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This is the strategy of someone who is aware of an internal cultural problem at Twitter. You can blame pointy haired PMs, activist community managers, leetcode

This is the strategy of someone who is aware of an internal cultural problem at Twitter. You can blame pointy haired PMs, activist community managers, leetcode and Foosball engineers, or whoever you want for the situation. To Musk its all the same, over 50% of the workforce was actively hostile to Musk for being Musk, and at least 25% was actively engaged in sacrificing the business to pursue personal or political agendas. This would be fine if Twitter were a cash cow posting record profits, but it wasn't. The strategy Musk is performing is to create as much chaos as possible to shake out as many of those groups as possible, and hire back anyone caught in the crossfire. I've never seen a CEO attempt this at this scale, but at my last company there was an employee like above in a top position - and in order to get rid of the people under his influence the only solution was to can the whole division.

guax 4y ago
This 4d chess thing is getting old. He's just a terrible boss doing what terrible bosses do all the time, fire people at whim, decide product direction is a feelings thing that only he is capable of doing, ignores and reject any competence that threats his image and position, etc.
papito 4y ago
I mean, the guy who told us all to "vote Republican" just a few days ago has zero agendas, amiright. Musk is not creating chaos on purpose [eye roll] - he does not know how to be a manager in a situation that is not a crisis dialed to 11 at ALL times. Everything has to be a hair-on-fire-level crisis, to stress the minions and get them moving, except we see how that strategy is burning him out. He's always been like that, we just never called it because "you can't argue with success", but you can definitely argue with failure.
dymk 4y ago
Got a source on >=25% of Twitter's employees being "actively engaged in sacrificing the business to pursue personal or political agendas"?
- subradios 4y ago
  Censoring real news stories that look bad for particular political groups. The entire set of "fact checking" systems, adding NFTs because someone thought it sounded cool. Being sued by the government for being an ISIS recruiting and messaging platform. All of these pretty clearly indicate that no one was minding the store.
  - runarberg 4y ago
    These are examples of behavior not sources for 25% of the workforce engaging in this behavior. But I challenge you to a much easier task. Link to the government lawsuit that you claim has been issued to twitter for being an ISIS recruiting and messaging platform.
the_snooze 4y ago
> hire back anyone caught in the crossfire. Who would agree to be hired back without extracting serious risk premiums from Twitter? If I had taken the 3 month severance and am seeing the ongoing chaos, the only way I’d agree to go back is as a contractor for $2000/hr with a $1M retainer with no clawback.
- subradios 4y ago
  Depends on the environment, in the tech world of six months ago I'd have no problem signing back on for a few tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The risk of losing your job however, carries a greater premium today than it did six months ago. I don't know if 100k retention grants are good enough, but they're going to be good enough for some people.
  - piva00 4y ago
    What kind of grant though? There's no more public shares, it's all private, whatever grant you get from stocks is basically worthless as it would require the private owners to agree to buy them. A lump sum of US$ 100k as a retainer doesn't sound like a great deal after you've been through all these shenanigans. Some more desperate workers might take it just to get anything but those won't be the most motivated workers you'll get. The good ones will find better pastures, or just go back to extract more money out while looking for something better because they know there's no mutual trust anymore. I feel like a lot of people trying to defend Musk's actions are treating people like they were logical machines. That their psychological safety doesn't matter if they're paid enough, they'll just accept the payment and work as usual, that's not how humans work...
joegahona 4y ago
“Pointy-haired PMs” is a good one. I have to use this. In all honesty, this is just absurd, and is playing out like some bad movie plot. Next I expect Musk to fire more engineers without any severance at all, and force them to exit the building wearing one of those #GetWoke T-shirts he unearthed in a Twitter closet. He’ll then tweet out the video of the fired engineers exiting, and mock them with a Tweet like “Out with the old! Maybe you should go work at Grindr! LOL!”

guax 4y ago

This 4d chess thing is getting old. He's just a terrible boss doing what terrible bosses do all the time, fire people at whim, decide product direction is a feelings thing that only he is capable of doing, ignores and reject any competence that threats his image and position, etc.

papito 4y ago

I mean, the guy who told us all to "vote Republican" just a few days ago has zero agendas, amiright. Musk is not creating chaos on purpose [eye roll] - he does not know how to be a manager in a situation that is not a crisis dialed to 11 at ALL times. Everything has to be a hair-on-fire-level crisis, to stress the minions and get them moving, except we see how that strategy is burning him out. He's always been like that, we just never called it because "you can't argue with success", but you can definitely argue with failure.

dymk 4y ago

Got a source on >=25% of Twitter's employees being "actively engaged in sacrificing the business to pursue personal or political agendas"?

subradios 4y ago
Censoring real news stories that look bad for particular political groups. The entire set of "fact checking" systems, adding NFTs because someone thought it sounded cool. Being sued by the government for being an ISIS recruiting and messaging platform. All of these pretty clearly indicate that no one was minding the store.
- runarberg 4y ago
  These are examples of behavior not sources for 25% of the workforce engaging in this behavior. But I challenge you to a much easier task. Link to the government lawsuit that you claim has been issued to twitter for being an ISIS recruiting and messaging platform.

the_snooze 4y ago

> hire back anyone caught in the crossfire. Who would agree to be hired back without extracting serious risk premiums from Twitter? If I had taken the 3 month severance and am seeing the ongoing chaos, the only way I’d agree to go back is as a contractor for $2000/hr with a $1M retainer with no clawback.

subradios 4y ago
Depends on the environment, in the tech world of six months ago I'd have no problem signing back on for a few tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The risk of losing your job however, carries a greater premium today than it did six months ago. I don't know if 100k retention grants are good enough, but they're going to be good enough for some people.
- piva00 4y ago
  What kind of grant though? There's no more public shares, it's all private, whatever grant you get from stocks is basically worthless as it would require the private owners to agree to buy them. A lump sum of US$ 100k as a retainer doesn't sound like a great deal after you've been through all these shenanigans. Some more desperate workers might take it just to get anything but those won't be the most motivated workers you'll get. The good ones will find better pastures, or just go back to extract more money out while looking for something better because they know there's no mutual trust anymore. I feel like a lot of people trying to defend Musk's actions are treating people like they were logical machines. That their psychological safety doesn't matter if they're paid enough, they'll just accept the payment and work as usual, that's not how humans work...

joegahona 4y ago

“Pointy-haired PMs” is a good one. I have to use this. In all honesty, this is just absurd, and is playing out like some bad movie plot. Next I expect Musk to fire more engineers without any severance at all, and force them to exit the building wearing one of those #GetWoke T-shirts he unearthed in a Twitter closet. He’ll then tweet out the video of the fired engineers exiting, and mock them with a Tweet like “Out with the old! Maybe you should go work at Grindr! LOL!”