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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 o

• 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.
      • dangerwill 4y ago
        No, the argument is that we are on a forum run by and for venture capital, so criticizing labor for not being activist enough is out of step with where we are.
    • cr4nberry 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"). I mean, we definitely could. They'd be seriously fucked if we did. It's a wonder it hasn't happened yet
  • DesiLurker 4y ago
    So its our fault for not making a union? Also nothing to do with 40 year decline in consumer rights & stagnated wages & heavy influence of money in politics. Also, to quote Stephen Colbert, its the ribcage's fault that victim got knifed.
    • luckylion 4y ago
      The "stagnated wages" of SV engineers? What?
    • sklivvz1971 4y ago
      > its our fault for not making a union Surely a union would help avoid this exactly kind of things, I can assure you. Once I kept my job thanks to a union when there were mass layoffs at a company I worked for. Also, a union would probably have negotiated something better than an "at will" contract, which I assume Twitter employees are bound to.
• Someone1234 4y ago
  This is a discussion board. Therefore, commenting at all requires something to discuss, and there is nothing really to discuss specifically around the topic of empathy towards the laid off employees. It sucks, we all know it sucks, and it shouldn't be minimized but there's no "other side" to that viewpoint, so what is there to talk about? People aren't "heartless" because they choose to talk about the bigger picture rather than wallowing in sympathy.
  • uwuemu 4y ago
    The vast majority of the people let go were management-class silicon valley people. Not a single tear should be shed.
    • deleted 4y ago
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    • NikolaNovak 4y ago
      And just like that we found a counterpoint to "Empathy is obvious, nothing to discuss there"; I assume the explicit point here is "Management aren't people and shouldn't be treated as such"? :)
• Ancapistani 4y ago
  I get it. I'm almost 40 and have been working at tech startups since I was in my 20s. I've been through what they're going through. The difference is that people are being laid off, terminated, or otherwise losing their jobs every day. It's not a new or interesting phenomenon. What's interesting are the conditions that led to it happening to these people, both inside and outside Twitter. It's novel and may have broad impacts well outside the ~3.5k people who are now looking for work.
  • TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
    > What's interesting are the conditions that led to it happening to these people, both inside and outside Twitter. Which, in your estimation, are?...
    • Ancapistani 4y ago
      Inside Twitter, I don't have enough context to say much in detail. I will say that 7.5k employees seems very high given their product offerings, and that the existence of things like an "ML Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability Team" at least lend credence to the idea that many of those people weren't contributing directly to the company's revenue. Outside of Twitter: the purchase was high profile and novel, made by a popular figure whose star seems to still be on the rise. There was drama around it for months, and we still don't really know if Musk really meant to buy it. Musk's personality alone is interesting. Then there are the responses of people approximately split down party lines in the US, the various communities that use Twitter heavily today, advertisers, and high-profile people who have run afoul of Twitter in the past. Finally - and perhaps most impactful of all, though it's not been extensively discussed here - there is the possible impact this will have on US politics. Exactly how much of Trump's popularity ~2015-2020 was due to his tweets? Will his account be reinstated? If so, will he use it? Will he resume using it the way he did before, or will he feel less encumbered by Twitter's policies and be even more bombastic/inflammatory? How will that impact the 2024 presidential election? From where I sit, I have no idea where things will end up. Any outcome from "Musk loses tens of billions of dollars as Twitter ceases operation" to "Elon Musk sends his congratulations to President Trump from his home at the SpaceX lunar outpost after his election to a second term". If you don't find such a range of possibilities interesting, I don't know what to tell you :)
• deleted 4y ago
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• wobbly_bush 4y ago
  > A huge number of people have lost their livelihoods, sense of belonging and might fall into financial hardships in current market conditions At the end of the day, CA is an at-will employment state. Anyone can get fired anytime, and it is up to everyone to be prepared for that. Any person working in any company X can meet the same fate - it's like being prepared for an earthquake, which can happen anytime. I'm not condoning what's happening at Twitter, but the idea that those employees had no way to be prepared for this is false. Though I agree with you that we should show empathy to those affected.
  • arrrg 4y ago
    Being prepared for getting fired (in the sense of having a financial cushion) is one thing. What I’m seeing here, however is a discrepancy between saying that working hard and burning brightly for your employer is meaningful and fulfilling and something to strive towards (as seen in the threads around expectations at Twitter of working 12h days and meeting tight deadlines) and on the other hand the expectation to dispassionately deal with being fired. That just doesn’t go together. It‘s just a weird perspective. Those views don’t seem to be consistent with each other. If your work is meaningful to you then psychologically being fired can have a devastating impact. You can’t be at the same time emotionally invested in your workplace and also not affected by being fired. I know that HN is not one person, but that’s the perspective I’m perceiving.
    • cr4nberry 4y ago
      > working hard and burning brightly for your employer is meaningful and fulfilling and something to strive towards (as seen in the threads around expectations at Twitter of working 12h days and meeting tight deadlines) but how many people actually do this? Even then, if someone does it and learns from it then they've set themselves up to make even more down the road
      • arrrg 4y ago
        That seems to me to assume the people are robots. Or Vulcans, or whatever. It just seems weird to me. And again: you are taking the financial perspective about making money. That‘s just plain weird to me. I’m talking about psychological impacts, not money. Having empathy for the psychological impact of the situation these employees find themselves in. Presumably if you are willing to work long hours as an employee you identify heavily with your work, probably also your colleagues, you value what you are doing. To suddenly have that taken away is certainly not easy. I mean, if you liked your colleagues that‘s people you were around a lot and suddenly won’t be … And in that context Musk unemphatically arriving with a fucking sink as a joke, overall handling the layoffs extremely badly and without a shred of empathy anywhere to be seen is fucking awful. And I’m just weirded out that that‘s not the tone seen here. There have been a lot of layoffs during the last few weeks and months and while, yes, HN commenters typically did recognize the economic circumstances that led to that they also had a lot of empathy for those who were laid off and were able to differentiate and recognize if employers were treating those laid off well (severance payment – and this is not strictly about financial safety but about respecting employees – and communicating with empathy) or not so well. Why is that impossible with Twitter? And I think hardly anyone would give Twitter and Musk good marks here.
• fullshark 4y ago
  We aren't employees on HN, just temporarily embarrassed founders.
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• hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  > Sorry to say this but comments on this thread are very disappointing and show a basic lack of empathy in HN crowd. The vast majority of comments near the top don't seem to be of this type, so not sure what you're referring to. I have a lot of sympathy for Twitter employees who just had to deal with the total shitshow of the past ~10 months, with the media spotlight on them. But that said, the thing I fundamentally disagree with (and I'm speaking from experience) is that getting laid off if this colossal, tragic thing that many HNers seem to think it is: 1. There will definitely be ups and downs, but getting laid off in a growing industry is very different from getting laid off in a shrinking industry. Many companies are tightening their belts but there are still tons of companies hiring right now, and it's not like most tech workers have the concerns of, say, medical transcriptionists, where the vast majority of those jobs just won't exist in 10-20 years. 2. Tech pays well, and the likelihood of huge layoffs at Twitter have been known for months. While I can empathize with people who were laid off, it's difficult to have sympathy if folks haven't prepared, i.e. saving up a cushion and starting their job search early. It is rare to get this much foresight into a layoff. 3. Tech also tends to give much better severance packages than in many other industries. To be clear, lots of other industries give 2 weeks max, if anything at all. Again, I have tons of sympathy along the lines of the "man, that really f'in sucks that you had to deal with that" level. I disagree with some of the melodrama I'm seeing that this is something like the worst thing that can happen to someone - one of the linked tweets in the article had a Hunger Games screenshot.
• Cyberdog 4y ago
  I don't really relate or sympathize with the Silicon Valley types, no. I don't do the yoga and $8 latte-shakes and the Kegerators and Ping-Ping tables; I come into an office I rent myself in a flyover state, do a full day of work, and then go home, usually after sundown, seven days a week, and I make a lot less than those kids in California do. So it doesn't really burn me up to see the less productive ones trimmed off. I read elsewhere that they all get 60 days of salary as severance, so I'm not interested in hearing sob stories about being fired right before the holidays either. If you got laid off in these cuts, you'll do fine. Just find another SV company that's hiring, go in there with "Twitter" prominently on the CV and play up a sob story about how that mean ol' racist fascist homophobe fired you because you wouldn't give him a Roman salute or whatever, and you'll be back to working in an office with bean-bag chairs and free vegan flatbread brunches in a jiffy.
  • AustinDev 4y ago
    >60 days severance. No it’s crazier than that they get paid for the next 90 days but are not allowed to work at Twitter. They’re in a paid but ‘non-working’ status. In addition they will be offered severance. This board is hilarious in thinking that the package musk is offering is in any way ‘cruel’.
    • Cyberdog 4y ago
      Yeah, I saw the 90-day-thing-plus-severance in a later article. Assuming that's the one that's true… Jesus, that's a life-changing firing.
    • theonething 4y ago
      > This board is hilarious in thinking that the package musk is offering is in any way ‘cruel’. So much agree. The attitudes here are just laughable. The drama, entitlement, the faux "empathy", violins, crocodile cry me a river tears. The factory worker or janitor working hard doing honest work and struggling to put food on their table get my sympathy, not these tech workers with cushy jobs in the top percentile of wages. I'm one of these btw and am very thankful and I don't feel I'm entitled to it. I've been laid off. And you know what I did? I got another tech job. Barring special circumstances, it is that simple.
• deleted 4y ago
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