treat employees nicely" issue. I'm open to being convinced otherwise. But... Elon's premise from day 0 was that Twitter was mismanaged -- bloated, misguided, bad as a business and broken as product. This echoes the sentiment even by many here on HN over the years. Now Elon owns it, and is undoing the hiring decisions of previous management, to start with a clean slate. Seems to me this was simply an inexorable part of his takeover, and so you may as well be saying it "wasn't nice" of Elon to buy the company. Also, a completely different counterpoint: If an employee's layoff is inevitable, it is much nicer for that is be part of a mass layoff like this, rather than a surgical one later. Because these people have a perfect explanation for their dismissal when they apply at their next job.
  • watwut 4y ago
    > Elon's premise from day 0 was that Twitter was mismanaged -- bloated, misguided, bad as a business and broken as product. And then he bought misguided broken product for 4 time the price and took deep debt for it.
    • PaulHoule 4y ago
      And through a set of misguided decisions initially he caused advertisers to depart Twitter and revenue collapse. I imagine the last man is dying 500 years from now and thinking "... now we just could have gotten to Mars if Elon Musk hadn't posted that tweet" Selling advertising is all about the emotions of the buyer: you'd better believe that half the price of ads on the radio has to do with how the business owner feels when they hear their name on the radio and that the first, second and third tactic of the person who sells ads for your local newspaper is "I know this tiny ad in our paper costs about as much as an employee and it might not seem to pay for itself, but if you stop advertising your customers will think you went out of business."
      • xapata 4y ago
        > I imagine the last man is dying 500 years from now and thinking Women inherit the earth.
• titzer 4y ago
  The same is true of leadership at all levels. The US political situation isn't looking that great because of the popularity of all kinds of jerk behavior that has become the norm. Ironically, Twitter itself is partly responsible for that, as crapping on your political opponents has become more important than having policy proposals or solving problems. It's a downward spiral when we accept shitty behaviors from leadership, because of exactly this copycat tendency of people--they emulate behavior of elites, sometimes unconsciously.
  • tstrimple 4y ago
    I don't think Twitter is responsible for a planned shift in political behavior decades in the making. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gingrich-says-youre-welcome/570832/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gi... > But Gingrich had a plan. The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along. His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself. “His idea,” says Norm Ornstein, a political scientist who knew Gingrich at the time, “was to build toward a national election where people were so disgusted by Washington and the way it was operating that they would throw the ins out and bring the outs in.” > Gingrich recruited a cadre of young bomb throwers—a group of 12 congressmen he christened the Conservative Opportunity Society—and together they stalked the halls of Capitol Hill, searching for trouble and TV cameras. Their emergence was not, at first, greeted with enthusiasm by the more moderate Republican leadership. They were too noisy, too brash, too hostile to the old guard’s cherished sense of decorum. They even looked different—sporting blow-dried pompadours while their more camera-shy elders smeared Brylcreem on their comb-overs. > Gingrich and his cohort showed little interest in legislating, a task that had heretofore been seen as the primary responsibility of elected legislators. Bob Livingston, a Louisiana Republican who had been elected to Congress a year before Gingrich, marveled at the way the hard-charging Georgian rose to prominence by ignoring the traditional path taken by new lawmakers. “My idea was to work within the committee structure, take care of my district, and just pay attention to the legislative process,” Livingston told me. “But Newt came in as a revolutionary.” > For revolutionary purposes, the House of Representatives was less a governing body than an arena for conflict and drama. And Gingrich found ways to put on a show. He recognized an opportunity in the newly installed C-span cameras, and began delivering tirades against Democrats to an empty chamber, knowing that his remarks would be beamed to viewers across the country. Newt Gingrich and Roger Ailes have done far more damage to political discourse than anything social media could hope to do.
• jjtheblunt 4y ago
  Jobs wasn't like Musk or Bezos, cared deeply about employees, despite the famous youthful tantrum stories (probably also true, but salacious so more famous): my friend's wife had a hard to diagnose condition (autoimmune it turned out, I believe) and Jobs offered unlimited use of his private jet to get her to any doctor anywhere. I was similarly told to be with my very sick parent, no time constraints, and I was part of an inner sanctum engineering team, and later similar when I had a pet get ill, in all cases because we all had one another's backs, and we all were NOT fungible assets, but, rather, harmoniously integrated by years of working together and a strict hiring filter in the first place.
  • jm20 4y ago
    I feel like Hacker News might be the only forum online where you can reliably find ridiculous one-off anecdotes like this on a regular basis.
    • jjtheblunt 4y ago
      The outliers compared to the famous stories, I think you mean. I think you're right. Thing is what I wrote is factual as can be. Your comment made me wonder, how much of Bezos and Musk sociopathy is innate, versus imitation of some excerpt popularly known of earlier successful albeit at times abrasive characters. And how might they be different if the decent stories were so well known, because they do exist.
      • Apocryphon 4y ago
        90 Hours A Week And Loving It!
    • neuronic 4y ago
      > one-off anecdotes like this on a regular basis That's an oxymoron if I've ever seen one...
      • kspacewalk2 4y ago
• yanderekko 4y ago
  Alternatively, if Musk is successful then it will show that a lot of firms are bloated and this rot is maintained under the guise of "treating employees nicely", in the same way that union featherbedding is considered a "nice" practice.
• nimbius 4y ago
  'treat your employees nicely' exists in tech for one reason only: to deter unionization in the face of overwhelming profiteering at the expense of an overworked tech cattle. if twitter employees understand now the excess capital from their labor has been extracted without due pleasantries such as notice or severance, then Musk has done far worse to the tech industry than just lay a bunch of people off, hes galvanized the case for tech worker unions.
  • SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
    It seems extremely challenging to construct a theory of how an unprofitable company is profiteering or extracting excess capital.
• nindalf 4y ago
  I think deep down we all knew that burning people out has a decent chance of getting you solid results in the short term. The problem comes after, when people who understand best how your systems work will quit because they’re burned out husks of their former selves. This is obviously not sustainable, because it’s difficult to recruit after you’ve built a reputation as burnout central. Unless the business is run by a “tech visionary” who is “making the world a better place” and has millions of fans. These millions of fans would jump at the chance of working for him. Musk burning out Twitter employees by making them do twice as much work is fine, because he’ll have no trouble recruiting. He might be able to turn the business around. It’s quite possible there will copycats, but they’ll have less success than Musk.
• gota 4y ago
  In other words, if developers had guild mentality the ones left at twitter would have great incentive to actually sabotage the company
• rdevsrex 4y ago
  I think by default you have to assume most billionaires don't care that deeply about their employees.
• anonuser123456 4y ago
  A lot of people like working for Musk. Your thesis needs to grapple with that.
• Test0129 4y ago
  > Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive". I can't verify the veracity of this claim. Tech spans a wide spectrum of job conditions. I have worked in traditional suit and tie places, and show up with pizza stained sweat pants places. Tech is a bastion of one thing in my opinion. It's a place where employees hold disproportionate power over the company. It's the one place where there is such a labor shortage, and enough smart people, that the companies will do what the employee wants in order to keep them happy. Make no mistake, no company tech or not wants to bend over backwards like tech companies have. Hence, all of the effort in outsourcing and getting code camps running. Don't make the mistake of thinking tech is charitable. A lot of engineers I know are very soft because they think like this. Tech CEOs have a problem no other CEO has. A legion of smart, hard to replace, highly paid people that have enough power to demand more or less what they want. The whining about Musk has to stop. He's being a dick about this because he has a personal vendetta against the old guard. When you look past the personal vendetta he is doing what anyone would do when a billion dollar turd is dropped on their desk. Dramatic, fast, often negatively viewed change. Ask yourself, if Twitter was such an incredible company would the CEO have taken the offer? Probably not. The C-levels saw the ship sinking and rightfully jumped at the opportunity. Who is responsible for this lack of profitability? The old guard. So, task #1 is to get rid of them.
  • technofiend 4y ago
    >Tech is a bastion of one thing in my opinion. It's a place where employees hold disproportionate power over the company. It's the one place where there is such a labor shortage, and enough smart people, that the companies will do what the employee wants in order to keep them happy. On the other hand employees hold the power to also enable the company. I'm not accusing you of personally holding the "the company must do what I want" mindset, but at least for me what motivates is the idea of solving problems and helping people rather than lording some kind of power of them. IT has always felt powerful to me (and I'll be honest made me feel powerful in some small way) because it let me automate away things or make them measurably better. Hopefully I'm not alone in that.
  • merely-unlikely 4y ago
    Investment banks also face the problem of employees holding disproportionate power but they have a somewhat different solution than tech companies - keep the harsh working conditions and pay top performers huge bonuses. If you're a fan of Matt Levine, "the modern investment bank is a socialist paradise run for the benefit of its workers." It's common for a top trader to make more than the CEO at major banks. You'll see this on occasion at tech companies but generally pay is far flatter and so they come up with other ways to entice staff.
• adam_arthur 4y ago
  Tech’s been that way primarily due to a shortage of labor. Once layoffs begin in earnest across tech, there will be no more shortage.
• polote 4y ago
  > Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive". Maybe that was what the field was letting visible, but in reality that has never been the case. There is everyday news about unicorns where employees complain that the culture is toxic, and that the CEO is impossible to work with. Only need to read Glassdoor pages.
• huhtenberg 4y ago
  > treat your employees right, and they'll be productive Until complacency settles in, blubber accumulates and the productivity takes a nose dive. You don't have to like Musk to agree that 7500 employees seem like few Ks too much for what Twitter is.
• lucideer 4y ago
  I think you're giving Musk too much credit by classifying this as not "treating employees nicely" - he's mismanaging things in every way possible. The individual treatment of employees is such a small subset of it (e.g. Bezos also mistreats employees but seems much more grounded & competent than Musk). My real curiosity from the whole affair is gauging the actual impact a CEO can have on a company's success / failure. No doubt Twitter's had issues as a product for a long time, long before Musk came along. Whatever direction the company goes next, will be be due to or despite Musk's input.
• delfinom 4y ago
  >THe issue we all have here is this: if Musk is successful then treating employees nicely will fall out of fashion. Yea but guess what will come into fashion at that point? Unions.