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Elon Musk gives Twitter staff deadline to commit to being ‘hardcore’
- mikkergp 4y agoSounds like everyone can work from home now, because he said only exceptional work is a passing grade. Finally the first piece of good news coming out of Twitter. Why didn’t he just start with this email rather than anonymously laying off half the company and picking fights with engineers on Twitter, though now I guess people have a crystal clear picture of the culture they’re choosing to stay at, it would have been much more humane to start with this. Sounds like a lot of people will choose this path, I wonder how many will be left.
- siva7 4y agoNope, Elon banned remote work for anyone except those personally approved by himself. All remaining remotes were fired.
- mikkergp 4y agoIt was kinda a joke based on this headline: https://fortune.com/2022/11/14/elon-musk-only-exceptional-twitter-employees-work-from-home/ https://fortune.com/2022/11/14/elon-musk-only-exceptional-tw... He said exceptional is the baseline and only exceptional twitter employees can work from home, ergo all employees can work from home.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nigerian1981 4y agoAre labour laws that weak in America he can get away with treating workers at his companies so poorly?
- dotcoma 4y agoYes, probably.
- bediger4000 4y agoMusk will probably be lionized for this. Jack Welch of GE had a doctrine "Six Sigma" that was pretty hard on workers, but he was hailed for using it. On the other hand, Eddie Lampert used a weird libertarian method and ran Sears into the ground. I think there's a lot of survivor bias in how business leaders are treated.
- guerrilla 4y ago> hailed for using it. But hailed by who in this case? Himself?
- pmyteh 4y agoI was Six Sigma trained in a former job. It's a lot of statistical process control, defect reduction, and process redesign. You could certainly use it to create a dystopia for your workforce, but it's not in any way intrinsic to the method. Where I was trained it was mostly used in a Toyota-like way to get relatively junior employees engaged in making things work better. Empowering rather than the other way around, I'd say.
- dekhn 4y agoYeah, for some reason people think six sigma is a management technique and immediately hate on it. It's really just applying the stuff Deming and others had already established.
- spacemadness 4y agoThe only chance of him being lionized is if he turns Twitter into a high profit generating enterprise. It doesn’t look like the chance for that is high at the moment.
- l3uwin 4y agoYes, American labor protections are incredibly poor versus say, The Netherlands
- cambaceres 4y agoAnyone with a link to the full email?
- acqbu 4y agohttps://nitter.net/donie/status/1592859900941852674 https://nitter.net/donie/status/1592859900941852674
- cambaceres 4y agoThx
- TheLoafOfBread 4y agoWhy would anyone do that, when competition will probably pay more or same for less hours? Yeah I know, lay off, but those are here only temporarily.
- yellow_postit 4y agoIf you are relying on the medical insurance and have extra factors like having a family leaving without having another job lined up already is quite a risk, both actual and perceived. Does severance include any upcoming stock grants? If no, could be another reason to try and stick it out hoping for some sanity to prevail.
- vitaflo 4y agoCOBRA lasts 18 months.
- yellow_postit 4y agoIt can be quite expensive. Is Twitter going to cover for the full time period?
- intsunny 4y agoHow is all this insane Twitter news not making the front page of Hacker News?
- kossTKR 4y agoIt´s a bit weird? This is all over twitter, one of the biggest tech stories in a long time while very relevant to corporate culture in general - but there´s almost dead silence here? That said the story and musk shenanigans in general is also quite annoying at this point.
- shagie 4y agoThere are various algorithms around the front page of HN. For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089 where dang has a "overheated discussion detector" to try to give things a chance to cool off. Too much material on a single topic likely also gets down rated (similar to how posts about politics get less visibility).
- century19 4y agoNot working well here then since this should be on the Front Page. Your explanation sounds correct though.
- shagie 4y agoI think of it as "HN has anti-engagement algorithms to avoid single topics from getting too much front page space in a period of time." Note that there's also a secret page of /pool ( https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool ) that has articles that are considered for being given a second shot.
- joegahona 4y agoOne ongoing thread might be better, but it's hard to argue that this is not big tech news. HN users cut through the noise of Twitter replies, and I enjoy reading what they have to say, so I'm having to search "Twitter" in HN's search and sort by "last 24 hours."
- macleginn 4y agoI am beginning to feel half-ashamed of having a (mostly dormant) Twitter account now.
- torben-friis 4y ago>Musk added that Twitter would be “much more engineering-driven” under his ownership and that “those writing great code will constitute the majority of our team”. Hard to think that those writing great code would be open to be abused, giving how in demand their skills are.
- faefox 4y agoHe keeps firing even the engineering staff that survived the first wave of layoffs. It seems like a stretch on his part to think that those left (who, again, just watched a ton of their colleagues/friends be laid off or summarily terminated) are going to put up with the promise of even worse treatment going forward.
- joegahona 4y ago> Hard to think that those writing great code would be open to be abused, giving how in demand their skills are. Are they? The layoffs in tech have been... extensive. Engineers are more in demand than journalists right now, but the climate now is pretty dubious compared with only a few months ago.
- guerrilla 4y agoSurely if they're the best, they can get a job somewhere else, probably for lower pay, where they aren't abused, regardless of the macroeconomic situation.
- faefox 4y agoI'm a heavy Twitter user and it's sad to watch it CFIT in real-time but I hope everyone with the option to do so takes the severance and gets out of there.
- FartyMcFarter 4y agoBy hardcore he really means "being willing to work in a toxic environment".
- achow 4y agoI don't envy the remaining folks at Twitter at all. Imagine employees getting this survey and thinking I want to get out but what if this is trap? By opting for leaving I would be outing myself as not 'hardcore'. Mr. Musk gets a database of self declared 'disengaged' employees. He chooses to scrap the offer (there is no legal binding) and then over next few months pressures them to quit without any severance. Nightmare!
- the_snooze 4y agoThis is why you build up a healthy emergency reserve. If I were a Twitter employee, I'd take the severance instantly. If it pays off, great. If it doesn't, then I'm financially comfortable enough that I can leave a rudderless organization and I take my services elsehwere.
- spacemadness 4y agoI find it highly doubtful anyone would damage their employment prospects by accepting severance and leaving. I wouldn’t want to work anywhere that thought this way.
- adamrezich 4y agoI'm having a hard time figuring out why everyone is up in arms—the guy wants to change the course of an openly-languishing product and thinks it should be more engineering-focused. if it were anyone else, or even if it was the same person saying it but a few years ago instead of today, I would think a statement like this would be lauded here. what causes people to perceive this as "abuse", a "toxic environment", a "nightmare", rather than plain ol' leadership? are we so far gone as a society that wanting to improve things through hard work is just a completely foreign concept to us now? what the fuck happened in these past few years to make us this way?
- aschearer 4y agoIt's the part where he says employees will need to be "extremely hardcore" and "work long hours at high intensity" with "only exceptional performance constituting a passing grade."
- adamrezich 4y agowhat exactly is wrong with this? why have we been programmed to believe that putting hard work into making something great is a bad thing? this was not the case a few short years ago. again: what the fuck happened?
- oneeyedpigeon 4y agoIt's not a case of "hard work is bad". It's a case of forcing your employees to work an unhealthy number of hours, on pain of sacking, should be illegal. It certainly would be in the EU, where an employer must ensure staff do not work over 48 hours/week on average.
- aschearer 4y agoFirst, I humbly recommend you stop accusing others of being "programmed" in negative ways. It's presumptuious and makes me wonder if you're asking in good faith. Second, I would not end comments with "what the fuck happened" as it sounds condescending, as if you're on the "good side" looking down on the others and shaking your head. With that out of the way, I think hard work is great. Making something cool is what gets me up and to work every day. What I think isn't great is being commanded to be "hardcore" and work at "high intensity for long hours." To me, that implies having to work for more than a typical work day and with little slack for any hiccups. Add to that the expectation that anything less than "exceptional performance" is a failing grade. Taken together it strikes me as a recipe for burnout and anxiety. At a minimum I don't see how it's possible to have any sort of work life balance in that arrangement. Jobs with that level of intensity are fine if the rewards are there. That's been my life for a while, working on an indie game. I don't think that's the case for Twitter. I also think it's a raw deal for a boss to walk in one day and completely flip the expectations. Of course fairness has nothing to do with it, it's Elon's company. Still, that doesn't maen he's free from criticism.
- helf 4y agoThey need to just quit en masse
- sAbakumoff 4y agoMusk is just jealous of people who have lives and don't want to work their ass off beyond 9-5.
- almog 4y agoIf people who claim Musk is playing a four dimensional chess game turn out to be right, then I cannot help but guess that his end-goal must be to stress the importance of unionizing.
- RedShift1 4y agoThis just seems to be simple 2D chess where he wants to fire more people but can't because of labor laws or something and wants to drive people out this way.