Going "hardcore" can be an amazing experience. Some of the most exciting and fun times during my career were when I was on a tiger team. Elon Musk is approachi

Going "hardcore" can be an amazing experience. Some of the most exciting and fun times during my career were when I was on a tiger team. Elon Musk is approaching this in a horrible way though. By using hardcore as a default setting, and quiet firing anyone who doesn't sign on to it, he's signaling hard core must be forced thing. "hardcore" itself has negative connotations. Think of how different the news cycle would be right now if he had said the following: * "Twitter's engineers have done an amazing job, and everyone is getting a 2% out of cycle bonus in stock" * "Those who want to do an even more amazing job and enter beast mode with me (crucial that he work the same hours), will get a 10% bonus in stock each year they do, with the first year's 10% after the first month of beast mode. For me beast mode means 60-70 hour weeks, one or more pushed commits per day, and being on-site at least two days out of five." * "Those who don't enter beast mode are still Twitter engineers, among the best in the industry, and will not be penalized in any way. We recognize that different people have different needs when it comes to work-life balance, and we value diversity at Twitter." * "We do need to improve our platform in some ways though. To this end I am putting a 3 month freeze on hiring, firing, and new features. Our focus during this time will be improving performance, improving security, and fixing bugs."